Comment on In Star Wars, what would it mean "to bring balance to The Force?"
BladeFederation@piefed.social 15 hours ago
Lucas himself kept it pretty simple. From interviews and the movies themselves, his narrative is that the dark side is a corruption and abuse of the force. Think like burning through natural resources, instead of renewable energy. The Force is not a finite resource in that way exactly, but corrupting the Force can have wider effects sociologically. This may seem. overly simple at first, but I don’t think it is.
But you know, death of the author and all that. The expanded universe saved Star Wars in my opinion, and gave it a lot of much needed depth. There was a lot of info about lessons Luke had to learn about accepting all parts of himself, and learning how fear, even of himself, leads to the dark side. He hesitated using powers like force lightning or mind manipulation because of how evil it seemed. But he learned that it isnt an act itself, but the indention behind it that matters, as well as the rezoning behind it. Dominating another’s mind to aura farm is not the move, but a Jedi mind trick to save lives is acceptible,for example. This was expanded in more in the EU by those that walk a middle path, the Grey Jedi.
The Prequels reinforced this by highlighting how imperfect and ultimately impotent the Jedi order was at the time of Palatine’s rise. I think that was intended even by Lucas.
While I don’t believe the discourse online that Anakin killing all Jedi and Sith WAS the balancing of the Force, the Jedi Order DID need to be reworked. Just like how religion in real life isn’t perfect and needs reform kn a regular basis, but we do need people to tell us to be nice to other humans and form a certain kind of social accountability. We certainly DON’T need an equal, “balanced” amount of people whose religion is mass genocide and “might makes right” to the degree that they kill their teachers (often guardians that raised them) as a rite of passage.
I’m not going to pretend there was any subtext to the sequels since there isn’t even a main text.
Source: used to be WAY too much of a Star Wars nerd.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
So it’s more a Ring of Power situation where some powers erode your morality?
Yes, I think there’s something to be said about Anakin’s religion preventing him from integrating himself. He was overtaken by his Shadow.
BladeFederation@piefed.social 14 hours ago
Yes but also no. Due to all the good Star Wars video games and the emphasis on dualism, we think of force powers as abilities unlocked on a skill tree, and you have to choose to use or not use them, or it’ll make your dark side points go up. That’s not really the case though. Everyone uses the Force for telekinesis. Force Choke is just telekinesis, except increasing the pressure specifically around the throat. Sure, you can kill someone and be “good” or Light Side, even specifically that way theoretically. But let’s be honest here: it was a way for Vader to torture or kill underlings that questioned him to assert his authority to aura farm. Not out of love, not out of any sense of “I need to do this to make the world better”. So it is a “dark side power” in practice, because of your intention. There is some debate about how Palpatine’s master (have you ever heard the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the wise?) was able to extend life. But at least one popular books says that it was by literally sucking the life energy out of someone else to extend your own life, increasingly having to kill more to extend your life by increasingly shorter periods. So yes, defying the laws of the universe of life and death, and using life itself (the Force that is a part of us all and we are all part of it) to inflict suffering, pain, and death, just to extend your own life ("you” really just being the Force too that exists for a small period of time, think Buddhism) is definitely a corruption of the Force for evil purposes. But if you were able to do this to sacrifice your own life to save multiple others, or even to save one person who can serve a greater purpose, perhaps that wouldn’t be seen as the Dark Side.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
That’s a satisfying interpretation, but it does leave open the question of why the Jedi could not see it that way. They seem more than anything else to be an object lesson against simple-minded dogmatism.
BladeFederation@piefed.social 13 hours ago
The oversimplified explanation: they are stupid/unwise/shallow. I couldn’t have said it better myself than your last sentence, that’s exactly the narrative purpose of the prequel Jedi order.
They have the correct words memorized, but they don’t understand what it actually means. Anakin is able to quote “unconditional love is encouraged, it is just attachment that is forbidden”. When he goes to Yoda after having nightmares of the future, he tells Anakin that he must learn to let go of the thing he is afraid to lose, since it is just a part of life. Is any of that wrong? Not particularly, was Yoda unconditionally loving him, or did he uncaringly spout dogma at him when he could clearly tell he was struggling. No questions of what it was about, no follow up, no kind words, no empathy, no nothing. There’s a lot more to it as well, but I’ll just touch on the clouding of the future. So, they could generally see the future before this point, and now they can’t. And they don’t think this is odd or concerning? They’re not on their toes enough to expect a trap or a feisty? Mace floats the idea of telling the senate in episode 3, many years after it started. Just because they are the ones the presuppose they are trying to do good and find the answers doesn’t mean that they will always have the answers or always be strong. Pretending otherwise led to the downfall of the free world.
I am all too familiar with the mindset as someone who was raised very Christian. Jesus himself even criticizes the practice of “tithing the mint and cumin, but ignoring thr weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness.” Basically. the religious leaders of the time took the old law’s command to give a tithe (one tenth) of your income to God SO seriously that they’d dump out every slice on their spice rack into a table once a week, and carefully divide it into 10 equal pieces, and give a tenth to God. Yet they completely missed the point of religion, the concepts and real people that actually matter. Even for the small things, why did God want them to tithe their belongings? Not because he came down and grabbed it from the altar every night, but so it could go to people who needed it but couldn’t afford it. Yet the religious leaders neglected the orphans and widows in the community. They were too enthralled with the specifics (and their own additional dogma) that when God himself came, they killed him because they didn’t recognize his teachings as the same thing they “followed”. Whether you believe in the Bible or not, it is a universal truth about humanity, and unfortunately even so-called Christians have learned nothing from this.
Similar to Anakin, I left my local church of over a decade because my mom got cancer, and nobody said a thing about it to me. I called out one guy on it later, and he was basically like “yeah but she’ll go to heaven so no big deal right? I don’t know what you want me to say” Like yeah maybe, even if I fully believe that (which I’m not sure I do anymore) or in Buddhism where we all become a part of something greater, I still have emotions and it would sure be great if anyone cared enough to help me process them. If God gave us emotions, it was for a purpose, not to ignore them.