Developing the Jedi Persona – 2 : Dates and Ages

As I discussed last post, while I knew that I couldn’t portray an AgriCorps persona in the New Republic period, I still needed to pin down a time period that would work (because personas work best when they are tied to a specific place and time). While conceivably I could go with any point in the previous 1,000 years, I had some decisions to make.
Even though I’m pretty sure most folks would agree that the Galactic Civil War is the best period, the further back in time one goes from the Prequel Trilogy era, the hazier and less-fleshed-out things get. Also, since (at least for now) I’d likely be presenting this to children, I figured I should probably keep it situated around the Prequels and the Clone Wars, with which I expect a younger audience would be fairly familiar (especially compared to the ~950 years between the Battle of Ruusan and the Stark Hyperspace War, which are pretty much blank).

Therefore, next I thought about what would be my ‘anchor point’—the place where my life history matches up with the GFFA timeline. At first, I considered basing it around the Naboo Crisis, since I was 11.5 when Episode I was released. That meant I would’ve been born 43 years Before the Battle of Yavin, and since I’m almost 30, would put the ‘present’ at 13 BBY.
That seemed decent, but I like having choices, so I tried coming up with another.

My second option would be to anchor around the outbreak of the Clone Wars, since I was 14.5 when Episode II was released. That would make me born 36 BBY, so I would’ve been four years old during the Naboo Crisis, then washed out to the AgriCorps at age 13 (23BBY) just before the Clone Wars (which would explain why I didn’t play more of a role…but could also let me channel my AgriCorps duties into a sort of ‘victory garden’ scenario to ‘feed the troops’!).

Now we were getting somewhere! The brilliant thing about Lucas’ approach to the Prequels was that by having the Clone Wars last three years—the same length of time between the release of Episodes II (2002) and III (2005)—we essentially got to watch the war play out in real-time. This means that I can say that I was age 14-17 during the War, and was aware enough to follow its developments (because I did, via the various cartoons, video games, and books)!
So: if I’m almost 30, that puts the ‘present’ at 6 BBY, which is solidly in the Dark Times, but not yet in open Rebellion period—in other words, there’s not that much happening on the surface, but we do hear some rumblings.
I liked this time scheme much better than the first. But I had to wonder: would it be too ‘Gary Stu’ of me to survive the Empire’s Purge that long? Almost certainly! But…if I’m starting off on a backwater agriworld, away from clones’ Order-66’ing, with no lightsaber or overt Force powers…if I picked up the Stay-Away signal and went underground or nomad/native? Hmmm. Maybe its just me trying to self-justify and make myself feel good, but I like those odds!