redrikki:

grand-duc:

padawanlost:

redrikki:

padawanlost:

redrikki:

padawanlost:

redrikki:

According to Wookiepedia, members of the Jedi Council were elected by, well, the other members of the Jedi Council. In Legends, five members served for life. I’m guessing Yoda was one of these, which is super problematic considering just how long his life is. Four other members served open-ended terms with a chance at promotion to life-time when one of the five kicked it. The remaining three members were term-limited and were often brought on because they had specific types of expertise. I’m guessing Obi-Wan was one of these, promoted to the Council during the Clone Wars thanks to his skills at general-ing.

They rule over 10,000+ knights plus an unknown number of younglings, padawans, and service corpse members, but the Jedi Council is basically the board of a small art museum where everyone just nominates their friends and relatives. A number of councilors were nominated to the Council by their masters including Depa Billaba, Plo Koon, Ki-Adi-Mundi, while others were simply part of a siting councilor’s lineage, like Obi-Wan. Basically, if you’re just a rank-and-file Jedi from some random lineage, then you have almost no chance of ascending to power. You have even less of a chance if you have a known complaint with the Code or the Council’s interpretation of the same. No wonder Barriss felt like she had to blow something up just to be heard.

i need to
confirm the sources but i’m pretty sure Obi-Wan was got the rank of Master and
joined the Jedi Council right after the battle of Geonosis.

Btw, I loved
you pointed this out because the Jedi Council always gave me some serious
nepotism vibes.  

• Yoda (Council Member) trained Dooku (invited) trained
  Qui-Gon (considered) trained Obi-Wan
  (Council Member) trained Anakin (it’s complicated!)
• Yoda (Council Member) trained
  Mace Windu (Council Member) trained Depa Billaba (Council Member)
• Yoda (Council Member) trained
  trained Ki-Adi-Mundi (Council Member)
• Yoda (Council Member) trained
  trained Kit Fisto (Council Member)

It’s too much coincidence,
to be just coincidence. Of the 12 members, we have at least 6 linked to Yoda. In
An Order with more 10000 members, no one else, who was not directly linked to
Yoda, was good enough to be on the Council? Am I supposed to believe that?
Seriously! I call bullshit. The members were not elect on merit only, their
views HAD to be in line with Yoda’s (and his apprentices and, let’s be real,
yoda’s apprentices believes = yoda’s believes) for them to even be considered.

Qui-Gon: I shall do what I must, Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan: If you would just follow the code, you would be on the council.

It’s not about
selecting the “best” members. It’s about selecting a member who will help them maintain
the status quo.

The Jedi Council is the people in a room deciding what’s best for everyone, ready to give final say to one ‘wise’ leader when they don’t agree. Boy, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard of that system of government before? Hmmmm.

What’s really interesting to me is the aspect of dynasty within the Council. Jedi aren’t permitted to have families and, if they have biological children, they aren’t permitted to raise them so as to avoid attachment and nepotism, and yet, that’s exactly what happens with master-padawan lineage. It’s about as incestuous as all those medieval popes being succeeded by their ‘nephews.’ Yoda, a life-time member with an insanely long lifetime, basically has a stranglehold on the reigns of power which his ‘heirs’ may share but never actually inherit.

The more i
think about this the more frustrated I get. All the Order’s major issues, in
some way or another, come back to this. For them to evolve, they didn’t need a
radical chance like Anakin slaughtering everyone. All they needed to do was
open themselves to new opinions. It was that simple. If they had accepted new
ideas, debated them, learned from them, they would’ve been unstoppable. Something
to be truly respected and admired. They didn’t need a revolution. All they
needed to do was listen. This is what frustrates me so much about the council. If
they had done something as simple as listening to new ideas everything that
happened could’ve been avoided.

And as much
as I enjoy criticizing all the members of the council, I’m blaming this one on
Yoda and here’s why: the Jedi Order was capable of change. They changed their
rules a bunch of times to adapt to new situations, so change was possible. But how
many changes happened after Yoda took control? As far as I know, nothing significant
changed. If anything, his “rise to power” marked the decline of the Jedi Order.
Under his guidance, the Jedi kept themselves isolated and detached from the
rest of the galaxy, they grew more dependent on the Senate, we noticed the
first signs of nepotism in the High Council, they turned themselves into
soldiers, etc.

Yes, the
individual members of the Council are all responsible for what happened too but
we can’t deny the only thing they have in common is Yoda, and that says a lot. They
were all trained by him (at some point or another) and they all sought his
counsel when in doubt. That’s a lot of power over a lot of minds. And that’s
why I don’t by the idea that Yoda is wise or admirable. I’m not saying his sith
lord in disguise but I can’t call wise a being who lived for 900 years without
learning shit. I just can’t.

The saddest part is that the Jedi, or at least some Jedi, were aware of this. In the Kanan comics, Depa says that the reason she chose Caleb is because he questions the status quo and the Jedi are going to need people who do that if they have any hope of surviving in a changing universe. She firmly believes that they need some sort of avenue for peaceful dissent in order to stay a relevant force in the galaxy.

The sad truth is that the Jedi order has a Yoda problem. He trains all the younglings. Ahsoka later describes him as both wise and kind but he’s demonstrably neither. She, and every other Jedi youngling for 800+ years have simply been raised to think that. He also has the power to override anyone else in terms of decision making both because they’ve been raised to respect his ‘wisdom’ and because he has that authority as Grand Master of the Council. During AotC, he overrides Mace Windu, the Master of the Order, and makes him cover up the fact they have no clue where their mystery army came from.

So many of Yoda’s decisions are about maintaining or consolidating power, both for himself within the Order and the Order within the galaxy. He doesn’t want Anakin because the Chosen One might be a threat to his dominance. He doesn’t want to admit that the Jedi don’t know what’s going on during the Clone Wars, because he doesn’t want them to lose power within the Republic. In an episode of Rebels he admits that he acted out of fear and that all of his decisions leading up to and during the Clone Wars were based on his fear of change. It’s nice that he finally gained the wisdom and introspection to figure that out, but it was too little too late.

“a Yoda
problem”!! I love it. From now on all my meta will be tagged “the Yoda problem”!!!lol

Tbh, I never
bought the idea behind that scene in Rebels. I never believed had actually
learned anything from what happened. it’s the same problem I’ve with Yoda in
the ROTS novelization. Both have scenes with Yoda admitting he was wrong but he
changes nothing afterwards. He admits he acted out of fear, and years later he’s
back to pull the same shit that led to destruction of the Jedi order. It doesn’t
matter what he says because his actions don’t align with his beliefs. It’s like
Anakin saying he’ll bring peace to the galaxy right after he killed a bunch of
children. What comes out of his mouth doesn’t match his behavior.

I think at
some point Yoda mentions they were wrong to jump into the Clone wars. Okay, I agree.
He’s right. But then he’s absolutely okay with Luke turning into a soldier so
he can kill his own father. Where’s the wisdom in that?

What bothers
me the most about Yoda is that he had more time than any other character in the
franchise to learn from his mistakes but yet died preaching the same crap that
got all his students killed in brutal, violent ways. Not only that, he died in
his bed, peacefully. As if he had done well and accomplished his mission. Like a
hero resting after saving the day.

He never
took any responsibilities for 900 years of mistakes. There’s no wisdom or humility
in that. The very little he learned changed nothing. He died the same way he
lived.

I think part of the tragedy of Yoda and Obi-Wan in the OT, is that they knew they had fucked up somewhere, but they were never able to figure out WHERE they had fucked up.

So they died doing the same shit that got them in that position in the first place.

#for an order of empathic monks #they’re shockingly bad at self-reflection (tags by @grand-duc)