Ruin Explorer
Legend
No this is a total nonsense fan-canon bollocks that people like you are far too smart to be repeating.
Stop it!
Everyone who is saying this kind of stuff as if it were fact needs to stop. Period. What they Jedi were "meant to be" was entirely in Lucas' mind, and even from early drafts of Star Wars concepts, there were signs that they were not pure "good guys" in some Paladin-ish way, but flawed beings, largely trying to do the right thing. Just because you made that up in your head, and decided it was true, before finding out it wasn't, doesn't make it unfair that that changed. Nor inappropriate or wrong or anything like that.
Is this a joke?
Are you doing a bit?
Lucas envisioned and created the Jedi. If his view was that they were imperfect, and that's why they got wiped out - then that's the correct view - the only view, even, that matters.
In Episode 4 we only saw two Jedi - Obi-Wan - who somehow evaded a purge of his kind - and Darth Vader, who we later learned had turned traitor on his fellow Jedi - that's not a great record right there, so mindlessly assuming everything Obi-Wan said was 100% hard fact is was pretty silly. We had no idea if what Obi-Wan was saying about the Jedi was objectively true, largely true, or true only from "a certain point of view". Lucas knew, and he knew it was one of the latter two.
You don't get to death-of-the-author (which isn't even what that means) Lucas here. You don't get to say "Lucas tarnished their reputation". In this sense, Lucas is a historian of his own universe, writing episodes 1, 2, and 3. Filling in just how it came to be that these mystical good guys totally fell on their face, got owned, and got purged.
Further, even if the majority of Jedi were "noble and heroic", which y'know, may well be true, the structure of the organisation was clearly and plainly rotten by the PT era (or the High Republic even), and that why, after 3000+ years of Jedi and Sith, with the Sith always losing, the Jedi finally lost like losers - at great cost to the galaxy. Specifically the issue seems to be, in Lucas and Disney's view, essentially "regulatory capture".
For the 3000+ years before the High Republic period, it seems like the Jedi operated largely independently of the Republic, such that it was. That they were not integrated into its governance and military, and probably, though we don't know, opposed it at times, perhaps even having to use violence (this period is unclear, but it seems likely "noble, heroic knights" and "guardians of peace and justice" would clash with politicians and militarists, doesn't it?).
The problem in the High Republic period is that the Jedi of that era (including ones alive in the PT) felt that the Jedi and the Republic were so well-aligned that the Jedi should basically work for - rather than with - the Republic, and became integrated into it in a way that hadn't previously been the case. As such, they were no longer in a position to argue with the Republic, merely to do its bidding, and when the Separatist issue appeared (at least in part because of Sith manipulation, though I doubt it was entirely their making, probably a long-brewing issue - the Senate were clearly shown as politician-corrupt - i.e. pork barrel, I've got mine, moral cowardice etc. - in both the High Republic and PT eras), the Jedi could no longer act as neutral mediators, even though they tried to, because they were clearly on the side of the Galactic Senate, who completely opposed the Separatists. The Jedi were basically taking orders from the Galactic Senate at that point, which means they couldn't be "noble and heroic knights", because they were serving a corrupt and self-interested system - not the will of the Force, which is what they needed to be serving. This was reinforced when war broke out, and the Jedi made a series of terrible decisions, not least accepting this mysterious gift of slave-soldiers (so "good" of them, so "noble"), which turned out to be a trojan horse. They essentially became the military leaders of the Republic, which is insane, given their mission, and shows how severe the "regulatory capture" had become.
What we knew from 4/5/6 was that the Jedi were wiped out by two Sith. Two. And it sure as hell wasn't in combat. So an explanation was needed - and that explanation was always going to require at the very least the Jedi Order to be a bunch of screw ups by that era. They should never have become the military/enforcement wing of the Republic, and should have followed the will of the Force, not of a bunch of politicians.
Lucas seems to want us to question Jedi traditions, too, of taking kids, at a very young age, at least sometimes from very vulnerable parents, and possibly allowing only one Force-tradition - theirs - to exist. And it's reasonable for him to want that to be questioned, frankly. Especially as Luke, Rey and others show that you don't have to do that, and indeed, perhaps it's not even a good idea, but rather a tradition that lived on long past its sell-by date. I mean, whilst Anakin was slightly older than the kids the Jedi normally took and this made them extremely doubtful, the history of the Jedi is littered with figures who were taken at the right age, trained as Jedi, and turned out to be bad eggs anyway - Count Dooku being an easy example.
