Star Wars and non-violence

I’ve been reading up on (and aspiring to) non-violence recently. As I noted in a series of posts almost a year ago (here’s the one that wrapped up the series, and it links to the two earlier ones), I’ve been trying to figure out what that means for playing games and consuming media. I don’t necessarily believe that a commitment to non-violence means that you can’t play through an epic battle in D&D, but I think the question is worth thinking about.

Star Wars has been a part of my life since my childhood, and it’s perhaps because of that (and the fact that “Wars” is literally right in the title) that I’ve been asking the “non-violence and media” question over and over about this franchise in particular. I’ve got a neat poster in my campus office of Red Squadron X-Wings headed toward the Death Star. It’s great art, and I think that scene is one of my favorites of all of cinema, but lately, whenever I see the poster, I ask myself the question that was sometimes hinted at in the old Star Wars Expanded Universe—how many people did Luke Skywalker kill in that act of self-defense? Is it possible that it was more people than were on Yavin IV? Again, I’m open to the possibility that I’m overthinking this: I haven’t entirely figured out the question of whether violence in self-defense is justified, much less the question of whether the answer to that question that also needs to be applied to escapist cinema.

My spouse and I finished The Acolyte this evening, though, and during nearly every episode, I found myself thinking about the inherent violence of the lightsaber, something I’ve quipped about before. It’s a fun weapon to see deployed on screen, but once you start actually thinking about it, it’s really kind of horrifying. One of the biggest questions that I have about how the lightsaber fits into that fictional universe is why all the Jedi are trained in lightsaber-to-lightsaber combat. One of the premises of The Acolyte—like of The Phantom Menace—is that it’s wild and unexpected that there would be evil Force users out there swinging around red lightsabers. Why, then, does every Jedi seem to be totally prepared for that very possibility?

I get that this is Watsonian thinking, when there’s a more compelling Doylist observation out there: It is sweet as hell to watch a lightsaber duel on screen, so the fictional world is going to bend over backwards to make sure that happens. That said, I think there’s an interesting metaphor in there, too, so long as I’m using Star Wars to think about non-violence: The inherent violence of the lightsaber only invites more violence. Perhaps the most interesting fight scene in all of The Acolyte was in the first episode, when Carrie-Anne Moss’s Jedi character holds her own without ever drawing a lightsaber. For a show that seems to be interested in finding cracks in the pedestal fans have put the Jedi on for nearly 50 years, it also seems to provide us at least one example of a “guardian of peace and justice” that is committed to those concepts rather than enforcing them with a laser sword.

Lots of overthinking here, but hopefully in a semi-productive way.

• macro
• Myself
• non-violence
• Star Wars
• The Acolyte
• Watsonian versus Doylist