#if the jedi are an institution then they're a peaceful one that works

[antianakin]

It seems like the height of arrogance to look at a story like Star Wars with some of the most blatantly obvious and evil villains in the history of sci-fi/fantasy and when asked "What went wrong to cause the situation we see in the main story" the answer isn't "the villains were working for years to undermine the heroes from the shadows piece by piece until they were able to topple everything and murder everyone" but, somehow, "the heroes were actually the REAL villains all along because they have a religion they follow and don't immediately believe everything they're told point blank."

[pinkrangerv]

There's a lot of implications in Star Wars that this was the entire point of the Chosen One prophecy.

RotS novelization has a line where Obi-Wan says to Padme essentially that, yeah, Anakin might go to the Sith--he just needs to be sure that's what he wants. Because to Obi-Wan, he'd lose a brother, but Dooku left too, and Dooku still has honor and courage, Dooku is still a good person--people can walk away, that's a point in the novel.

Obi-Wan believes it. The rest of the Jedi?

Anakin doesn't mention his culture, but he doesn't wear Jedi robes either. No one seems to give a fuck that he started off a traumatized child, and no one has any qualms about sending him into combat...

Just like no one has qualms about sending clones, who are TEN YEARS OLD, into combat either.

Did you know that a child who's taken from their parents and raised in an orphanage without enough adults develops attachment disorders? The symptom list involves rigid, black-and-white thinking (Jedi or Sith, nothing else), emotional detachment (hey, don't worry about your still-enslaved mom! you're Not Supposed To Care!), serious interpersonal skills issues (they're wise and sagelike and everything they say actually is just weird when you translate it, like they've never interacted with real people), and a bunch of other stuff that isn't onscreen.

It's mentioned in the novelization that the Jedi were preparing to fight the last war the Sith and Jedi had. And that Yoda, especially, had supervised a lot of it.

Detachment, to the point of losing people and still being rigidly bound to an ideology...well, that sure is a great way to keep someone in the fight.

The Jedi religion basically had a bunch of very, very serious problems. Anakin Skywalker could have been anyone, but the point of the prequels--especially in the context of the original trilogy--is that the Sith were shit, but the Jedi were the main powerhouses...and so fucked up that it was time to start over.

It could've been peaceful. But Anakin was a former slave and a general in war and no one even mentions him getting therapy. In fact, the Jedi took Anakin from his culture and mother, and never bothered making sure his mother was safe or even mentioning his culture again.

When you have a religious order with weapons and military training committing crimes against humanity and putting child soldiers in combat, that is no longer a purely religious order. That is a political and military clusterfuck waiting to happen.

So Anakin and the clones slaughter the Jedi and do a damn thorough job. They spend the next two decades cleaning it up. Canonically, odds are they just pretended the Force didn't exist--in Episode IV, a senior Imperial openly doesn't believe in it, and no one has ever told Luke that the Force is a thing. It's a great way to get rid of the Jedi--who's gonna pick up a religion when they can't teach it?

Which means there's now two Sith--Sideous and Vader--and two Jedi: Obi-Wan and Yoda.

The Sith die. The Jedi die.

The remaining Padawans have just enough knowledge to manage to not blow themselves up. And that's it. Little to no theology, nothing that would repeat the war crimes...

Because 'balancing the Force' in this case means 'break down the prior Sith\Jedi dichotomy, and rebuild from the ground up'.

Luke gets christened the heir to the Jedi by Yoda, because he's got the moral compass to make it work. Ashoka has martial arts, Ezra has a bunch of organizational skills, Cal has enough institutional knowledge to say 'this isn't standard, but it works better'.

This is the point. The Force is balanced.

Because the Force doesn't have a bunch of people committing fucking war crimes in its name.

Technically speaking Cal is the only, living, Jedi who was officially knighted. Yoda implied Luke was a Jedi, but he never knighted him. And Ahsoka and Ezra were Padawan’s who never officially finished there training.

their collective teaching credentials are basically just "haha dude trust me I know what I'm doing for sure"