#I also would have enjoyed anakin's tragedy if it had been about the institutions of the republic destroying a boy and creating | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stonefreeak · 4 years

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Wheee! Another update is here! I hope y’all will continue to enjoy this fic as we move forward!

When the news breaks that the case against Mas Amedda and Former-Chancellor Palpatine for corruption charges will go to court breaks, it explodes across the holonet like a supernova.

The recent arrests and trials of Senators from all over the Republic, the arrests-in-absence of Senators formerly of the Republic and currently of the Separatists have been making headlines for weeks, but before now there has been nothing about Mas Amedda or Palpatine themselves.

If there had been nothing to substantiate the claims, the investigation would have ended now with no charges being brought forward against them. The investigation would only have caught these other people, and so far only sent other people to trial. So for this too to come a trial... Well, clearly that means that there is a case against them. There is evidence to be found.

The people start to wonder how far the corruption goes, how big a web it has woven, and how many of the already arrested and sentenced Senators have testimonies against Amedda and Palpatine.

News anchors argue and debate each other into exhaustion regarding what this means not just for Amedda and Palpatine themselves, but for the Republic and Senate at large. If the two who were the most powerful beings in the Republic are found guilty on corruption charges... Does that mean that the Separatist worlds who chose to try and leave the Republic in protest are right?

Or does it mean that someone, Count Dooku perhaps, saw an opportunity to gain power by playing on the corruption they saw in the Senate rather than work towards eliminating those issues from the inside?

~~~~

Obi-Wan doesn't have much time to spend watching the holonet, but what little he sees is enough to exhaust him. He's unsurprised, but he's also worried. He doesn't know what the investigation has found—as he shouldn't, per due process—but he knows the possible ramifications of a guilty verdict.

Yes, the Republic is under new leadership, certainly, but many, if not most, senators remain unchanged. How many of them were in Palpatine or Amedda's pockets? How will this affect the peace discussions and reintegration of returning separatist worlds?

How, exactly will the neutral systems—if there truly can be such a thing in a conflict like this—react? Will some of them finally take a stance beyond "we will not fight"?

He shakes his head and moves out of his chair, to sit down on the floor instead.

He moves into his most favoured meditation position, and tries to clear his mind. He'll need to work through his emotions and thoughts one by one, lest he gets overwhelmed.

He's needed more meditation than he's needed since childhood after his near-death experience. His connection to the force has been shaken, and he's been shaken. It takes him far more effort than usual to calm down.

Perhaps he'll speak to one of the Temple's mind healers when he gets the chance. It is usually a good thing to do after you've faced your death in such a stark way, he knows that.

Still. He's so busy. It feels almost wrong to take any sort of time off between all of his responsibilities.

Hah, no doubt Master Yoda would hit him in the shin if he heard that, and then give him a long-winded lecture on the impossibility of helping others if you do not care for yourself.

"There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no chaos, there is harmony. There is no death, there is the Force," he mutters the mantra over and over as he sinks deeper into meditation. Blast and the others will keep watch, and Obi-Wan has it on good authority that Waxer and Boil's treatments are over and they're back on duty as well. He has good men at his back.

There is no need to worry.

~~~~

Anakin stares at the newsreel, uncomprehending.

Mister Palpatine has been arrested, awaiting trial.

It's as if all of his thoughts need to force their way through stone to make sense. He's... blank.

This can't be!

There's no way Palpatine is guilty! The investigation is probably just arresting him and Amedda and setting a trial date due to outside pressure. That's it. Of course.

The trial will just prove Palpatine innocent. They just have to do it. Perhaps there's some doubt in his position due to corruption among his aides. That has to be it.

Palpatine wouldn't do something like this. Anakin knows he wouldn't.

He paces back and forth in his rooms, unable to settle down. He's close to bursting with frustration and agitation and he can't hope to meditate on his emotions as Obi-Wan would tell him to when he's this upset. Meditation is for calmer mindsets.

Perhaps he can talk to Obi-Wan... Or Padmé.

Or maybe both of them?

That... That would be good. That's what he needs right now.

He picks up his comm and sends a group message to them. Byt the Force how he hopes they'll agree. There's no way he can deal with this alone. Palpatine has been his friend and mentor since he was a child... This is just too much to deal with.

Obi-Wan said it was his duty to start the investigation due to the Vote of No-Confidence, but there's no way he thought it would find anything. He can't have. Palpatine is one of the only politicians worth trusting in the Senate.

Surely Obi-Wan knows that?

He's always allowed Anakin to go visit Palpatine, even when he was a child, so he couldn't have thought anything was suspicious. The same goes for the Council for that matter!

They would have stepped in and refused Palpatine's requests for Anakin to visit if they thought he was corrupt. The Council hates politics outside the Order, and they always speak of the need to root out corruption.

They must have found Palpatine trustworthy then, and he's done his best since he became chancellor—no matter what Senator Mandai thinks.

It'll... It'll be fine.

Anakin swallows harshly and clenches his fists in his hair. He just needs to talk to Padmé and Obi-Wan.

He's too ashamed to face Palpatine—Obi-Wan got him into this situation, and Anakin has always vouched for him with the former chancellor—even though he knows his friend probably could use the support. Palpatine is strong, he can no doubt manage until Anakin gets a grip on himself.

~~~~

Padmé watches the news as they break. Former Chancellor Palpatine has been arrested and placed on house arrest pending the trial.

She presses her lips together and fights down the fear and anxiety she feels at the news. She knows Palpatine used the occupation of Naboo to further his career, so in a way she's not... She's not surprised that the investigation has found something...

But at the same time... Using an existing tragedy that you cannot make undone anyway is not the same as actively corrupting the system. Padmé should know, her own career has been helped by her hard work in disaster zones. So even though she knows that Palpatine used her—used Naboo—the thought that he may be entirely corrupt...

It feels foreign. It feels wrong.

It's as if there's an itch in the back of her head, as if there's a voice whispering to her to tread carefully, to doubt everything, because who knows who's truly to be trusted?

Her head hurts.

Her heart hurts when she considers how conflicted and hurt Anakin must feel right now. As if her husband needs more on his plate. One of his dearest friends possibly being a criminal of a terrible degree won't be a devastating blow to him.

She picks up her comm and looks at it, wondering if she should send him a message. He probably needs her, right now.

They never should have married.

At least then that would be one less thing weighing on him. At least then there might be a chance for them, for the dream of a happy ending.

She chokes back a sob. She must be strong.

Anakin will need her to.

~~~~

Bail listens intently to the report, drumming his fingers against the top of his desk. So the corruption stems as far as this, does it?

He glances down at the files and notes Miss Marili gave him just before the explosion in the Senate Office Building. He's still going through them to verify their validity, but so far everything checks out, and her own notes and thoughts are very astute.

Bail has always known, taught as such at his mother's knee, that if you want to truly know what goes on in an institution, you ask the aides and the lower-ranks—those who fade into the background. After all, who thinks of what the secretary overhears when they walk inside with documents? Or even what they can piece together they remain at their station by who comes and goes. Miss Marili, currently the aide of Senator Jacks of Belazura and the former aide of Senator Larr of Saram, is an excellent example.

Her information is very interesting indeed, and dates back decades.

Bail wonders just what it was that caught her eye, what sent her looking in the first place... But he's yet to hear that story from her. He's also curious as to why she came to him rather than Senator Jacks, but it's possible that it's due to his position as a Core World Senator.

And possibly his known friendliness with the Jedi—definitely important considering the content of her research.

Still, Bail can't make any moves as of yet. The information may check out for now, but who knows if she's hidden some falsehoods that could prove damaging within it. After all, she is an unknown factor, and Bail knows very little about her.

In fact, how Bail does not even know how she ended up as Senator Larr's aide in the first place, considering how young she must have been at the time. Perhaps her family moved to Saram at some point. That could, of course, be how Senator Larr found her in the first place since a Twi'lek family taking up residence rather than just going on holiday there would likely draw attention. Aside from the native human population few make Saram their permanent home despite its popularity as a vacation planet, as far as Bail knows.

Regardless, her mysterious past and everything else together makes for quite the puzzle.

Perhaps she'll trust him with the truth at a later time—though no doubt will he need to prove himself first.

All in all, the political situation on Coruscant is growing increasingly complex, even when you don't take the currently ongoing civil war into consideration.

~~~~

So those cretins think they've found something on him, do they?

Well, they'll certainly see about that.

Palpatine has made damn sure that anything more than slightly frowned upon will fall entirely on Amedda. The fool was always set up to take the fall should something go wrong and Palpatine's plot was derailed—as it has been.

At most Palpatine himself will receive a slap on the wrist and an admonishment to hire better staff.

Even so, he suffers the utter humiliation of being stranded on Coruscant, wearing a prisoner's bracelet to ensure he cannot leave the planet. They'll all suffer for this humiliation, the lot of them. Palpatine will grind Kenobi's skull to dust for daring to set this farce in motion.

Blasted Jedi.

He'll bathe in their blood and relish in every single second of it.

—

(Supreme Chancellor Obi-Wan Kenobi masterpost)

#Supreme Chancellor Obi Wan Kenobi #my writing #star wars #obi wan kenobi #padme amidala #anakin skywalker #bail organa #palpatine #update

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lj-writes · 6 years

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It really is time for the Jedi to end

Morality, Trust, and the Force--toward a new model of Force instruction

What went so fatally wrong with the Jedi Order?

It’s a recurring and fundamental question. Through the prequel, original, and now sequel trilogies we’ve watched the Jedi Order fall, rise, and then fall again. Unless they can end this cycle the end of Episode IX won’t be an end, but rather a prelude to a new tragedy.

I believe the old Jedi Order’s reliance on inborn Force power became warped into blood worship in Luke’s new Jedi Order, and Kylo Ren was a product of this repugnant and ahistorical belief. To overcome the mistakes of the old and new Orders, a new model of Force instruction must arise: One that does not rely on inborn talent and certainly not on the nonsensical idea that a lineage confers a special destiny or rights. Rather the new model must recognize and nurture the Force powers inherent in everyone, and instruction itself should be a horizontal process where the students teach each other.

Below I will lay out these ideas in more detail. First I will explain the progression from the old Jedi Order to the new one, and how discontinuity in history led to Luke’s mistakes and Kylo Ren. Then I will lay out the new model that I believe must take the Jedi’s place in order to prevent new Kylo Rens from arising, or at least minimize their damage, while also avoiding the mistakes of the old Jedi Order.

The Old Jedi Order: Meritocracy and forced obedience

We know quite a few details about the workings of the old Jedi Order prior to Order 66 and the fall of the Order. When it comes to selecting and instructing students for the way of the Jedi, they followed two main tenets:

First, select naturally strong Force users.

Second, induct them young before they form lasting attachments with family.

Jedi in the old Order, in other words, were skewed toward individuals with strong and inborn Force powers that manifested young. In order to ensure that these unusually talented people would not go astray and turn to the Dark Side of the Force, they were taken young enough that the attachments they would have formed with their families could be transferred to the Jedi Order--more specifically, the padawan’s own Master--the better to make them obedient to the Order’s will. The First Order would later on explicitly copy the second part of this model for their Stormtrooper program.

The most obvious failure of this model is the case of Anakin Skywalker, who failed the secod test and ordinarily would not have been made a Jedi. Some might even use his case to argue that the fault was not in the Jedi model itself but in the deviation from it.

The failure of the Jedi, however, was much more profound than the individual case of Anakin. The problems of the Republic and the Jedi preceded Anakin and were bigger than him, and the Jedi were complacent in these problems including the militarization of the Republic and the decline of its democracy. They did nothing about the plight of enslaved persons like Shmi, and they actively led the armies of clones created and enslaved for war.

The Jedi Order model worked for its intended purposes. In fact, it worked too well. It had become an entire order of powerful beings who were discouraged from independent thinking, who participated in and amplified the injustices of the Republic. Palpatine and Anakin may have ended the Republic and the Jedi, but they were able to do so because of the deeper failures of both institutions.

The New Jedi Order: Blood supremacy without safeguards

Though we do not have many details about Luke’s new Jedi order, we probably saw the beginning of his instruction methods with Obi-Wan Kenobi’s and Yoda’s teaching of Luke himself. The second part of the old Jedi Order’s selection model was no longer workable at this point, with the tattered remainders of the Jedi being in no shape to take in children and raise them to be Jedi.

Both Kenobi and Yoda were products of the old Jedi Order, however, and they still hung on to the first part of the model: the selection of Jedi for powerful inborn talent. Because they were unable to roam the galaxy looking for child talent, hunted as they were, they used the novel method of relying on a known Force bloodline--Anakin’s own children. They pinned their hopes on Luke and, should he fail, Leia, because they were out of options and certainly not because it was the traditional Jedi way. Out of these circumstances was born a pernicious belief that poisoned the future of the Jedi and brought about its destruction yet again.

Though we do not know much about Luke’s own Jedi school, Luke is likely to have applied the teachings he received to his own students. He probably did not put much stock in starting Force instruction young, having started training as an adult himself. One thing he did seem to have believed in, however, was the power of the Skywalker bloodline, in a jarring line from The Last Jedi:

My nephew with that mighty Skywalker blood. In my hubris, I thought I could train him; I could pass on my strengths.

As many have pointed out, this is a blatantly ahistorical vision of both the Jedi Order and the Skywalker line. The Jedi Order never selected candidates by lineage, but by individual merit. There was no mighty Skywalker blood, a family whose matriarch was an enslaved woman who lived and died on a backwater planet.

Is it so implausible that Luke himself at this time believed this manufactured myth, though? Kenobi and Yoda had died before they could teach him the full history of the old Order, and even if they spoke to him afterward I doubt they were completely candid about its failures. The fable about Skywalker blood was Luke’s own story of involvement with the Jedi Order, and one of the few things he knew--or thought he knew--about the Jedi. Kenobi and Yoda’s desperate plan may well have turned into a Skywalker myth in a universe where history itself was irreparably broken from massacres, terrors, purges, and outright rewritten pasts. The Empire’s own fixation with supermen and heritage may have been an influence as well, since Luke after all was a good citizen of the Empire for twenty years before he turned rebel.

So not only was the old Jedi’s belief in inborn meritocracy continued in Luke’s Jedi order, it took on an unbelievably more sinister form with the added layer of the Skywalker myth and all it implied--that certain bloodlines and people from those lines were special and were destined to save the universe. The proof was in recent history, after all, with three people who were born into or married into that line having freshly saved the galaxy.

Now imagine what this ahistorical yet powerful belief had on the mind of young Ben Organa-Solo. Imagine what it’s like to believe that you are born to a holy line and are destined to save the universe. All it would take is a little bit of entitlement, a little bit of arrogance, a little bit of narcissism. Combine these with your considerable personal power and the privilege you enjoyed your entire life, a welcome word whispered in your ear about how special and exalted you are, and there would be nothing to stop you from believing that you are, indeed, destined to be a god. Your power and desires are paramount values and the lives of lesser beings are nothing but kindling for your ambitions. There will always be some conflict because your parents and their friends loved you and taught you better than this, but these petty concerns of morality are fetters meant for lesser beings, bonds that you must break on your triumphant way toward your manifest destiny.

The stirrings of Kylo Ren were growing in the belly of Luke’s new Jedi Order, spreading to other students in what would become the core of the future Knights of Ren. Without even the weak and imperfect bonds that tied the Jedi to the old Order, there was nothing to restrain this new faction that would bring a new whirlwind of destruction. Luke was very right to see that the practice of taking children from their families was morally repugnant and ultimately futile. The problem was that he had failed to recognize the real need that had given rise to that practice, and had come up with nothing to take its place. His imperfect instruction in the ways of the Jedi, and more importantly its failures, had taken its toll and brought about tragedy and new war.

Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It's the only way to become what you're meant to be.

Kylo Ren wasn’t entirely wrong when he said all the old edifices had to be destroyed. He is completely wrong about both the means and the endpoint, of course. The way to overcome the mistakes of the past is not to build an empire on a mountain of corpses, which is just a repeat of yet more crimes from the past. Rather, the way forward is to create something new that refutes the wrong beliefs that led to these mistakes in the first place.

So what is the way forward? If the Jedi must end, what should take its place?

A new model of Force instruction: Morality and democracy

What really needs to end is not the idea of Force instruction per se, but the whole idea of inborn Force meritocracy. Why not flip the whole idea of the Jedi on its head? They don’t have to be people with some special inborn talent. They most certainly don’t have to be from some special bloodline, which as explained above was never true of the Jedi in the first place.

If the Force is truly in everyone, there’s no need to select people for their power in the Force and then either try to restrain them (the old Jedi) or fail to restrain them (Luke’s new Jedi). Why not take on people who don’t need restraint in the first place, who don’t need to be treated like bombs about to go off?

Why not, in other words, take on already trustworthy people regardless of their level of Force powers, and instruct them in the ways of the Force?

The belief that only a select few people with special inborn powers can handle the Force has failed miserably and multiple times. It is irrational to keep trying the same thing when it plainly doesn’t work and has never worked.

What’s more, the method of Force instruction doesn’t have to be a vertical master-apprentice relationship, and there is no one left to be a Jedi Master anyway with most of them dead and Kylo Ren and the Knights of Ren emphatically disinvited from all study sessions. Rather than Jedi academies the new model of Force instruction would be more like Jedi study groups, out of sheer necessity if nothing else. Obedience to the Order will no longer be a virtue. The new Jedi will have to seek a way forward together, seeking the meaning of the Force and the ethics of using it.

Yes, the individual users might not be as powerful as those of the old Jedi and Luke’s new Jedi. Classically powerful Force users like Rey would still have a place and play a major role, though. What’s more, there would be many more Force users of more diverse powers to meet potential evil Force users and other threats. If @themandalorianwolf‘s theory that Finn is a wound in the Force who awakens other Force users is true (link), more characters could awaken to their Force powers.

In sum, the Jedi model of meritocracy has been an unqualified failure and it is well past time to try something new. A new, democratic model of Force instruction would be a way to move toward a new future instead of repeating the mistakes of the past.

#space fights #episode ix #jedi #the force #luke skywalker #kylo ren #obi-wan kenobi #yoda #meta #worldbuilding #speculation #first of all

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