quote:Originally posted by millernumber1: Exactly - it's not that I don't understand the idea of corruption, it's that corruption is a process, not a jump from "I'm on the white side of the line" to "I'm on the black side of the line."
quote:Originally posted by millernumber1: Exactly - it's not that I don't understand the idea of corruption, it's that corruption is a process, not a jump from "I'm on the white side of the line" to "I'm on the black side of the line." The line, especially in corruption, is a wide, wide thing. Sure, Anakin had already done some pretty sketchy things - but in very emotional state (when his mother had just been killed). While I still don't buy his betrayal of Mace, it made a bit of sense. But to go straight from that to killing children personally...no.
This has to do with what it means to be force sensitive, and the extent of what is really going on when someone "falls to the dark side." You can make a parallel to the mages in Dragon Age: they have amazing powers because of their connection to the fade, but it made them extremely dangerous, both to themselves and to everyone else. Their connection to the fade comes packaged with a vulnerability to a very profound force of corruption. The Towers, Templars, Harrowing? It was society's best possible idea at how to manage this issue. Similarly, the jedi code and all its regulations on the life of a force sensitive — including their disconnection from all family, and the prohibition on relationships or sex — were all considered tragic necessities to prevent vulnerabilities to corruption. The corruption would usually be slow and subtle, with a force sensitive doing things or acting on desires which would become slowly more and more addictive and drawing, but it doesn't have to be slow at all. It could happen in an instant of terror or rage that would overwhelm their self-control and get them hooked/enslaved right away. And it's a very real thing, like a profound madness or instant psychopathy, that even comes packaged with physiological changes. Your irises change color, and the longer you have been dark and feeding on the dark side of the force, the more this makes your skin turn pale and withered and discolored and veiny and whatever.
The short of it: light side force sensitives are always perched above a slippery slope wherein they have to play it pretty straight and avoid a wide degree of temptations, fears, and aggrivations. little misdeeds and emotional events risk making them progressively more and more vulnerable to the switch.
And it wouldn't be too hard to make this make sense for people watching a story about Anakin and the Jedi, but of course Lucas fails at this because he is a bad writer and a bad filmmaker.
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Another thing that lucas did an absolute laugh of a job on was force sensitives and lightsabers. There's really neat and compellingly well-designed reasons why force users gravitate towards and stick with lightsabers, but the prequels made them look wildly impractical and easily outclassed. good job lucas!
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Temple of doom is not my favorite movie, by far, but I still include it in the Indiana Jones linage, where as Crystal Skull I do not. Temple has it's flaws, but an annoying female lead and some over the top mysticism don't fundamentally change it from being an Indiana Jones adventure. Indy is a good guy, he fights for the right and protect kids and kicks ass and is lucky and funny.
One of the big problems with Crystal Skull (one of many) is the Russians aren't really evil. They even go so far as to make the Americans out to be just as bad, the CIA grilling Indy, the anti Communism rally (Better Dead then Red), the double, triple back stabbing friend with the gay neckerchief, etc. And in the end, the Russ are seeking knowledge, yes to be used to further their country, but they are trying to learn stuff...through archeology, and for -some crazy nonsensical undisclosed reason- the pay off of seeking knowledge, of the aliens, is a gruesome death, with no real answers or truths learned in the end. The movie movie lacks any moral backbone, decent ending or even a decent villain for that matter. Add to that a useless aging heroine, not a lick of realistic violence and some of the lamest fight scenes known to film and you don't have an Indy adventure, you have a movie that was fun for the stars and directors to make instead of just going to a reunion dinner and catching up like they should of. We don't care that you had a good time making this movie, it is a steaming pile. It does have some of the series iconic visuals, some entertaining sequences but it is not and never will be what it was intended to be and because of this it is an affront to fans who are invested in what it was supposed to be. Lucas need to stop pissing on his own legacy and let us fans retain the love of his past work instead of poisoning the well with his half assed attempts to rekindle what has clearly been lost.
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I always hated the way that Star Wars handles the turn to the dark side. It ruined the paper RPG.
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You know, if Lucas had seen Breaking Bad before creating the prequels, he'd probably have a better idea of how to write a good character turning to the dark side. In fact, Walter White is essentially Darth Vader in a modern setting, except instead of the Force, his power is chemistry.
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I haven't read any of the Extended Universe material, so I assume that's where Samp is getting his information.
Given Samp's evaluation of what makes a person accede to the dark side:
1) Obi-wan's friendship with Anakin should have been a route to his own dark path. As Anakin's relationship with Padme turns him to violence and tyranny to protect her, Obi-wan should have felt similar forces drawing him to protect his padawan against all sense and discipline. 1a) ...which would have gone a long way to explaining the comment in ROTJ about how Ben thought he could train Anakin better than Yoda. 2) It would have been a hoot to discover that Palpatine was really after Kenobi all this time; or even that Kenobi would have been a suitable second to Anakin, should Kenobi destroy him. Palpatine could have even encouraged Anakin to train under Kenobi so that he could snatch them both to the dark side. 3) One of Lucas' first mistakes in the Kenobi/Anakin relationship was starting Anakin so young. He should have been near to Obi-wan's age in the first movie so that they could be peers.
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Samp: They've made it canon that in the Star Wars-verse, switching from good to evil really -does- make a Disney cartoon look subtle and nuanced by comparison?
Well! That got rid of my last vestige of interest in the setting.
I don't mind the Dark Side being depicted as a malevolant influence and temptation, but I can't swallow "Anakin was just its puppet from the moment he made a dim-witted deal."
Especially since the in-film jedi still treat him as being responsible for his actions, so we're supposed to treat it seriously that it took him five minutes to switch from "I don't want Padme to die, even if it means making shady deals" to "I love killing babies."
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I should add that the second season of the Genndy Tartakovsky "Clone Wars" shorts and the Paul Dini-penned episodes of the CGI spin-off show a much better look at the build-up and reasons for Anakin's eventual turn. So I know it could have been done.
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quote:Originally posted by Puffy Treat: so we're supposed to treat it seriously that it took him five minutes to switch from "I don't want Padme to die, even if it means making shady deals" to "I love killing babies."
I agree. It's a little hard to swallow. The strangest part is that the actual Darth Vader (the one from the original trilogy) turns good again in a VERY gradual way, which is why it is believable. I think people were expecting the opposite to happen (after all, why wouldn't it?), but then it didn't and we all felt ripped off.
If the movies had started with Episode 2 (other than finding Anakin, what did the first episode matter?), we probably would have had more room for character growth. Plinkett's reviews of the prequels also mention the fact that there's no main protagonist in the first movie, which is, as he points out, one of the reasons you can't connect with anything. I never noticed it, but it's totally true.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: There's really neat and compellingly well-designed reasons why force users gravitate towards and stick with lightsabers
Really? As someone who loved the first three movies as a kid, had his interest in the series knocked onto the ropes by the 4th movie and stamped out of existence by the second, and never in any case got into it enough to read any of the EU books, I wasn't aware of that; I assumed that it just boiled down to "because they look cool". What're the reasons?
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Samprimary's explanation matches my understanding, but I'm not sure you even need to go to EU.
I kinda assumed that it was implicit from the Yoda/Skywalker training in ESB and Emperor/Skywalker confrontation in ROJ that we aren't dealing with gradual shades of grey tempting trope, but that for example, if the Emperor could force Skywalker to act out in anger against his father that he would fall to the Dark Side with no real hope of return.
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quote:Samp: They've made it canon that in the Star Wars-verse, switching from good to evil really -does- make a Disney cartoon look subtle and nuanced by comparison?
*shrug* It really depends on the author telling the story in the EU. Sometimes it is simply that absurd. "I'm going to save Padme-somehow-by trusting this man who wants me to massacre a bunch of kids. Sounds kosher!"
In other cases, it's an extremely gradual descent that takes months of psychological manipulation and torture (as well as the usual physical kind), and at the end of it it's not entirely clear if he has turned to the Dark Side, at least for awhile.
quote:I kinda assumed that it was implicit from the Yoda/Skywalker training in ESB and Emperor/Skywalker confrontation in ROJ that we aren't dealing with gradual shades of grey tempting trope, but that for example, if the Emperor could force Skywalker to act out in anger against his father that he would fall to the Dark Side with no real hope of return.
It wasn't explicitly stated, but the Emperor (and Vader) did get Luke not just to be angry, but to lash out from anger and even use the Force while doing so from anger repeatedly. What they couldn't quite seal the deal on, though, was to get him to take one decisive, premeditated step-execute/murder Vader, his father, as he lay defeated, out of anger. But even then it was a close thing-had Luke not been reminded so specifically of himself, and had such a clear warning of the larger scheme at hand, who knows if he would've gone through with it?
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As for lightsabers and force users, I've read a lot of the EU material (in fact up to about, say, 10 years ago I'd read nearly all of them). I'm not sure what Samp is talking about, but I think some of the reasons given in the stories that Force users go for lightsabers is that the construction is somehow special, requiring some kind of meditation that encourages growth (other people in the universe could, of course, build lightsabers of their own, but in canon both Jedi and Sith do something metaphysically with the components to take it beyond a glowing turkey carver). They also help lead to personal confrontations, keeping Jedi grounded, and they also help keep things close for the good guys-after so much training, and the way they immerse themselves in the Force while dueling means that even though the lightsaber is extraordinarily dangerous, they are sufficiently aware that they're not going to be-if properly trained-lopping off bystander limbs and stuff. Things might get sticky if they were, I don't know, shooting lightsaber arrows or something.
I'm just reaching, though, I'm not entirely sure what Samp was talking about.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: When in rome, do as the romans do. When in a star wars thread, do as nerds do.
I think it was mainly the "Look the way falling to the dark side works in the SW mythos is tricky, so to clarify it I'm going to compare it to Dragon Age" that sealed the deal for me.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: ... What they couldn't quite seal the deal on, though, was to get him to take one decisive, premeditated step-execute/murder Vader, his father, as he lay defeated, out of anger.
I know, I'm just saying that if this a "modern" story like say the BSG reboot then Luke could just have killed his father, maybe have got all angsty about it, and then have switched back to the light side a few hours later.
I treated it as a quirk of the Star Wars/Jedi world* that the slippery slope is extremely slippery and that things don't need to be moving in gradual shades of grey.
* until maybe the EU or Bioware depictions
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I always assumed lightsabers were used by the Jedi because they were multi-functional and could only be used properly by a force-sensitive person. If you think about it, they can deflect laser fire, cut through basically anything (except other lightsabers), and, of course, act as a regular sword in a fight. A regular person wouldn't be able to do most of those things properly without serious risk to themselves or others (think about it for a moment, seriously), but someone who can see half a second into the future at any given moment could easily manage it with a little practice (really, how long did Luke train before he was able to properly use his lightsaber? A few days? Idk).
Anyway, for a person like that and compared to a blaster rifle (or whatever), it just seems more practical.
Oh, there's also the fact that these guys are basically knights, and knights use swords. This is a scifi story set in space, and everything in space glows, so why not have glowing laser swords? Makes sense.
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I think my main problem (other than horrible execution on nearly every aesthetic level other than "oversaturation") with the way the Light/Dark fall/redemption aspects were handled in the prequels is that the Light side is so utterly self-obsessed, blind, and generally unattractive (other than pretty actors and cool skills) on a moral and philosopical level that despite my utter hatred for the Sith, and my sadness at Order 66, I still hated the Jedi. Which I know is sort of the point, but I think it's really kind of a dramatically uninteresting point to make (but then, clearly millions of people disagree).
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quote:Originally posted by Puffy Treat: Samp: They've made it canon that in the Star Wars-verse, switching from good to evil really -does- make a Disney cartoon look subtle and nuanced by comparison?
Not really. It's a good vessel for dramatic flair. It can work very well. It usually has. Even in the depths of the extended universe's horrid meandering adolescent pulp, it has done okay (or well, as in the original trilogy). But when we're talking about any theme of star wars' swashbuckling space opera thematics, you can always append how the prequels are an example of lucas failing to use it compellingly or coherently, because he can't write a movie. To wit: anakin was not a puppet from the first moment he started cutting deals, but he was being stupid angsty due to a number of contrived plot situations, did some real crappy stuff that represented very serious corruption to the dark side in and of themselves. To recall: he watched his mom die, flipped out, and went all My Lai on the sand raider village. He was all but completely gone by then, but then lucas had to backpedal because this was a movie too early and we had to wait for Palpatine, so the third movie threw out some weak bones about how anakin is still pretty much a good guy or whatever. He wasn't able to tie this all together into a coherent slow creep of corruption, so it turned into Palpatine going "Evil now thanks" and Anakin going "kay" — I think Plinkett talked about this some.
quote:Originally posted by Jake: Really? As someone who loved the first three movies as a kid, had his interest in the series knocked onto the ropes by the 4th movie and stamped out of existence by the second, and never in any case got into it enough to read any of the EU books, I wasn't aware of that; I assumed that it just boiled down to "because they look cool". What're the reasons?
It always boils down to 'because it looks cool,' but you gotta come up with a compelling system, mechanic, metaphysic, etc, to flesh out that coolness. Can't have the tardis without the wibbly-wobbley timey-wimey stuff, as it were.
The big thing that makes trained force users awesome isn't pushing things around with your mind, or force persuasion, or lightning, or choking, or any of those things. It's that the force makes you precognitive, and the more you train in the force, the better your precognition is. You learn to see the world as a fractal pattern of potential futures, and then use them to decide what you should or should not do. It's why something like a sniper is an impractical means by which to try to kill a trained force user. Every jedi and every sith is working hard at the ultimate goal of being so strong in the force that they're essentially like nicolas cage in Next. Combat, for a force user, is the art of angling through potential futures to reach the optimal desired conclusion. The better you are at staying focused and clear in your visions of potential futures, the better you are at avoiding the bad ends. This works fine with any weapon, but lightsabers are the best. One reason for that is because they are effectively attunable to the force. They extend your perception in a fight. In addition, training with a lightsaber is perhaps the absolute perfect way to train yourself for this kind of precog fighting, since you're swinging around a stick of plasma that has very clearly delineated Bad Ends that you're trying to avoid (cutting your own face off, for instance) and this tends to sharpen your forcey-worcey future-timey skills. As it were.
The most important part, though, was that fighting with these blades was the most effective way for force users to fight each other as well as keep themselves in a bubble of protection from fire: When they are fighting each other's precognition, swordplay with these massless, attenuated blades works to create a lattice of Bad Ends that confuse and eventually overwhelm the opponent so that you can start getting wounds or fatal cuts in. Melee combat was the only really practical way for these duels to happen in the flesh without horrid stalemates, so early force users gravitated to melee weapons well before lightsabers ever existed. Then lightsabers came around and it was practically flat-out unfair to non force sensitives. It was just the perfect weapon.
AS USUAL, lucas couldn't do shit with any of this in the prequel. He did the exact opposite through contrived, lazy, and messy screenplay, ending up with all of the jedi just standing in the middle of a coliseum getting shot to death hopelessly from afar by robots so that the clones could save the day. He did his absolute damnedest to make lightsabers seem like an impractical weapon that jedi tend to drop in any serious fight.
So now we're up to dragon age, dr. who, 2007's Next, what else can I shove in here.
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Do you really think that Lucas understands any of the philosophy of the Expanded Universe? He really should've hired a Star Wars consultant.
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There's a clip of the Behind the Scenes footage that plays in the RLM reviews where lucas is saying something about the upcoming production completion on the fight between dooku and yoda. He's lying on a couch, I think, and he's saying something like "it's exciting, because we haven't gotten to see him, pull out his little, uh, laser sword thing, and fight" —
As usual, the employees around him are standing around nervously, smiling and nodding. It's not about him understanding the Expanded Universe (frankly, I would prefer it, as it's often just terrible). It's about him not really understanding what made his own original trilogy work. And, more to the point, it's not about him understanding little nerd details like lightsabers or how the force works — it's about him not being able to make a compelling story, compelling characters, setting, theme, or a coherent transmission of a dramatic or personal arc.
It's not about his attention to nerd detail. It's about the language of cinema, of storytelling.
To what degree he knows or cares about his own canon ceases to matter. Crystal Skull sure ain't got no lightsabers or force or any of that in it, but he was able to dick that up all the same, for many of the same overlying deficiencies.
When I watch the parts of the reviews where Plinkett is observing what is happening at lucasarts as they struggle with their own product the sense I get is that Lucas has entrenched himself into a position of supreme executive dysfunction. It reminds me of studying Japan's Lost Decade and why their extreme social power distance and the extreme untouchability and unchallengability of their company's executives led to the complete and utter dysfunction of their corporate culture.
It was notorious. Everything was stratified, with everyone having a clear level above or below each other, and you were not supposed to challenge or question or even inform anything your company's leaders did because they were your business and social betters. They could not be challenged, nor could their paths be righted. To try to inform them that they need to change strategies was made into a direct challenge of their worthiness by a person who IS wrong because they are new or below them. The higher-ups were often left in a bubble of extreme misinformation, because the culture made people terrified to upset their 'betters' with the truth, and considered it more impolite to correct an executive than to simply be polite and nod and support that misinformed view or strategy. Lucas has turned Lucasarts into that for himself, and ends up with nervous people around him at all times who operate on the maladaptive strategy of "make lucas happy and don't challenge him" in order to keep their jobs. So, lucas ends up in the same distorted executive bubble and makes terrible movies. He's not the first who's done that to himself, but he's certainly the best and most potent example, especially considering that he's doing this with multiple franchises that people care about, as opposed to new things that won't go anywhere because they're failed visions from the onset.
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Anyway, how long do you guys think it will take them before we see another star wars film in theaters? I'm going to go ahead and say that it probably will happen after Lucas dies. If you think about it, by that point it will have been long enough for people to forget about the prequels (not entirely, but the same way you forget about Ghostbusters 2 or any other bad sequel) and the companies that take over his franchises will start looking at how much the films made. Say what you will about them, but the prequels look great on paper from a financial perspective. They made a lot of money. I think it's only a matter of time before we see another live action film.
There's also the live action TV series that they've been working on for a few years. It hasn't started yet because they want the special effects to be amazing, yet affordable for TV. Once that happens, we'll probably see it. Who knows when that will be. Strange isn't it? 40 years ago Stars Wars looked worse than a modern B-movie on the scifi channel, and yet it was so ingeniously made and filmed that people love it. You'd think they would look at the TV show in that light and try to film something affordable, but with really well-written scripts. Oh well.
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quote:Originally posted by Jeff C.: Strange isn't it? 40 years ago Stars Wars looked worse than a modern B-movie on the scifi channel, and yet it was so ingeniously made and filmed that people love it. You'd think they would look at the TV show in that light and try to film something affordable, but with really well-written scripts. Oh well.
At the time, the special effects in the original movie were mind blowing--the best that audience had seen; they were absolutely cutting edge. They as much as anything (or maybe more than anything, looking back at how clumsy the first movie really was, and how thin its plot) were responsible for the movie's success.
Sam, thanks for the explanation about the lightsabers; very interesting stuff. I never caught even a whiff of that from the movies. It sounds pretty Dune-like, honestly.
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Among the grievous faults in Star Wars is the way the Jedi council is shown to be against the "entanglements" of love and caring for people--the very things that are needed to keep people with Jedi powers human. Specifically, Anakin is forbidden to have any contact with his mother, or attempt to deliver her from slavery. Until finally he gets up the nerve to do what any decent hero would do, and goes to save his mother--only to find that he is too late, she is already dead. That would turn anyone to the dark side. In my opinion, the Jedi council deserved to be wiped out.
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There are actually quite a few really good reasons why, within the story, the Jedi conducted themselves that way. And y'know, for hundreds of millenia it met its goal which was stability and minimizing Jedi turning.
Their mistake with Anakin was applying their standard policy to a very non-standard new pupil. He wasn't like the vast majority of candidates, in that he was found at a very young age and separated (a little shady just how voluntary this was in many case) from his family, replacing it with the Jedi themselves. He already had a family, and had built powerful attachments. And then of course there was the knowledge that not only did his mother love him, personally, but the knowledge that she was still a slave (actually, I don't remember if the story ever handled this part of it-was she still a slave in II?), and furthermore there were the many memories of a mother-son relationship.
So yeah, deeply stupid policy for Anakin on their part. But then, my thoughts on the Jedi of the Old Republic is that they were already morally bankrupt because of how prevalent slavery was in the galaxy. If they had been fighting it, attempting to abolish it where it existed, that'd be one thing. Instead their policy seemed to be 'these guys have slaves; tough break!'
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Among the grievous faults in Star Wars is the way the Jedi council is shown to be against the "entanglements" of love and caring for people--the very things that are needed to keep people with Jedi powers human. Specifically, Anakin is forbidden to have any contact with his mother, or attempt to deliver her from slavery. Until finally he gets up the nerve to do what any decent hero would do, and goes to save his mother--only to find that he is too late, she is already dead. That would turn anyone to the dark side. In my opinion, the Jedi council deserved to be wiped out.
Interestingly, I agree. It is clear from Lucas' later comments about the "consequences" of love and attachment, that he envisioned the perfect person, the Jedi, as essentially a nihilist sociopath. They don't value family, they don't respect the rule of law, and they contribute in no way to society, except for acting as assassins and bully boys for the senate. And as Rakeesh said, they apparently don't care about slavery, or other *serious* social ills.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: So yeah, deeply stupid policy for Anakin on their part. But then, my thoughts on the Jedi of the Old Republic is that they were already morally bankrupt because of how prevalent slavery was in the galaxy. If they had been fighting it, attempting to abolish it where it existed, that'd be one thing. Instead their policy seemed to be 'these guys have slaves; tough break!'
That was my understanding. The Jedi had become blind to fighting for good in the universe and had become broiled in domestic politics and dogma. I've read a good bit of the expanded universe, and you certainly wouldn't see the new Jedi council withdrawing so much from Republic affairs.
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Among the grievous faults in Star Wars is the way the Jedi council is shown to be against the "entanglements" of love and caring for people--the very things that are needed to keep people with Jedi powers human. Specifically, Anakin is forbidden to have any contact with his mother, or attempt to deliver her from slavery. Until finally he gets up the nerve to do what any decent hero would do, and goes to save his mother--only to find that he is too late, she is already dead. That would turn anyone to the dark side. In my opinion, the Jedi council deserved to be wiped out.
Interestingly, I agree. It is clear from Lucas' later comments about the "consequences" of love and attachment, that he envisioned the perfect person, the Jedi, as essentially a nihilist sociopath. They don't value family, they don't respect the rule of law, and they contribute in no way to society, except for acting as assassins and bully boys for the senate. And as Rakeesh said, they apparently don't care about slavery, or other *serious* social ills.
I think that to understand the Jedi philosophy as Lucas understood it, it helps to be really familiar with Mahayana or possibly Tibetan Buddhism. They seem pretty obviously modeled after it.
I'm not actually disputing your negative characterization, by the way. I think you aptly sum up a lot of flaws in Buddhism.
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It's ironic if you think about it. The jedi are supposed to be on this high moral ground, but they don't mind using slaves/clones as cannon fodder. I guess life isn't actually as precious as they make it out to be.
quote:At the time, the special effects in the original movie were mind blowing--the best that audience had seen; they were absolutely cutting edge. They as much as anything (or maybe more than anything, looking back at how clumsy the first movie really was, and how thin its plot) were responsible for the movie's success.
I can appreciate that, but there's a difference between theatrical success and the lasting appeal of a film. Star Wars has lasted as long as it has because of its characters and the amount of memorable scenes and characters. The new films looked great and were the pinnacle of their time (as far as green/blue screen CGI goes anyway), but when you look back at them they had almost no interesting characters. What's more, Lucas didn't do all the work in the first set of films (directing, writing, etc), but he took a much more substantial role in the new ones. There's a big difference in who is doing the story-telling, and it shows.
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Yeah, the whole clone army thing was another incredibly corrupt thing they did. They would sooner create millions of people with the exclusive purpose of killing and being killed than they would, say, tasking 20 Jedi to assassinate Dooku or the other Separatists.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of moral hazards with that, but for the good supposedly life-revering guys? Clone army not the way to go.
Man, one of my larger nerd wishes would be for, say, Timothy Zahn to have been the writer for all of the prequels.
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I spent some energy trying to figure out whether any given thing the jedi order was doing was intently (1) written in purposefully to serve as evidence of their fossilizing moral and structural degeneration, (2) palpatine using his hazily defined "make every character stupid" power, or (3) just really bad writing
It is the worst experiment, don't bother
But at least knowing as much as we do about the old jedi order allows us to see how important Luke Skywalker, Future Voice of the Joker is. Not only did he save the jedi order, but he was its most important reformer, figuring out how to make being a jedi work without the need for many of the orthodox cultinesses and disconnections of the old order.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: I spent some energy trying to figure out whether any given thing the jedi order was doing was intently (1) written in purposefully to serve as evidence of their fossilizing moral and structural degeneration, (2) palpatine using his hazily defined "make every character stupid" power, or (3) just really bad writing
It is the worst experiment, don't bother
But at least knowing as much as we do about the old jedi order allows us to see how important Luke Skywalker, Future Voice of the Joker is. Not only did he save the jedi order, but he was its most important reformer, figuring out how to make being a jedi work without the need for many of the orthodox cultinesses and disconnections of the old order.
Not just the Joker! He's an all-around awesome voice actor.
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