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.

[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