By Trevor Law
The Force Awakens is coming out this week and I just can’t get Star Wars out of my head. That’s not even talking about Star Wars week here at Nerd Union. All of us really can’t stop thinking about it and for me I keep coming back to one question that bugs me. Why do the Sith and the Jedi hate each other so much? In the original trilogy the Sith aren’t even mentioned. Its just evil force users battling the do gooder Jedi. It doesn’t raise this the question at all, but boy do the prequels. Nowhere is it explained what a Sith is, why they hate the Jedi, and why there are always only two (this is, of course, excluding anything outside what has been dedicated to film).
Now outside of the movies this has been talked about. Wookipeida has an excellent list every with every Sith related appearance here, but they don’t go into great detail. We only know the Sith and the Jedi fought several wars that laid waste to whole planets and enslaved billions, but we haven’t gotten to see this acted out on screen. While there is plenty of stuff that talks about this, right now nothing in canon does, and the movies almost ignore it. However, the easiest way to answer all of this, is very simply, with an origin story of one character, Yoda.
Yoda is around 900 years old, (the exact number seems to be 874 when he died) so a movie dealing with his origin would be the perfect time go into detail about the origin of the Jedi. Obi-Wan says the Jedi were the guardians of the Republic for 1000 years. We could see Yoda and the Jedi order adopting its role as guardian of the Republic. Its perfect! While the timelines don’t match up exactly, but it is close enough to say Obi-Wan was rounding up. We also get to see the justification for the worst thing the Jedi do, the kidnapping and indoctrination of children. I mean … this is pretty evil, but if the risk is too great, its totally possible they could’ve had a valid reason for doing this.
That valid reason is the Sith. The movie would begin with the ending of a great war, the Sith finally beaten after a long bloody conflict (honestly there is enough here for a full trilogy, but lets stick with one movie for now). The movie’s villain would be Darth Bane. Now in Legends (the now defunct Expanded Universe Canon) he is the creator of the Sith’s rule of two and is the reason they survived the Jedi wiping them out. In Legends, the Sith are powered by emotions, like anger and rage. Their passions are allowed to consume them. They are able to use the force to strive for any goal they want and it is almost always power. Before Darth Bane the Sith killed each other as much as they killed the Jedi. It was a constant problem. Imagine a government made up of nothing but Palpatines and see how long that would last.
Bane would be one of the last surviving Sith of this great war. He will see the error of the Sith and create the rule of two and will begin to plot from the shadows. This is how we will explain how the Jedi know know about the rule of two. You see, Yoda will be a young Jedi who ends up getting locked into a battle with this new Sith order run by Bane. We will see his effects and we will see why the Jedi are so afraid of these people. The movie would end with the Jedi thinking the Sith have finally been wiped out; the details don’t matter too much. This would allow the Jedi to know about the Sith rule of two, while at the same time thinking the Sith have been destroyed. It wraps all of it up in a neat little bow.
Now I know what some of you are saying “don’t just get rid of all the great lore Knight’s of the Old Republic made!” The beauty of this is that if it was done right it wouldn’t. The Jedi could still be much older but only in the last thousand years did they become Guardians of the Republic. There could still have been countless wars between the Jedi and the Sith before all of this, but this would simply explain the modern day versions of these two groups. I personally thing it would be an amazing movie and it would have the potential to also correct some plot points in the prequels, while adding a new layer of depth to Yoda and the Sith.
The movie would also have the potential to be both very dark and kid friendly. It would be dark for the simple reason of having someone like Darth Bane in it, but having a character like Yoda be the focus would be a great way to lesson the tension and make it more kid friendly. Plus we could see a young and reckless Yoda, not listening to his Master. We could see a young, hot headed Yoda, not the seasoned mentor we find in the movies. If Disney decides to make a Yoda movie I hope this is what its about. If not, then I hope they make a Sith origin movie some other way because it will keep bugging the heck out of me they haven’t answered what a freaking Sith is, even though a movie is called Revenge of the Sith! Come on guys!
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