Qui-gon Jinn Bashing - Tumblr Posts

1 year ago

What the Fuck

You know, I have a fair amount of fondness for what could be considered light Qui Gon bashing, specifically in regards to how he raised Obi Wan. I wonder if any of you could tell?

Along those lines I there is one thing I would love to see more of, the High Council finding out much later (like during the war) the fucked up parts of Obi Wan’s padawanship and just go ‘Fucking what????’

Walk with me for a minute while I explain.  Also this is an idea for an AU not a commentary on any version of cannon. 

There are 10,000 Jedi. There is no way the high council could be personally involved with all the Master Padawan pairs, not to mention not all the members during the war were members during Obi Wan’s padawan years. So let’s start from the premise that Qui Gon and Obi Wan had the normal amount of interaction with the High Council. This is, in part, because Qui Gonn lies like a rug for 90% of their reports to make them seem more normal than they actually are.  In this idea Qui Gon is also at the very least emotionally abusive and negligent, if not physically abusive as well. 

So Obi Wan grows up thinking things like being left in a Cantina for hours to days is normal Master behavior, or being lost in bet (both intentionally to track slave rings and just because Qui Gon did not have as good a hand as he thought), or being forced to meditate his needs away for days, or the crippling anxiety that Qui Gon seemed to be deliberately instilling. Obi Wan never does these things to Anakin (Obi Wan just cannot convince himself to treat Anakin like he was treated, but justifies it to himself that it was Anakin that had the strange padawanship because he came to the temple too late and too early. He does always feel like a failure of a master for the fact that he couldn’t do it). 

Obi Wan doesn’t talk about it to other Jedi, not out of shame but out of the sincerely held belief that every padawan faced the same, that it would be boring. He does not tell Anakin because he does not want to make his padawan feel bad for having a strange padawanship. 

He does give utterly horrifying answers to any member of his battalion that asks questions about his padawan years, which convinces the clones that the Jedi need to be protected from themselves. 

Now that we have set the stage, I think this should be a random time not tied to any specific set of events. Though It should be after Ahsoka is assigned to Anakin. I kind of want the Anakin, Ahsoka, Cody, and Rex present and the High council has just finished the “official” part of the meeting and have moved on to just chatting, or maybe it was before the meeting began, or perhaps it is semi official where they are talking about some Cantina in the mid rim that would be useful in an upcoming mission. 

No matter the situation, Obi Wan fondly reminisces about the proprietor and how they (the proprietor, Obi Wan, and some of the regulars) had worked out a routine where Obi Wan would lure in slavers that targeted children, the proprietor would drug them, and the regulars would steal their things and figure out where they were hiding their ‘product’.  

There is confused silence among the jedi present. At last Plo Koon goes ‘I know you looked young without your beard, but I didn’t think it was that young’ while thinking that he didn’t think he was that bad at judging near human ages. 

Obi Wan laughs and goes ‘oh no. This was when I was 14, though I was a bit stunted after Melida/Daan so I did look a few years younger. Master Jinn like to gamble around the corner whenever we had a mission that brought us to that sector, he got great tips about the slave trade. I was so scrawny that I didn’t make good collateral until I was 16. So he left me in the Cantina’. He then muses thoughtfully that the proprietor always seemed angry with Master Jinn when he came to collect Obi Wan. 

There is a dead silence, every member of the High Council turned silently to stare at Obi Wan.  Anakin, Ahsoka, and Rex looked shocked while Cody looked somewhere between tired and murderous as he stared into the middle distance. 

Mace Windu asks, in that careful voice people can get where they don’t want to let on that there is anything wrong, about being ‘collateral’.  Obi Wan answers with the air of someone who thinks their experience is much more universal than it was. Every answer he gives sparks more questions and more horror. 

Obi Wan is so used to thinking that his experiences were universal that it takes him several questions before he realizes that no one is reacting as if this is normal. He starts to try and explain, you know trying to make himself understood because he assumes that it is merely him explaining badly, which makes it worse and worse and worse. Anakin is near hyperventilating because that was decidedly not how his own padawan years went (and explained some of the strange questions that Cody has asked him over the years).

Cody is actually relieved that the Jedi appear to be just as horrified over all of this as the clones were.

Each and every other member of the High council is both internally and visibly going ‘Fucken what????!!!’ with every statement Obi Wan is making.  Just a straight up hour of being horrified, not evening being able to move onto guilt that no one noticed because of the sheer volume of WTF.  Interspersed with various Jedi thinking about how they are going to need to get a therapist that is dedicated specifically to Obi Wan, and probably a therapist for the therapist to avoid burnout.


Tags :