@Reverend
Statistically, there are probably hundereds of force capable children born each year, and that continued to happen after Order 66.
Some were found by Vader or the Emporer, but at a guess most just slipped through the cracks, so you could have a 20 something force user, with no training, or barely any they have cobbled together, so you may have a Merc, or a pilot, etc. that has force abilities. I'd like to start encountering them, not 66 survivors.
Let's not forget when and where we are in the timeline. For most of the last three decades there has been a concerted galaxy wide effort to hunt down, capture and/or eliminate *anyone* with force sensitivity potential. Statistically, only a
fraction of a percentage of those would have evaded capture and detection each year. Compounded by the systematic elimination of bloodlines with higher than average m-counts meaning the second generation born under the Empire would have an order of magnitude even fewer potential candidates, all while the resources levied against them only increases.
The Empire has only been gone for 5 years, so unless you're expecting the next big bad to be barely out kindergarten, it pretty much has to be a survivor, or someone trained by one.
Plus, as I already said, potential is only part of it. You have to have someone that actually knows what they're doing to 1) recognise the potential at an early enough age, and 2) train them to use their abilities. The only people out in the wild that that kind of knowledge are surviving Jedi. Without that, most will have their talent simply fade as they grow up. There's a reason Jedi prefer to begin instruction from childhood.
And none of this matters if as I suspect the point of these characters is to draw a direct parallel with Ahsoka and/or say something about the fate of the Order. You don't just pick the main villains out of a hat for the sake of variety, their story has to matter just as much as the protagonists.
It is one of those things that bothers me (still) with ROTS to A New Hope that the Jedi are treated as "extinct" and no possibly of returning. Now, that of course can be put on Imperial level arrogance thinking they had wiped out a threat, and that without formal leadership that the Jedi would not ever return.
I think it's just arrogance...and bad writing.
Correction: "all but extinct" is the exact words used. I'd say a few dozen or even a hundred survivors of a group that once numbered ten thousand qualifies as very nearly wiped out.
I don't mind that we have another order 66 survivor, but I hope his order 66 story is a little different than the rest. Surely there was some Jedi that were out on missions without a clone contingent at the time the order was issued.
Yup. There's at least two such examples in 'Jedi: Survivour' but I won't go into detail because I can't be arsed to use spoiler tags. Suffice to say one was off on their own doing stuff unrelated to the war, the other was working undercover much as Voss often did. Aside from that; the guy Vader got his new kyber crystal from right after RotS had taken the Barash Vow and was living as a hermit off on his own during the war. Plus you have those like Ahsoka (and Dooku, I suppose) that left the Order for their own reasons. Eeth Koth supposedly did so at some point during the war and it took Vader a decade to track him down. I'm sure there were others not in the immediate vicinity of clones. So there's options. It's even possible this guy was a disgraced Jedi in prison like Barris was, or as Krell would have been had Dogma not offed him. Maybe he escaped. Maybe he didn't and became an Inquisitor for a time before fleeing with a little fair haired force sensitive baby he couldn't bring himself to hand over to Operation Harvester, and instead raising her as his apprentice.
Not that I think it's a huge problem that the survivor stories are so similar, especially given the circumstances. Any Jedi around clones on that day got shot at, and were either killed or ran for their lives, forced to go into hiding. Those that weren't around clones (or worse) soon were whether they wanted to be or not, and again: getting shot at, running for their lives, going into hiding. Yadda-yadda-yadda.
Either way there's a commonality of experience there that's hard to ignore. Pogroms are like that.
