Vindicated at last!

[potboy]

 Ha, look at this! Qui-Gon Jinn's deepest, darkest secret revealed in which the only Jedi I've really ever had time for is revealed to have felt that the Jedi were being used by the Republic as their enforcers and soldiers, and when he is sent out to fight for the Jedi council he feels like a murderer.

"As Qui Gon makes perfectly clear, they serve the Force, not the Jedi Order."

I am going to have to buy that, but it makes me punch the air. This is pretty much what I've said ever since TPM came out. There was definitely a school of thought that felt that Qui-Gon was an imperfect Jedi in the sense of being less fully 'Light' than the rest of them - of having more of a tendency towards immorality and selfishness. But what I noticed was that Qui-Gon was the only Jedi who treated his beliefs as a religion - who attempted to surrender his own will to the will of the Force, rather than allowing himself to be used as a political weapon. And who as a result was treated as a dangerous maverick by the rest of the Order.

I'm so pleased :) Most of my Qui-Gon meta was lost when the Yahoo groups and Geocities sites went down and I don't want to try to recreate it here, but I was so interested in him as a man of faith, whose humility could be mistaken for arrogance because it was so immovable.

It's nice to think I was on track all those years ago.

Comments

[filigranka]

Oh my, the man of a deep faith? Honestly, I'd be afraid of him as an already established Order, too - real life-wise, such people quite often do things like nailing some Very Strong Opinions on the cathedral door, so to speak, and you're not always able to neutralise them via absorbing some of it into the structure. ;) Wants some reforms, coming back to the noble roots of the movement etc.

Which, come to think of it, reminds of the Separatists with their "let's make the Republic great again, come back to our origins and true values" (and also Walter Benjamin - I think it was him? XD - with his "every revolution is reactionary in its core and promise the return of the Golden Era"), which leads us to Dooku and his relations with Qui-Gon - if they're still canon - and this leads us to the funniest questions of them all, who would Qui-Gon support? what he would do? especially when Separatists would be preaching what the essentially was saying for years - we serve the Idea, not the (archaic) Structure.

He was on Naboo, which, I guess, might cool his feelings towards Separatists side - but I can't believe he would support the war or rather, the form it took and the way Jedi took a part in it - sending younger and younger people, not letting them any rest, using the clones like machines etc. I can easily picture him as clone-rights activists /in/ Order, tbh, something along the lines of "I feel them in the Force just as well as you, so they're our equal, not devices".

Digression - my first thought when I read "of the Order" was, of course, about FO. It still fits and this, I even believe, might actually be a Disney intention.

[potboy]

My answers to all these questions can be found in this fic Redemption but honestly, yes. I really don't understand why the Republic's response to "these few systems want their independence" goes straight to TREACHERY! TERRORISM! ALL OUT WAR! Speaking as a member of the now-very-much-ex British Empire, systems gaining their independence and then having to find ways to co-exist using diplomacy seems very definitely not a cut and dried good versus evil thing.

They don't seem to have considered negotiating this and accepting the will of the people AT ALL. Which I can understand from Palpatine because he was EEEEVIL, and he was also cleverly engineering the whole thing to consolidate his own power. But the Jedi? Why did it never occur to the Jedi to negotiate before defaulting to war? Shame on them.

Also, yeah, utter shame on the Jedi for accepting the clone army and using them as if they were battle droids. Perhaps they had been bred for that. Perhaps they would have chosen it if given the chance? But certainly they should have been given the chance to choose for themselves.

I really wish Qui-Gon had lived! I'm certain he would have made everything so much more complicated by not following the party line. Also he would have got on very well with Chirrut Imwe, I think. I'd have liked to see what kind of a difference a loose cannon like him would have made to everything :)

[isabellerecs]

Oh my god, this is so awesome! It makes me like him even more than I did before. I remember reading long ago now, that Qui-Gon was a proponent of the Living Force and somehow that was supposed to make him different from "normal" Jedis who followed the Light.

I don't think he'd have sided with Dooku, but I do agree that he would have been furious at the use of the clone troopers. Also with this beliefs, I can't help but wonder what his teachings would have meant for a young Anakin.

Good on you for calling it. :D

[potboy]

It is awesome, isn't it? I'd got used to the idea that further canon about my favourites always disappointed me. (I started writing Qui-Gon because I felt that the Jedi Apprentice books got him all wrong, and I wanted to fix it :) ) So it's a relief to have a piece of actual canon that takes the same view.

Interestingly, I think it is canon that one of the things that set Dooku on his path toward being a Sith was that the Jedi ignored Qui-Gon's warning and sent him out against Maul without any backup, and he then died. So if Qui-Gon had lived, Dooku may not have gone bad. In which case the two of them would almost certainly have made a big difference to everything. (I think they'd have supported the seperatists, tbh. What's wrong with a few systems wanting to be independent?)

Heh, more about how I think Dooku and Qui-Gon would have approached the Seperatist issue is available over here in my fic Redemption ;) Sorry!

[isabellerecs]

Don't be sorry, I'm marking that story and I'm going to read it when I have time. :D

No, you're right there wasn't anything inherently wrong with them feeling that the centralized government was not in their best interests. I find it interesting that you compared it to the dismantling of the British Empire, which I think is a fair comparison. I think what trips up American fans is that we're seeing it as somehow analogous to the American Civil War which I'll grant is not I think the proper lens through which to view the Separatists.

I was unaware that that was supposed to be part of Dooku's reasonings. O_o It also puts a different shine on his personal antagonism with Yoda and Obi-Wan. He must have felt that Yoda had failed Qui-Gon and that Obi-Wan had abandoned his teachings.

"But the Jedi? Why did it never occur to the Jedi to negotiate before defaulting to war? Shame on them." It doesn't occur to them does it, wild O_O. I wonder if that is why it seemed like the Force itself conspired to pull down the Jedi order. They had stopped listening and had built up all this dogma and ritual around the Light side of the Force, but all Light is not balanced.

Man, this is frying my cold-addled mind, but thank you, it's so interesting.

[potboy]

Hee! No, thank you for being interested :) I naturally compare things to British history because I am British, but I can see that those things probably aren't the things that are supposed to come to mind when an American artist is talking to an American audience. You share a cultural context, so you're probably seeing what you're meant to see.

Even so, it seems to me that the US can hardly fault people for wanting independence and self-rule ;) Particularly if they feel that their concerns are not being heard by an impossibly remote government that doesn't really care about them.

I must admit that I squeed a little when I read that Dooku had left the Jedi in protest at Qui-Gon's death. I liked the idea of them having a really good Master/Padawan bond, if only because I have a soft spot for Christopher Lee.

And yes. I'm rolling my eyes at the Prequel Trilogy Jedi council, who let themselves become the enforcers of a Sith Lord and didn't ever seem to notice that anything was wrong about that until they were literally being mown down. How could they not notice that they were being used for repression? Didn't they ever question their orders or think for themselves? IDK, I throw my hands up at them.

[isabellerecs]

Ah yes, I love Christopher Lee. He was so metal.

Yeah, the Council didn't even seem to pause before starting to call their masters "generals" and treating their padawans like soldiers. Red flags, nope apparently not. Were there any dissenters amongst the Jedi (besides Dooku) not on the council (I can't remember)?

On the other hand, leave the Order, sure, but why would Dooku sign on with the guy that sent the guy that killed his student? *pulls hair out*

[potboy]

I don't remember there being any dissenters among the Jedi mentioned, which is scary in itself when you think about it. You would think that a change of that magnitude would be very divisive and spark all sorts of debate and disagreement between people. If it doesn't, that's a suspicious level of homogeneity already.

Heh, maybe Dooku was aware that it was a Sith tradition for the apprentice to kill the master, so he always intended to kill Palpatine for it, but was just waiting until he'd learned everything first?

[isabellerecs]

To right. You'd think there would be plenty of masters that would have objected to the wording at the very least. You start out as a negotiator and diplomat suddenly you're being called general. No one bats an eye. And then the padawans, holy crap.

Heh, looking to make it an inside job. I'm actually sorry we didn't get to see Christopher Lee stab Palpatine in the back.

[potboy]

Ha, yes, I'm always sorry about that :) Palpatine deserved to be stabbed in the back numerous times ;)

[isabellerecs]

Amen to that. ;)