AND NOW, MURDERS

I've been working my way through the Wheel of Time, and I can't help but notice some....overlap. This has prompted the creation of my Greater Unified Wheel of Stars Theory, wherein the world of Wheel of Time is in fact Tython and the White Tower is the precursor to the Temple.

Evidence is as follows:

• Aes Sedai are the precursors of the Jedi.
  
  • In legends, the very oldest version of the Jedi are called Je'daii. Aes Sedai -> Sedai -> Je'daii -> Jedi.
• The Je'daii originated on the planet Tython. Thus, if Je'daii were previously Sedai, then it follows that the world they were from is the same world that the events of the books took place on, separated by many thousands of years.
• The structure and functions of the White Tower and the Coruscant Temple are startlingly similar.
  
  • Both take in applicants when young, and there is a cut-off date for being considered "too old."
    
    • Note: in Legends, this cut-off for the Temple is at 13; as of the Clone Wars and other new material, it is unclear if that is still canon. Within the confines of this particular theory, I am operating under the assumption that there is a cut-off point, but it is much later that 13, and that with the advent of the Clone Wars specifically, the cut-off was pushed back even further.
  • Both focus on emotional control-- Sedai are expected to maintain a blank expression at all times, no matter what is going on; by the time of the Temple, this has evolved into maintaining internal equilibrium at all times as well.
    • The flame and the void is the precursor mantra to releasing one's emotions into the Force.
  • It is generally accepted that the loyalty of members of both groups is to be solely to the Tower or the Temple, respectively, regardless of where or to whom they were born. You are a Sedai or Jedi first and a member of your birth government a distant second, if you maintain that tie at all.
  • Both orders create and maintain mental bonds with people-- Sedai with their Warders, and Jedi with their Padawans, for many of the same reasons. The former evolving into the latter is not an unreasonable stretch.
  • Sedai and Jedi serve similar functions within their respective societies. Both orders are heavily trained as diplomats and political advisors, and the primary purpose of many of their members is to act as peace keepers and councilors. However, this is not the sole focus of either order, and both orders are equally notable for their historians and wandering do-gooders.
    
    • Both orders are also viewed with similar levels of suspicion by wider society, much of that stemming from their general inscrutability and from the fact that the most visible of them participate in politics.
• The One Power=The Force
  
  • Both are universal magic that exists in all things and causes things to happen. "It is as the Force wills it" and "The wheel winds as the wheel wills" are both commonly used phrases in their respective times.
    
    • Functionally, there is little difference between being ta'veren and being strong with or beloved of the Force.
      • Both of these are in-universe acknowledgements of Main Character Syndrome.
  • The Force is split into the Dark Side and the Light Side. Use of the Dark Side drives the user mad and turns them into power-hungry, destructive forces of evil. However, in the distant past, in Legends, there are Force users who use the Dark Side without loosing their shit, as evidenced by the Je'daii Order, who valued balance, before there was a civil war and it all went to hell. The One Power is split into Saidar and Saidin. Use of Saidin drives the user mad and turns them into power-hungry, destructive forces of evil. However, in the distant past, there were Saidin users who didn't go nuts, before the Dark One cursed Saidin with the taint and it all went to hell.
    
    • Basically every single male Jedi has made terrible, terrible life choices, a fair number of which could be explained by being driven mad by the Force. Obi-wan's and Luke's respective mental shutdowns and time as depressed hermits? A manifestation of the taint. Mace deciding to attack the Chancellor in the Senate, before figuring out how to deal with the inevitable political fallout of killing the head of the government? Taint clouding his mind. Anakin's...everything? Taint.
    • Since the Force is tainted, using it is corrosive-- the more you use it, the more fucked up you get, and faster. That's why the Jedi have that rule about no excessive use of the Force. It's not because they're boring monks with weird ideas about laziness, it's because if you use the power to float pears across the room it eats away at your mind and it's just not worth it.
  • At least one Sedai uses a mind trick on screen, to make a woman more susceptible to obeying her wishes.
• Sedai have been shown to have "swords of light", including Moiraine Sedai manifesting two blades from her staff. These swords are like fire, but not affected by wind or movement, instead remaining perfectly straight, and are created through the use of the One Power.
  
  • This dovetails neatly into the idea that only a Jedi can wield a lightsaber; it's not that only Force users have the requisite reflexes, it's that there's no power source in lightsabers-- the beam is pure Force, and if you don't have the Force, you can't turn it on.
    
    • Kyber focuses and amplifies 'saber beams, but does not create them, much like a sangreal focuses and amplifies channeling, but does not produce power on its own.
• The Wheel of Time is literally about history rhyming with itself, endlessly, particularly with regards to great big showdowns of good vs. evil with deeply powerful chosen ones in the center of it all.
  
  • Anakin is the Dragon (very powerful magic user, hero of a great war at the end of an age, driven mad by the exact same power, deeply involved in facilitating the fall of said age, strongly affected by Main Character Syndrome).
  • Luke is the Dragon Reborn (very powerful magic user, deeply affected by the shadow of the last guy, much of his story is fixing the things the last guy broke, just as much if not more of a Main Character, farm boy origins.)

Recently, I was part of an argument discussion regarding Obi-wan’s role in Padme’s death by childbirth in ROTS. In it, the question was raised of, “Why didn’t Obi-wan heal Padme? Surely he could have had enough Force healing to do the equivalence of chest compressions until a real doctor could get there.”

Short answer: no, he couldn’t have.

Long answer, Watsonian:

-        Obi-wan doesn’t have Force healing. It’s just not a talent he possesses, just like psychometry is also not a talent he possesses but other Jedi do.

o      There was an argument made that he should have been able to “brute force it”. I think this is horseshit, for the reasons outlined below.

-        While there are many uses of the Force that are unconscious—increased reflexes, mild precognition, “I have a bad feeling about this”—using the Force on things outside of oneself has been shown to require a certain amount of training and mental discipline. It takes sustained mental effort to affect minds, lift objects, and, indeed, heal.

o      This is right after Order 66 and the fight on Mustafar. That’s a lot of trauma for a regular, non-psychic person. The thing about trauma is that it makes it hard to think. Everything’s a panic response. Think about the last time you were stressed, and how hard it was to remember to do things, let alone get up the wherewithal to do them. Now add the death of everything you know and everyone you love, which you got to feel on the inside of your head. Obi-wan was mentally bleeding out; even if healing occurred to him, it’s unlikely he could have been able to affect any real change.

-        Obi-wan is a diplomat-soldier, not a doctor.

o      Bodies are intensely complicated things, and learning how to properly treat them takes years. Years Obi-wan spent learning galactic law and politics, because that was more directly relevant to his job.

§       While taking care of Anakin Skywalker, known trouble magnet.

o      Even if Obi-wan did learn some medicine, it would have likely been battlefield medicine, not obstetrics. Learning how to avoid bleeding out while things are exploding is a set of skills different from learning how to give birth.

-        Draining life from one person and giving it to another is an established Sith skill; it is not unreasonable to assume that Palpatine drained Padme to stabilize Anakin. Whatever Force powers Obi-wan had left at that point would have been insufficient to overcome that, assuming Obi-wan even realized what exactly was going on.

Long answer, Doylist:

-        While Force healing is a thing that exists in later installments of Star Wars, it is unknown if it existed during ROTS.

o      Lucas has gone on record as conceiving of the Star Wars that he puts on screen and the Star Wars that fans put in books to be two different universes, and Force healing did not appear on screen until the sequel trilogy.

o      Lucas made shit up as he was going along. There’s a reason plot threads in ANH don’t link up quite right to the rest of the series. So if Lucas didn’t think of Force healing when ROTS was being written, it functionally didn’t exist.

-        George Lucas was more interested in the fairy-tale element of the hero’s mother dying in childbirth more than he was interested in that scene actually making sense. Relatedly, he is welcome to Catch These Hands.

Long answer, miscellaneous:

-        Can’t say I’m thrilled with an argument that boils down to “Obi-wan Kenobi could have fixed everything had he just tried harder and been better”

o      It relates to a train of thought I see cropping up in fandom sometimes, and that other people have also pointed out and discussed, where the way people talk about Order 66 drifts awfully close to “the Jedi were out of touch and unpopular, so they had their genocide coming.”

o      As a bit of in-universe propaganda, I live for this thought process, I really do. The idea of people in the gffa thinking “well the Jedi were corrupt and fell due to their own hubris” and then never examining what they’re actually justifying? Sublime. Phenomenal. Love it. Real life people buying into this thought process? Not thrilled. A group of people bringing about the violent, bloody end of their culture and people—including children and elderly—because they weren’t nice enough or didn’t solve other people’s problems enough….isn’t a take I’m thrilled about.

o      Also, Obi-wan is one dude. One very competent dude, but one dude. One human, mortal dude. He can’t do everything, fix everyone, always be on top of everything, always have the exact right answer. He’s going to fumble, and fall, and make mistakes, and say exactly the wrong thing, and miss obvious solutions to problems because he just didn’t see them. He already hates himself enough; we don’t need to go finding more blame to pile on.

-        During the argument, and in thinking about it afterward, I think the main point of contention was around perceptions of the Force and a Jedi’s relationship with it.

o      To put it in D&D terms, I see all Jedi as magic users, but not all as the same class.

§       Wizards, clerics, druids, etc., might all be magic users, but they are all fundamentally different. There is a certain degree of overlap, but they also just flat-out have different spell lists. At the end of the day, a wizard will not be able to fill a paladin-shaped hole.

·       In this conception, the question that was asked is, “Why didn’t the wizard cast healing word?”

o      Wizards don’t get healing spells. At no point would the wizard have had access to healing word. He can’t cast healing word, because that’s not something the class can do.

o      Wizards can only cast spells they have spent the time, in-game, to copy down into their spell book. He never copied down healing word, or any other healing spell.

o      Healing word is a 1^st-level spell, and all this wizard had left was cantrips. Even if he did have healing word because of in-game justification and a permissive DM, he couldn’t have cast it.

·       Related question: “Why didn’t the wizard ever take a level in paladin? Even one level of a multiclass would give him lay on hands, you’d think he’d want that.”

o      Because when you can spend your action with lay on hands and save one person, or you can spend it on meteor swarm and save a bunch of people, meteor swarm wins every time.

o      However, others see all Jedi as all the same class, but of differing domains.

§       In this conception, all Jedi are working from the same base spell list, but differ in what spells they have to prepare vs which ones they get automatically. The question then is not, “Why didn’t the wizard cast healing word?” but rather, “Why didn’t the knowledge domain cleric prepare healing word?”

·       The point of being out of spell slots still stands, but this is a much more reasonable question to be asking.
 

In summation: let the tired man rest and stop trying to blame him for everything that goes wrong in Star Wars.