Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

Because no one knew a thing about them. No one knew what Luke was up to as recently as six years before TFA, at which point they had been exterminated for some time. Luke was already an enigmatic figure, and neither Han and Leia had spoken to him in a long time. All signs point to them being relatively hermetic.

The movie only mentions them in the broadest of terms as a mistake.

Again, that doesn't mean they were isolated.

Rey - as our viewpoint "ordinary person" character - only believed Luke and the Jedi were a myth. And while we could construct an out-of-universe explanation that since she lived in the armpit of the galaxy she may simply have been uninformed and that they were more present in the minds of the rest of the galaxy, the fact remains that this and her perception in general was used as exposition in regards to how the Jedi are known in the present day in TFA, and continues to be the sole source of exposition regarding how well they're known in TLJ with no contradictions, so its was initially what the audience is meant to accept as true, so any explanations like that are Fanon until they actually establish it.

It's one of the many reasons I really want a future movie to focus on the galaxy as a whole and what's going on outside the Resistance vs First Order conflict beyond a few brief snippets. It wouldn't be hard in the slightest to establish that the New Jedi Order still had a lot of influence on the modern era even though they're gone (or, incidentally, that one shot with a superlaser didn't completely destroy the Republic), given how intimate the context for the story is so far, the but the movies have been uninterested in doing so. The result is that the universe itself becomes smaller the more the story keeps itself that way.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 27th 2019 at 11:20:33 AM

But Han also thought the Jedi were a myth and that was only 19 years after the Jedi Order was killed and they we're pretty famous. Rey has at least heard of Luke and the Jedi.

Han thought the Force was a myth, not the Jedi.

ANH also has a bit more exposition of what people think of the Jedi though Motti's comments to Vader: people thought they were a bunch of religious crackpots who pretended to be sorcerers and got wiped out for it.

In both trilogies, the only people who know of and/or care about the Jedi are people who were old or experienced enough to have met one (or influenced by such people), like Jabba in the original trilogy or the Rebels / Resistance members in both trilogies.

Either way, the use of such in the OT didn't make the universe smaller because the universe didn't exist at the time. That was what worldbuilding was at the time, and so doing so made The 'Verse bigger. But now the universe is big, and pulling the same plot points now involves filing aspects of the setting away to facilitate the story rather than adding them.

Which could make sense from a directorial/writing point of view: the minds behind the current story don't want to be beholden to the greater universe, so do away or ignore the parts of it they don't need in favor of what they want to do (for an equivalent from another film universe, see Thor Ragnarok). But that still causes friction, because there comes a point where you can't pretend that The 'Verse is small and go back to the beginning without it being obvious.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 27th 2019 at 11:42:53 AM

The Jedi also only had like 10,000 prior to the Clone Wars. In a Galaxy-wide society.

The odds of anyone other than leading politicians on Coruscant seeing one first hand approaches zero

Luke's Jedi Order was much smaller and younger, so I have no issues with Rey thinking the Jedi are a myth.

Edited by alliterator on Jan 27th 2019 at 2:05:47 AM

Jakku is the sticks-to-end-all-sticks, too.

Though given its status as the site of the last gasp of the Empire you'd think it'd at least attract regular crowds of military history enthusiasts.

Nah, you can do that from space. The surface attracts all the people looking for parts to sell for shitty food.

You think there are a bunch of armchair generals on every planet hashing out the battles of the Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War, debating why this side won or this side lost like in real life?

Obviously. The real question is whether or not it's common knowledge that Palpatine was playing both sides of the Clone Wars, so most major battles were little more than puppet theater.

I'd imagine most people were unaware of Palpatine playing both sides. Palp's legitimacy IIRC comes from the notion that he alone can keep people safe from the likes of The Separatists.

If word gets out that the clone wars were an inside job, it'd be the kind of PR nightmare that would severely threaten the stability of The Empire.

To be fair I would argue that the strategy of the battles themselves probably weren't predetermined by Palps himself. The Clone Wars were a Xanatos Gambit-Palpatine would have won no matter which side of the Clone Wars was victorious so there isn't necessarily a reason for him to rig the actual battles.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Jan 27th 2019 at 6:58:43 AM

Yeah, their primary purpose was to weaken and separate the Jedi, and maneuver himself into a position of power where the transition from democratically elected "In power until the crisis is over" leader turns into autocratic "He got us through a devastating war, why don't we make him Emperor of the Galaxy?"

It just occurred to me that Palpatine is in many ways Evil! FDR.

*cough cough internment camps*

I really don't want to get into an argument over whether any specific action of a real life politician was justified or not, so I'm just going to say this: All people are complicated, and presidents especially have to do many things that their constituents might disagree with, never mind their descendants decades later who (hopefully) have a more evolved moral framework.

The point was that for the most part FDR was considered a good president, and Palpatine aped many of his policies for evil purposes.

What would Sheev's actual positions be in a real-world context, anyway? In his fake persona, I mean. He's clearly a security > liberty kind of guy, but has anything more been revealed?

I imagine he would go from Authoritarian Democrat to National Populist or Paternal Autocrat.

Sheev is openly a fascist Space Nazi, that part isn't really secret. Basically, his argument goes that humanity is The Empire/The Republic, and it needs to be protected from all threats so that something like The Clone Wars doesn't happen again.

In fact, he's actually less of a Space Nazi in private than he is in public IIRC. He has no special hatred for aliens, but he creates policies to torment them mostly to look good to his political supporters.

He also supports building jobs through government mandated construction projects, and probably made the space trains run on time.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jan 28th 2019 at 8:26:09 AM

He explicitly didn't, actually. He just blamed all the Empire's problems first on remnant Separatists, then on aliens, then on rebels, then on the Rebels. Palpatine was mostly concerned with making sure the Empire couldn't function without him, rather than worrying about efficiency.

Are his immortality projects still canon? I can't remember.

I've always thought there was great potential in a story about the repression of the Separatist-aligned species under the Empire. Entire peoples damned by society for the actions of their worst apples... very relevant to real life, no?

Though that would require having aliens among the main cast.

Luckily the EU has easily done that, the movies........ not so much.

Edited by slimcoder on Jan 28th 2019 at 9:10:39 AM