Star Wars: Age of Rebellion - Luke Skywalker #1 | by Greg Pak & Chris Sprouse & Scott Koblish & Stefano Landini
This has been backed up in other places, that Luke has some fame within the Rebellion and the larger galaxy, as well as the whole “I’ve never seen anyone wield a lightsaber” thing (ie, “the Jedi were just a weird cult who didn’t actually have any special powers”) but it’s interesting to see that even other Rebellion members have a sense of wariness around Luke, that the only time they’ve seen someone use a lightsaber was Darth Vader.
This is twenty three years after the Empire formed and the Jedi wiped out–which can be a long time (as my exhaustion over just the last three years has shown me), but really shouldn’t be long enough for people to have whole-sale forgotten something they would almost assuredly have been alive for at least in part.
It’s also an illustration of how the galaxy really just doesn’t quite know what to do with Force-sensitives, that there’s always that sense of unease and wariness, just because it’s something they don’t understand. We saw that, too, even at the height of the Jedi, that there are just so few of them (one per billion/three billion people, one for a single planet’s entire population, possibly less) and they seem to always be half-listening to something that you can’t hear or see yourself.
Even in the Rebellion and possibly the New Republic, being a Jedi never seems to be easy, because the galaxy seems to fear you and the only time they saw someone do the things you did, it was filtered through the lens of what the Empire allowed (aka, ONLY THE EVIL ROBOT GUY WITH THE NIGHTMARE BREATHING, pretty much) and just natural fear of what people can’t experience for themselves.
There are pockets of people who actually get to know Force-sensitives (or at least those on the light side, those who turn to the good instead of the evil) who speak warmly of them, but canon is absolutely LITTERED with people who’ve never met a Jedi before and are immediately unnerved or outright dismissive, until they actually spend time with them and realize they’re there to help.
EvenLuke Skywalker, having blown up the Death Star and having foughtfor the Rebellion for four years at this point still gets the side-eye from some people. That’s what it’s like for Force-sensitives in this galaxy far, far away.
Crimson Reign actually has a good explanation for why the Jedi were forgotten:
The criminalization of knowledge
It’s not just that being a Jedi was a crime in the empire, they made helping a Jedi a crime, knowing about the Jedi was a crime! And it went further! Knowing about or being able to use the Force was a crime under the empire!
Thus people with knowledge of the Jedi or the ability to use the Force were encouraged to keep it to themselves for fear of punishment ,and to not pass on knowledge and stories to the next generation, and thus when they died, so did their knowledge, and what was commonly known became lost
Yes! This is something Star Wars has been weaving into stories for awhile! Most Wanted has this passage:
Not only does the Empire engage in full on propaganda about the Jedi and the Force, just having anything related to the Jedi and the Force was made illegal and you would “disappear” if the Empire caught you. Anyone who pointed people to others who had Force-related or Jedi-related items “disappeared”.
The Mighty Chewbacca and the Forest of Fear also has a really good passage about just how thorough the Empire’s propaganda was:
“Then all the vidscrolls stopped working. The Empire sold us new devices that let them control what we could see and read.”
Same for what happened on Lothal:
(Ezra’s Duel with Danger - For memory, this was from a Rebels episode directly as well.)
For two decades, the Empire engaged in a full on propaganda war (Lost Stars also had them teaching their cadets that the Jedi were a criminal gang, that it was an answer on an Imperial test they were taking) and made it outright illegal to have any Force or Jedi stuff, to teach others about the Force or the Jedi, that you were never seen again if you did, so it really makes sense that the galaxy forgot about the Jedi, even if they were alive when the Republic was still around.
You had some caches hidden around (Jocasta stashed one for the next generation to find, Grakkus the Hutt was a collector of Jedi stuff), but the vast majority of anything to do with the Force was stolen or destroyed by the Empire–pretty sure that’s what happened to any planets that had Force traditions as well, like look at what happened to the Lasat people. Look at what happened on Jedha.
So, when you combine the criminalization of knowledge about the Jedi with the terror people feel about speaking out and disappearing for it, with the outright lies the Empire tells, with that Force-sensitives are a little off-putting and incredibly rare (even before the Jedi were genocided nearly out of existence, meeting one was very, very rare), people’s reactions aren’t surprising.
Adding in the examples mentioned above from Crimson Reign of how this wasn’t just something the Empire stumbled into, but it was very calculated and deliberate:
“Some will be willing to die for their beliefs, in an effort to bring back the light, to expose the truth. So you kill them first. The ones left are, by process of elimination, not willing to die for their beliefs, they’re apathetic, just trying to get by. Afraid. It’s not that the Jedi are forgotten. It’s that the very idea of them is a death sentence. Those who remember stay silent. In time, they will die and the Order will truly be lost.”
