notbecauseofvictories:

Full disclosure, I borrowed that line from Yoda: Dark Rendezvous—a book I have not read, but acknowledge because fallen Jedi Dooku telling Yoda that the Order is a fucked up institution that steals children and turns them into soldiers is something I can get behind. The full quote is: “Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without. I wonder, sometimes, if that is what drives us, that first abandonment. We have a lot to prove.”

Listen. A lot of what Star Wars has to achieve is via shorthand—the whole canon is less than 20 hours, which means it has to communicate a complex world, plus plot, is a very abbreviated way. Which is why the Empire borrows the design and aesthetic of fascist dictatorships, and why the Jedi Order steals children. They’re very simple ways of communicating, “this is really fucked up, we can’t show you the extent of how fucked-up it is, but trust us. it’s real fucked.”

Obviously, the reason that the Jedi Order is fucked is shown to us in real time; they’re the primary agent of a pointless, reasonless war ordered by the galaxy’s elected body out of pure politics. (I will fight anyone who says the prequels have no political grounding, they are so early 2000s US of fucking A; george lucas is a numbskull but he knew what he was about.) The Order is an institution, it is woven into the fabric of the galaxy, such that Qui-Gon never thinks twice about Outer Rim slavery and Obi-Wan understands the role the Trade Federation plays in Galactic politics. It’s not the fact that nine-year-old Anakin is a child that keeps him from being indoctrinated into the huge, martial system; it’s that he’s too old for a child. They want someone more malleable.

(There’s an entire scene when Anakin, who has been recently freed from slavery and watched a man die in front of him, must watch strangers debate his right to exist as a Jedi. You can say a lot of things, but there’s that. You have to deal with that, you have to understand that.)

Plus, there’s something unspeakably horrible once you consider that—Obi-Wan, Yoda, Qui-Gon, all these pillars of Jedi wisdom were taken from their families before the age of nine. As early as possible, when children are at their most malleable and plasticity-brained. The Jedi Order wanted them as untainted as possible, and maybe it was for religious reasons. I doubt it, but hey, maybe. (The Catholic Church used to castrate young boys to keep their voices high, pure. Do we think that was religious? Or aesthetic?) But was it any surprise, when they moved on to actual clones, manipulated from before even birth? 

I mean, stop asking nature versus nature—control both and you have the whole creature in your hands.

The problem with the Jedi Order is that at the end of the day, they were convinced they were Light. And while they were probably right by dint of no other good options (the Dark built Death Stars) that sheer belief is dangerous. It makes you untouchable, even when you do horrific things in the name of Light. You take children, and accept it as your due; you swallow half the galaxy and think they’re better for it. There’s a self-propagated lie at the heart of the Jedi Order, which is that the Light of its goals justifies all it does in the dark.

Even taking children. Leaning on families until they give up their precious daughters, or sons, or hatchlings, or—

Even that.

Everything else comes from there, from that central conceit. If the Jedi Order is justification enough to say “we deserve the offerings of your infants” then they deserve everything else. Death and blood and clones and privacy and freedom and democracy. Asking for their babies paves the way for all the rest. Shattering families is the original sin of the Jedi; if they hadn’t asked for such a sacrifice, or if the very idea of offering up your children to the ever-gaping maw of the Order was more horrible, unthinkable.

Every Jedi is a child who wasn’t wanted enough by its parents to keep him or her from the battlefield. The tragedy at the heart of the Jedi Order is exactly that—not that they were unwanted, or even horrible, but just not enough. Not to keep them from bloodshed, or uncertainty, just. Not enough.