gffa:
“But in preserving life, there was still the act of taking it. And losing even more of it. An endless tide of it. I could feel thick pockets of it snuff out–small tremors in the Force, each like a clench squeezing the air from my lungs.“
I can’t stop thinking about this moment during the war, when we get a glimpse inside what it’s like to be a Jedi in the middle of a battle. How the focus on the determination to protect people and to save lives can clear the way, but that also means taking life. This is not a situation where there’s a way out, to preserve life means you have to take the life that’s determined to kill others.
And to feel all that life being snuffed out around them, a Jedi feels that like a physical clench around their lungs.
They still have to keep going or they’ll die, the people behind them will die, more people will die.
But every battlefield, not just the psychic weight of every person’s anger and fear being pressed down on the Jedi–because the Jedi are literally psychic empaths who feel other people’s emotions through the Force–but their deaths reach out through the Force and squeeze the air out of their lungs.
It happens again and again and again and again, it never stops until the battle is over.
And then you have the lingering death in the air, no longer active, but suffused through every atom of it. Every clone feeling the loss of their brothers.
All of this piled on top of your own feelings.
Imagine being a psychic who feels other people’s anger and fear and their death will reach out and drag you down just a little, bit by bit, but if you don’t stay and help, people will die. And you have to maintain your focus through all of that, you have to clear the noise of your own thoughts out of your head, you have to clear all those deaths and all that fear from others out of your own head, because if you reach out to the Force in fear or anger, that’s how the dark side literally works.
Just imagine what kind of mental discipline that takes.
Just imagine what kind of horror show it is not just to see it, but to have all that death reach inside you and squeeze.
This is what it’s like to be a Jedi.