LogFAQs > #902624664

As a last thought there, in a setting where the Alliance and the Empire are co-equal political entities in the same universe engaged in a Cold War, it really opens a lot of complicated plots you can apply to Luke's New Jedi Order.

In a setting where the Empire is still cartoonishly evil, you could easily have one of Luke's earliest students defect to the Empire. Potentially, they discover some cache of notes (or Sith holocrons, or whatever) from Palpatine or others, using the knowledge to embrace the Dark Side and reestablish the Sith. Then you get all the lightsaber battles you can stand, as Luke's Jedi become the lieutenants in the Alliance military who occasionally have to oppose the Sith who support the Empire. And then you've also got the potential plot where heroes have to travel into Imperial territory and try and take down the Sith Academy.

Conversely, in a setting where we drop the black/white absolutism for shades of grey, Luke can have a student who defects to the Empire... but then starts his own Jedi academy, that still follows the Light Side. While their worldly politics differ, they're still both "good" in the sense of following the Jedi traditions and ideology. In fact, in such a setting, maybe one of the Alliance Jedi tap into the Dark Side in an attempt to overcome the Empire, and it's left to an allied group of both Alliance and Imperial Jedi to unite and hunt down the new world-be Sith.

Or maybe Luke isn't an idiot, and he implicitly understands that the downfall of the old Jedi were tying themselves to mundane politics, and he establishes a New Order that tries to be impartial, and sides with neither Empire nor Alliance, and instead focus on their own spiritual advancement or helping others on the small scale, not interfering with massive space battles or diplomatic manipulations (in that sense, the Jedi would very much mirror the monks of Japan they were originally based on, with the monks of the Nara period who were implicitly tied into government and politics replaced by the monks of later eras who became itinerant wanderers who would travel from village to village with no real authority, but willing to fight when necessary - which is what the Jedi should have been anyway, until the prequels and the EU ruined them).


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