It’s a pattern in Star Wars of taking the things that are associated with the Jedi--not just the Jedi themselves, not even murdering all of them, but taking everything that was even associated with them--and turning them into weapons of the Empire. They do it with lightsabers during the Clone Wars, where no longer seeing a lightsaber is just the Jedi or the Republic, but with people like Dooku and Grievous now as well. Vader literally steals a Jedi’s kyber crystal, because Palpatine instructs him as a Sith that that’s the way to move forward--by stealing and crushing and bleeding and rewriting everything that a Jedi was. They do it with the Jedi Temple, turning it into the Imperial Palace:
There’s a whole huge running theme in the supplementary material about how Palpatine and the Empire not only hunted down Jedi, but they made speaking of them something you would “disappear” for, they literally taught students that the Jedi were a criminal gang during the Republic, they took over planets’ holonets and made them air Imperial propaganda. Palpatine didn’t just kill the Jedi on a physical level, he did his level best to murder their memory, their hope, their legacy, their everything. In the time of the Empire, you can’t look at anything from the Jedi without thinking of how it was stolen and used for the Empire’s purposes now.
#I have made fun of Palpatine doing so much work to overthrow the Jedi and sully their image on to lose his empire in 20 years#but when you lay out the scale of his purge of the Jedi this way#in destroying not just the Jedi physically but also turning the minds and hearts of the galaxy against them#that is is something that lasted far longer than any empire ever would#so perhaps in the end Palpatine really did win#because even though there are still Jedi after there are no more from those before Palpatine to impart their philosophy on#there’s also the matter of there not being enough Jedi or at least people who wanted to be one#before tcw there’s already very little Jedi to begin with so it only makes all the fledging attempts in an Jedi order in the ST quite frail#and now they have a lack of knowledge and past mentors as well as a galaxy terrorized into fearing them#jedi order#meta (via @thegreencarousel) One thing that gives me hope is that there are prequel era Jedi there to impart their philosophy. Yoda is still there to talk to Luke on Ahch-To. Luke hears voices telling him to let go when he dies on Ahch-To. Rey helps bring forward so many other Jedi in her most desperate moment against Palpatine. Luke and Leia become Force Ghosts as well. It will still be a long, slow road to healing, but the Jedi of this era are still there, they can tell future generations about the philosophy that has come before, that every Jedi walks their own path, that the Jedi have always been about their students growing beyond them, from the era of the High Republic to the prequels to the sequels, every generation has directly expressed that their students will go further than them, and I love that the sequels Jedi, that Rey and Finn will have the foundations and knowledge of the Jedi Order to help them when they need it. Because Yoda and Obi-Wan (and now all the Jedi that showed up in TROS) can tell them what they know. There are ancient texts, sure. There are probably still some unfound holocrons around. But also Yoda and Obi-Wan and the others are right there to help them, now that Rey has been able to find the connection with the Force Ghosts. So, fuck Palpatine, because he may have killed their physical bodies, he may have killed their image in others’ eyes, he may have killed their Temples and sacred places, but he couldn’t kill their spirits.