[Bissrok]

Why are there so many Jedi if they can't have "bonds"? Are they all little Jesus' brought forth by bacteria? Are there a lot of sperm banks all over the core worlds? If so, are the Jedi's children sent to train somewhere else? Because they obviously can't be around their parents or they'd develop a strong bond with them. Has this been explained anywhere or is this just half-assed writing?

[Despondent]

or is this just half-assed writing?

Oh, it's much Worse than half-assed writing. It's almost INTENTIONALLY rong.

[KurganX]

A better question would be, why are there so few...


After all, 10,000 Jedi (even if those are only including battle ready "Knights") as a Galactic police force is simply ridiculously small. Somebody calculated that these guys would have to be moving constantly in order to locate all the potential force sensitives born in the galaxy, if they followed the method used by Obi-Wan and Qui Gon to find Anakin on Tatooine... never mind being ambassadors and detectives, fighters and everything else they seem fond of doing...

Then again this is the same mythos that feels a few million men constitute a "galactic grand army" capable of fighting one side of a "full scale" civil war.

Oh well, if we ignore the EU and stick with the movies, we can fudge any numbers that are mentioned (the few are give some wiggle room, like "units") and it's less of a problem...

This post has been edited by KurganX: 12 July 2006 - 03:53 AM

[Helena]

Actually, KurganX has a very good point: a figure of 10,000 Jedi for the entire Galaxy is just plain ridiculous. Suppose we make a very conservative estimate of 10 trillion for the population of the galaxy (though I believe Coruscant alone has several trillion citizens); with 10,000 Jedi that would make for one Jedi per billion citizens of the Galaxy. No wonder the Order is so fucking useless!

Another comparison: imagine that all those Jedi were gathered together on Earth. The total population of Earth is about six billion, making for one Jedi per 600,000 citizens (a pretty low ratio in itself). To achieve the same ratio of Jedi to non-Jedi in a population of 10 trillion, you would need about seventeen million Jedi, well over 1000 times the official figure.

Of course, the problem here stems from EU writers making exactly the same mistake as Lucas: forgetting that Star Wars takes place across an entire galaxy, rather than a world or country or continent. (Or, going by the PT, a small village where all the main characters happened to grow up together in close proximity.)

[barend]

the star wars galaxy is more like a house party... everybody knows eachother, and if they don't they know someobne who knows someone... and so on.

[CowboyCurtis]

Yeah, I don't know what to say about the number of Jedi. On the one hand I would've preferred seeing fewer in the PT's. As it stands, with all of the troubles in the galaxy, why are they just hanging around the temple? I don't know, I just can't stand it.

I don't know. I don't know what to think/say about it all. I just know that what we see in the PT's is just not cutting it for me. Partially execution.

Tell me this, if there weren't no "wars" and strife in the republic in the thousand years, and all the Jedi are doing is training and sitting around, isn't that a waste of money and so forth. If there are no troubles, send all of those Jedi babies back home. If you're training for something that will inevitablly happen... oh, I don't know...something like the TWO SITH that will eventually return---don't you think they'd use all of that "labor force" of Jedi to go seek them out!? I mean, they've got more than they need for cry-eye!!!

Okay, ranting... shutting up....

This post has been edited by CowboyCurtis: 16 July 2006 - 06:09 PM

[Helena]

Yeah, I don't know what to say about the number of Jedi. On the one hand I would've preferred seeing fewer in the PT's. As it stands, with all of the troubles in the galaxy, why are they just hanging around the temple? I don't know, I just can't stand it.

Well, there's a very simple solution for that: show them actually doing something rather than just hanging around the temple. Even if there are no major wars going on, surely they must have all sorts of other duties to attend to? Aren't they supposed to be diplomats, law enforcers, peacekeepers? Just to take one very obvious example, why not show them trying to deal with the slavery and organised crime that still seems to be rampant in the galaxy?

[Casual Fan]

If I had been making the PT, I would have done just the opposite. I would have had only a dozen Jedi, and each one would have been super powerful, the equivalent of an OT Darth Vader.

Limit the Jedi to about a dozen, and you can actually develop their characters and make people care about them. Its also makes certain things much more believable, first that Palpatine is a match for them (he only has to get rid of or flip a dozen), also why Palpatine would be so interested in flipping any Jedi to the Dark Side (he coverts 1/12th of their strength, even with a run-of-the mill Jedi). It makes any weird rules you want to inflict on the order more believable, after all we are now talking about the twelve most powerful force users in the galaxy, who knows what sort of program you need to develop this and then make sure the jedi don't use their power to run amok.

And the reason why having few Jedi seems to be a problem is that they are supposed to be a pangalactic police force. No, the Republic should have its own police force and army, thank you very much. The jedi then only have to be used in the rare situations where the normal Republic authorities can't handle things.

In LOTR terms (I just saw the movies again so this is on my minds), the Jedi should be the equivalent of the wizards. Saruman leaving the reservation was a big deal, and given how much power he potentially had his temptation was believable. Gondor, Rohan, etc. had armies of their own, they didn't rely on Gandalf and Saruman to run around everywhere settling trade disputes. Likewise in Asimov's Foundation series, the Second Foundation gets by with about a dozen scholars.

[CowboyCurtis]

And the reason why having few Jedi seems to be a problem is that they are supposed to be a pangalactic police force. No, the Republic should have its own police force and army, thank you very much. The jedi then only have to be used in the rare situations where the normal Republic authorities can't handle things.

In LOTR terms (I just saw the movies again so this is on my minds), the Jedi should be the equivalent of the wizards. Saruman leaving the reservation was a big deal, and given how much power he potentially had his temptation was believable. Gondor, Rohan, etc. had armies of their own, they didn't rely on Gandalf and Saruman to run around everywhere settling trade disputes. Likewise in Asimov's Foundation series, the Second Foundation gets by with about a dozen scholars.

This hits the nail squarely on the head! Ding-ding-ding!! You deserve a cookie, CF!

[MyPantsAreOnFire]

I always had assumed there were only a few hundred Jedi running around before the "purge"...maybe a thousand, tops. Like people are saying, having fewer of them works better to prop up the idea of how powerful idea they are and why people in the OT act as if they're so removed from the rest of the galaxy and mysterious. There never should have been a Jedi council involved in the daily affairs of the government...they should have been in and out of society, wandering from planet to planet, like samurai.

[Helena]

I fully agree that the Republic should have had its own army and police force, but that's not the point. Unless they were at war with the Sith ALL the time - over a thousand generations - the Jedi must have had other duties to attend to when they weren't helping to defend the Republic. It makes perfect sense for them to act as general-purpose troubleshooters - diplomats, peacekeepers, etc - even if they're not part of the Republic's government. Having them as a tiny band of wandering samaurai is a nice idea, but practically it simply does not work; a group like that would have about as much effect on the Galaxy as a drop of red dye in an ocean.

And I'm sorry, but I think the idea of each Jedi being as powerful as Vader is incredibly lame. The whole point about Vader is that he was supposed to be one of the most powerful Force-users in the galaxy; making everyone as good as him would simply diminish his character. Not that it would make the slightest difference anyway, as even someone with Vader's power couldn't take on more than a small group of opponents at once. The Jedi are not the equivalent of the wizards in LotR, and trying to compare them simply leads to nonsensical conclusions.

[azerty]

I kind of like Casual Fan's idea, actually. It explains Solo's attitude to the force in the original movie, as well as Owen's attitude to Obi Wan. It's better than thousands of robe wearing jedi policemen interfering in people's affairs everywhere. "Jedi business, go back to your drinks" is one of the lamest lines in any of the films.

It also explains Luke's importance; he wasn't one of a possible million force sensitive beings that could be trained to become a Jedi, he was the single last hope, and worth Obi Wan spending 20 years living in a hut on a desert planet keeping an eye on him.

On the other subject, if the republic were going to have it's own police-force/Army, what's to stop it from being another U.N. type security force, unable to get out of it's own way? I thought that was the point of the whole Phantom Menace senate scene was. A bunch of Eurocrats trying to decide what to do in Rwanda / Naboo, and doing nothing because they couldn't decide on the definition of "genocide".

[georgelucas4greedo]

I agree with azerty and casual....The Jedi went from being a sacred group to to the alien equivalent of affirmative action:

green girly alien for the virgin nerds: check
female yoda: check
old wise looking alien with a football head: check
old wise looking et-like alien with long neck: check
rastafarian lizard type with big black eyes: check

[Helena]

Yes, it would explain the attitude towards the Jedi in the OT, but that can't get us away from the fact that it doesn't work. The idea that tens, or hundreds, or thousands, or even tens of thousands of Jedi would have any impact whatsoever on a galaxy-wide society is, quite frankly, insane. I could far more easily believe that the entire Empire was suffering from some kind of collective memory-loss than that a few dozen Jedi could ever have been considered a force to be reckoned with.

Most of the problems with the Jedi in the OT don't stem from the number of Jedi; they come from the way Lucas portrayed them. He didn't have to make the Jedi Order into an even less competent version of the UN (quite a feat, actually); he didn't have to make them part of the Republic's government or subject to political appointments by the Chancellor; he could have shown them doing things which actually made a difference, rather than sitting around moaning about the Dark Side clouding their vision. The attitude of Tatooine's citizens could be explained by its being an isolated backwater where the Jedi hardly ever went anyway; Han's attitude could be explained by his having been a young child when the Empire came to power. I can believe that the Jedi's power, numbers and authority had diminished somewhat since the golden years of the Republic; what I cannot begin to believe is that there were hardly any of them there to start with.

The 'affirmative action' problem is a completely separate issue. Again, this is entirely Lucas's fault; he could have made some of the alien Jedi into important characters with actual lines and personalities, rather than just Token Aliens. (And, I might add, the female Jedi.) It actually makes perfect sense to have lots of aliens in the Order, given how many different species there are in the Republic; the problems come from the way Lucas handles it.

If you want to see what I mean by all this, try playing Knights of the Old Republic and look at how the Jedi are portrayed there. There's nothing fundamentally different about the Order's structure; the difference comes from the fact that the Jedi DO things that really matter rather than lazing around in their fancy Temple all day. Even in the midst of a devastating war, they can still find time to help ordinary people with their problems (of course, it helps that the Republic has its own army, which should have been the case in the movies). That version of the Jedi is both believeable and attractive; the Order as portrayed in the movies is neither.

[Lord Aquaman]

Strength in numbers. That's the only answer I can offer.