In Star Wars, what would it mean "to bring balance to The Force?"

Submitted ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

So the Messiah in Star Wars is supposed “to bring balance to The Force,” but I never understood what it meant.

Star Wars is extremely dualistic–there is a good side and an evil side, a light side and a dark side, the Jedi and the Sith. Every plotline is based around a manichean struggle where only one side can win by annihilating the other.

The “good side”, the Jedi, are explicitly looking a savior to provide “balance” while at the same time imposing all sorts of restrictions on which force powers are allowed and which aren’t. For an order whose messiah is based on Taoist equilibrium, they are positively Christian in their obsession with purity.

I think there is an implicit subtextual critique of the Jedi Order in the prequels that they incompetent, as you might expect from the leaders of a theocracy, but that’s about as far as it goes.

I think the closest we get to ANY real discussion of balance is Luke’s vision on Degobah, where he must see himself as potentially Darth Vader, which can be interpreted as an attempt towards wholeness OR as a warning to not stray into evil.

Can anyone square this circle?

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ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Nothing. Nothing in Star Wars means anything. It’s just mediocre sci-fi at best and explanations for pretty much everything are worked out backwards trying to fix all the inconsistencies and nonsensical ideas. “This monster will digest you for 1000 years!”. So are people supposed to be kept alive inside of it for that long or you die immediately and it just takes 1000 years to poop you out? Just another silly phrase in a badly written script but I’m sure “the canon” came up with some crazy explanation for it (“you see the worm bends time and space in a way that one day inside of it feels like 1000 years!” or something).

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- tacosanonymous@mander.xyz ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Honestly, this.
  
  George Lucas had a basic outline then just started making shit up as it went along. He even tried to retcon stuff by blocking the reproduction of the original releases.
  
  Fans, and non-canon media spent so much time explaining his bs.
  
  If you want to enjoy Star Wars, don’t think about it too much. Just roll your eyes at the dumb stuff and cheer for the action.
  
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- Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Fantasy, not sci-fi. At least since Disney killed all the extended canon that tried to graft on science to all the fantastic elements.
  
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- Vedlt@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think perhaps the original Star Wars just being kind of a cool sci-fi/fantasy setting with more of a vague outline and nothing super concrete actually is what let it thrive in the way it did. I don’t know if it was intentional by any means, Lucas just wanted to make a neat space fantasy story and didn’t put a whole lot of thought into it. Nerds love to debate, nerds love sci-fi, nerds love fantasy. It’s almost a perfect breeding ground for what happened. Lucas and then Disney saw a rabid fan base and thought “I can use this” then tried to enforce more meaning into something that was vague and fun to speculate on and it ended up going very poorly until you look at the success of the sales. Cause some people just like space/fantasy stories.
  
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  - schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    You know, I will give SW credit for this: Luke’s decision to not fight his father at the climax of the trilogy is really quite amazing given the western pop film canon’s enshrinement of violence as the ultimate means to defeat evil. This was a culture that had grown up on Westerns and war films. The good guy always kills the bad guy in the end.
    
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  - ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Totally agree. Star Wars was just a cool movie and something new for its time. I even liked the first one but personally, I think the cliffhanger ending of the second movie was a disgusting cash grab that should have ended the entire experiment and it go only worse from there.
    
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  - LordMayor@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    He was trying to make a Kurosawa-esque, classical hero story set in space. He definitely had more than a vague idea but the Jedi magic stuff really seems like a kind of hand waving magic MacGuffin.
    
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- Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Agree with everything except one thing.
  
  It’s just mediocre sci-fi at best
  
  Star wars is not sci-fi, it’s fantasy. People usually make that mistake because most fantasy is medieval and most sci-fi is futuristic, but Star Wars is an example of a futuristic fantasy story. Medieval sci-fi is harder to find, but some Stargate episodes from the point of view of the native of the planet would qualify and I’m sure there’s some 40k or Star Trek examples as well.
  
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  - Grail@multiverse.soulism.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Mistborn is mediaeval sci-fi
    
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  - ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yes, of course you’re right but even ignoring all the fantasy bits and just focusing on the science and vision of the future it’s mediocre. Let’s take AI as an example. Star Trek has state of AI solidly defined: there’s one truly intelligent android, it’s state of the art and no one really knows how it works so it’s not copied yet but it’s recognized as a person and granted all rights. Computers are intelligent but not real AI. Dune doesn’t have AI and there’s an explanation for it. But Star Wars? C3P0 was build from junk, is completely useless but is kept around for decades as some sort of a pet or companion. At the same time robot soldiers are just weapons. AI is granted personhood or treated as appliance without any sense or logic behind it. Nothing besides robots has any intelligence for some reason. Star Wars used basic concepts from sci-fi but it’s clear the writers didn’t understand any of them.
    
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- schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yes, it’s pretty clear from the media around Star Wars that Lucas didn’t really care too much about Star Wars a work of philosophy or pragmatic world building… the Star Wars Christmas Special was particularly awful, and Alan Dean Foster, who wrote the original novelization of New Hope said Lucas’ instructions amounted to “whatever.”
  
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- Folstar@lemmus.org ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  There’s this all powerful force that binds the universe together and controls our destinies. It’s like gravity, but different and possibly sentient. We call it “the force”.
  
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marcos@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Anakin killed every single member of both sides of that dualism, and then died on the process.

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- Pudutr0n@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  well in his defense… balanced.
  
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  - marcos@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yes. It’s a classical oracle prediction.
    
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Satellaview@lemmy.zip ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Ultimately, Star Wars is made by a lot of authors with a lot of different visions and external pressures. I’ve heard three main interpretations:

Bringing balance to the Force means destroying the Sith, because darkness is inherently evil. Vader fulfills this by killing the Emperor and becoming redeemed in his last moments, “destroying” the last Sith. (Ignore the whole fleet of off-screen Sith retroactively placed there by Expanded Universe works.)

Bringing balance to the Force means making the number of Jedi and Sith equal, and Vader fulfills this by killing hundreds of thousands of Jedi.

Bringing balance to the Force means destroying the black-and-white view of Jedi and Sith, which definitely seems to be the position of the Bendu (an ancient loosely-all-knowing alien who shows up in a handful of episodes of Clone Wars, but has been treated by the broader franchise as disproportionately important). Vader fulfills this by breaking the boundary between Sith and Jedi in his dying moments—or maybe the prophecy was about Rey after all. (Doesn’t this make the shot of Luke’s face inside Vader’s helmet the most interesting? Almost as though it’s saying both “there is evil in you, but there is good in him too.”)

Which is “right”? Well, you’d have to ask Lucas, wouldn’t you? Or Rian Johnson, or Dave Filoni, or the entire writing team of Knights of the Old Republic, or any of the thousands of people who’ve written for Star Wars… There’s not just one answer.

I think any of these could be true, from a certain point of view.
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- Pudutr0n@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You talk as if these are the only options. Only a sith deals in absolutes…
  
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  - akunohana@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I wouldn’t pick a fight with ‘em if I were you. They have the high ground:
    
    134JxffzKquVtZz.png
    
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  - Satellaview@lemmy.zip ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    😁
    
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- schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  There’s true and there’s satisfying. The third option is the only one that I find personally satisfying and the one least explored.
  
  I’m happy not to read what authors have to say for the most part, just as I´d rather watch their movies than read their twitter feeds.
  
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Dadifer@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Apparently it meant kill all the super light-side users and all the super-dark side users, and just have ethically questionable middle-of-the-road force users.

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Danarchy@lemmy.nz ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The prophesy was misheard. Originally it was “bring bell-ends to the force” which tbf ended up happening

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modernangel@sh.itjust.works ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The prophecy of “one who will bring balance to The Force” wasn’t inserted into the franchise canon until 1999’s “The Phantom Menace”. Nothing in the original trilogy, nor any comic books or other lesser canon, points to this “bringing balance” notion before then.

According to actor Ahmed Best (Jar-Jar Binks, et al.), George Lucas explained “bringing balance to the Force” as purging all Sith / Dark Side influence. The Light Side is balanced-ness; the Dark Side is unbalance.

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- Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Ok, but what about when Spock says “Nanu Nanu”? Is that Spock’s mating call?
  
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  - modernangel@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It’s a joke in Sindarin, it means “your towel is in another castle”
    
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BladeFederation@piefed.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨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.

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- schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨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.
  
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  - BladeFederation@piefed.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨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.
    
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bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Balance to the Force meant basically all light side.

Trouble was that the Jedi have become arrogant and hypocritical. They were also corrupted by the dark side, they just weren’t realising it. They had become political puppets instead of guardians of peace and justice.

I wish George Lucas had been a little more overt about that.

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justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The "balance to the force" was misread by the Jedi council as meaning a complete Jedi victory over the Sith. Even in the first and second movies, Yoda and Windu both express doubts about the accuracy of the prophecy.

What a more pragmatic view would be is that a the force wanted a new type of force wielder philosophy where emotions don't rule over you(what the Sith ended as) but also one where emotion and connection are allowed to exist(what the Jedi outlawed.)

To that end, pre-Disney Luke and his academy were that new force wielder academy. One could argue that prequels Anakin struggled to meet that balance and his rebuff by the Jedi masters led to him being manipulated by Palpatine.

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Canconda@lemmy.ca ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Luke can use dark and light side force abilities. What makes him different from other similarly capable users like Darth Tyranus or Yoda is that he didn’t use the force to create a power structure. Everyone else, including Obiwan, was using the force to perpetuate an empire, a jedi temple, a senate, some sort of artificial construct that in would inevitably lead to imbalance in the force.

Luke trained Jedi with the goal of protecting life in general.

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- schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I always get kind of annoyed with Avatar’s squeamish around blood bending. Like, why? Why is that worse than hitting them in the head with a giant rock?
  
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  - Canconda@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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Septimaeus@infosec.pub ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Taoish equilibrium

While the most obvious explanation of the incoherency is that SW exhibits a mostly haphazard implementation of a philosophical aesthetic only loosely related to Taoism, an artifice on loan from the cultural fixations of the era, if we set that aside and assume the premise charitably in an attempt to reconcile, we arrive at an inevitable conclusion.

The Jedi order of the republic represented a decaying and overextended ideal terminally corrupted by its marriage to the state and its crusades. The council’s inability to see the coming reign of fascism, a future “shrouded in darkness,” should have been evidence enough, but they were blinded even to that, and incapable of setting aside their Force goggles long enough to reasoning deductively about current events. A new order was thus necessary which entailed near-complete destruction of the old.

That is to say, the council’s misunderstanding of the prophecy of “balance” as an event that could only increase their power and influence was just another symptom of their corruption. Their obsession with hierarchy and use of violence to maintain order in the galaxy through their various holy wars, for example, predicted the Imperial reign of fascist terror. Through that lens, restoration of balance required their apparatus be drawn to its inevitable conclusion and dismantled before the galaxy could begin anew.

I know nothing of SW. I just made this up.

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- bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  I know nothing of SW. I just made this up.
  
  It’s pretty much spot on.
  
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IWW4@lemmy.zip ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Coming from someone who grew up at the best time to be a movie fan, the first movie I remember seeing in the theater was Jaws, the second was Episode IV, when it was just called Star Wars.

I used to think there was fleshed out detailed ideas on the story points of the movies. It has since been made clear that they were all winging it the whole time.

So what doest bring balance to the force mean? Nothing … Nothing more than some cool shit for a character to say.

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- schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Saw an interesting video about why Jesus had to die. Originally, he was supposed to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven, maybe without dying. Then, he said something “lol brb” and his disciples waited. But as his original disciples started dying off, people started to think, “Well, maybe he ain´t coming back right away, so what did he die for?” and that’s where we get the concept of him dying for our sins, which has gone through many different permutations over the century.
  
  I find it interesting because really what happened is people fell in love with the STORY of Jesus, of a God who became man (this was sorted much later) and died in the worst way possible; they wanted to keep the story, so they´d ad hoc rationlizations after the fact.
  
  I feel like it’s the same way with Star Wars. We love the world and SFX and the editing and it’s all very cool, but it’s really a Flash Gordon adventure with a patina of Eastern Mysticism, so fans have to do quite a bit of work.
  
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Pudutr0n@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
it’s like a vibe you know?

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Vince@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yeah always confused me too, there hundreds or thousands of jedi vs 2 sith? Seems like balance would be the last thing the jedi wanted

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- cattywampas@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  The presence of the dark side/Sith is imbalance. The light side is balance.
  
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Steve@communick.news ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I think the Jedi incredibly stupid in Episodes 1, 2, 3.
They had a prophecy about one to bring Balance in a time when the Jedi were unquestionably dominant. Well Balance during that time, would obviously require the Jedi to be taken down. Anakin was that balance. The Jedi order was destroyed and the Sith began their period of domination. Creating Balance.

The next obvious story for Episodes 7, 8, 9, would have been a the creation of a new order, neither Jedi or Sith, that fostered Balance within each member. That’s where Rian Johnson was going with Ep. 8. But the idiot Glass Union came back and shat the bed trying desperately to unravel all that, going back to what he thought the fans wanted. Which was the same old thing all over again.

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warbond@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Did everyone share qui gon’s view that Anakin was going to do that? Or was it just him and obi wan?

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- Canconda@lemmy.ca ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Quigon was one of the few “prophecy” enthusiasts. The closest to his disposition was arguably his former master, Dooku.
  
  Obiwan trained Anakin because it’s what Quigon wanted. And nobody could tell him otherwise because he was the first jedi to face a sith in millenia. Even YODA had never fought a sith lord.
  
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  - Telodzrum@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    A Sith kills a whole squad of Jedi in Acolyte. It’s a century before we hear Duel of the Fates for the first time, but nowhere near “millennia.”
    
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meathorse@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
There were lots of Jedi but only two Sith… Jedi are a bunch of cheating bastards who wouldn’t let the Sith play with their Senate. That’s why Anakin got recruited, they just wanted to balance the teams for a fair game.

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Rumo161@feddit.org ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
So there are some books were this relevant. I short: The force has no good or Bad. By forcing (lol) a direction on it like the sich and the Jedi did it got out of its natural balance. To live as one with the force is to follow its ways rather than forcing () your way in to it. The Jedi and the sith had to die to bring balance to the force.

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ToiletFlushShowerScream@piefed.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Lots of highly detailed responses in the comments, and yet I’m still confused.

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- cattywampas@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Light side = balance
  
  Dark side = imbalance
  
  Sith = dark side. Must get rid of Sith for balance.
  
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  - queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I think that is precisely the misreading that led to the downfall of the Jedi order. The dark side of the force isn’t inherently evil, just as the light side isn’t inherently good. The Jedi did a lot of shitty stuff under the banner of being the good guys. Balance, I think, is having all aspects of the Force (that is, all living things) in harmony.
    
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bobbyfiend@retrolemmy.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Definitely that everyone should be centrist.

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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Getting the force users to be even split between light side and dark side. That’s why Vader brought balance to the Force; there were way too many good guys.

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IAMgROOT@lemmy.wtf ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Anakin brought balance to the force, for a small amount of time, there was only 1 jedi and 1 sith

the Jedi were just terrible at reading prophecies

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- cattywampas@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That’s not what balance means for the Force.
  
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  - IAMgROOT@lemmy.wtf ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    its balanced right? In the Republic, it was really imbalanced as there were thousands of Jedi but only two sith.
    
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AskewLord@piefed.social ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
it’s supposed to be that the jedi and the sith are always moving to equality. one rises, the other falls, vice versa.

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