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?
Edit: It’s funny to me that there are more comments than upvotes. People want to share. I love it.
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.
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.
Anakin killed every single member of both sides of that dualism, and then died on the process.
That is, until Disney got their hands on the story.
well in his defense… balanced.
Yes. It’s a classical oracle prediction.
Yes, I think the surest path to rescuing this aspect of the story is as Greek tragedy.
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.
Knowing that, the prophecy is obviously a callback to the climax of Episode 6… But then in 2012, Lucas sold out creative control, so we started seeing post-Empire Dark Side masters anyway (Moff Gideon, Kylo Ren, Snoke etc.) So I think we have to downgrade expectations of the prophecy: it was important within its own stretch of the Star Wars tapestry, but its Balance was merely for a time, not all time.
Ok, but what about when Spock says “Nanu Nanu”? Is that Spock’s mating call?
It’s a joke in Sindarin, it means “your towel is in another castle”
Not to be confused with “Shazbot” which is Melmakian for “Frak the positronic Trans Am.”
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.
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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Oh, there’s a Nickelodeon TV show called Avatar: The Last Airbender where people have telekinetic ability called bending, but limited to a single element (Earth, Air, Fire, Water). There’s an episode where a character is forced to bend the water inside someone’s blood to prevent her from killing people and it’s made out as a step towards evil, like a dark-sided Force power, whereas it’s really just one more way to use bending to force people to your will, just like bending a rock at their heads.
Avatar has some impressive depth to it and the writing is impeccable; definitely and always a kid’s show first, but I discovered it as an adult so it has a lot to offer. Just make sure to watch the original animated series and not the Netflix live-action caricature (and not to be confused with Avatar: Dances with Wolves in Space).
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The way my brain works, unfortunately. You’re not alone. My constant context-switching bothers my gf too.
Edit: Though I guess I’m a little confused (and annoyed) about why you think this is an AI thing. There’s a pretty obvious connection between bending and the Force.
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
The presence of the dark side/Sith is imbalance. The light side is balance.
it’s like a vibe you know?
edit: basically like when someone says “this would be chill” only with jedis and shit.
Did everyone share qui gon’s view that Anakin was going to do that? Or was it just him and obi wan?
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 at that point.
So ya even tho Obiwan’s emotional attachment to quigon was clearly what drove him to defy the council if need be, there wasn’t much they could do because Obiwan was galactically viral at the time.
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.”
Acolyte isn’t star wars. It’s a fan fic with a budget.
Best lightsaber fight ever in it. More story in one season than all of the sequels combined.
It’s good Star Wars.
