Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Honestly, given the Grysks, I could see a lot of them at the ass end of the universe in time for the OT.

This is all hypothetical though, but it makes the failure of Luke’s attempt to rebuild the Jedi sting a lot less if there is a group carrying the torch.

Edited by Beatman1 on May 10th 2020 at 11:15:59 AM

I would love to see some more unorthodox masters. Cere was probably the most compelling character in the game because of her history with the Force and the Order, and seeing characters from diverse backgrounds like Cal, Cere, and Merrin trying to rebuild an Order and do good in the universe even without the specific Jedi tenets would be pretty cool.

It would also be more interesting than "here are some original characters that tried to do the same thing as the character the plot centered around".

Frankly I feel the opposite way about Luke's failure to revive the Jedi. If there's one idea I liked best from TLJ it was the idea of abandoning the franchise's past obsession with restoring and maintaining the Jedi Order as it was. The idea of the ST being the End of an Era for the Jedi as we knew them was really cool and I'm mostly bummed that they didn't focus more on that.

I'm firmly in the camp of "the ST was a mess but it's a mess that can be potentially salvaged through EU material." Backtracking on that - going all "Just kidding! The Jedi are fine and there's a bunch of them that were just hanging out somewhere else" - would just make Luke's failure even more pointless.

If you want to make it less All for Nothing the solution isn't to make it so that he didn't even have to try in the first place, it's to show that his failure had a purpose and accomplished something in the long run. Have Rey start her own thing that's better than the old Order, have those Jedi survivors fighting the Grysk find their own path that defies the Order's dogma. But just going "oh actually these other guys succeeded in rebuilding the Order so don't worry" is just lazy and makes the whole story even worse than it already is.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on May 10th 2020 at 11:47:48 AM

Granted his failure was due to matters completely out of his control like Sidious being actually alive & his nephew being a born psychopath.

Though being honest I want the Jedi back with its typical tenants back as a sort of FU to the constant Jedi deconstruction we’ve been getting especially from TLJ.

No better way to show how meaningless TLJ is by bringing back the Jedi somewhat unchanged.

Yeah and that's missing the entire point of what I said, which is that making TLJ more pointless just hurts the overall story of the franchise. Soft-retconning where you just completely ignore (or god forbid actively shit on) a major aspect of canon is never good; it comes across as lazy and vindictive and just makes the story feel inconsistent.

And hell, even the PT and pre-Disney EU were constantly pointing out how the Republic-era Jedi Order was generally arrogant and misguided, underestimating their enemies and letting aspects of their dogma cloud their judgement on problems like Anakin's behavior - hell even Return of the Jedi brought it up with Luke rejecting his dogmatic masters' insistence that Vader must be killed.

Bringing the Order back exactly as it was would be an "FU" to far more than just TLJ, it'd be an "FU" to a major aspect of the entire franchise.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on May 10th 2020 at 11:58:32 AM

I agree. One of the best aspects of the original EU was the New Jedi Order, where Luke actually looked at what had contributed to the Order's decay and fall and worked to address it. As much as it would fit Disney's permanent "we're going to milk this franchise and its nostalgia value until the sun burns out" MO to bring back the Jedi Order unchanged, I hope they don't.

Here’s the thing.

I genuinly really like the whole monk aspect of the Jedi. The focus on religion, spiritualism, the necessary rigidity in maintaining The Force because of how potentially chaotic it can be which enforces a sort of moral standard that a Jedi has to maintain. It’s all compelling & cool.

So my fear is casting that off might mean whatever replaces the Jedi won’t be as cool or interesting. It will be a more generic kind of hero, maybe something easier & simpler without the complexities.

Edited by slimcoder on May 11th 2020 at 12:03:07 PM

Yeah see again, as I pointed out in an edit, even the OT was pointing out how the rigidity was objectively a bad thing because it blinded them to the spectrum of morality that life actually is.

The idea of an order of monks that rigidly controls themselves because they have a dangerous power is cool, yes, but it's never been something that Star Wars treats as a positive thing because the Force has never been portrayed as some uncontrollable power that needs rigid rules to prevent its misuse - it's the natural, flowing life energy of all things.

It's only bad if the person using it is an honest-to-god bastard or has been seduced by honest-to-god bastardry, and Star Wars generally takes the stance that most people are not bastards. This has been a thing since Empire Strikes Back, dude; I can't think of a single work in Legends that took the stance that the Prequel-era Jedi's moral absolutism and rigid monastic traditions were right.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on May 11th 2020 at 12:10:17 PM

Well it also generates discipline & a sort of standard.

I like it because it kinda keeps things from being too easy. A sort of rules & standards you have to live up to.

I don't know it kinda adds a difficulty that makes the character work & not be "snap snap your a hero" if you can understand.

Don't real life monks have similar dogmas/tenants they have to follow to reach a sort of enlightenment?

Edited by slimcoder on May 11th 2020 at 12:11:32 PM

I mean generally I view personal self-realization and spiritual enlightenment as a whole lot of work, and that's the stance that the Star Wars franchise has always taken as the "correct" way of handling the force compared to the Prequel Jedi's rigid, repressive codes of conduct.

EDIT: Yeah many monastic orders have rigid codes and such. But I doubt you'll find a single Buddhist monastery (and the Force is primarily based on eastern spiritualism) that holds that their way is the only correct way and that straying from it at all is a path straight to ruination and failure, like the Prequel Jedi did.

Star Wars's attitude towards spiritualism has always been sort of a new age, freeform "just be a good person and you'll find your way eventually" one. Luke succeeds in Return of the Jedi by choosing his own path in regards to his father rather than sticking to the Jedi's rigid belief that the Sith must be destroyed, that family must be spurred, and that people can never come back from the darkness.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on May 11th 2020 at 12:21:07 PM

Well I'm not abdicating for a return to the extreme levels of rigidity the PT Order had which was the result of centuries of stagnation.

But to keep some of that flavor ya know. I don't know you can have a sect of Jedi who choose to be a bit more rigid in how they practice their devotion compared to another sect being more relatively loose.

TBH, the Haxion Brood stuff was one of the primary reasons I figured this game was getting DLC. They got their own planet, unique designs for their affiliated people, the big bad of that group got their own model which was only used in a hologram, and they only come up for a single battle that stunk very heavily of "we'll finish this later."

So if that story doesn't get DLC and/or it's not in the sequel, I'll be very surprised.

People said the same thing about about Ahsoka, that she couldn't survive the Purge / OT because there aren't supposed to be a lot of Jedi around - but the answer for that was "she was alive, but doing other stuff / helping in other ways."

With Cal, there's even more reason to figure he can do so, because unlike most Jedi Cal has made the conscious decision to bide his time and not make waves.

Eh, is that really true with Ahsoka though? Because we still don't have any information about where she was or what she was doing between Rebels and the OT. My impression is that she came out of the Timey-Wimey Dimension in the later stages of the Rebellion, like near Return of the Jedi, and left with Sabine for the unknown regions maybe a decade later. Like, she was there but not enough to make a discernible difference.

I mean maybe I'm wrong; maybe we'll get a big story arc where she, Cal, and Luke all team up and then the former two leave and never come back and Luke never mentions them to anyone. But I don't see it happening and if it does I probably won't like it unless it's got some really clever writing.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on May 11th 2020 at 12:24:55 PM

I like to think the Jedi have a good diversity of how they practice their faith & devotion to The Force especially through acts inspired by real life religious examples.

Like Jedi who willingly choose to live more ascetic lifestyles devoid of Earthly pleasures or Jedi who prefer to train hard and constantly refine their saber skills like how Shaolin monks practice martial arts to better themselves spiritually.

We know one thing: she didn't spend that time being dead (though she did skip several months, temporally speaking).

Edited by KnownUnknown on May 11th 2020 at 12:44:00 PM

I do genuinely think that people who saw the failings of the Order, people who refused to remake it as is, people who realized that suppression of all emotion created Darth Vader, would not make the Order the same as it was. Even if they were just a bunch of outcasts trying to keep a tradition alive. You don’t have them be the same, but you keep it from being all for nothing.

Plus, the current survivors (Ashoka, Ezra, Cal) were either padawans or trained by padawans created by war. Any order they created will be with that absolute failure of the PT Jedi witnessed first hand, and they would take steps to avoid that.

It didn't have to be the same, but getting some kind of working Order would have been better than letting the Jedi be exterminated again because they are just that uncreative for the setting.

Honestly, there’s my ending. All these misfit Jedi, meeting a Rey who has no idea what to do with her textbooks. They see her on Tatooine and go “We will help you. You're not alone.”

Edited by Beatman1 on May 11th 2020 at 10:28:58 AM

I mean, that would just come across to me as the writers going "Yeah, okay, fine, you hate Rey so much? Here, she can't accomplish her goals without all the characters you do like swooping in to help her. Happy?"

If you want to redeem the sequel trilogy have Rey and Co. actually accomplish something cool on their own merits in a story that's actually written well. Don't just throw all the fan-favorite characters into her story and have their presence be the deciding factor in the heroes' success. That's just lazy pandering.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on May 11th 2020 at 8:53:26 AM

Admitably just having Rey rebuild the Order alone sounds rather dull......... also slow.

She herself is a recently graduated Padawan with her main teacher being another Padawan. It will take a life-time for her Order to have more than 5 members.

The alternative could be that they’re not a group, they’re off having their own adventures battling the Grysks or the Yuuzhan Vong, and Rey recruits them like she’s Professor X. Giving her the agency but not diminishing them.

I don’t think it’s wrong to have these characters do cool things and not invalidate Rey at the same time.

Edited by Beatman1 on May 11th 2020 at 12:18:03 PM

I mean, I'm not saying that. And I'm not against that idea either, of her seeking out Jedi survivors for her new Order. But for the love of god, give Rey the agency in that part of the story, and have the other characters wrap up their big separate adventure beforehand.

She's supposed to be the hero of the final trilogy, the successor to Luke Skywalker, the second Chosen One. The final hero who closes out an entire decades-long era of the timeline. Diminishing her and putting her in the backseat — having all her struggles amount to her still being an inexperienced chump who can't accomplish her mission without help from older, more established, and more popular characters — will hurt the Sequels even more than JJ Abrams' hackjob of a finale did.

That's what Time Skips are for, my dude. And as I've repeatedly pointed out, mastery of the force is more about self-realization and strength of will than spending years lifting rocks over and over to "build discipline." There's a reason Luke went from "can't deflect a stun bolt" to "beats Darth freaking Vader in a one-on-one fight" in the span of like two or three years, and it wasn't the three weeks of training he got from the so-called "Masters" who he went on to surpass entirely on his own.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on May 11th 2020 at 9:43:32 AM

Depends how long.

Like 1 good apprentice could take 10 years or so.

Getting a sizable Order would prolly take until Rey's an old woman.

I mean Luke was turned into a depressed chump just so Rey can have the honor of being the one who revives the Order & defeat Sidious. Her having problems is pretty fair play.

Edited by slimcoder on May 11th 2020 at 9:43:15 AM

"Fair play" doesn't equal good storytelling. The way you've described your preferences makes it sound like you're more interested in a story where Rey gets her "just desserts" for being a bad character in a bad movie than you are with a story where Rey gets redeemed into a good character through good storytelling.

Like, you want her to suck and not succeed, and then get told how to not suck by characters you actually like; not because that would be a good story that explores the themes of the franchise but because you want to feel the satisfaction of seeing a character you dislike struggle and fail while a character you do like one-ups them. That's more the speed of fanfiction.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on May 11th 2020 at 9:49:37 AM