Let’s stop pretending the Jedi were the good guys.
No, the Sith weren’t “better.” But the Jedi weren’t righteous defenders of peace either — they were a bloated, dogmatic, authoritarian religious order that got exactly what was coming to them. The prequels (and Clone Wars) don’t accidentally make them look bad — it’s intentional.
Their fall wasn’t some noble tragedy. It was a necessary collapse of a corrupt institution that had lost its way.
- Emotional repression = cult tactics
The Jedi Order indoctrinated kids from a young age, stripped them of attachments, and taught them that love, fear, and grief were sins. That’s not enlightenment — that’s emotional sterilization. They literally banned families and told people not to feel things. That’s not wisdom. That’s psychological abuse.
- "We're the good guys!" — while leading war crimes
The Jedi became generals in a manufactured war they didn’t understand. They weren’t peacekeepers anymore — they were the Republic’s hitmen. They fought a fake war on behalf of a corrupt regime, playing right into Palpatine’s hands. And instead of questioning it, they just followed orders. Sound familiar?
- Their arrogance blinded them
They were so convinced of their own moral superiority that they couldn’t see reality. Palpatine sat right next to them for years and they didn’t even notice. Why? Because they thought their own “purity” made them immune to corruption. That’s classic institutional hubris.
- The Jedi Code was broken beyond repair
No attachments. No passion. No questioning the Council. No thinking for yourself. Obey the Order or be cast out. That’s not a religion. That’s a control system. They punished any deviation and treated dissent like a virus — including from the "Chosen One" they claimed to believe in.
- Anakin was their creation, and their failure
They took a traumatized kid, filled him with contradictions, used him as a pawn, and then acted surprised when he broke. They feared his power, refused to trust him, and shoved him between blind loyalty and impossible expectations. And then they called him the traitor.
Bottom line:
The Jedi fell not because of the Sith, but because they became everything they claimed to oppose — authoritarian, dogmatic, inflexible, and blind. They moralized control, pathologized emotion, and propped up a decaying Republic while pretending they were above it all. Sound familiar?
It wasn’t the fall of heroes. It was the overdue collapse of a cult that lost touch with reality.
Fight me.
Wow - so the above was written by ChatGPT, obviously, but here’s why I had to post it:
Absolutely. Here's a version tailored for communities.win/c/KotakuInAction2, which leans anti-authoritarian, highly skeptical of institutions, and critical of legacy media and ideological dogmatism. The tone here is more cynical, with an emphasis on institutional rot, hypocrisy, and control — all things that tie in perfectly with a critique of the Jedi Order.
That’s freaky ain’t it? It’s got this place pegged lol
Don’t agree? Fight me - lmfao
It's missing another line of attack.
In the Prequels, Lucas retconned the force to not be an intangible energy field, but a disease that can be tangibly and consistently measured for via blood tests.
There can be no inherent "good" or "evil" from such a thing, let alone the pretense that it has a will to be enacted. In this, the Sith are vaguely correct. The Force has no will, it's just power and there is no inherent nobility or duty arising from having Force powers. Their usage of this truth is self serving of course, but their understanding of it is still correct.
The Jedi order is a pretense, based around a hamfisted idea clumsily lifted by Lucas from the American Indian premise that everything has a spirit, including trees and rocks. Much like how he lifted the "they aren't allowed to marry" thing from one of the more halfassed Protestant critiques of Catholicism.
Lucas is a skilled plagiarist and worldbuilder, but a hugely halfassed storyteller. Combine that with his well known addiction to Adderall and you get the basket of contradictions that is the Prequel lore.
I thought the whole midiclorian thing was about how much a person can access the energy field and how sensitive they were to the energy field??
My impression was that they were an effect, not the cause. That is, people would attract those things relative to how strongly they could tap into that energy field.
Not sure I agree with this take, though it is obviously an unfortunate possibility opened by the prequels introducing medichlorians, I don’t think it was his intention to “demystify” the force so much as give a plot justification for Qui Gon taking such an interest in the young Anakin
His notions of the “Living Force” and “Cosmic Force” get into this, but I think he never abandoned his original framing of “The Whills”, and it simply took shape over time as the notion of a/the “Will of the Force”
Im not making the case that the prequels are flawless or even particularly great movies, simply that many criticisms of the jedi order we see people make today, often focused on the prequels, were in fact done on purpose and done to increase the thematic depth of the story - for example, that’s likely why we see the Republic award ceremony is a shot-for-shot remake of Riefenstahl’s scene from Triumph of the Will
I submit that content that actually was released, has more weight than theories of something that was not.
Within the bounds of the pre Disney SW that is. After that it's deliberately a crapshoot because whether they'll admit it or not they were trying to destroy the franchise.
Agreed, though much of what im talking about is hinted at by Qui-Gon in Episode 1 (like the Force itself being Anakin’s father) then covered more extensively in the Clone Wars cartoon which is the last thing George handled, mainly the Mortis gods stuff and the force ghost stuff. And that’s without regard to any of the expanded universe stuff
And yeah there is literally zero point in discussing anything post Rogue 1 / Disney, as they fundamentally misunderstood George’s vision / the “Star Wars universe” - we need look no further than how they handled Luke to be sure of that
And then you get into the older EU content. Say, the Thrawn trilogy, which clearly establishes that if you clone a force user that their force power potential remains the same but they essentially go nuts.
Something that is very pointedly ignored and never discussed again in pre Disney canon as far as I know.
No they have more changes to the force making it something even someone not force sensitive can learn to do.
Naturally, because the idea that anyone can have an inborn power the elevates them above the masses runs contrary to Disney's Lysenkoism.
You can argue about the quality of the idea lifted or the way it was executed in adapting it, but if that's your standard for "plagiarist" then I'm not sure you'll find any writer in any medium who hasn't committed plagiarism.