A Geek History of Time - Episode 68 - What the Jedi Could Have Been Part II

Episode Date: August 15, 2020

BELLS Blow in her face and she'll follow you anywhere. You are destroying the Constitution of the United States may God have mercy on your souls. Good day. Yes. It's a very sad word. We could be saying that we just elected the right white man to power. That's creepy but that's a different category of creepy. Zizuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and find out what the fuckin' truth that man was trying to get at. Like with most episodes I can bring him back to wrestling. Right, well he's got other people who work for him who also do things

and they can use mutate, hide, human size into smaller worlds after all. Fuck you. I still don't give a shit about getting fake property in a fantasy game. This is a key history of time. Where we connect nursery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history teacher here in Northern California and this coming year Virtually for the first few weeks. I'm also going to be teaching remedial English, which is going to be a new challenge Because number one, it's a variety of English I haven't taught before and and I now get to learn how to do it from a distance

Who are you? I am the world's worst technician. I'm Damian Harmony. This is the third time we've tried to do this. I've met worse, believe me, but you're giving him competition, though, I will say. I, yeah. So it's the third time that we've tried to do this. It's now working because I literally

turned the volume up on my computer. I am also a Latin teacher, which explains my inability to handle technology. Humanity is major in this gentleman. Yeah, masters in history did not prepare me for this. But yes, I teach Latin up here in Northern California. We'll be doing it digitally as well. I'm thinking quite frankly, for the entire year,

we'll see what happens and if California behaves itself at all, ever. Probably not. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, last week, we were talking, we left off actually at a really good spot talking about the entire history, which is what the Jedi Gecki movies were writing about.

Yeah. And that's kind of where we left off. Yes. Okay. So, to briefly recap, so the Jedi Gecki genre is Japan's version of the Western. As we discussed last week, the tropes don't translate perfectly one for one, but it shares a great deal of the psychic baggage, which comes to mind, but the overtones and the subtext are kind of all there. It's the Japanese version of pathologizing their own relatively recent history. Yes. You know, as a nation-state, and it has very

similar themes throughout, and the big commonality is that in both the Western and in Jidagaki stories, the protagonist is almost always a night-errant figure. And the discussion that we were having last time to tie this back into Nurturri again is that that is the core description that we get in the Lucas Cannon of the first three films of kind of who the Jedi were. Right. When we're in episodes 4 through 6, they're spoken of in the past tense because they don't exist anymore. And much like the portrayal of Ronin and Samurai and Gidaggeki movies, we kind of come to learn if we get into the expanded universe, if we get into talking about the, you know, what we learned about the Jedi Order in the prequel trilogy. We learn that this view we have of the Jedi in

the original trilogy is, there's kind of some Vaseline on the lens, the focus is a little bit soft, and there's kind of been some self-congratulations, some self-serving kind of description of who and what, how the Jedi worked. Maybe not entirely who they were, but how they worked has definitely been mischaracterized. Yes. Romanticized, very heavily. And so the important takeaway from the last episode is that all of these ideas that we have

in the original trilogy about the Jedi are taken from how samurai look in Gida Gecki. Okay. Okay. And how they are portrayed in who they are. Mm-hmm. And I want to spend a moment right now to kind of open up this episode, I want to spend a moment to kind of talk

about the parallels between historically who the samurai were and kind of who we see the Jedi being in the Star Wars universe. Okay. Now when you say the Star Wars universe, do you mean the EU that is no longer canon or do you mean the movies? Yes. Okay, cool. Kind of kind of kind of all of it kind of a, kind of a global thing. So the primary point that I want to make about it is there are two characteristics that I think are very important for the characterization, both of the Jedi and of Samurai, historically. The first point is that of course they are both warriors. Yes. Now Yoda spends an awful lot of time of episode five telling us wars do not make one great a Jedi is not a warrior, et cetera, et cetera. That's a really hard pitch to make when every

single one of them carries a particle beam sword as their badge of office. True. However, that sword is shown very early on as not only being able to dismember or at least disarm the opponent, but also, but it's also that sword is shown to be able to deflect and block shots in coming. So it is at least in part a defensive use of the sword which is being taught. Yes, it is both sword and shield. Yes. It's the Bon Jovi sword. It's never drawn first, but it draws first blood.

Nice. Thank you. Nice, well done. Thank you. Nice, well done. Thank you. Well done. So, but they are martial artists. Maybe not warriors. Maybe warriors is the wrong way to characterize it, but they all have learned how to use this

weapon. And, you know, ideally, they have learned how to use this weapon in defense of innocent unarmed people and in furtherance of justice and the public way. Yeah, there's a layer of you need to be a reluctant warrior. If you're going to do this The best way to hold the sword is to hold it in stillness. Yes. Yeah. Tiveness is... Yes, I like that. God, you scared me.

I thought you were freezing up. I'm like, you're a scientist. You paused for quite a while. Yeah, no. Sir. Yeah, no, I apologize for that. But no, I think I think that's a good point. I think part of that is the parts of Buddhism that George Lucas did actually out of the out of the the cliffs notes. And yes, so they are, they're martial artists who know how to use the weapon like

universally. Yes. And they know, and they know how to use their powers in a militant, in a confrontation, like if there is a confrontation, you know, how to use your powers to do that, but there is this emphasis on, you know, being diplomats first, being, you know, not being the ones to start the fight, but being the ones to finish it kind of thing. Yes. And so yes. So instead of saying warriors, I am going to say martial artists, because I think that's a better, and then actually ties better into kind of my ongoing thesis going forward.

So both the Jedi and the samurai of the Ado period were martial artists. If you were born into the samurai class, you were going to learn how to use a sword. Even when we get into the 1700s and the early 1800s, when there had not been a war in over a century, you were born into this class, you're going to spend time learning martial arts because you are a member of the warrior class. So in both cases, they are martial artists. And the other thing that's important is in the Star Wars universe to become a Jedi, you have to be force sensitive.

Yes. And a brute force sensitive is something you are born into. And seems deeply tied to lineage, by the way, because with the exception of Obi-Wan Kenobi, everybody in episode four, five and six is related like who are force users. It is all in the family. Yes.

Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Luke is meathead. Vater is. Oh man. Vater is archie. No Vater is archie. No Vater. It'd have to be archie. Yeah. And and in some weird way. No. Hon is meathead. And Hon is honest. Totally meathead. No, but but Luke is meathead until. Honest, honest, totally meathead. No, but Lucas Meathead until, until Lucas decides that they're not related or that they are related. They're that they are related. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's funny. Wow. That's, that's a whole, that's a whole paradigm shift that completely changes like so many. Tarkin is Edith.

Oh, it's the death star. Oh, it's death star. When we tried to blow up all to ran. And in the end of the spin-off series, Vader goes and opens his own diner. Yeah. So. Oh, Lord. All right. So, but, but, yeah, but getting back to my point,

we're getting off the subject. A little bit. So it's an issue of you either are, for instance, and thus are going to be picked up by the Jedi get trained in in becoming this thing Yeah, which you know again is an artifact of how Lucas wound up caught up playing the Jedi order Uh-huh and and so okay now you're you're one of the chosen and so And so you have this gift, you're born into it. And similarly, to become a samurai,

you had to be born a samurai. Okay. And if you were a commoner, if you were a town's person or a peasant or, or, you know, out, and anybody who was not a member of the samurai class, you were not allowed to learn how to use a sword. Okay.

We caught with a sword in public or even in the, in the Aedo period, if you recall, a spear, you, you would be executed like period as a commoner. You weren't allowed to have you did not have access to weapons. Um, and, and certainly not a gun. And yeah. And so it's very interesting actually to get into the history of it. There is a very remarkable point at which the ordinary foot soldier in the military forces that the Toku Kawa allowed to to exist was, you know, he was an ordinary foot soldier. He was a spearman

or an archibiceer, a Teppo Shiu Kormann, or an archer or whatever, a typo-chew, Quarman, or an archer, or whatever, and he was basically nobody, but he had the distinction of being samurai, and there was a clear, bright-line delineation between him and any commoner he dealt with. Okay. So again, for sensitive or not, simple as that. Yeah. Yeah. And so being a samurai is something you're born into and you are a martial artist. Being a Jedi, we're born into and part of being part of what the Jedi Order is going to do with you is they're going to train you to use your, and that training is going to involve learning how to use a lightsaber and, you know, force push and whatever other, you know,

power is we've developed because of our generations of warfare against the Sith. You know, and so in both of these cases, it's not a job. Like being a Jedi is a role in society, being a samurai, was a role in society. Right. And the thing is, historically, being a samurai actually became separated from your profession for whole swaths of the samurai class for literally several generations in order to become a doctor.

In some parts of Japan, some provinces of Japan, You had to be a member of the samurai class. In Star Wars, you have something similar. So when you had just the original trilogy, four, five, six, they talked about how Luke was too old to be a Jedi, right? Too old to begin his training. We know at that point Luke is, let's see, he was 18 in the first one, so in the second one, he was early 20s. Okay, I believe it was a three year gap between the two, because it's only like a nine month gap

between episodes five and six. Yeah, because by that point, he's become a commander. By that point, Leah has become a commander. She's actually taken on military rank. She knows way more about organization than she did the first time. She's not a snarky 18-year-old. And yeah, so it's like a three or four-year gap.

So he's in his early 20s. When you say somebody's tool to begin their training in their early 20s, it can be reasonably understood that, oh, okay, but if he was like 16, we could have gotten tool. Like, you don't think, oh, they kidnap babies. No. So now, with that as being kind of the only canon at that time, four, four five and six in the books

most of the books take place after the the second Death Star blows up Which always bothered me that they always went from the Battle of Yavin as their year zero instead of the death of the Emperor as their year zero because to me that's, that's the moment where you can actually rebuild a calendar. But anyway, in the books, almost everything is after the Battle of the Year. It's always about emperors for you classes types, isn't it?

It really kind of is. As opposed to a battle. You got to date it from the death of Trajan. Like, I mean, come on. Well, as opposed to a battle that didn't actually lead to anything ending for another three years Yeah, I would say the battle of Yavin was less a paradigm. Yes, it was the first just blow struck but They built another death start So anyway, so in the book still most of it's after the Battle of Yavin, but some of the

books start coming out that are, let me think, there are a couple books, there's, well, no, none of the books that come out actually between trilogies are before, are ones that mention Jedi very much before the Battle of Yavin. And part of that was due to a mandate from Lucas, like, okay, y'all can license these books. They have to be internally consistent. You cannot marry Luke off.

You cannot tell us what Yoda's race is. You can't kill any of the main characters. There were a lot of strictures put on it. Once the second trilogy came out, the Lucas trilogy, the Unholy trilogy, then they started writing books that existed anywhere from a thousand years before to 50 years after, which was, I loved it. But many of them absolutely were going based on the Jedi that we saw in episodes 1, 2, 3. So there were plenty of Clone Wars era novels that came out. And they, you know, because they had a cannon to draw on, they weren't doing guesswork. So when it was the after the Battle of the Avon stuff, the original trilogy spawned

a whole bunch of books by Bantam and Del Rey and they were, you know, garbage, a lot of them. They just were, and it was- You know, a sturgeon's, a sturgeon's law always applies. 90% of everything is crap. Yeah. So, what's the other 10% of everything is crap. Yeah, so... But the other 10%. This is the part that everybody leaves off of that. The other 10% is worth fighting for. Okay.

Most of those books that dealt with the Jedi dealt with Luke struggling to find the identity of what it meant to be a Jedi. And he readily acknowledges that Obi-Wan, his training for him was incomplete, his training under Yoda was incomplete. He basically went through two incomplete trainings by two very different personalities. And now he's trying to cobble together an academy. And that's his focus throughout those books.

So even then, there is this lack of coherence when it came to the role of a Jedi, which meant that all the people that he was finding, he found Streen. Streen is this guy who's in his 50s, who is kind of a wavy gravy type character, quite honestly, who, yeah, okay. And he's really good at controlling weather with the force.

And then he finds a bunch of other people All of whom are much older than Luke was when he started training under Obey one And it's just like yeah, you dance with the partner that that you came to the dance with, you know Like this is what we've got this is what we've got yeah and so the the idea that you could be a different profession Was necessarily true because all these people were living in a world And so the idea that you could be a different profession was necessarily true because all these people were living in a world

that Luke then found them and said, hey, you could be a Jedi now. Yeah, so, oh yeah. And we can kind of talk about that a bit when I get to a different kind of paradigm that the Jedi could have followed when we talk about the Freifester guilds of Germany in the early modern period. Because that's an important aspect of how that tradition operated. basically, or the Aedo equivalent thereof, who were magistrates, you know, and were still samurai, and were expected to, you know, uphold Bushido, but much like Luke had to figure out, okay, well, what does being a Jedi mean in this new world, they had to figure out, okay, well what does being a Jedi mean in this new world? They had to figure out

what does it mean to be a samurai when there aren't any wars to fight? Right. And one of the answers to that was developed by a member of the samurai class, and the 1700s, in the 1700s in a book entitled Hagakure, or literally means viewed through leaves. And as is kind of a trend historically, when you have a tradition like this that has, I don't wanna say died out, but when you have something like the samurai who all of a sudden wind up in this position where there aren't any wars to fight, who are we? One of the responses

that always shows up is, no, whether there are any wars to fight or not, we are warriors. And so we have to harden up even more. You know, just because there's no worries to fight doesn't mean, you know, we can't allow ourselves to become soft. Okay. And so, you know, Haggakure actually said, if you are a samurai to maintain your spirit and to maintain the tradition of what being a samurai means, you should spend a certain amount of time every day contemplating your own death. Oh, like, like meditate, meditate on dying on the point of a spear, meditate on dying in a fire, on a great height. So yeah, not only like not only face your own death,

watch the thousand ways to die and put yourself in them. And prepare yourself for that because your ancestors had to be ready at any moment to die and hesitation, you know, there's a famous line, you know, about the samurai mindset, which was, if you, and this is actually from Miyamoto, you know, there's a famous line, you know, about the samurai mindset, which was, if you, and this is actually from Miyamoto, Musashi, who I'm going to talk about here in a second, if you go into battle, fearing death, you're going to die. If you go into battle without fear of death, you won't hesitate. And you'll probably live. And you will, and

you will survive. Yeah, and so how accurate that was like no, no, seriously meditate on that shit. Like, like, like the gom Jibbar scene. I'm kind of riffing on this for a moment, but if you remember, Dune, have you read Dune? I'm still looking forward to your podcast on it though. Oh Lord. Yeah, once I find a hook for it, but in a very early in the book, within the first 15 pages, young polatrix is put through a test called the gum jibbar. Oh, that's where you put your hand in the box.

Yeah, you put your hand in the box. Step one, cut a hole in the box. Yeah, you put your hand in the box. Step one, cut a hole in the box. Step two. Put your hand in the box. Oh, yeah, I went, see, I went out in a different direction. But yeah, there you go. And so, and he's told, he says, what's inside the box and he's told pain. Right. And then explain to him how it works. It's nerve induction. It makes you think that your hand is on fire, but it's not. And then Herbert does this really great job describing just exactly what it is that feels like is happening to Paul's hand. And it's really vivid. And when Paul pulls his hand out of the box, it's completely unmarked. Unmark know. And that experience that he goes through is kind of what the author of Huckakare wanted samurai bureaucrats to imagine is, no, no, no, you're on fire.

Think about what is it going to feel like for your skin to peel away from your bones? Like when one of your eyeballs bursts from the heat, like how is that going to feel? Like think about that being prepared for that pain. And like ridiculously hardcore, muchismo, I talked about this, the Kodoboshito, like even during the Sangoku G'dai, when it was a more pragmatic kind of, you know, this is how we behave, you know, this is what the rules are, kind of code. It was still like to a Western mindset,

the level of, no, no, you are, you need to be prepared to die, was really nuts. Yeah. But then later on, the code became ossified. It turned into this thing that was no longer living, that was no longer pragmatic, that no longer, you weren't actually fighting any wars anymore. And so the author of Fogagogy was just like, no, no, no, it says be prepared for death. Here's how you prepare for death, man. Like that's not metaphor. That's literal. a pair of her death man, like that's not metaphor, that's literal. Now, I wanna talk about one of the books in Star Wars.

So there's a series called the Republic Commandos series, which is just phenomenal by Karen Travis. And it's essentially, let's look at clones and let's look at clone culture and let's look at clone commandos specifically and then that there's family that forms around it and stuff like that and you get some really neat characters You eventually run into these Rogue Jedi like this tribe of I'm gonna use the term here. I don't know a better term for it. So feel free to correct me. Iris Gypsy

don't know a better term for it, so feel free to correct me. Iris Gypsy. Traveler? Oh, okay, that's the other word. All right, traveler. I apologize for the other one, if I can remember to scrub it, and if I can do it, clearly I will.

So traveler, okay, so this group of traveler Jedi, who check this out, this is during the time that there are clones, right? This is between episodes two and three and in fact the book series is five or six books and it encompasses order 66 and the aftermath But they run into this group of Jedi travelers who are all married and have families and The yep, yeah, and they are now this is this is in the Canon and they mentioned who are all married and have families. And the, yup. Yup, and they are, now this is in the canon,

and they mention, they say, oh yes, well, there was a thousand years ago, a group of ascetic jedis who kind of became, attractive to a lot of folks, like philosophically it made sense But we never thought that they would become the mainstream as Jedi and then they became the mainstream So a lot of us just had to leave the order that didn't mean we stopped being Jedi But we don't go for that you can't be attached to anyone because you know, we're agents of love, etc., etc

So even in that book and we're agents of love, et cetera, et cetera. So even in that book, and we're back to we be gravy. Yeah. And even in that book, you absolutely have the discussion of kind of what you were talking about, of just this tension of what does it mean to actually be a Jedi, and it's not all agreed upon. It doesn't have to be these eschetic monks living in this ivory temple.

Yeah. It can be folks who travel about and do good works and stuff like that. And to their credit, the Jedi didn't hunt them down as heretics either. No. So there's that. Correct.

But there were sects of Jedi that very specifically rejected the aesthetic fetishization that the Jedi had fallen into a thousand years prior. Indeed. Indeed. And, you know, when the thing is, I want to hear more about those groups. Like, I mean, ultimately kind of, we're jumping ahead a little bit here by saying this, but, you know, what I kind of ultimately want to call for is, I want to hear more about those groups because those groups don't come across as being dick bags. Yeah. You know, but before I get there, I want to talk about another,

one of the other paradigms that could have been what we got, specifically, and to do that, Ben what we got? Uh-huh. Uh, specifically. And to do that, I want to talk about lineages in martial arts. Okay. Now, and I'm going to start by focusing on lineage in eastern martial arts, specifically Japanese martial arts. Okay. This is one of the places where it's pronounced and where I have at least kind of a passing level of knowledge of it. And to talk about that, I've got to talk about the greatest swordsman in world history, potentially. And if anybody wants to argue with me about this on Twitter,

hit me up, e.h. Blalock on Twitter. I'm ready. Bring it. Greatest swordsman in history, Miyamoto Musashi. Okay. Real quick, is this the guy that beat the shit out of a guy with an ore once? Yes. Okay, cool. Actually, he, he, he clocked him over the head with your and then disemballed him with a short sword. Like you do. Like you do. Well, yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, samurai dual, it's what happens. Like you do. Well, yeah, because you know samurai dual. It's what happens. And there's actually there's there are so many layers to that to that dual to that whole story. It's it's it's amazing. So but I but I got to talk about him because he is the founder of a school of swordsmanship. That is extant. It has students to this day. And there is a very clear lineage of him as the founder to his number one student and on down the line and there are records that have been kept. There is a memorial on the grounds

of the main school of the school of swordsmanship in Japan that has the name of every headmaster of the school since Miyamoto Musashi. Oh nice. Okay, so this is a codified lineage of teaching. Okay. And I'm going to get into that get that's important here in a minute, but first I want a fanboy about me and Mona Musashi for a couple of minutes because if you took his story and turned him into a Jedi, it wouldn't make a bitch in series. So he was born in 1584. Okay. And at the age of 16, in the year 1600, he fought at the Battle of Sekigahara. Now you'll remember, of course, from our last episode, that that was where Tokugawa Yaya-su consolidated his power over Japan, and it was after that battle he declared

himself Shogun. Yes. And he was and Tokugawa was the leader of what was referred to as the Eastern Army and he was fighting against the Western Army. Important to note, Miyamoto Masashi showed up as a 16 year old kid to fight for the Western Army. So he, his very first battle as a young samurai, and his only battle as a samurai was a defeat. Yeah, a losing effort. Yeah, he was on the losing big time on the losing end of it. And now his life has been used as fodder for multiple movie series. There's a long running, very well respected manga series about his life and all of his

duels. There was a whole series. I want to say it was like in the 1920s, might have been the 30s, there was a whole novel series that's the basis of one of the movie series with Toshiro Mifune and the title role, which you didn't know about his life. Well, because I mean, come on, who else are you going to get? But anyway, but he, as the 16 year old, like, hot-headed, murderous kid, he had serious anger management issues, I mean, from every source we know, even the ones that are not massively sensationalized,

because the novel series, it's important to know, was was written in the either 1920s or 1930s which was as Japanese nationalism was you know burgeoning. Yeah And so the myth of Miyamoto was so she was tied to the myth of Japanese identity and Of course the idea of we are a samurai nation was a really big kind of thing for a population that was, you know, being introduced to, you know, massive conscription and expansion to your own forces, et cetera, et cetera. So, but, but even, even if we don't go with the most sensationalized versions of his life, he, he lost this first battle and was left as a Ronin, a wandering samurai.

The lead lord that he had been fighting for was killed, the family was disposed as the territory was given to somebody else. So he was left with no income other than what he could gain by fighting duels, and, you know, eventually, you know, the goal for somebody in his position would be to try to get a position as a retainer for somebody. Mm-hmm. And the best way to do that is to show off what you could do and say fighting duels was a way of doing that.

That build your brand in kind of the same way. Yeah, in kind of the same way that tournaments were a thing for nights in feudal Europe. And so as this masterless wandering swordsman over the course of Set many years he fought in 61 duels and was never defeated Yeah, and fighting in a duel is pretty much you're either good at it or you're dead, right? Like there's Or were there ways to lose without losing your life? They're worth you were I mean Generally speaking most of them were not We're not fought under the assumption that it was to the

death. You could, you could lose and, you know, simply be wounded. Okay. And so there, there were, I mean, there were other wandering swordsmen who were dualists who didn't have an unbur, a, a, can record, who didn't wind up in the graveyard. Um, but, you know, but the risk was, but the risk was very high. Yeah, it's kind of, okay, similar to Gladiators, Rome, where they didn't fight to the death necessarily, but death could happen anyway. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Scott it. Yeah. Good, good analogy. Okay. Uh, most, most of the time, most of the time, most of the time the tools you would

be fighting would be to show who was best. And that didn't require anybody to die. But, you know, you were for fighting with real weapons. And so, you know, somebody really screwed up, it wouldn't just be first blood. it would be an artery. Yeah. And, you know, that didn't end well. Yeah, bummer for you that you zipped. So, yeah, pretty much, yeah, yeah, you should have zipped. You should have read which way I was actually going. Yeah.

And, well, you know, it's up to you. Bummer of a birthmark, how? Yeah. You know, to tie us back to the last series we'd sure. But and so eventually, he wound up making a name for himself because he was, I think, I think possibly trying to figure out kind of how to phrase this, but my own, and this is just me kind of interjecting a theory here, but I think because he showed up

on the scene literally at the very end of the period of active warfare. He kind of had an opportunity to look at things and go, well, you know, I'm not fighting the same fight that everybody's been fighting for the last 150 years. So I can do something different. And you know, so on the battlefield, a samurai's main weapon, you would start out fighting with a spear.

Okay. Like, almost universally, start out in hand-to-hand combat or from the back of a horse. You'd rush in first with a spear. Okay. You'd go back and forth with a spear until you got too close to do that. And then you would draw the longsword you would fight with the katana. Right. And then, you know, the almost ritualized description of it in the

text is you start with the start with the spear go to the longsword go to the short sword then go to rolling around on the ground with a dagger until somebody dead is is kind of the kind of the description of how fight between two armored samurai would go and and what he realized is i'm not actually fighting against anybody with any armor anymore. I'm not on a battlefield anymore. We're dueling. Right.

And so in Europe, at kind of around the same time, a little bit earlier, there became this distinction between what the Germans referred to as Harnessed Fetchden and Blowsfetchden. And I'm butchering the German, I'm sure, but Harnessed Fetchden is fighting an armor. Blowsfetchden is literally blouse fighting. It is you're not wearing armor. You're in cloth clothes. And so Mimono Musashi could be described. And if you want to fight with me, go to the sun twitter, you know where to find me. But I think Miyamoto Sasishi could be described as being Japan's first blowsfest in dualist. Like like the first guy to come up with the system specifically built around, we're not fighting an armor here. And and the the innovation of his school was,

we know we carry two swords around. Why am I only fighting with one of them at a time? Well, now that's interesting because the Jedi and the books in the Old Republic wore armor and didn't see any problem with wearing armor. And several of them fought using two lightsabers, sometimes with a longer and a shorter, sometimes linked together,

but you had plenty who used two lightsabers. Yes. And so, and of course, and again, we can look from where we can tell where it is in real life that inspiration comes from. And that's from Nitencho. Hold on. I gotta go back up and look at it in front of me. Niten Ichiraiu, which is the School of Swordsmanship that Musashi founded. And in it, he makes in the treatise, the book of five rings, the Go-Rin No Show, which

is his basically the very basic instruction manual for how Niten Ichigryu works is he says, you need to learn how to fight with a long sword in one hand. Because historically, if you study straight up Kendo nowadays, you're going to get taught, you hold the sword in two hands. Yeah, it's very important. Because it gives you more cutting authority. Right. And what he said was, no, no, no, you should be able to fight with the long sword in one

hand and the short sword in the other. We carry two swords. We should fight with two swords. And so his techniques all grow out of the idea that no, you have a weapon in either hand. And you should be, and if you are truly prepared to do it, there is no difference between killing one man and killing a hundred men. If you are prepared to fight one guy, you are prepared to fight a hundred. Okay. There's no, there's no difference in it. There is no difference in killing one man and killing ten. There's no difference in killing ten men and killing a hundred. Thus, by the transit of property, there's no difference between killing one man and killing a hundred. That's is is that's paraphrasing what he actually says in the manual and And part of the key to that is you gotta have a sword and I their hand. Okay, so When you look at episode three especially

They do very much the katana overhand holding it Kind of thing and when you look at episode two, you see some of that as well. But then you also see Jedi alternately using it one-handed. You see Mace Windu absolutely going one-handed against Palpatine, Palpatine sticking to two hands. And in the comics and in the old books, there's discussion of the Jedi just using it one-handed. And it's very rare that the Jedi use their swords to hand it, which is why it looks so weird that Anakin and Obi-Wan, they go for it that way.

Well, part of that is when the movies were being written, there was no end in mind. Right. As you pointed out, in our last thing, and there was a really, it was actually really great. I wanna say Tumblr thread, and I wish I could give proper credit for it, but there was discussion from, you know, sword martial arts nerds talking about,

if you look at the way cinematically the Jedi fighting arts developed, Luke's, Luke's form in episode two and episode three is he is wailing like like anybody five and six, yeah, in in Empire and return of the Jedi. Yeah. In Empire and Return of the Jedi. He is wailing with that saber. And you think about it for many years, that's a magic weapon that can, that's through anything. You don't have to hit that hard. Like the mirror, if you actually make contact, the mirror swipe is going to take somebody's head clean off.

Like caught as the wound and everything. And, but he is, I mean, beating the shit out of Vader when they're, when they're duplink. Yes. And you're like, you know, and then you look at the way, well, you look at the way Anakin fights in two and three. And he's kind of doing the same thing, but there's a little bit more finesse. And you look at the way Obi-Wan Kenobi fights. And Kenobi is like Errol Flynn.

Yes. You know, and Mace Windu is like Miyamoto Usashi. Like there is a furiousness to his swing, but he's not trying to overbear. He's not, you know, there's not this sense that man, I not only have to hit you, I have to fucking hit you hard. Well, so that gets into, there's seven different forms, seven different Jedi fighting forms that are codified in the books.

Yes. Yes. And Obi-Wan Kenobi is a master of the first one. Yes. And I believe Yoda is a master of the third one, Anakin prefers the fifth one, and Luke does shockingly enough a combo of one three five, largely one in five. And Mace would do, came up with the seventh one all on his own

and it's all kinds of wacky and like, Duku is a master of form number two, and there's a wonderful discussion. Oh, and Duku, yeah. And Duku is a master of form number two, and there's a wonderful discussion. Oh, and Duku, yeah. And Duku is a classical fencer. Yes. Speaking, speaking as a Western sword nerd, what's really fascinating about it is,

you look at 135 and Vapod. And you're like, okay, that's Kendo, that's another variation on Kendo. Right. I don't know how you're doing. I don't know how you're doing. I don't know how you're doing. Yeah, I do with an energy weapon, but you're somehow doing

the idea with an energy weapon. And so much of it is, you're clearly Eastern inspired. And then you look at Form 2 and you're like, did you just step off of an Olympic fencing strip? Yeah. Like you're handling that thing literally, that is, in fact, like all of your moves are taking it straight out of you know classical sport fencing.

Yeah. Which like in a reate and a sword fight in the real world would not be very effective but when you're dealing with you know a weapon that can kill with the nearest touch. Okay, yeah, you're fine. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. A repost will kill people. touch. Okay, yeah, you're fine. A repost will kill people. Yeah, well, yeah, well, yeah. And it's like you studied, everybody else is doing, you know,

Kendo and you studied small sword, like, wait. And so what I find interesting, and it's good that this comes up here because it goes into kind of where I'm going with this. Part of the way that a samurai would make a living, if he became a Ronin, was again, he needed to, as you you said build his brand and fighting duels was way to do that and the really best way to build your brand was to find the number one student or the master of another school and kick his ass

and prove that your style was better than his prove that your style was better than his. And so that's what Musashi was setting out to do was to establish that Niten Ichigayo was the preeminent school of swordsmanship. And in the process of doing that, he fought 61 duels, was never defeated. And eventually, he did, in fact, land himself a job as head sword instructor to the Tokugawa family to the show in it.

And he then, seven days before his death, he passed on the scroll and the wooden sword that are the two badges of, I'm going to call it apostolic succession, but it's discipleship. Basically, he passed those two onto his number one student and said, I'm not going to pass this on to my son. I'm passing it on to you because you're the best one to actually carry on teaching this art. Okay. And that's how that lineage developed. And so the Nitenichi Raya lineage is not a blood lineage.

It is notable for the time period because at the time it was, well, you know, I've developed this school. I'm, you know, lead instructor to this family. And so you're my son. And so I'm going to pass this on to you because that's how our society operates. What's she said? No, no, I'm not handing this on to my son. I'm giving this to my number one best student. I think it's going to be best for the style of swordsmanship. Interestingly, the

first student tried to say, no, no, I shouldn't do this. You're his son. And the son said, no, you're better for it. You do it. That's cool. Yeah. And so what this kind of leads us into, and you're talking about the seven different styles of lightsaber combat, there is a historical precedent for the idea of a category of people, a class of people, having these master student relationships, these

master disciple relationships, getting passed down from master to disciple to secondary disciple to great grand disciple. You know with master being, you know, I now I as your teacher now recognize you as being a master of this art and you are qualified to now pass on the teach of this onto other people. qualified to now pass on the teach of this onto other people. Now, in, in some of the expanded universe, Cannon, we see this happening. The, the tails of the Jedi, I want to say, tails of the Jedi comic book series. Mm-hmm. Uh, my kids are currently doing shows. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because they actually want to play West End Game Star Wars.

So I said, okay, 4,000 years before the movies. Yeah, and you know what, it's really quite remarkable to me. So the, the, the, the, you look Eulik Keldroma had to look up the character. It is one of the central figures in that series. And he and his brother and his fellow students are all, you look in K K are all studying under their master and they're on this planet. And you know, their first first job as nights is they get sent off on Dron, yeah, on us, they get sent off to Andron to, you know, deal with this rebellion and they wind up, you know, running into the Sith and they're, you know and the whole saga happens from there. But so in that time period, we see the Jedi operating in this

as type of kind of relationship. And here's the thing. There is his whole genre of martial arts films built around the idea of rival schools and competing lineages like there's a whole set of tropes associated with the old master getting old and dying and choosing one set instead of the other one. Right. And the other one going off and saying, well, you know, I'm really a master. Anyone, I'm going to keep teaching.

And you know, and you know, and they're being this this conflict and this rivalry. And I mean, and there's there is so much storytelling material. Oh, yeah. A little in this archetype. And you don't have to turn it into, there's the single overarching, monolithic organization from the top down that, you know, that, you know, kid slash a dot, a dot, children from their parents at, you know, the age of three, you know, and in turns and tries to try to try to turn them into monastics. You don't have to do any of that.

Yeah. And, and, you know, you can still have wandering night air at night's air at, you know, and, and, you know, in that, in that case, in that part of the timeline, there, there is kind of, there, there is kind of a central decision making body for Jedi as a group, but they basically send word out, hey, there is kind of a central decision-making body for Jedi as a group, but they basically send word out,

hey, we need something dealt with, send some of your students to go do this, and that's kind of the extent of it. Yeah, there's a conclave. And there isn't. It's less a temple. And there are different annexed temples, there's different libraries and stuff like that.

And there's people that are like, oh yeah, we're the ones who take care of this. We're the ones who take care of that. We're the ones who take care of this. Like there's so much more loosely confederated and tied together by virtue of their abilities more than anything else. And a healthy respect for each other,

except of course, when the Sith pop up. Yeah, or when one of the Jedi goes dark at which point. And the thing is, there's historical precedent for that in a way. I mean, of course, nothing is one to one, but if we look at the way that Japanese martial arts developed since the end of the Sangokuji die, you know, we have, you know, schools that were this, I am, you know, I'm part of the lineage of this particular school of spear fighting. Right. You know, and part of what Musashi did was he went out

to show that he could defeat anybody using any weapon. He fought against spear guys. He fought against a chain guys. Like there was, there was one, one of the duels where, where, you know, he very nearly wound up, you wound up losing his life was against a guy armed with a Kusari Gama, which was a chain with a sickle on one end. He found that, okay, I need basically, he had to ditch everything he thought he was going to have to do, you know, and completely,

completely change his tactics the middle of the fight because he lost his sword. You know, and so I mean, it's, it's, it's, and, and there's, and within the canon of that story, there are all of these examples of all of these different stories that could be told. There's a whole portion of Masashi's life, several years of his life in which he was on the run from an entire school of swordsmanship that wanted him dead, Wow. Because because he he had insulted the the master of the school. And then he had beaten a shit out of one of the main students because they they had refused to do him with steel. So he so he dulled a wooden sword and just just beat the delights out of at a one of the lead students. a memory of the story, right?

And then these guys, and then they challenged him and they tried to set up an ambush and have a dozen of them attacking them once and he knew they were gonna try to do it, because obviously, so he intentionally showed up late, pissing all of them off. And it had basically, and showed up from a direction they didn't expect. And like there's all kinds of stuff that could be said about Musashi also using psychological warfare to his advantage, showing up late and being blatantly, blatantly, but passively

disrespectful. Like actually looking at a buddy in the eye and going, hey, hey, yeah, fuck you. He didn't do that, but he would show up, picking his teeth from kind of like, oh, yeah, oh, geez, I'm sorry, am I late? Oh, hey. And just like his very, his most famous, very last duel. That's actually one of the things he did. He showed up something like two hours late.

Partly because he knew that the sun would be setting and he could position himself to have the sun behind him. I remember this one. Yeah. I thought it was showed up at dawn and picked his position so that either way, yeah, the sun's yeah. Well, but but the other thing was that by showing up that late, his his opponent was furious. Right. I mean, I mean, by all accounts, just absolutely Hermitile. And and by doing that, it was like, well, see, I already have an advantage because you're so angry, you're not going to be thinking about how you're going to fight. And he took the time to craft himself a wooden sword out of an order that was longer than his opponent would expect. Right.

Yeah. So, but, you know, and again, just with the stuff we're talking about right now, there's all of these kinds of stories that could be told using the Jedi. Well, and having this kind of, go ahead. I was going to say, many are told of these stripes in the books that are no longer canon. And what I think is advantageous there is that the people who currently own the intellectual property that includes the no longer canon books is they have obviously been drawing very heavily on those stories to do the most recent trilogy. They've taken the dynamics and put them into their films. They haven't necessarily taken the names, but they absolutely

100% are clearly reading the books. Oh yeah, well, because here's the thing. You can go with what Lucas decided to do with who the Jedi were and how he codified them. Or you can go with this other set of options that gives you so much more flexibility and allows you to tell so many different stories. Because like when you when you decide that, okay, this character is a Jedi that means that their childhood was spent at the Temple of Coruscant. Right. It means that they're, you know, it like like you take so many character options away and you take so many plotline options away. Yep.. And you turn every Jedi into a member of this organization that we know is RIFE with groupthink. And they do come very close to calling anybody who disagrees with a maheritech.

I mean, they don't hunt them down, but we know. Well, Anakin is threatened with expulsion in the middle of a fight for wanting to save a woman. Yeah. You know, well, you know, because he likes her boobies. Well, and he's going off mission. And in fairness, he is not doing right by the mission. And he says, I don't care.

And it's like, you will be expelled from the Jedi Order. He's like, I don't care and it's like you will be expelled from the Jedi order. He's like I don't care Um, and the only thing that stops him from doing it is uh, what would she want you to do Yeah, you know, so you know a little emotional manipulation never heard anyone because I'm a don't well Yeah, because I'm a don't was a badass. Yes, she was So but yeah, you do that is is definitely a story. Clearly, no, I took after her mother. So, yeah.

Yeah. And so, I guess, they're like literally, there is a real world example of how this could have been just. And I think it is a example of how this could have been just. And I think it is a... It's going to sound more pejorative than I mean to me. I don't mean it to be rainbows and puppies,

but I don't mean it to be as inditing as this is going to sound, but I think it is a failure of... I think it's a failure of Lucas's imagination. I agree. To consider to consider a universe in which the Jedi are of peace and justice and they are not connected directly to the government. Does that make sense? I want you to unpack that more. Because the gentleman who finds up...

Okay. Yes. Because he wound up going in the direction in the prequels, which is when I think, frankly, everything to do with the way the Jedi wound up got screwed up when he started trying to write the prequels trilogy. Because he didn't think about second and third order results of the decision he was making. Right. And so the Jedi order is singular, monolithic organization based on Coruscant, literally

within the Jedi temple is literally within sight of them. And they act repeatedly throughout the prequel trilogy as the agents of Republic government. Yes. And I think because of his own world view, his own background, where he came from when he grew up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think Lucas could conceive of anybody

doing the kind of things that Jidda Gecki heroes did without being cops. And without being self-appointed? Not directly under the government control. Yeah, it's possible. Yeah. And the thing is, you can still have, because historically speaking,

that's not who the heroes of Jidakeki would have been. Within the context of the actual culture in which all of that happened, anybody who knows the, anybody who grew up in Japan and essentially knows the context understands that, contrary, like you pointed out in the last episode, contrary to the lawlessness of the Western. Right.

And when a Gidekeki hero shows up, he's not showing up because he's a guardian of peace and justice because there is no peace and justice. He's showing up because something in the system has broke down. And so as an outsider, because he is a Ronin, because he is, you know, brought into the sense of circumstances, he's coming from the direction of having to fix the system because we're dealing with an East Asian culture that's like Confucianism is the beginning and the ending of the this stuff. He has to, he is put in the position of having to be the hero to fix some way in which we have a confusion

dystopia. Mm-hmm. Okay. And so Lucas has them. He is explicitly an outsider. Right. Which you can kind of get to a bit. Yeah.

And in Lucas's, you can kind of get to a bit in episodes 456, but in episodes 1, 2, 3, it's very clear that they are insiders 100%. Oh, yeah. I mean, ultimately they're there. Yeah, they, you know, there's in the Clone Wars, there's, there's, and again, this is after, you know, Lucas is directing one of the ways that, that kind of the, you know, canonical now expanded universe does, does some great stuff with this. There are a couple of places in the Clone Wars where there are discussions amongst Jedi of, okay, way, are we doing this for the Republican, are we doing this for the Jedi or her? Right.

Because we're not, we've got to be aware of why we're doing this. Who's goose are we trying to say from getting cooked here? Sure. You know, into their credit, the writers try to actually depict Obi-Wan and Mace Windu and kind of Anakin, even though they kind of treat Anakin like, no, the grownups are talking. But when they have these discussions, it's still like, okay, what's the moral thing for us to do here?

We've got to, because they are the good guys, even though they're systemically not. Yeah, they're serving the republic the whole time too. They're serving specifically the republic. Like they are there to keep the order, quite honestly and to protect their own. Yeah. Yeah. And it isn't, and the thing is,

when Obi-Wan tells Luke in episode four of Guardians of Peace and Justice, that is a self-congratulatory, self-exculpatory kind of description because what we see in the Clone Wars is, I mean, they do genuinely believe that the best thing for the majority of people in the galaxy is for the republic to stay a thing but what they're really acting in defense of is the republic and you know, I mean we're never We're never shown any any point at which the republic is actively bad I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna go at a limb there. I mean, they

accept the delivery of, hey, ready-made army of disposable biobots, which is deeply fucking sketchy. I'm not going to lie about that, but we don't see them behaving in an actively fascist. We don't see any direct cases of there is some kind of racism, speciesism, the Republic must expand. We have to conquer new territory know we don't see any any of that kind of shit going on and so the republic is basically come is basically pretty benign and we can kind of believe that okay you know the ideals of the republic are basically you know good ones but the fact is still that like you know we never really hear what is it exactly the separatists are like you

know trying to get away with doing like yeah why are they separate just we just know they're trying to break away and that's a bad thing and we're like well okay but why I mean why are they trying to break away and why is that a bad thing like in the US in the American Civil War or as I'm you'm going to refer to it from now on, whenever I teach it in the US history, the slaveholders rebellion of 1861, 1865, we know, because we've talked about it ad nauseam in this podcast at the very least, why it was that those states in the South were trying to break away. It was states' rights, the right to what?

And the answer is, people. in the south we're trying to break away it was states rights the right to what the answer is people yeah so you know obviously that's pretty shitty in in in the case of the jet ice supporting republic it's like well you know the republic operates under democratic principles well there is there is a good deal of rot written into episode one um... that you know the courts take longer than the senate uh... that the chancellor has no real power chancellor valorum

uh... his name by the way is phoenix valorum which means the end of honors um... the uh... the fact that uh... the jedi came His name by the way is Finis Valorum, which means the end of honors the the fact that the Jedi came oh That how 100% was okay. Yeah, the fact that Qui-Gon Jin says flat out, you know, we're not here to Rescue slaves and also, you know, Obi-Wan or somebody else was like oh, there's still's still slavery out here. And she's like, yeah, the Republic doesn't fucking get out here. This is Tatooine, dude. Like, there, there are signs of internal decay and rot in, in competence, but not malice. Yeah, not active, level. Yeah. There, there is certainly, is certainly, it's collapsing under its own weight, kind of aspects to it, but you're

right. Yeah. It's not, they're not jackbooted thugs. Yeah. No, it's a, it is a, it is a system in the midst of failure. And so the Jedi, and so, I mean, over the course of the Clone Wars, what we see is the Jedi trying to prop up a failing system. And as somebody who's involved in that conflict, obviously, years later, Obi-Wan Kenobi is going

to characterize himself as having been somebody who fought the good fight to defend the right cause. Right. But, you know, you fought in the war. How reliable of a narrator are you? You know, and I'm not, you know, me, we've had this discussion outside of the podcast. I'm not one of the people who wants to, you know, jump on Obi-Wan Kenobi as, you know, being, you know, a villain and heroes clothing or anything. Right. But like, even, even I'm like, you know, I'm gonna be one fanboy. I'm gonna admit it. And even I have to be like, yeah, are you sure? Like dude, really? You know, you can do better than that.

Man, come on. Be a little boring, actually honest. And so, and again, that's reflecting who it was who was writing all this shit. And that's, and again, that comes back to, you know, Lucas couldn't, couldn't envision a paradigm differently from that, even though the very sources that he was cribbing all of these ideas from our based in real world history, that could have provided him with a more vibrant, more varied, more entertaining set of options. And if you just look at the real world history, like as I'm talking about in this episode, you just look at the real world history of how martial arts knowledge has been passed from master to students for the last 300, 400 years. It shows that, no, no, seriously, there is this model wherein people who have a talent can be trained and can be taught a code of behavior and can be taught, you know, all of this stuff that we learned, you know,

the reason ultimately, why do you need to have a Jedi order? You need to have somebody training force users because if they don't get trained, they can be a danger to themselves and others. Like, why do you need to train young wizards? Well, because if they don't learn how to use their powers, they're going to hurt people, whether they mean to or not. Okay, so you're going to train them in ethics about how to use these abilities, and then you've just got to teach them how to control it. Okay, fine. So to Lucas, that then went into, well, there's going to be this where I'm going to write

it with the centralized authority. And I gotta say part of my disappointment in that is again, so many aspects of the first three movies are clearly counter-cultural. And then in the prequels, he, he, like, he fucks all that out. Oh, yeah, they're 100% culture, like within the dominant culture. Yeah, you know, and, and, and, and there's probably some kind of metaphor if I could, if I could distill it down, I could probably come up with some great aphorism to explain kind of how that's a metaphor for what happened to the whole baby boomer generation during the 80s, but you know, I don't know. But you know, so there's this, there, there, yeah, so that's that's kind of where where I am

with with with talking about or or you know every time I start thinking about this I come back around to you know again being a a a a Western martial arts nerd and knowing a bunch of people who are Eastern martial arts nerds, this was not a necessary paradigm. This was not an inevitable thing. If you're going to do it this way. Like no, if you if you even paid attention to the context of the movies that you're cribbing all of this from. Mm-hmm. Again. You could have gone elsewhere with it. You could have gone elsewhere with it. Yeah.