#jedi/sith history

[kittystargen3]

Story Summary: A time traveling Grandmaster, to the Prequel Era, trying to fix the mistakes the Jedi made, and get rid of a certain Sith too. Only Time Travel is not that easy, as Yoda will soon learn.

Hi all,

Today I published a new chapter to Time Travel: To the Past Yoda Goes. Below is a small selection. Please use the links above to read more.

Chapter 68- Darkness

30 Years ago:

Yoda looked up at the time-piece against the wall and sighed.  

“Master, I won’t say I didn’t tell you this…” Dooku growled from the other side of the chamber.  “In fact, the whole council warned you about his fit as a padawan.”

Yoda tuned out his previous Padawan’s lectures, and he turned around the room to pace again.  

Suddenly the door opened and a teenaged boy with dark skin, and long brown hair, fastened back in dreads, timidly walked in.  Unsurprisingly, he seemed to immediately sense the judgment from the masters in the room.

“Well, there you go then.  I’d love to stay for the grilling, but Qui-Gon will be taking his trials next week, and I promised him to help him prepare for it.”  Dooku made his excuses and quickly skedaddled from the room, making sure to glare at the boy before he left.

The other Masters soon did the same, and Yoda was alone with a youngling that refused to look up and give him eye contact.  

“You’re angry, Master.  I know it was a risk, but if I'd had a few seconds more time, I could have made it work.  And then…”

“Angry, I am not… Disappointed, I am.”  Yoda corrected.  The boy’s face fell.  “Recovering from severe burns, two other Padawans are.  Included in their number you almost were.”

“But if Master Rancisis hadn't pulled me away, it wouldn't have exploded.” He sighed.  “I know everyone thinks I’ve fallen to the dark side, or that I’m flirting with it, or something.  But I haven’t.  I'm just tired of everyone waiting for me to fail.” 

“Padawan Windu. With me, come.”  Yoda said, and the youngling looked up in surprise.  

He followed Yoda down a seldom used lift to a part of the temple few Padawans had ever been to.  Technically it was a part of the Jedi Archives, if anyone looked at a temple floor plan.  But those who knew what it contained simply called it, ‘The Dark Vault.’

“Sense what, do you?”  Yoda asked.  

“Power, there’s a lot of it down here.”  Mace answered.  “Hey, if we have all this, why don’t we ever use it?”  

Yoda glared at his Padawan, and subtly used their new forcebond to remind him why they were having this conversation in the first place.

Mace shuffled a step back and corrected his wording, “I mean the Masters, of course.  The criminals wouldn't stand up to this being used against them.”

“Of the start of the Jedi-Sith Conflict, how much do you know?”  Yoda asked.

“Ancient history now,”  Yoda responded with a glare before the youngling could make a comment about his age.  “Uh, The Jedi were the original Force-users.  They used to use the whole force, light and dark, and…”

“What?”  Yoda asked.  

“Huh?” Mace responded with.

“Original Force-users our predecessors were.  Distinguish between light and dark, they did not.   Because Dark yet, the force was not.”  Yoda paused to look up at his Padawan.  Mace looked even more confused than he usually did during a Force-Physics class when his instructor started ranting in Rybese.  “A time for living, all things have.  And a time to die and rejoin the Force, all things do as well.  Both, a part of the Living Force, it originally was.”

“So then what changed?” Mace wisely asked....

[charmwasjess]

I always assumed the deal with Count Gora hating Dooku for being Force sensitive went back to the ancient Sith occupation of Serenno, his own house being tainted by association with the very people his family allegedly defeated.

But I was rereading the cursed book and the opening scene where Jenza is robbed, she's specifically going on about how she doesn't care about the money, but she really needs back this special crystal that belonged to her grandmother? And her mother is gonna kill her if she loses it?

How much funnier is it if Gora hated Force sensitives because of a very annoying ex-Jedi mother-in-law??

[groundrunner100]

Happy Black History Month, Star Wars homies!

[other-peoples-coats]

hey you know how basically the whole GFFA is a number of space wizards of varying moralities battlegrounds? and how like, irl, in ex-battlegrounds we find both like, live munitions, but also ones which are still around bc they were DOA?

and how sometimes (weirdly often) the dead/presumed dead bombs(/mines/etc) become kinda... decorative art or at least weird bits of the landscape?

point I'm getting at here is how many people in the GFFA have like, A Weird Stone or whatever that is actually an untriggered or mildly broken Sith Nightmare Machine (etc) sitting in their fucking yard, or the local park is actually 2/3rds of a ritual circle of 'kill everyone on the planet with spikes'.

[vandervoiz]

lowkey wondering how much anyone in the star wars universe knows about the sith. a thousand years of secrecy to the point that their enemy, the jedi, were sure of their demise. a millennia of nothing at all to the outside world. and then, prominent figures such as dooku, palpatine(in secrecy but still, his allegiance was eventually revealed to the jedi), vader, and, to an extent, maul. and yet, nothing other than that. nothing of the texts or how a thousand years have changed them. complete silence. only what they had been once, what they preached and what they had done once. only actions, only of those that were confirmed.

even the jedi, as prominent as they were, were a mystery to most or at best, mere wizards with lightsabers. the sith? nothing at all. at best, jedi with red sabers, jedi who were evil, or jedi who were different in a way nobody knew. how much did the jedi know of the sith? a thousand years can change a lot, they would would have been against a complete unknown. and yes, maybe it doesn't matter who the sith were outside of the damage they wrought to the galaxy. but a thousand years is a long time. how much were the sith like the ones that came before them? how much did the line of bane change the sith?

just as the open and closed from the comics had forgotten what it had been that made them fight, the battle continued by different people altogether, the jedi were fighting against something they didn't know anymore, something that could have been different. and yet it wasn't. the sith had stayed the same. or maybe they hadn't. does it matter?

[underwaterspiderbird]

Jedi Apologists in a nutshell

J.A.: *push random kid on the playground and take their toy* fuck you i’m the good guy

R.K.: no fuck you you suck

J.A.: OMG NAZIIIII!!1!1! NAAAZIIII!!! HEY EVERYBODY LOOK AT THIS NAAAAAAZIIIIII DONT THEY KNOW THAT IM THE GOOD GUY AND THAT ANYBODY WHO DISAGREES WITH ME IS A ROTTEN OLD NAAAZIIIIIII!!!!1!!1!

[ereborne]

please please please, did the space-monk keep his armies up his sleevies??

Of course he did! 

This is an exceptionally silly title, but in my defense, it’s a nonsense file full of contradictory timeline schenanigans and snippets of a fic I am not writing.  The same fic I’m very very absolutely not writing that I mentioned in the seven-sentence post last Sunday, actually!  It has been plaguing me. 

The thing is, is that I am so sure there ought to be a way to make it work.  I haven’t found it so far, so far I have only found many ways not to make the metaphorical lightbulb, but I feel so strongly that it should work.  I will make it work eventually, and then I will be free. 

The ‘it’ (army up our sleevey) in question:  the Mandalorian Empire!  I am so sure that there should be a way to rewrite these wholeass war stars so that the Mandalorian Excision is a turning point in the history of the Jedi Order, but in the opposite direction from canon.  Have it be the first time the Jedi were commanded to go commit large-scale violence against a sovereign system just because the Republic said to, and so the first time the Jedi found themselves truly pushed to a point where they cannot do as ordered without wholly breaking the tenets of their Order but cannot disobey and keep themselves safe and in a position to fulfil the objectives of their Order—and have them turn to the Force for a third option. 

It's a pretty radical third option, because I want to play with the timeline and also because the one scene makes me so so so happy, but—instead of killing off the Mandalorians, they meet with them, make a deal with them, pack them up on ships, and slide them into a pocket in the Unifying Force to be retrieved (much) later, when it’s safe.  Fast forward all the way to AotC, once the Jedi have discovered the clone army prepped for them on Kamino and received that implicit authorization to hire what amounts to a mercenary army, they can do a fine magician’s flourish and pull the better part of the Mandalorian Empire out of their sleeves!  What a scene that would be, I want it so badly. 

And all the fun of the set-up, too!  Imagine it, right, the Jedi have elevated ‘from a certain point of view’ to a zen art and have a now long-running history of taking creative options to do the most good possible regardless of Republic guidelines, but keeping it all on the down-low has given the Jedi chronically poor PR (essentially the same as they have in canon) and the truth of many things has passed out of memory and into the keeping of the Force.  Then the tragedy at Galidraan happens, Dooku’s faith wavers, and the Force returns one secret to them—Dooku’s good friend Sifo-Dyas gets him together with Master Archivist Jocasta Nu and the three of them learn about the pocket Mandos waiting to be pulled, the absolute proof of how far the Jedi will go (and how much the Force will support them) in order to preserve life.  And then immediately after that revelation is when Sidious comes to whisper in Dooku’s ear, all his manipulations, how the Republic is corrupt and the Jedi are useless and if Dooku wants power enough to make a difference he’ll need to do something radical—and Dooku is playing him the entire time. 

And thematically, it could be so good!  Revisiting the original Star Wars question of are the Jedi knights following lords or monks serving a higher purpose!  The distinction between lying to gain the freedom to do good (Jedi mind-trick) and manipulations to gain power to do evil (Sith compulsion)!  Once-and-future Mandos who are both the kings waiting to return to their people and the sword waiting to be drawn!  The Clone Wars are still fought, kind of!  An Empire still rises, kind of!  The clones who were chattel, produced and sold by a failed Mand’alor, denied any culture or history, destined to fight and die unacknowledged in someone else’s war; now being adopted wholesale by the returned Mandalorian people, hailed as a gift from the Force itself, sharing their knowledge of modern times and being taught all the cultural traditions of Mandalore’s heyday, being treated as beloved children and kept as safe as any Mando’ad could be!  Anakin, fatherless child of the Force, as the prophesied Chosen One, found by the will of the Living Force, trained by a sleight-of-hand master with a powerful connection to the Unifying Force, strong enough to bring balance to the Force not through massacre but instead by bringing back an entire people!  Renewal, healing, proof that good will always ultimately triumph over evil but that you have to get it there through a balanced combination of faith and hard work! So fun!!!!

Exactly how and when all this happens and what the hell all the fallout is, though, all that stuff still escapes me.  This file is an absolute nightmare bog of snippets and bullet-point ranting. 

[mayhaps-a-blog]

@jedihlaalu and I wrote a fic! It’s got Jedi!Luthen, Padawan!Kleya, my Sith OC, Crotalus, and lots of snark! Fun times for all :)

Enjoy!

Summary: Disgraced Jedi Luthen Rael Aveross doesn’t have the best track record with padawans, but then again there’s never been a padawan who’s meant more to the galaxy than Kleya. For all he knew, they were the last of a dead kind. He’s got to make sure she’s prepared to survive everything the galaxy has to throw at her, and if that means giving her a real live Sith holocron to train with … well. So be it.

---

Kleya furrowed her brows, prying her attention away from the ancient tablet she’d been cleaning to open the package that Luthen had unceremoniously tossed at her. It felt … weird. Almost angry. “Luthen…”

He smirked over his container of Nabooan noodles. “Just open the damn thing and thank me later.”

[drydak]

people will get so up in arms about the plot of a show that hasn't even released. what are you all talking about the thing you're mad at exists only in your mind.....

[reconstructwriter]

Star Wars Historians

Can you imagine being a historian in Star Wars post-canon – like centuries/millennia later when all of history is divided into pre-*That Asshole and post-*That Asshole.

If you’re studying post-Asshole there’s lovely records, descendants carefully preserving family oral history, beautifully preserved monuments, and handy-dandy time capsules and all the evidence you could ever want!

Pre-Asshole is excavating the giant crater for any scrap of evidence – a pottery shard would be lovely – whether it was a city or a temple or a random patch of grassland. Or Empire Propaganda, which has evidence of being re-written at least 100 times in its 19 to 53(?) year history.

*That Asshole was known as the following: Supreme Leader, Palpatine, Emperor, Sidious, Sith, Lord, Sheev, Chancellor, Master, Sido-Dyas and Snoke. Knowing him? Had all the titles at once.

[how-a-potato]

ok idk why but i can’t get it out of my head, Star Wars Au idea:

an au where Ahsoka becomes some force sensitive master that like hides in the mist and shadows and trains force sensitive mandalorians. Like it could b at any stage(like age wise) but it’ll mostly be the parents/finders wanting to protect their foundlings/kin by teaching them to use their weird abilities. So they go and track down this elusive jedi/not-jedi to ask if she’ll train their younglings.

Just Ahsoka being some old master training some little helmet clad younglings seems neat to me:)

[aestaseuria]

I've been thinking recently about the Sith Wars and specifically how it must have impacted Mando'ade-Jedi relationships for centuries onward. Buckle in, cause this is going to be a long one. We hear a lot in canon how the Mandalorians are historically the Jedi's enemies, often siding with the Sith in conflicts.

And yet, we have Jedi Master and Mand'alor Tarre Vizsla, who is seen as held in high regard by both the Jedi and the Mando'ade. He is Mando'ad by blood and Jedi by Creed before he became the Mand'alor. We also know that something happened to cause the Darksaber, Tarre's lightsaber, to become the symbol of the Mand'alor. Thus we know that in some form or another, the Mando'ade of the day (or at least some of them) did not see the Jedi as the child-stealing, emotionless sect that so many thought as them as by at least the time of the Acolyte. So then why would they be considered generational/historical enemies by the time Jaster Mereel became Mand'alor? Why would they be considered historic allies of the Sith if the Sith were gone from not too long after little Tarre was given to the Order to decades after Jaster died?

In real life, feuds like those don't just appear out of no where. Like, the enemyship of Israel and Palestine didn't poof into existence from thin air, it came from centuries of consistent conflict between the two peoples. To figure out what caused such hostility between the Mando'ade and Jedi that it would survive nearly 1000 years past the end of the Sith Wars, we must then look at the context in which each culture exists and how that shapes their views on each other.

First and most obvious, we have the Dral'han, the Mandalorian Excision. The Jedi were ordered by the Senate to commit orbital bombardment on Manda'yaim, the Mandalorians' home planet. This occurred in 738 BBY, 272 years after the Ruusan Reformation and 312 years after Tarre Vizsla joined the Jedi. But again, this is AFTER the end of the Sith Wars by several centuries. And this isn't ever really brought up when discussion the animosity between the two cultures.

What gets brought up is nearly always that the Mandalorians are the historical allies of the Sith. Which doesn't make sense! If the Sith and Mando'ade were allies, the Force-Sensitive younglings given up for training would never have gone to the Jedi like Master Vizsla was. They would all be given up to the Sith! But let's relax and backtrack even farther. Given that there is a "historical' allyship between the Mando'ade and the Sith, they must have fought on the same side of the Sith Wars for a while. But Master Vizsla having been a Master of the Order by the end of the Sith Wars and then going on to become Mand'alor means that at some point in there, that changed.

My best guess is that before Master Vizsla came in, there was no real leader of all the Mandalorian clans. Instead, like how the Sith had no real leadership, they all just kinda hung around various Sith and allied with them specifically. But the Sith had infighting. So much infighting. To the point that it is often listed as the true cause of the end of the Sith. Thus, it would not at all surprise me to find that the Sith were using the Mando'ade in their plots against each other like Pong Krell with the 212th and 501st.

And on top of that, the Mando'ade know war. Their language is kinda built around it. Like, the phrase "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"? They have a word for that. "Narudar," meaning a temporary allyship to defeat a common enemy. Both sides in this are very aware that the allyship is temporary, but can trust each other to not stab them in the back until the third party is dealt with. The Jedi of this time also know war, but as Force-sensitives (which by default have a larger blast radius if something goes wrong), they don't have this concept. For Force-sensitives in the Sith War, if someone becomes their enemy, there is no trust. They could not trust one Sith to help them, even to defeat another Sith. To them, any of their enemies coming to them proposing a temporary alliance to defeat someone else could never be anything but a trap. For the enemy to be one they know to be allied with the Sith? There could never be the prerequisite trust for narudar to work. They would turn the Mando'ade away.

Something else to remember is that the whole 1 padawan per Master, no-attachment, no public offices for Jedi, and no military offices for Jedi rules only came along with the Ruusan Reformation, which hadn't come into play yet. The Jedi had their own ways of dealing with things, their own definitions of words, their own associations with concepts. None of those would match the Mando'ade OR the Jedi Order we see in the Prequels or TCW. This is so far before that as to be nearly unrecognizable.

So in thinking of all this, and trying to put together a semblance of timeline for a fanfic idea, I began writing my thoughts and came up with the following:

1033 BBY: The Mondo’ad clans were following various Sith as allies against the Jedi and the Army of Light. They have grievances against the Jedi Order, and the Sith swore to help them resolve it, and to work as allies, partners, in this fight and those following. In actuality, the grievances the Mando’ade hold are half-rooted in misunderstandings. The Sith betrayed the Mando’ade (ala Pong Krell). They pulled out of the war. The lies and losses were enough to cultivate hate for the Sith in the hearts of Mando’ade regardless of clan. They begin their hunt. 

Do not mistake me, the Jedi were no friends of theirs, but narudar was possible. At first, the Jedi refused. Too long had they seen Mandalorians at the side of the Sith to trust easily. The Jedi do not have a concept of narudar. They knew the Light, and the Dark, and the difficult path that must be taken to come back, or die. 

(It is a difficult question to ask: when is a genocide justified. The Jedi did not ask it this day, nor any prior. Nor, I’m afraid, was it asked any day after. These were their Enemies, after all, and it is among the oldest laws of instinct that you did not suffer your Enemies to live. Regardless, the Jedi and Sith fought, and died, and fought, and the conflict seemed unending. Don’t think about how their cultures are fundamentally entwined. Don’t think about how at each turn they seemed destined to lock horns. Don’t think about how the Jedi preach emotional control in what likely started as an attempt to deprive the Sith of one more weapon. Don’t think about how the Sith Code preaches Freedom as its core goal. Don’t think of how the Force needs balance like a human needs air. Don’t think about what the galaxy looked like when the Sith weren’t there to provide the needed darkness. Don’t think about how the very first Sith was likely once a Je’daii. Don’t think of the depths of despair and hatred the captive, enslaved Force-sensitive that would become the Sith was subjected to. Don’t think of them coming home to the other Je’daii and being reviled as corruption, wrong, disgust. Don’t think of their family looking at them, afraid, before raising their weapons to kill them. Don’t think of how this millennia-long conflict likely started from an act of fear. Don’t think about how the Je’daii would regret, and strive to never act in this fear again. Don’t think, child. This is us, and this is them, and we do not think of how we are family, love. We are Enemies, they have killed us, and we kill them ‘lest they do it again. Do not think, child. Fight.) 

Regardless, to the Jedi of the day, no doubt the Mandalorians seemed Dark. They could not know different, no… Beskar muffles the force. They turned the Mando’ade away. This does not stop them from fighting — only stopped them from fighting together. Mando’ade-born and newly knighted Tarre Vizsla did not refuse those of his brethren that wished to fight with him. He gained allies this way, and formed many bonds of friendship. Remember, the Jedi of that day were not yet under the Ruusaan Reformation. This was not forbidden, only cautioned against. It is not the attachment that caused the Fall, but the fear of losing it. Emotion, yet peace. This was war. Let the bonds steady you. 

The friends he made here would be instrumental later, when Tarre Vizsla sought to unite his people as his visions bid. On that front, and some nearby, they fought together.

1032 BBY: The Sith Wars end, the Republic is formed, the Army of Light disbanded, and the Ruusan Reformation instituted. The Sith are thought to be by and large gone.

1031 BBY: Master Tarre Vizsla leaves the Jedi to go to Mandalore. The Force has told him his place from here on out is not among the Order, nut rather leading his birth people. He goes to unite the clans, as he had seen in his visions.

1022 BBY: Tarre becomes Mand'alor.

[hiddenbeks]

so many thoughts abt how schewpid the jedi council is in kotor but also not sure if i should write abt any of them before i finish the game because it's entirely possible that i'm still missing some critical information,

[maidenvault]

It just bums me out how much of SW fandom clearly doesn’t appreciate the levels of magnificent bastardy that Palpatine achieved as a villain when they bitch about so much being the Jedi Order’s fault. As if the Jedi should have just looked harder under some couch cushions and then they would have found the solid evidence they could use to go after him and the Senate.

Palpatine was too smart for that! No Sith lord had ever aimed so high and achieved so much, and he only did it by playing a long game that started before Anakin was even born. People have to understand that when Dooku tells Obi-Wan that a Sith controls the Senate, that’s hard for him to believe because it is absolutely ridiculous and hard to believe! The Jedi don’t understand why the dark side clouds their awareness because the Sith have become masterful at hiding their presence, which was not the case throughout known history. It would truly be like hearing that Biden’s administration actually are all Satanists who traffic and eat children. Palpatine’s extremely powerful and cunning and unlike anything they’re used to dealing with, otherwise they might seriously consider that Sidious could have accomplished this without the Jedi having any idea. And where do you even begin investigating such a thing when it’s been covered up so well?

The Jedi were always gonna be outmatched against someone like Sidious because a Sith’s whole thing is amassing wealth, influence, and power, and Sidious was probably the best there ever was at it. The Jedi are the opposite, they’re not meant to have those things, and Sidious ended up with too much control of the government for them to have any real power to act. (Probably even if they had complete knowledge of everything, which they never did.) It makes sense that just a couple Sith can bring “imbalance” to the Force when you consider that the use of the dark side is inherently an imbalance of power and a destructive influence in the world this way.

You don’t have to scapegoat anyone else. Palpatine needed his apprentice and other pawns to move around but he really did almost all of it himself. He worked so hard and deserves the hate for his efforts, he really was that bad. :(

[gffa]

Okay, so. The senator's speech. Here's why I'm okay with it: It fundamentally misunderstands the worldbuilding of Star Wars and the Force, in a way that's reasonable for a senator to misunderstand. To say the senator is right, you would have to say that the entire foundations of the Force are wrong, as well as it's pretty laughable to say that you shouldn't control your emotions. "Check yourself before you wreck yourself." is pretty good advice and that's literally just "control your emotions, before they control you". Because that's how the Force works, it's based on the emotions you pour into it--if you don't control your emotions, then you will run wild and out of control. To say that the Jedi seek to control their emotions, which is an impossible thing to do, fundamentally misunderstands that it's entirely possible. This is a speech coming from a member of the Senate, which has historically not always had the purest motivations, that Padme and Bail and Mon are written specifically as a contrast to the vast majority of senators who don't actually care beyond their own desires. We don't know anything about this senator specifically, but that's the weight that comes with having a character like this introduced--especially one who is trying to drag the Jedi into being more politically bogged down. Because that's the solution he's suggesting here, to weigh the Jedi down with outside oversight that doesn't actually understand who they are or what they do, who fundamentally misunderstand who they are (they're not a religion? come on, my guy, they are very clearly a religion, they have specific beliefs, practices, rites, and attitudes, to say they're not a religion is either dumb as shit or malicious bad faith lmao) and is very clearly not interested in the Jedi beyond them being a political enemy of his. He says, "But it's only a matter of time before one of you snaps." as if the Jedi haven't existed for literally 20,000 years at this point in galactic history and been aligned with the Republic since it's inception, something like 900 years ago at this point. His speech acts like a Jedi has never gone bad before or that the Jedi pretend they're above it--they very much don't. The Jedi are constantly making a point about how no one is above the dark side within them (TCW has a whole scene where the High Council say not even Yoda is beyond the dark side, and Yoda straight up agrees immediately), to say that one of them will snap and "who will be powerful enough to stop them?" is deliberately ignoring the worldbuilding. It ignores what the Jedi actually practice (it's a lifelong challenge not to give in to anger, so they're constantly on the path to turn away from it), it ignores that emotions very much are controllable, it ignores that the Jedi Order has been keeping a handle on their shit for thousands of years at this point, and it ignores that there's dark siders out there that were never trained by the Jedi, so if the Jedi aren't around to stop them, the Sith would have been wrecking the Republic's shit for the last 500 years. To be fair, they don't know that (but we the audience do, so we should know a bullshit argument when we hear one), but "who will be strong enough to stop him"? Idk, maybe the rest of the level 100 psychic space wizard monks? Pretty sure there's enough of them to stop someone who "snaps", if that happens. The senator's speech just flat out doesn't work with the established worldbuilding, in a way that really works for me, because that's kind of a huge established point throughout just about every piece of canon with the Jedi in it--people just do not understand them and hate the idea that anyone might actually be truly good because they can't imagine it for themselves. Because, as is a theme in Star Wars: "As much as people loved the Jedi, they also hated them, on some level. It is hard to look at people who have become their best selves. It reminds you that you have not."

The senator cannot fathom the idea that a group of people could become their best selves, he doesn't believe that it's possible, because he has not achieved it, and so seeing it in others unsettles him. And, yeah, that's a whole thing that happens with the Jedi in Star Wars, so this speech made a whole lot of sense to me, especially combined with, "So the answer is more bogging them down in political oversight that does not bother to or even want to understand them?" Like, yeah, I see where you're coming from, sir. And that's not even touching the idea of calling the Buddhist-inspired religion (which the Jedi explicitly are) a "cult", because anyone who unironically says that should not be trusted.

[sunderwight]

SV Star Wars AU where Shen Yuan transmigrates into a proxy for Padme.

I know the Obikin vibes are really strong with Bingqiu, but hear me out:

Shen Qingqiu is the fourteen-year-old(?!?!) King Elect (?!?!?!) of Qing Jing, a planet from the Cang Qiong sector that has been facing issues with the Trade Federation and has petitioned the Jedi Order for help.

"Shen Qingqiu" is also a role played by several similar-looking fourteen-year-old boys, except where Padme and her handmaids were all from more or less the same background, most of the servants conscripted for the Shen Qingqiu role are downtrodden slaves basically cast as expendable bodyguards, whose main advantage in this deal is that after Shen Qingqiu finishes his term as King then they get to go free.

Meaning, Shen Yuan and Shen Jiu are both expendable body doubles for the "real" Shen Qingqiu (in this case, Qiu Jianluo going by his royal name, with the "qiu" being deliberate rather than accidental).

Additional fun possibility: Qiu Jianluo has actually been dead since the trouble with the Trade Federation first escalated, and Shen Yuan and Shen Jiu have basically been Weekend At Bernie's-ing him because there's no time to elect a new king and if the Trade Federation's blockade isn't broken, everyone's immediate prospects are extremely bleak (and the odds of the Shens being sent to some prison camp instead of granted their freedom is very high).

Another additional fun possibility: the Trade Federation didn't actually kill Qiu Jianluo, Shen Jiu did, so not only do they have to maintain the charade, they also have to look for opportunities to drop Qiu Jianluo's corpse down a reactor core or something and make it look like he's died during the conflict in order to prevent any investigations that will look into pesky things like "time of death" or "how many stab wounds there are".

In the midst of all this, of course, there is the main plot of PIDW/SW, wherein Shen Qingqiu was originally one of several antagonists to excessively bully and dismay Jedi prodigy and future Chosen One Luo Binghe, a poor slave boy living on an ice planet and trying to win enough money via dangerous pod races to buy medicine for his dying mother. Featuring also young Jedi knights Liu Qingge and Yue Qi (the latter of whom seems to have some history with Shen Jiu...?), admittedly kickass Sith apprentice Mobei Jun, a certain future Chancellor from the Huan Hua sector, and sentient Sith holocron Meng Mo. And Airplane, probably as an up-and-coming member of the Jedi AgriCorps who basically has Count Dooku's plot duties (turn traitor and get killed) but is somehow also thoroughly entangled with Mobei Jun.