The Empire, Mandalore, and Benevolent Cultural Genocide

On how we write the Jedi (and how we unwrite them)

Content Warning: mentions of genocide, antisemitism, racism. Also contains some spoilers for The Mandalorian (through season 2).

Gone Before We Started

The Jedi are dead.

By A New Hope, they are functionally extinct; there are two Jedi left alive, more or less. Three, if you count Luke.

They were killed in a genocide at the founding of the Empire; children were killed by the right hand of the emperor, and Jedi were systematically hunted down and killed. More recent media like Kenobi shows the Empire’s efforts to kill the last of the Jedi, to leave a universe where there are none left.

The Empire, of course, mirrors Nazi Germany; the aesthetics, history, and actions are clearly modeled after them. This continues on to the newest movies; about them, J.J. Abrams said:

That all came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again? What could be born of that? Could The First Order exist as a group that actually admired The Empire? Could the work of The Empire be seen as unfulfilled? And could Vader be a martyr? Could there be a need to see through what didn't get done?

The Nazis are, at least to Western Europe and the United States, the archetype of a genocidal force; when most Americans think of genocide, they are probably more likely to think of Nazi Germany than examples like Rwanda, Armenia, or the Khmer Rouge. That was likely even more true in 1977 when A New Hope came out.

In this analogy, of course, the Jedi are Jews, a religious order that is hunted down by the Nazi-equivalent in an attempted genocide.

It’s not a perfect equivalent, of course, but it is an obvious one, and one that I think can’t fully be ignored when looking how the Jedi are talked about in the broader Star Wars fandom.

Problemitizing the Invisible

The problem I ran into when trying to write this is the same problem that I think Star Wars runs into, too: how do you write about the Jedi without showing the Jedi?

Because in most of Star Wars, there aren’t really many Jedi, if any. The absence of the Jedi is the point. It is a story, in many ways, about that hole, about what is left behind when a force for good—when a people—is destroyed all at once, leaving an open, gaping wound.

My impulse, as I’ve been writing this, keeps being to try to defend the Jedi Order, or to explain them—to frame the problematizing of the Jedi so you as the reader understand what of it is rational and what is not, where the Jedi’s failings are and where they aren’t.

It’s an impulse that is, in some way, the same thing I’m writing about.

The Jedi are dead. They’re gone.

Why does it matter if they were good?

The Empire

The Empire is, of course, the indisputable enemy of Star Wars, and many (dare I even say most) fans would agree with that.

Even as I say that, I feel the need to put a bit of an asterisk on it because of the branch of fanfiction that is focused on redeeming Darth Vader—some of which stray fairly unironically into “what if the issue of the Empire would be solved by him (or Luke Skywalker) being Emperor instead,” but I daresay that, at the very least, even those generally don’t agree conceptually with the wholsale genocide of the Jedi.

So I guess, at the very least, most people broadly agree that, in that case, genocide was bad.

In many ways, the Empire represents the purest, most obvious form of genocide, which is the deliberate attempt at destroying a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. It is the form that is easiest to look at and know what it is, to see children literally cut down by Anakin Skywalker and nameless, faceless stormtroopers.

It doesn’t require considering whether the Jedi were good or bad, doesn’t require debating the morality of their views or their actions. It is a morally binary action, and this is clearly on the wrong side of it.

The Jedi

The Jedi, on the other hand, end up in a much more complicated position in the broader framework of Star Wars fandom. They are the point, on individual levels—they are the beloved Luke Skywalker and the even more beloved Obi-Wan Kenobi—they are magic and mystery and, frankly, cool.

But as a culture, as a history, as an organization, they are often problematized and reshaped to the point of being nearly unrecognizable. A key point of that is the issue of attachment—and, namely, the idea that the Jedi are not allowed attachment.

The debate about what this actually means appears throughout the Star Wars fandom, in part because the actual framing of it is not entirely consistent throughout the franchise. On one end of the spectrum is authors who write attachment as synonymous with love, framing the Jedi as forbidding members of their Order from falling or being in love with someone. On the other end is attachment being written essentially as holding on to things, and that not having attachment means being willing to give up anything, even the people or things you love, for the greater good.

My understanding is that the franchise tends to write it more towards the latter rather than the former, but frankly, there are so many pieces of the franchise that it could be written across the entire spectrum.

The other complicated piece of the Jedi is their views on emotion—whether releasing them into the Force means letting go rather than letting emotions control them or whether it means negative emotions being looked down on in the first place. This, again, comes from a sometimes-ambiguous doctrine and a wide-ranging franchise.

There are other points that come up a lot, too—how beholden they are to the Republic, how they acquire children, what kind of children they accept, how they view the Light and Dark sides of the Force.

The funny thing about all of this is that, beyond the prequel films, the Jedi Order doesn’t really show up in the films. The Jedi exist more as something that has been destroyed than as something that exists.

A Secret Third Thing

Between the Empire and the Jedi, we are given a third people—the Mandalorians. Jango Fett—the bounty hunter and progenitor of the clone army—is the most notable of them from the prequel films; his son/clone Boba Fett is an antagonist in The Empire Strikes Back as well as a character in the more recent Disney+ shows The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

As with the Jedi, the Mandalorians as a culture don’t show up for most of the film canon, and are just now starting to show up in the TV canon; most of the backstory that people use for them in fanfiction is pulled from the books. Unlike with the Jedi, they’re not particularly relevant to the film canon—both Boba Fett and Jango Fett (and the clones) can be understood without understanding anything else about Mandalorian culture.

Mandalorians,¹ in many ways, are written in fanfic as what people clearly wish the Jedi were: a theocratic nation-state that adopts children and raises them as warriors, but is also separate from the Republic and shows emotions and has attachments. Sometimes they're written as an empire (but a good empire, unlike The Empire, because they're benevolent and not into genocide), and othertimes they're just written as an independent nation-state that dislikes the Republic and refuses to be part of it.

Their political system varies a bit throughout fanfic, but one of the key things is that they’re led by the Mand’alor, who is Jaster Mereel (who is betrayed and killed by a terrorist Mandalorian sect) and then his adopted Jango Fett (until the True Mandalorians were killed by Jedi on Galidraan after being tricked by that same terrorist Mandalorian sect). A lot of fics have Din Djarin becoming the Mand’alor because of his acquisition of the Darksaber (a traditional sign of the Mand’alor) in season 2 of The Mandalorian.

Fan interpretations of Mandalorian culture also tend to be folded into the culture of the clones that make up the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), because their progenitor was Jango Fett.

Given the size and breadth of the Star Wars fandom and the number of fanfics (230,087 as of April 30, 2023), it’s hard to say that any one thing is popular in the fandom; the top-tagged character, Obi-Wan Kenobi, only shows up in 45,515 fics, or 19.8% of the total fics. That said, 3,805 Star Wars fics (1.6%) are tagged with Mandalorian Culture, which is a decent size for a culture that doesn’t really exist in the films at all.

Change for the Better?

In a² Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker fanfiction, Luke joins Din in rebuilding Mandalore, and while they fall in love, Luke learns to put away the strictures of the old Jedi Order and Jedi traditions that he is truly to reconstruct. The lesson he learns is that the Jedi were fundamentally, existentially wrong, and he must put aside the old ways to be happy and successful.

In another, Din joins Luke at his new Jedi school—and Luke stresses that he won’t be following the old ways of doing things, that he’s thrown away the constraints of that old structure and is building a new, better, different Jedi Order. He incorporates part of the Mandalorian culture into his practices, having learned their benefits from Din.

There is a trend here, in these stories, to want to rebuild the Jedi Order in a new image, to take the pieces that we dislike or are made uncomfortable by and acknowledge that dislike and then get rid of them.

It’s often done in very therapized language, about intergenerational trauma and about allowing attachment, about having the self-worth to allow yourself to be loved. It’s about not holding onto the parts of the past that hurt you, or that aren’t applicable to you anymore, or that were always bad.

It’s a rhetoric that feels benign, even good.

With Thunderous (Armored) Applause

Fanfics featuring Mandalorians during the Republic era tend to focus on Obi-Wan Kenobi—either as a child, often meeting and being adopted (or at least pseudo-adopted) by Jaster Mereel, or as an adult, interacting with Jango Fett and/or the clones.

Oftentimes, a key point is Obi-Wan’s conflict with—and perceived mistreatment by—the Jedi Order, with points such as his abandonment on the warring planet Melida/Daan by his master Qui-Gon Jinn during his time as a teenage padawan³ or Qui-Gon's original refusal to take him as a padawan and him briefly being taken hostage by Qui-Gon's prior padawan Xanatos.⁴

The Jedi Order is often presented as well-meaning but misguided, or sometimes just misguided, blind to the control they suffer under the Republic and the Senate. Sometimes Obi-Wan is written as needing to be saved from them; sometimes they are written as needing to be saved from themselves.

The lesson we learn from these stories as well is, as before, that the Mandalorian way of life is inherently superior to the Jedi way of life—usually because it encourages attachment, is more (or differently) protective of its children, and (in some cases) exist as a diametric opposite to the Jedi's austere ways.

The Jedi are shown as having taken the wrong path, at some point—usually centuries ago—or (sometimes at the same time) clinging on too hard to old traditions, the old ways of doing things, which are obsolete and unnecessary.

Being part of (and beholden to) the Republic is a core part of this criticism, more often than not—that they are answerable to a slow, corrupt organization run by a Sith (not that anyone knows that last part), that they must go where the Republic sends them and follow the decisions of the Republic. The Republic falls, of course, in the end, voted into becoming an empire and leading to Padmé Amidala’s famous line, “So this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause.”

But there is a strong thread of anti-republicanism⁵ there, that it's not simply that this Republic is bad but that a republic is bad.

What Killed Us

There’s a tendency in some of these stories to write Jedi traditions as their undoing. They refuse to change, so they are destroyed. They don’t see love the right way, or don’t talk about it the right way, so they are destroyed.

The padawan system is one way that that’s talked about—they take only one padawan to one master, and that means that potential Jedi are sent away if there isn’t a master who will take them. During the war, they lose so many people, and all those potential Jedi never become Jedi. Their numbers dwindle.

But that doesn’t actually have anything to do with why they’re destroyed. They’re destroyed because the Emperor forces the clones to kill all of them, all at once, using slave chips implanted in the clones’ brains.

If there had been more Jedi, there would have just been more people killed.

The Jedi had no say in their own destruction.

Gone Before We Started (Reprise)

The Jedi are dead.

That’s where post-film stories about Luke Skywalker start—the Empire has fallen, but the Jedi are still dead. They are even more dead than before, because while A New Hope starts with both Yoda and Obi-Wan—the last remaining members of the old Jedi Order—alive, Return of the Jedi ends with both of them dead.

The old Jedi Order is extinct, and all there is left is a half-trained twenty-something who is trying to piece together Jedi traditions from old books. The only hope of the Jedi Order existing again is Luke rebuilding it.

Otherwise, they’re truly gone.

Otherwise, the Jedi Order never comes back. The Sith win, even if the Empire lost.

All of that makes the impulse to ignore Jedi traditions and rebuild in the Mandalorian image a lot less benign.

Never Here To Start With

I keep going back, of course, to the fact that the Jedi aren’t real.

To some degree, it doesn’t matter whether the stories people tell are about a benevolent, therapized cultural genocide of the Jedi, because the Jedi don’t exist, because they never existed. There are no people to destroy.

But when people tell those stories, it makes me wonder how they think about real-religions and traditions. If they look down on Jedi traditions of poverty, what do they think about Hindu renunciation of worldly goods or Jain asceticism? What do they think about madrasas or cheder or yeshiva? What do they think of any religion or culture that holds beliefs that they don’t understand, that seem old-fashioned or strange or just different?

But more than that, it makes me think more broadly about how we talk about Star Wars.

There’s a pretty obvious pro-dictatorship problem with the Star Wars fandom, when there are stories about an honor-bound imperialist Mandalorian empire being the ideal form of government, when there are stories about the First Order maintaining peace in a chaotic galaxy, when there are stories about cinnamon roll Luke Skywalker being established by Darth Vader as a benevolent emperor in Palpatine’s place.

And so the desire to reframe the Jedi as misguided, as ultimately deserving of being rewritten into something different, starts to feel a lot uncomfier. Because they suddenly start looking a lot less like victims and a lot more like a problematic force that deserved to be destroyed—unloving baby stealers, clinging on to traditions for the sake of tradition, even when it hurts their people.

Victims need not be perfect to be victims. But reframing victims as being harbingers of their own destruction—well, that looks like a viewpoint I don’t think a lot of people really want to be espousing.

1. Specifically the Haat Mando’ade, or True Mandalorians, as opposed to Satine Kryze’s New Mandalorians or Tor Vizla’s Death Watch. This is pretty lore-y, but it’s how basically all of the stories like this are written

2. I say “a” but I really mean “a bunch of”

3. This is a plot point in some of the Jedi Apprentice books, a Middle Grade/YA series in the Star Wars Legends (previously Star Wars Extended Universe) books

4. Also from the Jedi Apprentice series

5. Small-r republic, not GOP/big-R Republican