*reading Discourse-y Posts Again* I Do Think There's Often A Rejection Of Any Mundane Considerations

*reading discourse-y posts again* I do think there's often a rejection of any mundane considerations in the jedi, which I sort of get, since they're fantasy space wizards with swords, so any mundanity can feel incongruous, but for me that's part of the charm.

Take for example a discussion about why Anakin didn't visit/follow up on Shmi during his apprenticeship. If I proposed that maybe he could not afford it, that's deeply mundane. The idea that the temple is just really really far away and they didn't have a private ship they could borrow on their off time, and there's not actually a galactic internet he can facetime shmi, a poor farmer, on, that's very mundane for a fantasy space wizard with a sword.

But they're monks. They don't have a salary. They don't have personal wealth. They have some collective resources, and they're granted some resources by various parties. Anakin is eventually able to go to Tatooine when Padme offers to take him there. Maybe he faced censure for the unauthorized trip offscreen, but not enough to affect the plot in any way. Similarly, when Obi Wan goes on a personal mission to help Satine, he borrows Anakin's fixer-upper ship, and he isn't shown to get into trouble for taking a little vacation either (so maybe it's not just that it's super duper strictly forbidden.)

So then like. Yeah, there is a cultural reason for parents not being in contact with children sent to the temple. For sure. There's plenty of spiritual/cultural things going on, that get bound up in this. If it's part of your religion that you're part of greater whole and that some people aren't fundamentally more important than others based on things like blood, there's not going to be a prioritized resource allocation for visiting family members on the other side of the galaxy. Shmi deserves help as an enslaved person, but not more than any other enslaved person. Then maybe you have Quinlan running some op on tatooine, and maybe he could give Anakin some peace of mind, except if that would compromise opsec in any way, in which case that's not his priority. That's a cultural reasoning.

But also maybe sometimes the reason Anakin didn't go sooner is because he didn't have a sugarmama yet and maybe the reason Qui Gon didn't free Shmi is that his mind tricks didn't work on Watto. Maybe the fantasy space wizards with swords have normal-people problems too.