

Psychopathy in the Star Wars Universe - enmaku
http://enmaku.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/psychopathy-in-the-star-wars-universe/

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raganwald
Either you accept all this complicated subtlety or you go meta and simply ask
whether George Lucas is incapable of expressing empathy through his
characters, which leads to them all acting like psychopaths regardless of
other considerations.

"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."

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mechanical_fish
Yeah, the touchstone of a Star Wars essay is: "Is this essay diverting enough
to make me forget all about George Lucas?"

This one doesn't quite get there. Indeed, so far I've only seen one essay
incorporating the dreaded prequels that did:

<http://km-515.livejournal.com/746.html>

... though it's not as if I read widely in the genre. I generally prefer to
pretend that all Star Wars footage filmed after 1984 was part of a bad dream I
had in the mid-1980s. [1]

\---

[1] I really did have a dream, sometime in the Eighties, where I was watching
some sort of Star Wars movie on TV, but couldn't figure out which it was, and
in the dream I eventually figured out it was some kind of made-for-TV Movie
#4, and then I figured out that I probably hadn't heard of it because it was
awful. And I was sad.

I assume this was actually a memory echo of the infamous Star Wars Holiday
Special, which I saw at a young age and have since managed to completely
suppress except in nightmares.

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scottshea
This helps explain why I started looking forward to Anakin killing off the
Jedi. Well that or the atrocious acting and characterizations. "I sense much
fear in him." Really? A 9 year old boy taken from his home to a strange place
to meet a bunch of old losers to have judgement passed on him and he is
scared. What an insight there Yoda. Ass.

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thwarted
This isn't directly related to the OP, but there's a bit in E3, near the end,
where Obiwan says to Anakin "Only the Sith deal in absolutes". Then later on,
he says the absolute statement "The Sith are evil", to which Anakin responds
"From my perspective, the Jedi are evil." Not only is this terrible writing,
it shows the Jedi philosophy as inconsistent.

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jkincaid
This line has made me laugh/driven me nuts since the first time I saw the
movie — "Only the Sith deal in absolutes" is itself an absolute.

~~~
trevelyan
This isn't inconsistent with the purpose of the films. Like the other Jedi,
Obi-Wan is a flawed character through the first three films. He doesn't live
up to the pacifist and altruistic ideals of the Jedi in many, many ways. Lucas
stresses this with a number of cinematic parallels to Luke in Empire.

This is why the ending of III is in sharp contrast to the ending of VI: Obi-
Wan goes to kill rather than confront and forgive Anakin as a true Jedi
presumably would. Even Yoda makes this mistaken in attacking Palpatine --
although he seems the only character aware of why he failed after the fact.

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DiabloD3
This article is pretty much right.

Want proof? Go play games like SW:KOTOR and play the light side only... you
lay waste to everything you see EXCEPT for decisions that cause dark side
points.

Sith troopers for the most part do this as a job. They don't subscribe to
either side, they just wish to collect a pay check. And you kill them all, you
don't even try to negotiate or Jedi handwave them into backing down.

~~~
pflats
If I remember correctly, though, the sequel to Knights of the Old Republic had
a character who went out of her way to point out that both the light and dark
sides of the force are self-serving, and that the Jedi and the Sith each
honored their codes over people.

It was one of the more interesting takes on the series, I thought.

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enmaku
Jolee Bindo if memory serves.

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DiabloD3
Jolee Bindo was the black Jedi from the first KOTOR, and his sub plot makes
pretty much no sense.

He rejected the religious ways of the Jedi as a Padawan, he became a smuggler,
he got married even though he was a Jedi, he trained her in the force, and
then Exar Kun converted her to the dark side, Jolee fought her, won, but
couldn't kill her, and then she ran off to kill a bunch of Jedi before she was
stopped.

And Jolee's punishment for all of this? They wanted to promote him to being a
Jedi Knight. Seriously?

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enmaku
Ah, I stand corrected. I remembered the storyline but not which KotOR it was
from. This is why I research my articles instead of writing from fuzzy half-
memories ;)

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tsunamifury
Lucas may have been a terrible director, but he understood the basic mythic
themes enough to execute them properly in his films. Anakin brings balance by
tearing down a classical system (read the Jedi order) and making way for a
romantic system (read Luke, rebels freedom from the empire and the order).
Luke and Anakin are both just Odesseus.

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mquander
What is the deal with people's obsession over the word "psychopath?" I don't
understand the point of taking characters whose personality and motivations
are very clear to us and trying to apply or not apply this somewhat vague
label. What do we learn from the label that we didn't already know?

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bane
Put in this perspective, it makes one wonder if a program to actively recruit
and train psychopaths to act as impartial policemen with licenses to kill (re:
Jedi) would or wouldn't work.

