If you spend enough time in Star Wars circles, you eventually see some version of this claim: “Qui-Gon never even taught Obi-Wan any lightsaber forms.”
It sounds wild on the surface. Obi-Wan Kenobi is one of the most famous duelists in the saga. He beats Darth Maul, stands toe-to-toe with General Grievous, and goes the distance against Anakin on Mustafar. How could his own Master have “never” taught him forms?
The thing is, this idea doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes from one very specific moment in the novel Master & Apprentice, and when you look at that scene in context, you get a much more interesting answer:
Qui-Gon didn’t forget to train Obi-Wan.He held him back on purpose.
The Scene in Master & Apprentice That Started This Question
The root of this whole discussion is a late-night scene in Master & Apprentice, set years before The Phantom Menace.
Obi-Wan has just found out, indirectly, that Qui-Gon has been invited to join the Jedi Council. Nobody has told him what that means for their partnership. He assumes the worst: that his Master is planning to move on without him and hasn’t had the courage to say it.
He tries to meditate and can’t settle. So he does what a lot of Jedi seem to do when their emotions won’t sit still: he goes to the dojo.
In the empty training hall, Obi-Wan ignites his lightsaber and starts running through the basic cadences. The narration spells out exactly what those are: “The basic cadences were where everyone began. The primary moves, key defenses, potential attacks.” Obi-Wan has become “very strong in the starter cadences over the years,” and like most Padawans, he expected to be shown other forms and start building his own specialty.
But he’s angry.
At his age, most Padawans expect to be moving on to more advanced work: specialized styles, refined sequences, the kind of material you’d associate with named “forms.” Instead, Obi-Wan is still being told to repeat the same fundamentals over and over. In his head, that only means one thing: Qui-Gon has never planned to keep him long-term.
That’s when Qui-Gon walks in on him.
Obi-Wan finally blurts out what’s been bothering him:
“I’ve been asking myself why you’ve never trained me past the basic cadences… You can’t have thought my skill was inadequate. So why not move on?” From Obi-Wan’s point of view, you only do that if you’re not invested in your student’s future.
Qui-Gon’s answer is short and frustrating. He tells Obi-Wan, “I kept you in the basics for a reason, Obi-Wan. And if you’d ever understood why, you might have understood me well enough for us to excel as master and apprentice.” Then he leaves without really unpacking what he means.
That moment is what fans latch onto. It’s not a literal admission that Obi-Wan never learned any forms. It’s a glimpse of how badly misaligned their expectations were.
What Qui-Gon Was Actually Trying to Do
If you pull back from that scene and look at Qui-Gon as a character, his approach makes more sense.
Qui-Gon is never portrayed as a teacher obsessed with technique for its own sake. He’s a “Living Force” Jedi—someone who cares about being present, listening to the will of the Force, and not getting lost in dogma or image. He’s also openly uncomfortable with the idea of Jedi as front-line warriors or celebrities.
That attitude carries into how he sees the lightsaber.
In Master & Apprentice, there’s a moment where Obi-Wan is thinking in more aggressive, almost showy terms about weapons, and Qui-Gon pushes back. For Qui-Gon, a lightsaber isn’t supposed to be a status symbol or a spectacle. It’s a tool a Jedi carries because they have to, not because they want people to be impressed.
Now drop that mindset back onto his training choices.
Instead of racing Obi-Wan through the catalog of advanced sequences and variations, Qui-Gon makes a different call: he locks the door and keeps his Padawan inside the fundamentals.
From his point of view, it all comes down to the foundation. If Obi-Wan’s basics are flawless, he can adapt under pressure without needing a specific “named” form for every situation. If his movements are built on instinctive, drilled-in patterns, he’s harder to read and harder to exploit in real combat. And if he isn’t constantly chasing the next flashy technique, he’s less likely to treat the lightsaber as a status symbol instead of a tool he carries because he has to.
In other words, Qui-Gon is prioritizing depth over variety. He’s trying to raise a Jedi whose foundation is so solid that everything else can grow naturally on top of it.
The problem is that he never really tells Obi-Wan that.
To a Padawan stuck repeating cadences while his peers move on, it doesn’t feel like a grand philosophy. It feels like being left behind.