Again, the fact that you think poor people aren't a prime market for drug sales is just mind boggling to me. We've had several hundred years of global history to show us that low-income earners are the main demographic of users.

Again, I posit they were either transporting from a Mos Eisley crew to a Mos Espa crew, or delivering to a secluded spice refinery. There are plenty of reasons why you would not want to be doing deals, or processing your product in a city center where your criminal rivals also operate. Again, I pose Baltimore as an example. Dumbfuck gangbangers frequently doing deals out of their beat up Chevys in broad daylight because the police just don't fucking care, but those same dumbfuck gangbangers also frequently get murdered and have their supply stolen by other gangbangers.

I think this can be easily handwaved in various ways.

A) The New Republic Rangers are clearly patrolling the transit lanes around the spaceports for hints of illegal activity, as we saw in Episode 5. Like, dudes were so vigilant they pulled Mando over for the space equivalent of doing wheelies on the highway. Air shipment is thus a risk.

B) They are trying to move product through Boba's territory without his knowledge so they don't have to pay protection fees.

 

What's mind-boggling to me is your assumption that all low-income people are the same. A poor person in Baltimore lives like a king and has absolutely enormous resources at his disposal compared to a poor person in Somalia. Tatooine is Somalia in this analogy, and what you absolutely do not see in Somalia is a bunch of crackheads, coke-fiends, and tweakers. They use a shitload of Khat and Hashish because it pretty much grows in their back yard anyway. Basically if they can't grow/make it themselves, they can't afford it.

The Star Wars equivalent of the poor people you are thinking of would be the urban poor of the Core Worlds, like the people living in Coruscant's mid or lower levels.

 

You're just making a bazillion assumptions about what Tatooine is and what the spice trade is with literally nothing to back it up though dude.

Maybe the Tatooine of 9/10 ABY has a population of a few million? There's certainly been a population boom of some sort.

Whoever said spice drugs are too expensive or too rare for the poor of Tatooine to afford?

Maybe the Spice drugs the Pikes are making are cheap as fuck to make and buy, and are still profitable due to quantity moved, much like crack.

I've spent this whole debate trying to provide possible scenarios for the events to go down as they did, and you've spent the whole debate nitpicking on details that are unverifiable.

So I'm done now. Think what you want to think.

 

Where has that ever been stated? The only number ever given for Tatooine's population in either timeline is 200,000.

We literally just saw a Pyke in the episode in question say to Cobb Vanth that the little box of loose spice they were transporting was "worth more than your town." This is clearly not the cheap stuff.

 

We don't know the dosage needed for spice. That could have been the equivalent of a pallet for all we know. Plus it's kind of a tiny, crappy town.

 

Nowhere. But 200k is a 0BBY figure. Current Mos Espa, the Capital of Tatooine, is about 20x the size and density as it was in the prequels. There's been some sort of pop increase in Mos Espa since prequel era, so who is to say 200k total is still accurate 10 years after OT era? You can't, because we don't know. We can only use context from the current show to make inferences, not absolute declarations of fact.

Exactly this. What if 50 grains of spice cut with a dozen different chemicals makes an incredibly addictive and cheap stim drug? Just like you do to make crack from cocaine?

I think it is fine to have a headcanon, but don't present headcanon as immutable fact.

Okay, now I'm really done.

 

Was the term spice in Star Wars prior to this? Cause it just makes me think of Dune.

 

Yep. it goes all the way back to A New Hope, where C-3PO references the possibility of being put to work in the Spice Mines of Kessel.

 

Also, the Pykes and their spice trade have been a recurring (though not necessarily major)...character?...in the Clone Wars cartoon. Particularly the last season, where they took up about half the episodes.

 

Alright, I'm fucking angry.

You're telling me that Ahsoka Tano, who watched the Jedi's "no attachments" rule literally - not figuratively, fucking LITERALLY - destroy the Jedi order is just going to go along with the same philosophy? No pushback to the child of Darth Vader, who only existed because of said philosophy, to implore him not to fall into the same trap?

I know we have to have it this way, because once again, they're just not going to drop the sequels no matter how many nerds insist they could just retcon it, but at least have Ahsoka try to warn him off of it for fuck's sake. GOD DAMMIT.

And another thing - Fuck Cad Bane. Filoni should have pulled the switcheroo and let Cobb Vanth waste him.

 

Ehhhh. Perhaps she's not there yet? It's not unreasonable. Ahsoka left the Order because she was unhappy with Jedi peacekeeping hypocrisy, not their teachings on attachment. Her final Clone Wars and first Mando appearance shows us that, at this point, she is still an adherent to the idea that it was Anakin's extreme attachment to Padme that led him to be manipulated to the dark side, and not so much that it was Jedi's extreme detachment that led to Sidious being able to cloud the minds of the Jedi.

I would really like her own show to explore her becoming the first light side aligned force user to find true balance between attachment and detachment.

How dare you. Best bounty hunter hands down. Fight me bro. *-takes off gold chains and removes shirt-* Let's go bro. Bro.

 

Yeah... I'm not sure at what point she would have gotten "attachments are good" from:

"Attachments are bad and lead you down a dark path."
"Fuck you, I'm attached and now I'm gonna murder you all because of it!"

 

Yeah, the shitty fanon/EU take of "The Jedi should abandon the code and learn the power of heart!" needs to die.

The problem with Anakin wasn't that the doctrine of no attachments is bad and following it leads to poor outcomes. For all the other Jedi it was working just fine. The problem with Anakin was that he refused to accept and exercise that doctrine, which was borne out of his unsuitability to become a Jedi in the first place.

The Jedi's mistake was not having a poor doctrine. It was breaking their own rules and training Anakin when he was both too old and temperamentally unsuited to become a Jedi.

TL;DR it's all Qui-Gon's fault.

 

I don't think it CAN die when we have seemingly serene and peaceful middle-ground force entities like The Bendu and The Father who exist in total balance.

It is basically an affirmation that while the intentions of the Jedi Code were good (meant to allow Jedi to conquer the emotional impulses within them that lead to the dark side), it's not without flaws and perhaps not the best path to force enlightenment.

The Jedi's personal detachment from the suffering of the people in the Clone War directly created an opening for Palpatine to exploit and turn the people against the Jedi, so the code is definitely flawed in that sense. This is significant Clone Wars plot point.

 

Pretty much. The Jedi approach generally works well enough, but it's got some glaring flaws and weaknesses that make it obviously less than perfect.

That said, the problems seem more to be a matter of an overly-rigid and literal interpretation of the philosophy/code, a flaw of the calcification and traditions of the Jedi Order as an organization in other words, rather than a problem with the philosophy itself. The Jedi who actually grok the deeper meanings of the philosophy and embrace it (see: Obi-Wan, Yoda, Qui-Gonn, etc) are all exemplars of what it means to be a person, on top of being great Jedi.

 

FTFY

 

The biggest problem the Jedi had vis-a-vis attachment was failing to explain to their people (and Anakin in particular) the nuance that selfish attachment was the problem, not attachment in general.

After all, it is psychologically impossible (in humans anyway) for a non-sociopath to avoid forming emotional attachments to others, especially in an institution that pairs parentless children one-on-one with benevolent mentor-figures for years on end. Hell, holding a strong conviction in the Jedi Code is itself a form of attachment, in that case to an ideal. The problem only arises when the attachment becomes stronger than your sense of duty, or your belief in being morally upright (however you define that term). Marriage in particular is a problem because almost every culture's marriage customs involve swearing an oath to put their partner's well-being above just about everything else. It inherently creates divided loyalties by its very nature, which is a very bad thing when you're already sworn to a life of service for the greater good of the galaxy.

In the episode itself, Ahsoka literally stood two feet away from Din Djarin as he put this principle into practice, proving that his respect and care for Grogu's mental and spiritual well-being trumped Din's own attachment-driven desire to be reunited with his adopted son. Somehow Ahsoka seems to have simply missed that this grizzled Mandalorian mercenary was, in his own way, actually living up to the true Jedi ideal of attachment right in front of her face. Meanwhile she continues to alternate between being oblivious to her own obvious attachment to Anakin's memory (and now his son), and living in fear of it (which is itself a glaring problem, as we all know what fear leads to).

There's also the issue that Luke reinstituting the Rule of Attachment in the way he and Ahsoka have interpreted it is bizarre and hypocritical. He never gave up his own attachments, and he maintains contact with his family. Not to mention, Vader's attachment literally saved his life and freed the galaxy from Palpatine.

Plus, in-universe Yoda and Obi-wan clearly made a very deliberate decision to abandon many of the rules of the Old Order. It would have been easy for them to simply take Luke and Leia, and disappear to some out-of-the-way backwater to train the twins up from birth to be the perfect Pre-Clone Wars Jedi. Instead, they chose to place them with families that they knew would raise them with love, teaching them to love in turn. They willingly sacrificed 20-odd years in solitary exile waiting for the Force to decide that the time was right and the twins were ready to be trained. And in teaching Luke, neither one ever mentioned the rules against attachment, or those against taking students who were older than about 3.

Luke was handed a tremendous gift - and a huge investment of trust - by the last survivors of the final Jedi High Council, in the form of a blank slate to build the New Jedi Order on, free to adapt and grow and change. And what does Luke do? He immediately squanders it by trying to make his New Jedi Order a philosophical carbon copy of the old. I mean, I guess it fits with the overall Canon theme of the heroes wasting their efforts and victories by failing to learn from the past, but that doesn't make it any less annoying to see.

EDIT:

Spoiler: Qui-gon Tangent/Rant

I wouldn't quite include Qui-gon on that list. Fans on the internet seem to really idolize the guy for no good reason. When you actually analyze his actions in TPM (and especially in the pre-TPM Legends books, though they're no longer Canon), he was actually a deeply irresponsible, inconsiderate dick.

The dude literally wagered a ship that didn't belong to him, without the owner's permission, on a race where wagers were enforced by the Hutts, who absolutely had the power to force them to fork over the ship if Anakin lost. Who knows what consequences that might have had for the rest of the film's events?

All of this when the racer they were betting on (who was a child that Qui-gon was encouraging to participate in an often fatally dangerous race), had minimal experience, zero Force Training, and was using an untested vehicle built by a nine-year-old out of scrap parts. The chances that something would go horribly wrong with this "plan" were staggeringly high.

But people say "it's okay, he trusted in the Force like a Jedi is supposed to!" Except most Jedi view the "Will of the Force" with a healthy degree of skepticism, both because it's basically impossible to know if you're interpreting that Will correctly (and the act of assuming that you are interpreting it correctly is so deeply arrogant as to be a non-starter for the more thoughtful Jedi), and because they are aware that the Dark Side also has a Will, and manipulates people and events just as often as the Light does. Blind obedience to what he perceives as the Will of the Force is a horrendous abdication of responsibility, and indicates an absolutely astonishing degree of arrogance on Qui-gon's part.

 

I feel like this is missing the point of releasing your emotions into the force. The Jedi literally have a magical ability which makes following the code feasible regardless of human psychology. All it takes is being willing to use that power. Anakin, however, refuses to do so. He is too attached to his attachments to use magic to let them go.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves regarding the depiction of Jedi in general - the failure to take seriously the way their powers impact their mentality and psychology. Far too often Jedi are depicted as normal people with normal feelings and motivations who just so happen to have physical capabilities above other humans. But the whole point of the Jedi order is that it's a spiritual way of life which alters the perception of self and the world. The physical powers are far less important to being a Jedi than the spiritual.

 

Okay, I can agree with the idea that the fandom needs to recognize that their different circumstances would affect their mentality. But do we actually know how "releasing your emotions into the Force" works?

Because from everything I've seen/read, it's not actually a magic power that lets you do this when you otherwise couldn't. It generally seems like the individual Jedi has to come to a headspace where, much like irl Buddhist monks, they teach themselves to let go, to find contentment even in the absence of strong emotions and things/people you like. It looks like a purely psychological self-help trick, where the Force just cleans up the remnants of those emotions that you've let go yourself, of your own volition and by your own will. Then it appears to help your resulting state of serenity stick. I've never gotten the impression that this ability was some sort of self-imposed brainwashing, which is what you seem to be describing.

 

Emotion, yet peace.
Ignorance, yet knowledge.
Passion, yet serenity.
Chaos, yet harmony.
Death, yet the Force.


So that's almost it but not quite. Part of the code encourages compassion and love (it doesn't exclude familial love or romance either), but the attachment is forbidden thing is pretty clear. Attachments are basically defined as any sort of bond that would prevent your ability to accept change, or create in you a fear of losing the thing you are bonded to.

They are certainly allowed to have emotions, but they are encouraged not to emotionally bond to things, because when the things they are bonded to are lost, the Jedi need to let it go, and too tight of a bond makes this very difficult. This is why they are not allowed to marry or take more than one Padawan at a time, and why Padawans are frequently swapped between Masters if it is sensed a deep bond is forming.

So Ahsoka and Luke are not anti-familial love. Thry are against the the strong bond of attachment they sense between Mando and Grogu, a bond that would potentially prevent them from letting go of each other.

One of the best Legends examples of love without attachment was Ki-Adi-Mundi, who was allowed to take wives due to tradition and low birth rate on his planet. He loves his wives, and he constantly struggles with not forming emotional attachments to them. Unlike Anakin however, he is well-trained and stable enough to know that forming emotional attachments to them will lead to a fear of losing them, and thus potentially lead him to the Dark Side. So he refrains.

When it comes time to "let it go", they mentally release their negative emotions into the force so they can remain serene and at peace and focus on the big picture. So it is kinda a brainwashing technique, but a better description would honestly be force-assisted cognitive behavioral therapy. The exact process was animated in one of the comics and I wish could find it.