Why are there so many Jedi?
#1
Posted 07 July 2006 - 07:50 PM
#2
Posted 07 July 2006 - 09:23 PM
Oh, it's much Worse than half-assed writing. It's almost INTENTIONALLY rong.
#3
Posted 12 July 2006 - 03:53 AM
After all, 10,000 Jedi (even if those are only including battle ready "Knights") as a Galactic police force is simply ridiculously small. Somebody calculated that these guys would have to be moving constantly in order to locate all the potential force sensitives born in the galaxy, if they followed the method used by Obi-Wan and Qui Gon to find Anakin on Tatooine... never mind being ambassadors and detectives, fighters and everything else they seem fond of doing...
Then again this is the same mythos that feels a few million men constitute a "galactic grand army" capable of fighting one side of a "full scale" civil war.
Oh well, if we ignore the EU and stick with the movies, we can fudge any numbers that are mentioned (the few are give some wiggle room, like "units") and it's less of a problem...
This post has been edited by KurganX: 12 July 2006 - 03:53 AM
#4
Posted 12 July 2006 - 08:23 AM
Another comparison: imagine that all those Jedi were gathered together on Earth. The total population of Earth is about six billion, making for one Jedi per 600,000 citizens (a pretty low ratio in itself). To achieve the same ratio of Jedi to non-Jedi in a population of 10 trillion, you would need about seventeen million Jedi, well over 1000 times the official figure.
Of course, the problem here stems from EU writers making exactly the same mistake as Lucas: forgetting that Star Wars takes place across an entire galaxy, rather than a world or country or continent. (Or, going by the PT, a small village where all the main characters happened to grow up together in close proximity.)
- J m HofMarN on the Sand People
#5
Posted 13 July 2006 - 11:44 PM
Also: The Chefelf.com Lord of the Rings | RoBUTZ (a primative webcomic) | KOTOR 1 NPC profiles |
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#6
Posted 16 July 2006 - 06:02 PM
I don't know. I don't know what to think/say about it all. I just know that what we see in the PT's is just not cutting it for me. Partially execution.
Tell me this, if there weren't no "wars" and strife in the republic in the thousand years, and all the Jedi are doing is training and sitting around, isn't that a waste of money and so forth. If there are no troubles, send all of those Jedi babies back home. If you're training for something that will inevitablly happen... oh, I don't know...something like the TWO SITH that will eventually return---don't you think they'd use all of that "labor force" of Jedi to go seek them out!? I mean, they've got more than they need for cry-eye!!!
Okay, ranting... shutting up....
This post has been edited by CowboyCurtis: 16 July 2006 - 06:09 PM
Battle for the Galaxy--read the "other Star Wars"
All I know is I haven't seen the real prequels yet.
#7
Posted 17 July 2006 - 08:56 AM
Well, there's a very simple solution for that: show them actually doing something rather than just hanging around the temple. Even if there are no major wars going on, surely they must have all sorts of other duties to attend to? Aren't they supposed to be diplomats, law enforcers, peacekeepers? Just to take one very obvious example, why not show them trying to deal with the slavery and organised crime that still seems to be rampant in the galaxy?
- J m HofMarN on the Sand People
#8
Posted 17 July 2006 - 09:54 PM
Limit the Jedi to about a dozen, and you can actually develop their characters and make people care about them. Its also makes certain things much more believable, first that Palpatine is a match for them (he only has to get rid of or flip a dozen), also why Palpatine would be so interested in flipping any Jedi to the Dark Side (he coverts 1/12th of their strength, even with a run-of-the mill Jedi). It makes any weird rules you want to inflict on the order more believable, after all we are now talking about the twelve most powerful force users in the galaxy, who knows what sort of program you need to develop this and then make sure the jedi don't use their power to run amok.
And the reason why having few Jedi seems to be a problem is that they are supposed to be a pangalactic police force. No, the Republic should have its own police force and army, thank you very much. The jedi then only have to be used in the rare situations where the normal Republic authorities can't handle things.
In LOTR terms (I just saw the movies again so this is on my minds), the Jedi should be the equivalent of the wizards. Saruman leaving the reservation was a big deal, and given how much power he potentially had his temptation was believable. Gondor, Rohan, etc. had armies of their own, they didn't rely on Gandalf and Saruman to run around everywhere settling trade disputes. Likewise in Asimov's Foundation series, the Second Foundation gets by with about a dozen scholars.
#9
Posted 17 July 2006 - 11:00 PM
In LOTR terms (I just saw the movies again so this is on my minds), the Jedi should be the equivalent of the wizards. Saruman leaving the reservation was a big deal, and given how much power he potentially had his temptation was believable. Gondor, Rohan, etc. had armies of their own, they didn't rely on Gandalf and Saruman to run around everywhere settling trade disputes. Likewise in Asimov's Foundation series, the Second Foundation gets by with about a dozen scholars.
This hits the nail squarely on the head! Ding-ding-ding!! You deserve a cookie, CF!
Battle for the Galaxy--read the "other Star Wars"
All I know is I haven't seen the real prequels yet.
#10
Posted 18 July 2006 - 12:12 AM
#11
Posted 18 July 2006 - 07:41 AM
And I'm sorry, but I think the idea of each Jedi being as powerful as Vader is incredibly lame. The whole point about Vader is that he was supposed to be one of the most powerful Force-users in the galaxy; making everyone as good as him would simply diminish his character. Not that it would make the slightest difference anyway, as even someone with Vader's power couldn't take on more than a small group of opponents at once. The Jedi are not the equivalent of the wizards in LotR, and trying to compare them simply leads to nonsensical conclusions.
- J m HofMarN on the Sand People
#12
Posted 18 July 2006 - 08:26 AM
It also explains Luke's importance; he wasn't one of a possible million force sensitive beings that could be trained to become a Jedi, he was the single last hope, and worth Obi Wan spending 20 years living in a hut on a desert planet keeping an eye on him.
On the other subject, if the republic were going to have it's own police-force/Army, what's to stop it from being another U.N. type security force, unable to get out of it's own way? I thought that was the point of the whole Phantom Menace senate scene was. A bunch of Eurocrats trying to decide what to do in Rwanda / Naboo, and doing nothing because they couldn't decide on the definition of "genocide".
#13
Posted 18 July 2006 - 09:53 AM
green girly alien for the virgin nerds: check
female yoda: check
old wise looking alien with a football head: check
old wise looking et-like alien with long neck: check
rastafarian lizard type with big black eyes: check
#14
Posted 18 July 2006 - 12:47 PM
Most of the problems with the Jedi in the OT don't stem from the number of Jedi; they come from the way Lucas portrayed them. He didn't have to make the Jedi Order into an even less competent version of the UN (quite a feat, actually); he didn't have to make them part of the Republic's government or subject to political appointments by the Chancellor; he could have shown them doing things which actually made a difference, rather than sitting around moaning about the Dark Side clouding their vision. The attitude of Tatooine's citizens could be explained by its being an isolated backwater where the Jedi hardly ever went anyway; Han's attitude could be explained by his having been a young child when the Empire came to power. I can believe that the Jedi's power, numbers and authority had diminished somewhat since the golden years of the Republic; what I cannot begin to believe is that there were hardly any of them there to start with.
The 'affirmative action' problem is a completely separate issue. Again, this is entirely Lucas's fault; he could have made some of the alien Jedi into important characters with actual lines and personalities, rather than just Token Aliens. (And, I might add, the female Jedi.) It actually makes perfect sense to have lots of aliens in the Order, given how many different species there are in the Republic; the problems come from the way Lucas handles it.
If you want to see what I mean by all this, try playing Knights of the Old Republic and look at how the Jedi are portrayed there. There's nothing fundamentally different about the Order's structure; the difference comes from the fact that the Jedi DO things that really matter rather than lazing around in their fancy Temple all day. Even in the midst of a devastating war, they can still find time to help ordinary people with their problems (of course, it helps that the Republic has its own army, which should have been the case in the movies). That version of the Jedi is both believeable and attractive; the Order as portrayed in the movies is neither.
- J m HofMarN on the Sand People