EZRA HONEY..
You know a lot of people might claim this is proof Ezra’s as dense as a brick/blind to the obvious, but I have to wonder what it reveals about his scattershot education. Because he didn’t exactly get typical Lotholian academic instruction, much less military lingo for dummies…
@4persephone exactly!!! I’ve made a whole post about this before, but I always think it’s important to bring up. Because while it’s fun to laugh at this scene, it’s also quite sad because Ezra would have gotten 1-2 years MAX of a formal education (if he got one at all) before he had to fend for himself with all his time literally occupied by finding food, shelter etc. It’s honestly a miracle he can read as well as he does imo.
I agree…
he gets painted as kind of socially dopey and some seem to assume that he’s unintelligent as a result but his tech skills and capacity to learn as much as he did with minimal help/instructed and limited resources – not to mention the fact he survived as long as he did from age 7 with no consistently regular assistance with food or shelter or help when he was sick or injured?
Boyo may be undereducated but he certainly isn’t stupid. His IQ is probably fairly ridiculous. (I suspect from his clear memories of his folks talking to Tseebo and ability to understand so much of what they were saying to eachother from context at age six that he was a highly gifted child cognitively who already had the fundamentals of phonics down before his parents disappeared..which doesn’t mean he had an adults grasp of vocabulary/spelling etc) He’s just very patchy in his knowledges/understandings in some areas of life because his school was mainly one of ‘not dying’ – which required constant pragmatism and didn’t let him acquire much knowledge that wasn’t useful on a daily basis.
Still when you consider he had work each day long enough to feed himself and try and store up a certain amount of emergency provisions, maintain his home to at least some degree, make a daily trip from Capital City to home in varied weather, avoid the imperials and people from the city’s under belly and learn about security systems for break ins building layouts etc etc..and he did this semi sucessfully for 4 plus years before he was even a teen
Like I said he may be socially awkard as all get out and underinformed in some subcultural contexts.
But dumb or unadaptive he certainly isn’t.
completely agree with you guys! i also think that, even WITH a formal education, ezra might still be pretty ignorant wrt clone wars history, especially compared people who LIVED it. any imperial sponsored education ia heavily riddled with propaganda and inaccuracies. add in the fact that lothal was not directly involved in the clone wars, so ezra wouldn’t have grown up around adults who have their own experiences w the clone wars to share, unlike sabine. it’s no wonder he simply doesn’t KNOW what the clone wars were like.
ezra knows what the clone wars were in the most basic sense. he knows the jedi we’re wiped out. he knows they ended with the death of the Republic and birth of the empire. he even recognized kanan’s lightsaber from old bootleg holovids. but clonetroopers? battle droids? hundreds, thousands, millions of deaths? im sure he comprehends that war means that happened, but just doesn’t grasp the reality of it.
and as far as how intelligent ezra is, education or not, i agree he’s definitely pretty bright. if we can judge by how well he writes in “ezra’s rebel journal,” he writes QUITE WELL for a kid whose formal education ended at 8. he also shows a knack for planning and for engineering – he mentions rigging up booby traps and an obstacle course in his tower. and of the “galactic events” he HAS lived through, it’s clear he has a good understanding of the world around him, how the empire operates. he has gaps (geography is toootally a weak point) but ezra picks stuff up pretty quick and knows how to turn it into something USEFUL.
when it comes to his social skills, ezra can be clueless, DEFINITELY, but at the same time he regularly displays a really powerful sense for emotions. part of it is his connection to the force, but it’s also that he has a powerful sense of empathy as a human being and gives him a unique ability to connect with others. his tips on surviving on the street also demonstrate a strong understanding of how people react – yell “i’ve been robbed” and people will check their wallet so you know what pocket to pick, act like a lost kid and they won’t suspect you. where ezra IS completely out of his depths is with sort of unwritten rules of social interactions, social rituatals, and detecting unspoken implications. it’s not that he’s “stupid” or anything he just doesn’t really GET people in that sense (i think that’s more of an ezra issue than a lack of education thing)
space 