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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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That's true, but I think it's a good feel it's a good example of what I mean when I say that the Jedi from the original trilogy are just very limited and stretched to the limits of what you can narratively do with them. It's very interesting to see a quasi-pacifist hero in a war movie, but you have to really rig the plot to make that work. I don't want to see Luke sitting around in a swamp offering mystical mumbo-jumbo doing nothing, like Yoda, but I also don't want to see him charging in killing everything. He sorta got lucky with RotJ that he could be a pacifist so that Vader could do the actual killing. It's fine to be in inspiration or philosopher, but someone still has to do the actual fighting, and they just never really had a good answer for that.

The prequel trilogy had the Jedi becoming reluctant leaders in a massive war, though, and then had that backfiring on them horribly in multiple ways. This was one of the good things about the prequel plot: it retconned Obi Wan's and Yoda's reclusion and pacifism as being a desperate reactionary attempt to return to the old pre-war ways, an overreaction which makes more sense from that psychological point of view than on its own merits, as the original trilogy itself showed their attitudes to be quite lacking. Fortunately the original trilogy also shuffled the last of the old guard Jedi out of the way in the end, clearing the stage for Luke's more tempered, more reluctant, more battle-tested inclinations toward pacifism and forgiveness, ready to try to build something anew.

How do you balance a unwavering love of peace with the varying need for violence? It's an interesting question, and it was all nicely set up for them to add new thematic answers to! They had a formerly main character who'd aged to fit the "old wise mentor whose advice might not be listened to" role himself (and whose wisdom therefore wouldn't necessarily disrupt the narrative tension of protagonists making their own mistakes), who'd seen the consequences of both extremes, and who definitely could come up with advice better than "I should try to murder my nephew in his sleep and then abandon the galaxy". All the sequel trilogy needed to do was complete the last third of the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" dialectic, instead of going with "thesis, antithesis, potato".