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.
I think the answer to this is that George thought daoism seemed cool, but didn’t understand it.
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).
Edit: Same as the something-something run in 5 parsecs or whatever. Clearly just a mistake the writers made but the canon worked out some silly explanation for it.
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.
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.
I just thought about this now, but any alternate history that explores tech in the Middle-Ages would count as medieval sci-fi. For example, the Eastern Romans building on the ancient Greek technologies and experiments and using Greek fire, concentrated mirror beams, calculators and steam engines.
I found this universe that might be medieval scif-fi:
You beat me here. Great series and one I always use as an example in sci-fi Vs fantasy comparisons.
Dragons AND space ships!
Hmm…
Your point being?
It’s playing in the past and not in the future
Futuristic relates to technology level, not time period. Otherwise 2001 or Battlestar Galactica would not be futuristic either.
Edit: just to clarify, obviously futuristic relates to future, but in the context of a story being futuristic it’s about the level of technology being to the future of the current one.
Mistborn is mediaeval sci-fi
There are detailed in-world explanations for precisely where the magic comes from, who gets it, why, and how it relates to other physical systems.
It’s as much sci-fi as warp drives, planet cities, telecommunications aliens, ancient AIs, and space pirates…
Anyways, enjoy this quote:
There really is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions. Of course the scientist seeks to ask how things are the way they are, not to imagine how they might be otherwise. But are the two operations opposed, or related?
Ursula K. Le Guin, “It Doesn’t Have To Be the Way It Is,” June 2011; collected in No Time to Spare (2017)
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/28-it-doesnt-have-to-be-the-way-it-is
The books follow a series of Allomancers, who are individuals who can consume metal to wield magical powers.
Doesn’t seem scientific.
It’s more sci-fi than Star Wars
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.
Yeah, it’s a little hilarious to me that Star Wars occasionally tries to get serious about politics or economics and the droids are just kind of sitting there, completely unexamined in any way.
You can just spin up a consciousness that has to obey your orders and can be housed inside any kind of machinery and it has no impact on society?
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.
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.
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.
Hidden Fortress
@LordMayor @Vedlt I amused my sweetheart the other night by explaining the Lucas/Kurasawa influence, and pointing out that a katana is not a broadsword but is instead a type of saber, not heavy.
And the only reason those Samurais movies were made was because Japan had prohibitions on showing guns in movies since, well, you know, they were probably a little bit embarassed by how nuts they’d gone in dubyadubyatwo. Most of Kurosawa movies are really inspired by Westerns more than anything else.
I love the circular nature of culture.
I just realized now that “Dubya” means W.
And now I understand why that US president is given that strange nickname.
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.
@ExLisper @Vedlt The cliffhanger in the second movie was legit homage to the old Saturday morning serials ,Buster Crabbe style. Not that I liked it, but I think it’s legit. However, there is no forgiving the Ewoks, the yub yub dance, Jar Jar Binks, or a thousand and one other crass marketing grabs. And by the way, Han fucking shot first, mother-fucker.
Han didn’t shoot first. He was the only one who shot.
Makes it even more annoying when some insane fascist shit happens IRL and people are like “omg it’s just like what Palpatine did” or whatever.
Like no dude, it’s like what fucking Adolf Hitler did
Fantasy, not sci-fi. At least since Disney killed all the extended canon that tried to graft on science to all the fantastic elements.
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.”
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”.
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.
You talk as if these are the only options. Only a sith deals in absolutes…
I wouldn’t pick a fight with 'em if I were you. They have the high ground:
😁
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.
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.
It’s wrong to think there’s a good side and a bad side.
That’s like christians thinking they’re the good ones.
There’s no good or bad in taoismn
there’s no good or bad in star wars
good/bad is a Christian invention cause they love thinking they’re the good guys
can’t say what it takes to balance the force in star wars but I think you’re very corrupted by Christianity and are trying to project it in things where it shouldn’t
Your philosophical sophistication surpasses your reading comprehension.
One side killed kids, enslaved a galaxy, and blew up multiple planets
The other lives in a swamp, and smokes too much Halfing Leaf
bOth SiDeS
The prophesy was misheard. Originally it was “bring bell-ends to the force” which tbf ended up happening
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.”
I used to argue about the interpretation of the prophecy with other fans for years before I finally came upon an epiphany one day.
It doesn’t matter what it means, because even the Jedi don’t know for sure.
Yoda even admits that the prophecy may have been misread.
So every interpretation of the prophecy from “Destruction of the Sith” to “Equal number of Jedi and Sith” (the “official” canon answer and the oft-cited fanon answer respectively) to the much less common “The prophecy isn’t real/is a lie” and “The prophecy is real but Anakin/Luke/Rey were not the Chosen One” are all equally valid, IMO.
The movie gave you room to believe whatever you want to believe. Certainly, George made it clear what the Jedi themselves think - that the prophecy is real, that it means complete destruction of the Sith forever, and that Anakin probably isn’t the chosen one but they were willing to leave the door open for that one…
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know nothing of SW. I just made this up.
It’s pretty much spot on.
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.
Have you ever listened to the actual lyrics of “the final countdown” by europe. Star wars is pretty much just like that. Nonsense.
I can’t hear you over this AWESOME SYNTH RIFF
Dit doo doo doo dit dit doo doo doo
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.
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.
Nicely said!
