Jedi Are Not Boring

Happy Feast Day of Saints Peter & Paul.

Next week is another Camp NaNoWriMo, and you know what that means: existential agony as I try to write (or in this case, finish writing) a novel-length piece. Hopefully by August there will be a finished-ish draft, and I can work from there. Maybe that draft can go somewhere, and I can prove to not be a waste of space!

…I’m in a bit of A Mood after ImpishIdea, where my sporkings and a lot of my writing, went completely dead earlier this week. 

Also! Hey! I have started re-watching season one of Once Upon a Time.

Jedi Are Not Boring

I’ve been thinking about Star Wars a lot lately.

A frequent point I see in The Discourse around Star Wars, especially from professional critics (though not exclusively from them) is this: Jedi are boring. Lucasfilm should tell stories without Jedi if they want to make more Star Wars and remain interesting.

This is dumb as rocks.

The reason anyone cares about Star Wars is because it features space wizard monks with laser swords. Okay, yes, there are other interesting aspects, like bounty hunters. But the weird assertion that Lucasfilm should drop the Jedi altogether feels, to me, like saying you want something that isn’t Star Wars. There are plenty of science-fiction, space opera stories that feature universes without Jedi, so it always struck me as suggesting that you want Star Wars to be a different stroy. It’s fine to like different types of stories! However, you don’t go into, say, Percy Jackson and say, “Hey, I think it’d be much more interesting if we took out all of that mythology stuff, you know?”

I’m going to be real with you: I also think that part of the “SW needs to lose the Jedi” thing comes from people who… don’t actually pay attention to these movies? Polygon, for instance, has an article that claims “The exact lines between [Jedi and Sith] has always been murky”. Like, bro, what are you smoking? You can’t tell the difference between the flawed group of good guys and the guys with blood red lightsabers who set up a fascist regime? This is like a Tumblr person’s stereotype of a centrist or something.

“What about Rogue One?” someone may ask.

WHAT ABOUT ROGUE ONE! I mean… alright, I should be more specific in my point. And I admit, part of what prompted me to write this essay was the Overly Sarcastic Productions video on Rogue One.

Okay, I really like Rogue One, and it has no Jedi in the movie. Unless you count, briefly in the beginning, Jyn’s mother, because there was an early draft of the script where she was a Jedi survivor; some people act as if this is still canon despite there being no mention or indication of it in the final movie. I don’t care. All of that being said, even though there are no Jedi in the movie, it’s still a story set in a universe that has the shadow of the Jedi in it. Jedha is a sacred Jedi place; Chirrut and Baze are part of a religion tied to the Force. Even though there are no Jedi in the story, it’s a story where you know they used to exist, in great numbers, and their absence is being felt.

And then you have Vader, who completely outweighs everyone else. The Imperial military and the Rebel Alliance are absolutely nothing compared to satanic space wizard with a laser sword, and everyone’s out of their depth when facing him. It makes you say, “Man, if only we had a Jedi here!”

So I’m not suggesting every SW needs to be about Jedi, or even have to feature Jedi in the lead role or part of the main cast. No, that’s silly. Part of what I have always liked about Star Wars is that it’s a universe in which you can tell all sorts of stories in different genres and it still fits in the setting. 

I don’t think people are tired of the Jedi, really. I think they’re tired of terribly-written stories about Jedi. For whatever reason, the good leadership of Lucasfilm thinks we want to watch/read/play ten million “last of the Jedi” storylines, so there are approximately three dozen important characters who are survivors of Order 66, who more or less have the same character arc, and the Sequel Trilogy opens with the Jedi wiped out yet again and not built up until after the events of the movies. We don’t need this story over and over again. It can be done well, sure; that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try something new.

[It is also completely baffling to me that Lucasfilm decided that the first meeting of Ahsoka and Luke wasn’t worth showing on screen.]

It also doesn’t help that unlike in the old canon/Expanded Universe, the current writers have it so that the non-protagonist Jedi all exist to prop up the main characters as better. The final season of The Clone Wars has two characters explain that in an event that happened in a previous season, their home got wrecked, and the Jedi involved just told them, “It was the will of the Force” or something and left them on the streets. Ahsoka, on the other hand, is like what a Jedi should really be like and actually helps people. 

Like, okay, I get it, Jedi can be flawed characters, that’s fine, but you’re telling me that a Jedi Master, someone trained to be a peacekeeper and has psychic powers to be tuned to other people’s emotions, and clearly proficient in her abilities to attain a higher rank, sees someone’s home destroyed and was like, “Yeah, s*** happens, sorry guys.”? There are flawed characters who out of touch, and then there are flipping idiots. No, it doesn’t make much sense, but it does make our protagonist Ahsoka look good, so that’s why they went with it.

Think about this: the Jedi are a monastic-type order of space wizards with laser swords. For whatever reason, people thinks that means they don’t talk or hang out or have any idea how to relate to people. But just imagine: some of these Jedi probably don’t get along, not because of malicious events, rather because their personalities don’t click. Or maybe someone made a species-insensitive comment about a Jedi of a race that’s not commonly represented in the Temple. Some of them get along very well. Given Obi-Wan Kenobi has a friend who runs a diner, and Anakin spending a lot of time away from the Temple doesn’t launch a full investigation, so clearly they go out and hang out sometimes. What about Jedi who aren’t great warriors but have talents in other fields? Heck, what are mealtimes like for these guys?

You can have drama and compelling stories without romance or lone survivors. They’re possible. C’mon, now.

There’s so much to do with Jedi, and the people releasing the main stories appear to just… not be doing that? Alright, admittedly I haven’t read The High Republic or watched The Acolyte, so I can’t judge them, but I haven’t gotten the impression that they do anything really interesting with the Jedi. I’m convinced that there are so many opportunities that could be explored in the mainstream, but these critics seem to think that because the stories they’re only halfway paying attention to aren’t doing away with the key element of the mythos, that they’re bland. 

No, the problem isn’t Jedi, it’s boring writing. And that can be easily fixed, if someone actually takes the effort to do so.

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