Wait, you're supposed to do with a lightsaber? When Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke that lightsabers aren’t as clumsy or random as blasters, he forgot to mention one other thing: If you bust out a lightsaber in most contexts, you have to be ready to turn that thing into a murder stick. This apparently doesn’t apply to instances of practice or using your lightsaber as a flashlight, but in , we’ve got a new layer of Star Wars lore that makes fighting with this elegant weapon not exactly as civilized as we were led to believe. In the very first scene of , as battles Mae (Amandla Stenberg), we hear a lightsaber rule that gives Indara pause.
It might give longtime Star Wars aficionados pause too. Is this really the way Jedi are supposed to think about their famous weapons? As much has been written about Jedi lore, the rules are slippery and have reached fans all out of order. What applied in one era of Jedi might not be true a few centuries later, and once you throw in all the pre-2014 comics and novels that are now non-canon, it’s easy to understand why we’re often confused about various Jedi codes of conduct, Force powers, and fashion choices.
Lightsabers are a good microcosm of just how much Star Wars canon has changed in a short time. Before 2016, most Star Wars fans assumed red lightsabers were red because of a red crystal, or, as more commonly suggested in the old Expanded Universe material, that the crystal was synthetic as opposed to the natural ones favored by the Jedi.
