General Star Wars Thread

I've always assumed that Yoda was afraid finding out about Vader would have stopped Luke from doing what he felt was necessary when the time came, maybe even swayed him far too much.

Both he and Obi-Wan seem to have been of the opinion that the only solution was to kill Anakin and be done with it, and they both expressed the idea that if Luke couldn't do that then the galaxy was lost (ironically, thinking in absolutes).

So, Yoda's idea was that if Luke was swayed in such a way that he couldn't bring himself to kill Vader, he was essentially dooming his friends and the galaxy in the long run, not the short term.

They were incredibly wrong on all counts, but I can understand what they were thinking.

edited 29th Mar '12 9:05:46 AM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Didn't he also think that Luke just wasn't ready to fight Vader. I haven't watched it in some time, I just thought Yoda believed Vader would kill Luke or something (which wouldn't help anyone obviously.)

EDIT: Yeah, that.

edited 29th Mar '12 9:08:59 AM by NULLcHiLD27

@Hamburger Time That's exactly what I've been trying to say,James Earl Jones delivery was perfect,frankly I think it would've been a Tear Jerker without those terrible body expressions (That's Hayden's and Lucas' fault)

This is exactly why the Jedi might be more to blame for the Sith uprising than anyone else (save Palpatine that is). For starters, in The Phantom Menace Anakin was a sweet little kid who just happened to be powerful, in Attack of the Clones he's arrogant. Why? Because the darn Jedi fawned over all his skills,it's only natural for it all to go to his head. Obi-Wan was one of the few who had his head on Earth,so of course Anakin thought that meant he was being held back

The only Jedi other than Yoda and Obi-Wan who didn't fawn was Mace Windu who pretty much treated Anakin like crap most of the time,especially in Revenge Of The Sith before the inevitable. It's no wonder Anakin switched sides with such lack of respect,not to mention not being able to have friends. And then being used as a spy.

Although I doubt Obi-Wan deliberately killed himself just so Luke would want revenge,it just seemed like there wasn't another way out

edited 29th Mar '12 1:25:09 PM by terlwyth

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter

Yes, that's exactly how I interpreted it. It's a little creepy the way they go about setting Luke up - first Obi-Wan deliberately lets Vader kill him so that Luke has a reason to want to kill Vader (aside from Obi-Wan's word that Vader killed Anakin Skywalker), then he sends Luke to Yoda so that when Luke kills Vader it won't be out of a desire for revenge, and then when Luke comes back after finding out that Vader is his father, Obi-Wan tries to feed him a load of bull, and both Yoda and Obi-Wan imply that the galaxy is doomed if he doesn't go ahead with killing his father. Fortunately Luke chooses not to listen to them.

I have to wonder if part of it is that psychologically Obi-Wan needed to believe that Vader was irredeemable, because if it was possible that Vader could be brought back from the Dark Side, there was a possibility that Obi-Wan could have succeeded in doing so on Mustafar, and the implications of that failure were something he couldn't face. It would certainly make Obi-Wan a more complex character.

Qui-Gonn's a great character because he's the one exception to the Jedi Order's rule that you should care for everyone in general and nobody in particular. He cares about individuals, even when it seems to bring him nothing but grief (Jar-Jar). Anakin could have been a great Jedi if Qui-Gonn had lived to train him.

Yeah, the Jedi can be douchebags sometimes. This is only in the EU, but an earlier iteration of the Order was responsible for the near-annihilation of two sentient species, apparently on the orders of this guy; I really hope someone writes a novel or comic about this some day, I think it could have a bit of a Fullmetal Alchemist feel to it.

The pig of Hufflepuff pulsed like a large bullfrog. Dumbledore smiled at it, and placed his hand on its head: "You are Hagrid now."

I always thought that Yoda and Obi-Wan just underestimated Luke, and thought he'd fuck up the minute he got there, and when you get down to it, he did, since all Luke does is get there, fight Vader, lose hand, jump and get rescued. Leia, hand and Chewie got out thanks to Lando being awesome. Though I admit I haven't seen The Empire Strikes Back in a while, so I might have forgotten a few details.

A movie is a collaborative effort, parts of something that comes together to a greater whole. James Earl Jones can give a great vocal performance but if it doesn't match what is done on screen then it is a poor performance regardless, his Big "NO!" might have worked if was a collapse to the ground rather than a Skyward Scream (the difference between remorseful grief versus blind anger). Absolutely fantastic editing can sometimes fix a bad performance (physical or vocal) or bad directing, which didn't happen here.

Leia, Lando, and Chewie only escaped because R2-D2 hacked the doors to let them out, learned from Cloud City's central computer exactly how the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive had been damaged, and then fixed it himself. And R2-D2 was there because Luke brought him.

So, Luke wasn't able to rescue them himself, but he was indirectly responsible for their escape all the same.

I didn't write any of that.

Luke being there was also the reason why Vader's focus was on Luke rather than the prisoners, which is another reason they were able to escape. They'd never have gotten away if Vader hadn't been busy focusing on Luke.

With or without the prequels, its easy to interpret Yoda & Kenobi believing that it was more likely that Luke would get himself killed or worse, swayed by Vader/Emperor to the dark side, than it was that he could defeat Vader or that Vader would turn back.

With Obi-Wan especially it could be seen that having lost one pupil to the dark side, he is specifically adamant about Luke destroying Darth because he does not want that to happen again.

Still waiting for a Legion of Losers movie...

Training your student for the specific purpose of assassinating an enemy seems like a poor way to ensure he won't fall to the Dark Side.

These are the same people who believed placing Anakin's son with the same last name, at the same planet he was born on, with the very same family Skywalker grew up with would be the most effective hiding place in the galaxy. "Certain point of view" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Still waiting for a Legion of Losers movie...

Well, they were right

I have this one Star Wars Insider magazine that has an article talking about attachments in Star Wars play a big role.

This article points out how the Jedi Order acted so insensitive to Anakin Skywalker. Yoda tells Ani "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." While this sounds like a fine line to quote, consider the context behind this line. Yoda is telling a 7-year-old kid that he's vulnerable to the Dark Side just because he misses his mother, which would be considered very Jerkass behaviour. Then again, the J.O. by that time was made up of people who were raised without families and have no attachments. That just shows little they know about a number of topics, and how they are not as wonderful as we are led to believe.

The article does say at the end that Luke and Anakin won in the end, not because of Jedi teachings, but because of attachments. That seems to bring up the question of who's the real hero and who's the real villain.

edited 30th Mar '12 5:53:43 PM by TiggersAreGreat

Oh, Equestria, we stand on guard for thee!

It's still Palpatine,without a doubt.... maybe Plagueis for creating Anakin in the first place.

Luke didn't win because of attachment,he won because he didn't give in to fear of being defeated by Vader. Anakin gave into fear of losing Padme after losing Shmi

edited 30th Mar '12 5:58:05 PM by terlwyth

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter

Actually, Luke didn't give in to fear of losing Leia. Difference.

The fact that Obi-Wan and Yoda may not have been the best teachers doesn't change the fact that Anakin was wrong.

He didn't fall to the dark side out of love; there's a difference between love and attachment. Genuine love seeks the good of the person you love, not your own good. If Anakin had told Padme, "I know you're going to die, and I can save you, but only if I destroy the Jedi and the Republic and kill a bunch of children," she'd have been horrified. She'd rather have died. His objective wasn't to do what was best for Padme; it was to save himself the pain of losing her. That's why it destroyed him.

The Episode III novelization spells it out in the ending of the Yoda/Palpatine duel, Yoda realized that he had been training Jedi to be the same Jedi that came before while the Sith learned to evolve. It was the fact they were so uncompromising in how they did things that they ceased to actually rely on the living force, Qui-Gon's specialty. That's why Yoda insisted that Luke have a normal upbringing and not train him from the start to be a weapon against Vader and Palpatine, they would be imposing their own rules on Luke just as they had done with Anakin.

Even still, Yoda's advice to Anakin was solid if a Family-Unfriendly Aesop. Anakin couldn't handle the pain of loss so Yoda taught him that death is a natural part of life and obsessing with trying to circumventing it would consumed him in the process (and it was... unnatural). The Unfriendly part is saying that not everyone can be saved, whether from death or their own self-destruction.

The Jedi are very rigidly Stoic (possibly one of the better example of a true Stoic in popular culture), and were so engrained in it that they were very poor at explaining it without years of indoctrination from birth. By the time of Phantom Menace came around they had begun to get somewhat extreme about it as well, to the point where people like Qui Gon were considered unorthodox or even outright wrong when they probably shouldn't have been. This proved to be a problem - in the end, their attitude towards attachment caused similar kinds of problems as to the ones that would've been caused if they allowed it. Love and attachment are funny fishes - they're unpredictable.

Luke's victory wasn't caused due to attachment as much a love (his attachment was a factor however), but in his victory he did prove that a Jedi did not need to be without attachment to be a force for good.

^ Basically, he proved that.

edited 30th Mar '12 9:18:59 PM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

One part I find interesting is how Anakin Skywalker was supposedly a Sith creation by Darth Sidious and Darth Plagueis. George Lucas himself pretty much said that he left that part out in the films, because he was trying to make it so that Anakin going to the Dark Side was his decision, and not because he was a Sith creation at the beginning.

Still, the Darth Plagueis book helped in clarifying this matter. Sidious and/or Plagueis tried Midichlorian Manipulation to create a being that would be loaded in the Force. However, the midichlorians struck back against this by creating Anakin Skywalker in order to destroy the Sith. So I guess you could say it's yes and no!

Speaking of Darth Sidious, did you know that he is apparently a redhead with blue eyes? Well, at least he's not a Green Eyed Red Head!

Oh, Equestria, we stand on guard for thee!

You know, I'm not ashamed to say I liked ROTS, but there is one thing I'm disappointed in. To be fair, it wasn't actually in the movie; what I'm referring to is Word of God's explanation the the Prophecy of the Chosen One is... exactly what everyone thought it was. I thought there was a great opportunity for a Prophecy Twist there, no? I mean, why throw in Yoda's line about how the Prophecy might've been misread, if the Prophecy wasn't actually misread? My best guess is that Lucas may have actually changed his mind about what it meant between making the movie and delivering that particular bit of Word of God, but even that theory has holes in it.

The pig of Hufflepuff pulsed like a large bullfrog. Dumbledore smiled at it, and placed his hand on its head: "You are Hagrid now."

The thing is, we never actually got to hear or read this prophecy. All we got was the Jedi interpretation of something we never actually got told about.

And let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a' that)

Yeah, but Lucas said the Jedi were exactly right about it, so we wouldn't actually need to read it to know what it entails.

The pig of Hufflepuff pulsed like a large bullfrog. Dumbledore smiled at it, and placed his hand on its head: "You are Hagrid now."

The Jedi's interpretation of what the Prophecy meant was accurate, but how it came about is how it fits into the Prophecy Twist. Again, I think it was brought up in the Episode III novelization where someone asked "Did it say the Chosen One would be a Jedi?" "No, but what else could they be."

You know, that's actually pretty clever. Good show, George (or Matthew, as the case may be). Morality's still a bit too black-and-white for my taste, though.

edited 31st Mar '12 11:58:36 PM by HamburgerTime

The pig of Hufflepuff pulsed like a large bullfrog. Dumbledore smiled at it, and placed his hand on its head: "You are Hagrid now."