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ospreyeamon · 7 months

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the falls of the revanchist jedi

The narrative doesn’t directly examine why the Jedi who followed Revan and Malak fell. It is spoken of as a given – they followed Revan into war, so they followed Revan into darkness. That’s not how people work though. That’s not even how people under the influence of the Dark Side of the Force work. Spending twenty years as Palpatine’s thrall didn’t prevent Vader from throwing his Master into the reactor shaft to save his son. Revan can murder every NPC available to be murdered until reaching Rakata Prime only to pull a 180, redeem Bastila, and be feted as a hero of the Republic, Sith-eyes and all.

All but one of the surviving Revanchist Jedi who followed Revan and Malak into the Mandalorian Wars followed them again into the Jedi Civil War. Even the Exile, that lone dissenting actor, can say that they would have fought with their fellows against the Republic had their connection to the Force not been severed; that they were unable, not unwilling. Yet, the Exile can also say that they would not have followed Revan and Malak in attacking the Republic, that they went to war to defend the innocent. Many of the other Jedi who joined the war effort alongside them must have felt the same way, in the beginning.

Many of the soldiers of the Republic like Carth Onasi returned home after the Mandalorian Wars were over, even those like Saul Karath who would bow to Revan again. What then are the factors that led every surviving Revanchist Jedi, save the Exile, to follow Revan from the Mandalorian Wars into the Jedi Civil War?

1) The Mandalorian Wars changed the Jedi who fought in them. The Exile’s dialogue provides the different reasons why they might have left to fight in the war – to protect the innocent, to test their power, to defend the Republic, to win glory – reflecting varying motivations of Knights and Padawans recruited by Revan and Malak. However, despite the differences in the initial reasons for defying the Jedi Council to answer the Republic’s call, they all would have gone through similar uniting experiences during the war. Terrible experiences. Shared hardship often serves to reinforce group identity.

Older Jedi like Kavar and Arren Kae had fought wars before, but the initial expedition led by Revan and Malak was almost entirely composed of young Knights and older Padawans. Military morality, ethics in warfare, tends to be rather twisted from the perspective of modern western civilian morality. Your ability to prosecute the war and the safety of your soldiers takes priority over the lives of enemy, and sometimes even allied, civilians. Ruthless is more than a virtue, it’s a necessity. Collateral damage is an inevitability. For young relatively inexperienced Jedi, raised on ideals of valuing all life and always seeking non-violent resolutions, the transition to military command positions where they were not only required to kill, not only required to led troops to their death, but required to give orders which they knew would directly result in the deaths of civilians would have been distressing.

We know that the Exile once led troops directly into a minefield during the Battle of Dxun, but I think that barely scratched the surface. We aren’t given the full laundry list of the Mandalorians’ war crimes, but at the very least it includes the crime of aggression, murder of civilians, use of child soldiers, and conscription of captured civilians into the Neo-Crusaders and for forced labour. Given this disregard for the lives of civilians, I consider it likely that the Mandalorians also used hostages and headquartered themselves inside buildings like schools and hospitals. I suspect both sides used poison weapons, nuclear weapons, torture, and executed prisoners of war.

2) The Battle of Malachor V was a purge and a crucible of conversion. Kreia, HK-47, and the recording of Bastila Shan all say it; “a series of massacres that masked another war, a war of conversion”, “the intention was to destroy the Jedi, break their will, and make them loyal to Revan … Revan was "cleaning house" at Malachor V”, “to convert the last of the Jedi who fought beside [Revan] – and murder those who would not”. The Jedi in the radius of the Mass Shadow Generator would have included the Jedi Revan did not believe would agree with the plan to invade the Republic.

I think many of the Revanchist Jedi had already been falling by inches before Malachor. The Mandalorian Wars were brutal and one of the major symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is emotional dysregulation. Irritability, anxiety, depression, guilt, anger – the ongoing effects of trauma make a person more susceptible to inadvertently drawing on the Dark-Side of the Force. Using the Dark-Side of the Force was forbidden by the Code enforced by the Jedi Council, but the Revanchists had been pressured to compromise their ethics in other ways to effectively prosecute the war.

For any Jedi who had not already fallen, the detonation of the Mass Shadow Generator was a final blow they could not withstand. They all fell – into the Dark-Side, into death, away from the Force.

This was the conversion that Revan desired. The moral conversation – the acceptance of actions that violated their previous moral code, the previous moral code that would not have permitted making war on the Republic. The conversion in the Force – pushing Jedi to the Dark-Side ensured that they would not be accepted back into the Order by the Jedi Council even if they desired to return.

3) The Jedi Council’s decision to exile the Jedi who returned to face them was a gift to Revan and Malak. The Council’s judgement might have been rooted in their discomfort with what the Exile had become but the reason they publicly gave is that the Exile disobeyed the Council to follow Revan to war. That reason applied equally to every single other Revanchist. By exiling the one Revanchist to return the Jedi Council exiled them all, whether or not they intended to. They may not have, but by deciding to keep secret the true reasons behind their sentence of exile they ensured the other Revanchists could interpret their judgement no other way.

Telling the Revanchist Jedi they would never be welcome to return to the Jedi Order ensured that they would never go back. Onwards was the only path left to them.

4) Revan was extremely charismatic and competent. The Revanchist Jedi had already decided that Revan and Malak judgement was better than the Jedi Council’s when they chose to defy the Council’s orders to follow them to war. Revan, Malak and the Revanchists then won the war for the Republic. In fact, Revan even discovered the shadowy threat the which had been the Council’s justification for sitting out the war through engaging in it, while the Jedi Council remained ignorant.

The Republic government probably bungled the early stages of the Mandalorian Wars by not intervening sooner. The Mandalorians were committing more than enough war crimes for them to justify it, but they allowed Mandalorians to expand their territory, build their forces and industry, and entrench their advantage. When the Republic did enter the war, it wasn’t because the Republic leadership had made a strategic decision, or even a moral one; it was because some corrupt politicians organised bribes to fast-track Taris into the Republic because it was under threat and they wanted to protect their business holdings there. The Jedi Council was also tangled up in the culture of corruption; Lucien Draay was given a seat on the Council even though he’d been accused of planning and assisting the murder of four Padawans because of his powerful family connections.

The Old Republic was more an aristocratic republic than a democratic one. Alderaan, Onderon, the Empress Teta system – they were all monarchies during this period, not democracies. If aristocrats could hold power through right of blood and plutocrats through wealth, then why shouldn’t Revan lead the Galactic Republic by right of merit and conquest?

Revan was secretive, but at least some of the other Revanchist Sith knew about the shadowy threat – the True Sith Empire. If the Republic was going to need to fight another war against an even greater enemy, surely it would need better leadership. Leadership like Revan.

#Meanwhile in a Galaxy Far Far Away #kotor meta #Revanchist Jedi #Revanchist Sith #Revan #the Jedi Civil War #the Mandalorian Wars #the Battle of Malachor V #Darth Malak #The Jedi Exile #knights of the old republic #war crimes cw

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padmestrilogy · 4 months

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has it ever been more over

#just collecting my fave hate tweets. yes i hate u and ur ahsoka pfp specifically and i can never have fun #mandalorian critical #ahsoka critical #<i think both of those tags are dead but o well #star wars

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mearchy · 2 months

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eggdrawsthings · 1 year

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a duet in a galaxy far, far away

#the quote belongs to @/spoiler4you on twitter #sr if it looks a bit shitty #i don't normally paint a scene like this YvY #my art #din djarin #grogu djarin #grogu #i refuse to use the din grogu tag until further notice skjdfs #pedro pascal #clan mudhorn #a clan of two #the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #star wars

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fonmythenmetz · 1 month

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#jedi wear chanel boots #its common knowledge #luke skywalker #din djarin #bo katan kryze #based on that picture of ‘chanel’ boot prints in the sand #the mandalorian #star wars #dinluke #my art

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wwapich · 1 year

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a little guy as a little knight

#grogu #the mandalorian spoilers #kind of?#the mandalorian #grogu djarin #the mandalorian s3 #got some time to doodle the baby <3 #star wars fanart #star wars

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pedro-pascal · 1 year

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THE MANDALORIAN Chapter 22: Guns for Hire

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snawleyy · 1 month

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late night study

#rough sketch bc i dont want to fully render it #aurebesh: something about mandalorian culture #getting that education between battles as a child soldier #star wars #ahsoka tano #star wars art #star wars fanart #ahsoka #my art #snawleyys art #sw tcw #clone wars ahsoka #clone wars fanart #clone wars #star wars tcw #togruta #digital art #krita

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lupinsuniverse · 11 months

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older น้องGrogu

(what if au)

#the mandalorian #grogu #din djarin #star wars #older grogu au

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star-wars-shitposts · 4 months

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someone had to teach the clones sex ed and our options are aliens, space monks, and some bounty hunters who were game to cut ties with friends and family for 10 years with no explanation (excellent at healthy relationships)

#star wars #the clone wars #tcw #star wars the clone wars #star wars shitpost #star wars tcw #star wars tbb #star wars: the clone wars #star wars prequels #sw prequels #attack of the clones #kamino #mandalorians #the bad batch #tbb #star wars: the bad batch #sw the bad batch #sw tbb

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zener · 2 months

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if u ever feel bad about ur limited knowledge of the star wars universe, dont worry! din djarin knows less than u and hes literally in it.

#din djarin #the mandalorian #star wars #star wars the mandalorian

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ospreyeamon · 6 months

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There is an idea present in the Jedi Council’s tellings of the origins of the Jedi Civil War – not just in the KOTOR games and tie-ins but SWTOR’s Galactic Timeline as well – that you can trace the troubles in the Mandalorian Wars and the origin of the Jedi Civil War back to Revan and Malak’s defiance of the Council’s order to stay out of the Mandalorian Wars. That Revan and Malak’s fall was rooted in the hubris of thinking that they knew better than the Council. That if only Revan, Malak, the Exile and their cohort hadn’t disobeyed, then everything would have been fine.

I don’t think that everything would have been fine if Revan and Malak had just obeyed the Council. The Mandalorians would have continued with their invasion of the Republic, killing hundreds of billions of people. The True Sith Empire still wouldn’t have revealed themselves.

Eventually, Mandalore the Ultimate would have decided that the time was right to force the Jedi to enter the war, on the Mandalorians’ terms rather than the Order’s or the Republic’s. One advantageous way to do this would have been to uncover the location of the Dantooine Enclave, the Jedi’s primary base in the Outer-rim, and nuke the planet from orbit. The True Sith Empire still wouldn’t have revealed themselves.

Having been directly attacked, the surviving members of the Jedi Council would have been forced to enter the war, whether or not they believed the shadowy threat might still be a problem. Their inaction would have devastated the reputation of the Jedi in the Republic and neutral worlds – the Jedi stood by and allowed trillions to die, only getting involved when it was their own necks on the line. Revan, Malak, and the other Jedi who wanted to enter the war earlier would have been furious that the Council had countermanded them from acting on their own better judgment only for this to be the result. The split in the Order still would have happened, just differently.

But I think that the Revanchist Jedi had their own equivalent of this idea – that if the Jedi Council had just answered the Republic’s call to war like the Revanchists everything would have gone better, and the Jedi Civil War would have been avoided. I think they were wrong too.

Given Mandalore the Preserver’s account of the Mandalorian high command’s assessment of the potential threat of a Jedi contingent led by Master Kavar, I imagine the war would have continued to go badly for the Republic under Kavar’s leadership until Revan and Malak became desperate enough to assassinate Kavar so Revan could take his place as supreme commander. Possibly after the Mandalorians assassinated, injured or otherwise took out of commission battle-meditation prodigy Padawan Bastila Shan. Revan and Malak still would have arced through a decent to become fallen heroes. The split in the Order still would have happened, just differently.

#Meanwhile in a Galaxy Far Far Away #kotor meta #star wars au musings #the Mandalorian Wars #the Jedi Council #Revan #Darth Malak #Revanchist Jedi #knights of the old republic

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miguelo-hara · 1 year

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