One question I have is that is it even necessary to train him? I mean he's just living his life. but the second a character shows even an inkling of Force proficiency and suddenly they have to become formally trained as a Jedi? Why is that always a given? It would be really interesting to have Grogu choose not to carry on with his training and live however he wants. At least it would be something different for them to explore.
Yeah, ironically Luke is a perfect example of what happens when you don't train a Force user: pretty much nothing. Luke was a normal kid whose latent Force sensitivity is what gave him his edge in bullseyeing womp rats and not ending up a smear on the walls of Beggar's Canyon - the same way his father Anakin was the only human to successfully podrace. But otherwise, he could have gone his whole life never knowing a lick about the Force and never training as a Jedi, and he'd never be a threat to either himself or the galaxy at large.
Thinking about the history of the Jedi Order, I don't remember if this figure was mentioned anywhere in the PT films or if it just cropped up from some EU extra material, but they supposedly had about 10,000 Knights
for an entire galaxy. That's an absurdly small number compared to the galactic population. I have a feeling that the Old Republic standardizing blood tests for all newborn citizens wasn't only because, per their dogma, prospective Jedi had to begin training as very young children, but also because Force sensitivity was also
that damn rare (especially since the "no attachments" rule, while technically not requiring celibacy, resulted in a lack of families of Force sensitives, so they had to wait for the trait to randomly pop up). They'd be pretty desperate to keep their ranks up, so surely any Force sensitive child they'd come across they'd
really want to take and train.
No, the old Jedi Order weren't "babynappers," legally the families had to give consent - but over those thousand generations I'm sure the Jedi honed their sales tactics well to minimize being turned down, if you get my drift.
At this point, though, if I was in the GFFA, my two credits would be: indeed, who says every single Force sensitive HAS to train, when it's been demonstrated not to be a risk if training never happens at all (or in this case, somehow Grogu comprehends a certain level of Jedi training yet still expresses himself like a human toddler who has difficulty grasping more complex concepts like morals, and apparently if he lets his skills lie fallow long enough he'll forget them and "lose" his abilities)? And, while this may be a more existential question, who says the Jedi
have to be so concerned with the idea of being Team Republic: Galactic Police? I know Order 66 was a devastating loss, essentially a genocide, and they should rightfully seek to preserve and restore their culture, and in the previous centuries they obviously partnered with the largest government in the galaxy in order to have the resources to serve the most people and try to do the most good, and have some checks and balances established against them. Now that that's all shot to hell...would going back to being more of an order of philosophers and untethered nomad warrior monks, just following the flow of the Force, be so bad? Would it be an additional tragedy for the Jedi Order to take several more centuries to reach their previous numbers, or could they take it in stride?
(And most of all - like
Ron said, they really might want to reconsider the notion of never allowing these children in the past to have made their own decision to follow this lifestyle. That's a very sobering thought: that every old order Jedi was a person whose freedom was taken away in that respect when they were too young to understand what was going on. Even if they fully embraced it as an adult, and the order didn't forbid anyone from leaving as an adult either...they never asked to go down this path to begin with, and now they've lost X number of years they'll never get back, and trying to reintegrate into normal society when you're a psychic wizard is a daunting prospect.)
That's the thing that frustrated me about old Legends EU as well - that Luke turned Yoda's "pass on what you have learned" into "
I need to train as many people as humanly possible because we're an endangered species, risks be damned." That's
not what he was instructed. He could have trained a single person - his sister Leia, or Mara Jade, or whoever - in his entire lifetime and still fulfilled that command. And then that new Jedi could turn around and train one more person, and so on...slow growth done right is not inferior to chaotic and ineffective exponential growth. Quality over quantity.
That's a lot to say: yeah, who says every little green gremlin in the GFFA who looks like Yoda automatically needs to become a Jedi, lol. Kind of reminds me of this meme:
