Makes sense. The Jedi see love as a bad thing. Even Yoda wasn’t able to learn from his mistakes and realize that Luke following his heart was actually good. Sure, he lost his hand, but he was able to redeem Anakin because of it. The mistake was clinging to authoritarian ideology and suppressing emotions until the steam needs to go somewhere and explodes into rage and murder.
Imagine if someone had told Anakin it was okay to fall in love, or if they’d actually helped his mother, or both. If the kid had had some genuine support and someone he could talk to about his actual feelings other than Palpatine there might still be a Galactic Senate.
On the flip side, if Luke had been raised to shun his emotions and hadn’t been raised by his aunt and uncle we might have seen an Imperial victory in the galactic civil war. His impatience (and R2’s) is what gets his entire story going, and his concern for his friends is what makes it a success.
The Jedi are based on the Samurai who put honor above all else. Samurai are basically extremists, who will follow their code into death. Like they rather kill themselves than lose face. So yeah the Jedi being extremist ideologues is just Lucas copying Kurosawa’s homework. I’m not even sure if Lucas intentionally wrote the Jedi like that or the deeper subtext is by accident.
That makes sense. It does seem to me like they leaned more heavily into an outlook on non-attachment that comes off as a little hamfisted in the prequels. Like, the movies appear to mistake avoiding attachment with avoiding emotion and relationships that might produce strong feelings. Sort of a clunky take on Buddhism. Though at the same time, the Jedi seem very much attached to particular outcomes on a galactic scale, as well as to a strictness about how the force ought to be used.
It could be worse, but it certainly interferes with their ability to mitigate disaster. In the end, their approach ends up causing the mess that they’re trying to avoid, but it’s that mess itself that brings the balance they claim to want. Which, to be fair, is pretty good storytelling.
It was a thing of the time. In the 80s and 90s and likely long before that too, it was quite a big thing in media and society that emotions were bad and logic was good. Think Spock or Data. A computer was seen as perfectly logical, impartial, incorruptible, because it didn’t have illogical emotions.
You can see this kind of reasoning today too with e.g. Albania instituting an LLM as a government minister, because it would be incorruptible, thus stop corruption. (Guess what was used to facilitate massive amounts of corruption.)
Lucas followed that line of thinking in the original trilogy. Yoda is logical, not emotional. He is a Spock-type figure. Very intelligent, almost all-knowing. He warns Luke not to follow his heart, but instead to follow logic, and he’s right. Following his heart is a mistake that cost Luke his hand and his friends almost their lives. His character development is that he learns to follow logic.
When the prequels were made, Lucas wasn’t the young guy high on Star Trek ideology anymore. He learned that emotion was important and pure logic wasn’t the right thing. But he also wasn’t free of that logic either, so we got the prequels, where both following logic without any emotion was bad, but emotion without logic and restraint too.
Makes sense. The Jedi see love as a bad thing. Even Yoda wasn’t able to learn from his mistakes and realize that Luke following his heart was actually good. Sure, he lost his hand, but he was able to redeem Anakin because of it. The mistake was clinging to authoritarian ideology and suppressing emotions until the steam needs to go somewhere and explodes into rage and murder.
Imagine if someone had told Anakin it was okay to fall in love, or if they’d actually helped his mother, or both. If the kid had had some genuine support and someone he could talk to about his actual feelings other than Palpatine there might still be a Galactic Senate.
On the flip side, if Luke had been raised to shun his emotions and hadn’t been raised by his aunt and uncle we might have seen an Imperial victory in the galactic civil war. His impatience (and R2’s) is what gets his entire story going, and his concern for his friends is what makes it a success.
The Jedi are based on the Samurai who put honor above all else. Samurai are basically extremists, who will follow their code into death. Like they rather kill themselves than lose face. So yeah the Jedi being extremist ideologues is just Lucas copying Kurosawa’s homework. I’m not even sure if Lucas intentionally wrote the Jedi like that or the deeper subtext is by accident.
That makes sense. It does seem to me like they leaned more heavily into an outlook on non-attachment that comes off as a little hamfisted in the prequels. Like, the movies appear to mistake avoiding attachment with avoiding emotion and relationships that might produce strong feelings. Sort of a clunky take on Buddhism. Though at the same time, the Jedi seem very much attached to particular outcomes on a galactic scale, as well as to a strictness about how the force ought to be used.
It could be worse, but it certainly interferes with their ability to mitigate disaster. In the end, their approach ends up causing the mess that they’re trying to avoid, but it’s that mess itself that brings the balance they claim to want. Which, to be fair, is pretty good storytelling.
It was a thing of the time. In the 80s and 90s and likely long before that too, it was quite a big thing in media and society that emotions were bad and logic was good. Think Spock or Data. A computer was seen as perfectly logical, impartial, incorruptible, because it didn’t have illogical emotions.
You can see this kind of reasoning today too with e.g. Albania instituting an LLM as a government minister, because it would be incorruptible, thus stop corruption. (Guess what was used to facilitate massive amounts of corruption.)
Lucas followed that line of thinking in the original trilogy. Yoda is logical, not emotional. He is a Spock-type figure. Very intelligent, almost all-knowing. He warns Luke not to follow his heart, but instead to follow logic, and he’s right. Following his heart is a mistake that cost Luke his hand and his friends almost their lives. His character development is that he learns to follow logic.
When the prequels were made, Lucas wasn’t the young guy high on Star Trek ideology anymore. He learned that emotion was important and pure logic wasn’t the right thing. But he also wasn’t free of that logic either, so we got the prequels, where both following logic without any emotion was bad, but emotion without logic and restraint too.