I retcon/headcanon Jedi humor as lighthearted, effortless, and playful, rooted in how amusing, almost endearing, dualistic thinking and the illusion of separation are once you've seen through it.

Avoiding attachments isn't a strict decree (or moral obligation) that's hard to follow. It's a running joke, and the punchline is always the same: you don't need to hold on in the first place. You can't lose what's connected.

It's a classic. No need to rush it. It'll land.

“Average Jedi experiences 3 serious struggles with attachment yearly” factoid actually false. Anakins georg, who experienced 10,000 serious struggles with attachment daily, was an outlier who should never have been counted.

Why have Star Wars fans such a hard time considering the Jedi a severely marginalized and vulnerable group, regarded as more than human because of their connection to the Force, and thus, ironically, less than human?

Dehumanization through mystification.

Only cherished, protected, and tolerated if they are useful? They're culture and religion highjacked and exploited? With their service for the Republic as the price they pay for (cultural) survival? Their connection to the Force commodified by a neoliberal government where even the most 'just' actors sustain their power through exploitation? Having to choose between religion and culture or access to full civil rights?

While the Republic maintains the appearance of democracy, it marginalizes the Jedi through the very principles it claims to uphold (e.g., separation of powers). The Jedi are tasked with enforcing the Senate’s decisions yet barred from influencing the political processes that shape those decisions. This exclusion isn’t merely incidental; it is essential to maintaining the Republic’s power structure, ensuring that the Jedi could be used without a voice in governance. Over generations.

This dynamic simply persists with the rise of the Empire, but the methods of exclusion become more overt and violent. What began under the Republic as an insidious marginalization evolves into the Jedi’s outright elimination through genocide under the Empire. The Empire does not introduce a new system of oppression—it simply amplifies what is already in place, making the exclusion of the Jedi explicit and irreversible. Because, now, they are systematically excluded from life.

The transition from the Republic to the Empire isn’t a clean break;, they are not opposite systems but a continuation of the same underlying power structures.

The Republic established a system that excluded the Jedi from political influence under the guise of maintaining democratic order.

This marginalization isn’t (exclusively) about preserving democracy; it is about keeping the Jedi in a role where they face and carry the brunt of conflict and political fallout without having the power to challenge the system because they would be cast as traitors and enemies of democracy if they tried.

The Empire takes the final step of disposing of the Jedi entirely once their usefulness has run its course. Some call it the “liberty dying with thunderous applause;” I call it the natural progression of oppression.

I noticed something that never comes up in the discussion of whether it was wrong of the Jedi to fight in the clone wars (surprisingly from both the Pro Jedi and antijedidiot camps) is that the separatists want all the Jedi dead

Like even aside from that being implied by the separatists being controlled by the sith, Count Dooku and General Grievous explicitly state that they're in this to kill the Jedi, their idea for how the war goes is inseparable from the mass murder of the Jedi

(and it's not like anyone else in the separatists are against it, most of the military leaders are only slightly less murderous psychopaths than Dooku and Grievous, the corporate leaders hate the Jedi for always ruining their "get even richer" schemes so they won't protest, and the civilians and political leaders of the separatists are powerless)

Being neutral and staying out of the war was never an option for the Jedi, one side's goal was to murder them

Yeah so we should be talking about this. Why are we not already talking about this

What more could the Jedi have done?

I think a lot of the discourse about the "Jedi being slavers" comes from a deliberately uncharitable and bad faith reading of them.

I agree with you that TCW raises these questions and chooses not to go through with addressing them because it is ultimately a kids show that isn't trying to tell a story about the clones' situation but about [the Clone War itself].

But whenever I see people choose to go into these deeper ethical debates, they almost always assign an unfairly disproportionate amount of blame onto the Jedi who are, for the most part, in the same boat as the clones. Even the clones themselves seem to understand the nuance of the situation and most are grateful to the Jedi for coming in and leading them.

Although, yes, the clones do have it much, much worse, the Jedi are still there, fighting, protecting and dying right alongside them.

The Jedi are blamed for being part of the Republic in spite of all its issues, far more than the Senate is for being the Republic, even though the Senate is the one with all the power.

I wonder what it is people wanted the Jedi to even do for the clones...

OPTION 1: Leave the Republic?

And let the Separatists (whose originally legitimate grievances have been hijacked by the Sith) freely commit mass atrocities and enslave other planets with their humongous droid army?

OPTION 2: Overthrow the Republic?

And then what?

So in the middle of a galactic war, the Jedi, with their limited numbers and resources, decide to start another one against the Republic to free the clones and ignore all the other planets getting destroyed and enslaved, and then...? [Also] the Republic citizens were largely unwilling to fight their own battles and preferred to leave all the fighting to the Jedi and the clones. So, now:

All of this ⬆️ is premised on the Jedi even being willing to throw away their democratic values, and on the clones even WANTING THEM TO DO SO. Yes the clones are in a terrible situation, but the harsh truth is that, canonically, they do share the same values as the Jedi.

People can argue that they're brainwashed into this, and I would even agree. But that doesn't make it any less true that these are still their values. Most of them want to fight for the Republic.

They should have the choice available to pursue another path if they wanted, but the show - and thus the clones and the Jedi - barely have the time to consider all these issues because they are in the middle of a war.

In the show, [the clones] are the conveniently available highly-trained army that the Republic was going to use with or without the Jedi because it was all a trap set by a Sith Lord.

The Jedi, who were supposed to be some hybrid of social workers, peace-keepers and diplomats, were drafted into a war they did not want, and did not fight [the draft] because they had made an oath to the Republic, and because the alternative was letting billions get killed.

They were between a rock and a hard place and chose to prioritize trying to end the immediate war first before fighting for the rights of the clone army (which - again - is not even their job! Padme, Mon Mothma and Bail and all the other politicians are RIGHT THERE!)

The Jedi were a minority religious order whose own situation in the Republic was precarious, as evidenced by the fact that the citizens were willing to cheerlead their genocide just a couple of years in and gleefully bought into anti-Jedi propaganda en masse.

A more charitable reading of the Jedi would take all this ⬆️ context into account before declaring them slavers/slavery-enablers and surmise that... no, they did not agree with how the Republic was treating the clone army.

They were most likely hoping the Senate would enact a democratic solution to this after the war, so they tried to end the war as quickly as they could.

And no, they didn't "selfishly decide to overthrow/kill Palps just because they found out the Chancellor was their religious enemy when they were unwilling to do so for the clones."

It was because they realised that - all this time - they had all been under the control of a Sith Lord who had orchestrated a sham war to destroy them and take power for himself.

^^^

The Jedi are not a government agency, they are a charitable religious order with a formal relationship to their government.

Charities do a lot of good—but governments always have the potential do more, because they have consistent funding from taxes, because they have existing infrastructure (physical and bureaucratic), because they can make systematic change directly at the source.

Charities are almost never able to make up the difference when government programs are cut.

The Republic government takes the Jedi for granted, as it takes its own stability for granted. It assumes it can allow corruption to slip in without consequence. That it can fail to care for its citizens without consequence. That it can use the clones without consequence.

The members of the senate do not die at the end of ROTS. Their fate is subtler, but Sidious says it himself:

“I AM the Senate.”

And conversely, the senate has become Sidious, become the Sith. They have entirely lost the ability to exercise conscience.

The Jedi, on the other hand? They face the consequences of the Senate’s failing conscience daily, alongside the clones. They die, they witness death, they fight to prevent it where the Senate does not. They choose to be there, along side the clones, because the clones are alive, not in spite of it. The Jedi would never have been trapped by a droid army in this way. Given a droid army, they would have flocked right to the living people most in danger. Sidious knows that.

Imagine if you heard that your local quirky small religious organisation, that you know for its charitable efforts in the community (I’m talking a small local group, not like the whole Catholic Church or something) had been recruited as soldiers. And like, you knew they did martial arts lessons of some kind because they felt that bodily health was tied to spiritual health, and that being able to defend the weak was important, but shouldn’t recruiting them as a military be illegal? They’re not trained for one on one combat and disarming gun owners, not war?

But by an old legal loophole, it is legal. The Jedi can be recruited. They would protest but…there are vulnerable people getting hurt. The clones and the civilians. They can’t just leave them.

And I’d like to add a third bullet point to the what more could they have done argument that I sometimes see.

Option 3: Leave the Republic and Take the Clones with them

Part of this is already covered above, with the clones having agency to choose to fight and care about the Republic’s people, even though it’s mixed up with brainwashing.

But an even stronger argument is much less philosophical:

Feeding 2 million people is hard.

Impossible, even, without some existing infrastructure of irrigated fields, farming equipment, knowledgeable farmers. Or alternatively, without thousands of people dying of starvation and disease while you make your early mistakes. The Jedi keep gardens, but not on the scale of commercial or even full subsistence farming. The clones are able laborers, but they are not farmers. “But they could learn.” Yes, they could—but talk to a farmer sometime. Farming is a craft, with complexities and traditions and things that you simply cannot figure out without someone telling you or making big mistakes. There is no such thing as unskilled labor.

In order to hide a population of 2 million people, you need a lot of space. Like a lot.

I shoved some basic assumptions into a land-food calculator:

[ID: a food calculator website, showing various options for types of food. Fruit and Vegetables, eggs, wheat and grains, and Pathway and storage are checked off. Meat options are all left blank. End ID]

And for just a hundred people (the max it would let me enter), with only fruit, vegetables, and eggs—no meat at all—you need at minimum 1.6 sq km.

For 2 million people, that scales to 31 thousand square kilometres (12 thousand miles) of arrable land, and is likely a vast underestimate considering the clones’ metabolisms. It doesn’t even include living spaces. Or the land and labor needed to grow textile-crops, or spin their own thread for clothes.

And they have no safety net, no funds to buy food from other people while they get set up, because whatever planet (or planets if they split up) with 12 thousand convenient square miles of arable land they’re on has to be a secret, since they’re hiding from the Republic. Thousands, at minimum would die. Probably hundreds of thousands, just like in the war. Remember, there’s no access to manufactured antibiotics or bacta either, and they have no experience with whatever remedies might be available from the local fauna either. The clone medics were well trained, yes, but on manufactured supplies and equipment, not getting medicine from the land.

And convenient arable land tends to already be inhabited. Do the locals want 2 million new neighbours? Are the Jedi and the clones going to kick them out? Accidentally or on purpose? I don’t think they really want to go about reinventing settler violence and genocide.

Take the clones to a neutral planet then!

Well Mandalore can barely feed its own population, so toss that out. And besides—taking in an extremely capable army of 2 million people would be seen as an act of war, no matter what diplomacy you try. Neutrality wouldn’t last long, the planet’s population would no doubt find the clones at fault (blaming immigrants is a classic), conveniently available to fight, and with a fresh sense of loyalty to their new home. Oh look suddenly they’re fighting a war again. The Republic is absolutely capable of raising a natborn army—as proven by the stormtroopers—and that is now a threat to the clones, not a liberation. And the Separatists still have a droid army, by the way.

Not to mention Sidious can just go for a state visit or a holo call, use order 66, and claim the clones went rogue.

Maybe there’s a reason both logic and the Force didn’t tell the Jedi to just skidadle. The clones situation is just bad. Really bad. There was no way out but through, and even that was a trap.

That’s why it’s called a tragedy.

(While you were busy applying your gritty nihilist bothsides-ism to a hopepunk sci-fi show, I was studying the blade (re: doing the most basic amount of world building))

Anakin: *brags about never listening to the Council* Padmé:

MEANWHILE, THE JEDI:

The entire Jedi Order: “ 🧡✨Let’s validate Anakin’s lessons and his methods, let’s praise him for Ahsoka’s qualities, let’s praise Ahsoka for being a credit to his teachings, let’s encourage them both to rely on each other and trust each other, and let’s even praise Artoo for the same things while we’re at it. ✨🧡” 

i think it's great that people who've suffered religious trauma feel a connection to anakin. i also think it's deeply troubling that the majority of them are either unable to recognize or unwilling to admit that the religion he was indoctrinated into and abused by was the sith and not, in fact, the jedi.

Similar summaries for other frustrations:

Problems with corrupt government and politicans? Nothing could be more understandable. The prequels are all about that! What with you know, the corrupt senate, the corrupt Chancellor, and the corrupt Separatists. (not the jedi council, who are clear headed, decisive, and willing to change their minds with the circumstances)

Problems with corporations, and corporations buying out government? Nothing could be more understandable, and the prequels have that. The trade federation, the banking clan, the techno union are all in control of the Separatist government, Dooku aside. (unlike the Jedi, who are deeply aware of the power they hold with the Force, and avoid taking more of it by getting involved with politics)

But speaking of Dooku, problems with populist leaders becoming dictators by appealing to people’s reasonable distrust in government but then presenting the worst possible “solutions” to their problems? He is standing right there, giving a speech about how he “has no choice but to execute these prisoners.” (Unlike Jedi Master Mace Windu, who is willing to die to stop Dooku using the Jedi as hostages to begin a war)

Problems with people standing by and doing nothing during times of crisis? Nothing could be more understandable. The senate and the population of the Republic do that as Sidious guides them into supporting a war, hating the Jedi, and ushering in an authoritarian government. (unlike the Jedi, who are reluctant to go to war, try their best to remain kind and just when they’re recruited anyway, and are so incredibly relieved when it looks like the war is going to end)

And just to get *really* controversial around here:

Frustration with rich people justifying and hiding the crimes of their friends and family members? Nothing could be more understandable. The prequels have a place for that! Two, in fact, and their names are Sheev Palpatine and Padmé Amidala—who for all her usual sense of justice, does not fully engage with the violence Anakin confesses to her and its potential to continue, because he makes her feel less lonely. (unlike Jedi Masters Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, who are immediately somber and horrified when they see the dead children, and take action to stop the person who did it)

i don't know who needs to hear this today but the jedi would not be body-shy

especially during the war. some would be uncomfortable, sure, or even heavily dislike being nude and/or bathing around others, but the point of that is that would be respected as a choice. there is a very large difference between preferring not to be nude around others, for cultural religious or personal reasons, versus being ashamed. nothing you can do can convince me jedi would be ashamed or embarrassed of their or others' bodies.

why. why would the jedi think nudity undignified. why would they turn their noses up at it as unseemly, rather than a choice and preference

Yoda literally describes bodies as "crude matter" while calling people in general "luminous beings." This appears to be a pretty central concept to a Jedi given that they seem to view all people through the lens of the Force. They're canonically able to tell the difference between the clones and Yoda tells them that eyes can deceive you. The body is just a body, it's not necessarily representative of who that person actually is and doesn't really need to be like... venerated or considered particularly sacred. Bodies are what they are to serve the function of that particular person, no more and no less.

There is no group of people LESS likely to be body-shy than the Jedi.

On a related note, I need the narratives of Jedi considering lost limbs/other injuries some kind of tragedy and saying it weakens a persons relationship with the force to stop. Like I know everyone has “midiclorians are in the blood” brainrot (derogatory), but frankly even if losing a limb did make a Jedi less able to use telekinesis or smth, they wouldn’t place importance on that.

It would be an adjustment and perhaps a struggle for the individual just as losing abilities to injury/illness/age is in real life. But the Force is in everyone and Force abilities are not what brings fulfilment in life. There is no death, there is the Force. Regardless of physical form.

The Jedi would not regard injuries, disabilities, or any other change to the body with shame, any more than they would nudity.

Jedi neutrality in TPM comes not at all from not taking sides. They get there and pick a side in under five minutes. They are 100% team Naboo. No, their neutrality, and their cultural moral authority, comes from not having a stake in this fight. They're not mixed up in the trade federation. They don't have personal ties with the Naboo. They don't stand to benefit or to lose from the success of either party. They can just show up and say, hey, just decided you guys suck. And no one can accuse them of being secretly married to the Naboo queen or having offshore investments in the Lake country, or whatever completely hypothetical thing a person might have going on that would hypothetically compromise that neutrality

This also gets at the heart of all the “the Jedi should just leave the Republic” stuff more than debates that have been had a thousand times about how much being in cooperation with the republic helps or limits the work the Jedi do.

Being a Jedi is getting in everyone’s business. Meeting people and communities. Going to new places. Being doggedly persistent. Keeping to your commitments. Resisting threats and coercion. Refusing to give up. Investigating. Learning. Teaching. Fighting and running and talking and sticking your nose places people don’t want it. Helping, to the exclusion of all other ambitions. Leaving that trail of kindness everywhere you go because you’ve trained that instinct your entire life and you can’t stop now. Even if you could, you wouldn’t want to.

To be a Jedi is to be present, active, involved.

And you can’t be involved if you fuck off to do your own thing whenever the senator of Naboo is in the vicinity it gets hard.

When did the Jedi lose their way?

A notion put forward by Tales of the Jedi and The Acolyte is the idea that the Jedi were losing their way, as an Order, by letting themselves become more institutionalized and mired in bureaucracy.

Is that the intended narrative? Nope!

Because here's the thing, Lucas acknowledges the fact that the Jedi start to be corrupted, at some point. But if you ask him, that happens as a consequences of being used as generals during the Clone Wars.

But during The Phantom Menace? The Jedi are in their heyday.

Their only fault is that:

This notion that "they were so institutionalized/detached from the regular Joes of the galaxy that they became dispassionate and lost their way, forgot about the little guy" is absolute headcanon from fans and current authors. Lucas never brings it up once.

On the contrary, during development, he and concept artists took measures to make them look less institutionalized and heartless.

The Jedi temple isn't meant to signify an ivory tower, it represents a place of warmth/worship that contrasts with the coldness dispassion of the Senate building.

The Jedi used to wear uniforms, it was softened to a humble tunic.

Because the intended narrative is that the Republic (including the Jedi) and Anakin's downfall are paralleled with Palpatine's rise to power. There is a direct correlation, both in-universe and thematically.

And it all starts when Palpatine becomes Chancellor after pushing out Finis Valorum, marking the end of an age of value.

A scree-bat launches itself from a branch, opening flimsi-thin wings to flutter over to a berry bush. It lands on a bobbing branch and chitters with happiness. Its sharp teeth puncture the skin of a purple fruit, round with juice, and sugar spills over its tongue.

The Room of a Thousand Fountains is an oasis in the Force, and from Coruscant’s durasteel structure. These days, the arching canopy of its trees and the trickle of water over the land provide the only true shelter in the Temple. Always, there were pockets of distress or anxiety here. The daily fluctuations no one is immune to. But beneath those was always the foundation of goodness wrought by a thousand years of difficult, personal work done by a collective of individuals seeking rich soil.

Under the soil—there are layers of earth here, deep enough to turn a patch of space on a city planet into real water system—an eight-legged chanit marches, holding a grain of sand in its first set of legs. It follows a string of its fellows, thousands long. Each carries a brick for the base of their colony.

The foundation is still there, those individuals working as hard as they ever have, harder even, to be the best of themselves.

Dozens of species of moss, clover, and grass cover the ground. They spring up easily from the right soil, and with enough water. Their roots are tended by fungi gardeners in a relationship half as old as the Force itself.

But after two years of war, even the Jedi Order can begin to buckle, hairline cracks appearing in the structure. Others in the Order are aware of how war clouds the Force. Each of them are aware of their own struggles.

A single betnek tree grows taller than anything else in the garden. Its bark is smooth, its leaves wide. It holds a taf-hawk's nest in its branches and shelters a Jedi in its shade. After it traveled from Ryloth through deep space as a seedling nearly eight hundred years ago, its tap roots reached through the soil of the gardens until they broke through the stone base of the Temple.

It is Yoda alone whom the Force allows to reach out and touch the cracks, trace the way they’ll develop, see the way the whole will shatter if left unattended.

In a time when most Jedi favor the saber, Yoda meditates. He fills the cracks with vines, moss, and mortar made of gentle joy. He lifts columns and braces roofs with woody sprouts until they heal on their own. To pockets of fatigue, he offers the high trickle of streams over layers of silt and loam and sand and home, so that war weary jedi find healing. His work is never ending. Often, he loses ground. Still, he centers himself in the Force and stands, as mighty as betnek tree and as subtle as moss, a bulwark against the evil prowling outside his home.

This is what it means to be the grandmaster of the Jedi Order

—the canon compliant part of This Story can Kill You

I LOVE LITERALLY EVERYTHING ABOUT THE JEDI EXCEPT ORDER 66. I love a great many things about the Jedi and I have posted a lot about them, as you’re going to see, from the aesthetics to how much fun they are to their connection to the Force and how fascinating that is to explore.  They’re so incredibly extra, I mean, LOOK AT THIS GUY, THIS IS AWESOME:

I love how in touch he is with himself, his body and his mind and the Force, that he moves with such lethal grace and power and precision.  This is someone who has worked his entire life to have mastery over himself and his skills, this is someone who has a near unbreakable will, someone who can smile gently just as genuinely as he can righteously, angrily cut someone in half, someone who isn’t meant to be perfect, but who is good.  Obi-Wan Kenobi is the epitome of the perfect Jedi not because he’s an emotionless robot or whatever (he’s really, really not, not at any point in any of the movies or tv shows, just look at Ewan McGregor’s face at any point and you’ll see emotion all over it) but because he follows their teachings, he’s applied them to his life, he’s become an even better person by weaving them into his very bones. And that’s the big reason I love the Jedi is because they were so damn good. They devoted their lives to the Force and to compassion for other beings in the galaxy.  Their entire purpose was to seek further understanding this energy that bound the entire universe together, that familiar sense of warmth, of belonging, of finding themselves part of an endless lattice of connections that held them and everything else. I loved that the Jedi were just as dedicated to helping as many people as they could.  They weren’t soldiers, but they would give up themselves to become that because that’s what the galaxy asked of them, they were willing to not only die to save others’ lives, but to make hard decisions that benefited so many more people than just themselves.  They mourned, they took moments to feel that grief, but then did what they must. They fell into Palpatine’s trap not because they were corrupt (one of my favorite things about the propaganda book is that it is exceedingly clear about the corruption in the Republic, the lack of care for the people it was supposed to help, it was very much about calling people out, and yet was very, very clear about the Jedi were never part of that rotting from the inside out) but because they were willing to do what they felt needed to be done to help the entire galaxy. I love the Jedi because their teachings of mindfulness are analogous to therapy, that they’re beneficial (if you actually apply them), I love that attachment isn’t equal to love, but to the idea of being unable to accept things as they are. That, “the Jedi also value mindfulness, acceptance, and compassion, all of which have been shown to help people with various psychological disorders, such as anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), chronic pain, substance addictions, and other disorders.” That, “just as Jedi get in tune with the Force, those who are intrinsically spiritual come to appreciate the great variety of life and endeavor to serve others.” That the Jedi promote self-discipline because it’s beneficial to the self, but also because they are very much aware of their ability to hurt other people if they don’t control themselves.  This is why Depa teaches Caleb that his feelings are valuable and should not be suppressed, but learn to control them before they control you.  This is why the Jedi know the dark side is dangerous (and it is) not because anger, hate, suffering, cruelty, selfishness should be denied, but instead that they are to be understood about ourselves, that they’re necessary as part of living beings, but you should let go of them when you’ve worked through them, that’s what “balance” means. I love the Jedi because they are an intrinsically motivated religion (slash-culture) in a galaxy that is all too often extrinsically motivated.   I love the Jedi because, even when the entire galaxy turned on them and lied about them and twisted their image, they remained faithful and good.  Obi-Wan’s entire world burned into ash, helped along by the person he loved most, and he still remained “the bedrock of all good”, because that’s the person his Jedi foundations allowed him to be.  I love the Jedi because they weren’t doormats, they did what they must, but they were also willing to forgive when it was genuinely asked for–Anakin kills all of Yoda’s grandkids and he still almost feels sorry for him when Vader explodes with loneliness after Obi-Wan dies.  He and Obi-Wan still welcomed Anakin back and helped him over to the other side when he died.  Or sometimes, even when it wasn’t asked for. I love the Jedi because they’re a bunch of super awesome BABES, because their aesthetics are gorgeous, because they’re hilarious and fun, because they’re cool, but most of all because: The Jedi strove to be the best people they could be, internally and externally. In other words:  #JEDI SQUAD FOR LIFE

I'd say where the dissonance really starts, when it comes to the portrayal of the Jedi in more recent Star Wars stories, is the perception of what the Prequels are about.

They're not about the Jedi.

George Lucas said over and over that they're about:

The Prequels’ focus is on Anakin and the Republic, these films are not primarily about the fall of the Jedi. In fact, I’d argue they aren’t about the Jedi at all!

And when you look at the original backstory, you’ll notice that it also primarily focuses on:

So, there too… the Jedi themselves aren’t really that big a part of the Prequels’ original idea. They aren't mentioned much, beyond their trying to save the Senate and getting wiped out.

The Star Wars movies aren't about the Jedi, they're about Anakin and Luke, they're about Obi-Wan and Padmé and Han and Leia, the Rebellion vs the Empire, the fall of the Republic.

They're not about Ben and Yoda and Mace and Ki-Adi and Plo Koon and Shaak Ti and Luminara.

Just like Harry Potter isn't about Dumbledore and McGonagall. Just like the Lord of the Rings isn't about Gandalf.

On a functional level, the Jedi are:

But that's about it.

However, if you ask today’s fans and Star Wars creatives, most will say the Prequels are about the fall of the Jedi Order.

This is a take shared by a big chunk of the fandom, including various filmmakers, authors, and executives involved with Star Wars, so much so that the time period the Prequel films cover has now been redubbed by Lucasfilm as the “Fall of the Jedi era”.

Which leaves us with a question... why? Why the dissonance?