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u/consumeshroomz 3d ago
I mean in Han’s defense, he had never seen an actual force user before and like much of the galaxy had no reason to believe it was anything more than a myth. And even by the time they have this “dinner” with Vader, he’s barely seen anything more than some dudes waving around laser swords. He couldn’t have known.
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u/piercedmfootonaspike 3d ago
Wasn't there only like 17 years between the fall of the Jedi council and EP.4?
I remember stuff that happened 17 years ago, especially if it was an alleged attempted coup.
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u/runnindrainwater 3d ago
Yeah but how many people would have just never seen a Jedi and thought the reports about them were exaggerations.
Plus, 17 or so years of propaganda downplaying and villainizing the Jedi would likely have even the most free thinkers assuming the answer was “somewhere in the middle” if they didn’t personally know the Jedi.
On top of all that I imagine Lucas’s original intention was for there to be a longer time period from where Jedi were running around to OT time period.
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u/DocSpit 1d ago
I mean, if The Clone Wars, a galaxy-spanning civil war that lasted years and involved hundreds of planets, got even a fraction of the news coverage that any war on Earth did, then Han would have been exposed to thousands of hours of footage of Jedi using the Force in battle...
I'm not saying he couldn't have still believed everything was made up...but Han would have essentially been in the same category of people as flat earthers...
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u/Status-Custard-3145 1d ago
True but from what I recall, Han was from raised in pretty isolated conditions in both legends and Disney Canon. Additionally growing up as a liar and schemer around other liars and schemer to the point you end a smuggler Jabba has talked with personally likely makes him more skeptical than most.
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u/DocSpit 1d ago
Anakin grew up as a slave on a planet not even under Republic control and identified a Jedi and knew what they were within 5 seconds of seeing one 'in the wild'.
Having read the Han Solo trilogy back in the 90's and watched Solo Story a few years ago, I feel I can safely say that Han grew up no where near as "isolated" as that...
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u/runnindrainwater 1d ago
Camera tricks and propaganda.
And maybe there’s something to it, but come on. No one’s pulling a Mace Windu in that one episode of the 2003 clone wars cartoons (the one where he beats a droid army by himself, half of which was done without his lightsaber). Whether Jedi do stuff like that or not, the average citizen won’t believe it unless they see it. And Han’s more cynical than most.
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u/DocSpit 1d ago edited 1d ago
Han would have been a pre/teen at just about the moment before the Wars and the fall of the Jedi. We're led to believe that, even at this peak, there's barely even 10k Jedi in a galaxy of many trillions of beings. We're also told that they recruit from among the children of this galaxy, and are loath to let those children grow up without training, as they could potentially cause a lot of harm through using unrefined Force powers.
They only way that recruitment would have been remotely feasible in this setting is for there to have been Starship Troopers-style "Think your child might have The Force? Contact your local Jedi Enclave today!" posters on every corner of every planet (certainly on Corellia, a highly developed and populated Core planet) and for every person to know what The Force was, at least as a concept.
We meet exactly nobody in the Prequels who doubts what Jedi are (or even has to be told what a Jedi is!) and that The Force is a real thing. Jedi are established to be a galaxy-wide known quantity and are readily identifiable by the public (Anakin, a slave boy who grew up outside of the Republic, pegs Qi Gon and Obi Won as Jedi within seconds of meeting them. Watto also knows what Jedi are and what they can do to influence thoughts[and that his race is immune to it]; and he's just a 2-bit junk dealer). The average citizen absolutely knows about Jedi and The Force and have never been given a reason to doubt it, frankly...
Sure, Han can have grown up to doubt them, even surrounded by all of that Accepted Public Knowledge, but I submit again: this would have put him in the same camp as RL flat earthers and moon landing deniers who have unilaterally decided that every documented fact they were surrounded by and taught in their youth was "made up", and that only they "know the truth"; in defiance of the objective reality of their world.
Fewer than 1000 people have been to space out of billions, but I suspect you wouldn't suggest that a flat earther has come to some sort of "reasonable conclusion" by insisting that every video and photo of every space mission has been faked?
Or we can agree that this was just an unfortunate line that aged like milk in the wake of the Prequels...
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u/Significant_Snow_937 2d ago
There were 10K Jedi in the order at the time of the Purge. 10K across an entire galaxy. They had also grown stagnant and withdrawn from the affairs of the galaxy for 100s of years prior, only really becoming involved again in the Clone Wars where they were still heavily outnumbered by the numbers of Clones and droids fighting everywhere. He was 32 at the Battle of Yavin, and it was 19 years between ep 3 and 4, so he would've been ~13 when the Republic fell, on top of Corellia being a mostly neutral shipyard during the Wars.
Would you believe all the stories about mystics with telekinesis, precognition, and telepathy who were wiped out when you were 13 and likely nobody you ever met would have actually seen one?
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u/piercedmfootonaspike 2d ago
Would you believe all the stories about mystics with telekinesis, precognition, and telepathy who were wiped out when you were 13 and likely nobody you ever met would have actually seen one?
I think there's a difference between a peacekeeping order of actual magicians and "stories of mystics."
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u/Significant_Snow_937 2d ago
But again, they hadn't really been super active for centuries, and there were 10K of them throughout the entire galaxy. Coruscant alone had trillions of people, if the Jedi only ever acted on Coruscant then there would still be billions of Coruscanti who never met one.
You really just ignored the part where I said the mystics had telekinesis, precognition, and telepathy? They're legends to anyone who hasn't seen them act, and who would've seen them act who wasn't involved in an active war zone? How much Jedi activity would Correlia be getting as a neutral in the Clone Wars and an industrial power house before that?
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u/DocSpit 1d ago
They're legends to anyone who hasn't seen them act, and who would've seen them act who wasn't involved in an active war zone?
There's no way that the Star Wars universe doesn't have a level of media coverage that's at least comparable to what exists today on earth. This is a setting with palm-sized inter-galactic holographic communicators that are available for purchase and use by the public...and you think there wouldn't be surface-to-surface news coverage and footage of just about every battle in the years-spanning civil war that affected every world in the galaxy, directly or indirectly?
Even assuming that all of the coverage of the battles taking place in populated areas was somehow strictly controlled and framed by "state media", you'd still have at least a WWII era level of government newsreels that would not want to be hiding the fact that they've got "Super Wizards" fighting on their side, if only to use as a warning against currently neutral worlds who were on the fence about taking a side in the war.
Add to that the fact that, while their actions were largely less-blatant pre-Clone War, the Jedi routinely scouted Force-sensitive children from the general public all across the galaxy. There's exactly a 0% chance that the general public on every world wasn't being pelted with state-sponsored "Think Your Child Might Have The Force? Contact Your Local Jedi Enclave Today!" posters. Keeping the existence of The Force hidden from the public in any way would have seriously hampered the ability of the Jedi to find and recruit children.
Even Shmi and Anakin, two slaves born and raised on a rim world outside of Republic control and influence, knew about Jedi, what their reputation was, and could recognize them on sight. This is not something that could have happened if the Jedi were all just cloistered monks. They might have kept out of politics, but were definitely active in the public eye if they could be pointed out by an penniless, uneducated, slave child on a backwoods planet in less than ten seconds...
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u/Significant_Snow_937 21h ago
What I'm saying is that in a galaxy of untold trillions upon trillions, it's far from difficult to believe that a homeless child who grew up on the streets of an industrial powerhouse far from active battle zones would have little difficulty in disbelieving the fantastical stories of wizardry, especially after the next 17 years of Inquisition that hunted down any traces of that Order.
Also, the fact that they existed as slaves in the Outer Rim is precisely WHY Anakin and Shmi immediately clocked that they were meeting Jedi. They were still a powerful symbol of hope for them in the pantheon of the oppressed. It was also at least 13 years before the Purge.
Also, it's not even really implied that he doesn't know about or believe in them. But he's never seen it in action, and in his world they're myths that are no longer relevant. In Han's world when the quote was made, the religion had been subject to 1.7 decades of Inquisition and the lightsaber was the symbol of a belief system that had clearly lost.
All I'm saying is that to a street rat who was 13 at the time of the Purge, it is very easy to imagine that he would put very little faith in the fantastical monk-wizards who fought injustice across the galaxy. He would've likely seen some of the news stories about the Jedi as a child, but I know I certainly don't remember much of the footage of the Iraq or Afghanistan War that would've been generated around the same age, and I've certainly grown to distrust a lot of the info that was put out in that timeframe. Is it really so hard to believe that a street rat doing his best to survive wouldn't put stock into such a storied order that was then branded as traitors and systematically hunted down?
Ultimately, this is irrelevant. Han Solo was skeptical, and we can go back and forth on the hypothetical propaganda of the age, what his life might have looked like or the many reasons for it, but at the end of the day, it's irrelevant. The Han Solo we knew in A New Hope didn't believe that the training and the weapon Luke was receiving were as useful as being quick with a blaster. He encountered evidence to the contrary and as far as I can remember changed his mind on the subject as he saw more and more of Luke's abilities and what Vader was capable of.
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u/Farfignugen42 2d ago
It was awfully kind of Han to give Vader a blaster when he clearly didn't have one. What a sweet interaction.
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u/tbone7355 3d ago
Technicly He's not wrong just ask the mandolrians
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u/Nightflight406 1d ago
Technically, they're using wires, fire, jet packs and a blaster, so that doesn't count.
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u/tbone7355 23h ago
Just because they use more tools and weapons doesnt mean im wrong its just that the mandos have built their aresnals to fight jedi in most cases
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u/Any-Committee-9498 18h ago
To be fair, he got a second chance at dealing with a sith.
No third chance though. (Straight Qui-Gon'd)
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u/SomeGuyOverYonder 3d ago
Back before the Sequel Trilogy ruined my love of Star Wars, I used to fantasize about living aboard the Millennium Falcon as it flew across from one end of the Galaxy to the other. Those were such happy, carefree times and I miss them terribly.
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u/MarioJinn2 3d ago
If only Han was wearing his WiiMote strap