Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Knowing the Sith, it's likely that their attitude was "If Anakin ever has a child, we'll just kill it while it's still an infant". Hence the hiding of the twins.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII And yet Palpatine allows Vader to turn Luke to the dark side rather than killing him? Then he even tells Vader in ROTJ that Luke would seek him out and he'd bring before the Emperor so they could turn him to the dark side. Sorry, but it makes more sense forthe Force to have created Anakin to destroy the Sith and restore the balance. So reports of hew Sith in the sequels sounds morer than alittle odd to me.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII And that seems to have been Palpatine's aim by converting Anakin to become his new apprentice. A Sith Lord so immensely powerful that his skills and cunning could keep the Sith in control of the galaxy for generations. But when Anakin was horribly mutilated and left for dead on Mustafar much of that potential vanished since he no longer had much of his original organic body parts and was now confined to a life-support suit that severely restricted his mobility. The agile, acrobatic and vital Anakin Skywalker that Sidious had been relying on to be the new and future hope of the Sith was now a cobbled-together cyborg who couldn't even breathe on his own. Which probably led to the Emperor's desire towards the end of the OT to turn Luke to the Dark Side and use the younger Skywalker to replace his aging shell of a father as the new apprentice.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Even MORE new shots of the Falcon interior. Although it looks like this was before a lot of the extra detail and weathering was added. http://www.starwars7news.com/2014/0...falcon-interior-from-star-wars-episode-7.html
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII The "balance in the force" thing never made much sense to me. "Balance" implies equilibrium in distribution. The idea that Anakin was to wipe out all trace of Sith isn't that at all. Balance is essentially what was achieved at the end of RotS: two Jedi and two Sith. In the two millennia sine Chwayatyun was enacted, Jedi greatly outnumber Sith. Then through the use of Anakin and Sixty-Six, Sidious changed all that. I've always seen the Force as being a Yin/Yang kind of thing. It's impossible to have the good without the evil and the evil without the good--a couple of the class stories in SWTOR do a really good job of exploring this concept. If Force users are the physical manifestation, then to have "perfect balance" means there needs to be equal distribution of both sides. Palps achieves this, not Anakin.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Lucas has described 'balance' in regards to the Force to mean harmony, not equilibrium. The presence of the dark side disrupts the Force, which in turn throws everything else out of whack. To bring balance to the Force means to purge the dark side from it completely, which was accomplished at the end of ROTJ (or so we thought).
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Check out what's at the end of the hallway in the third picture down. Looks like the ladder leading to the gun turrets.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Is it sad that I still barely understand what the interior layout of the Falcon is? I've seen various schematics over the years, but I still have a hard time connecting them with the actual sets I see in the movies.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII We never really saw the whole ship in the films, but what we did see is easy enough to place if you give it a little thought. This should probably help though. There's been a couple interpretations of what the layout should be over the years, but it's never going to make total sense since the interior set was about twice as tall as the external mock-up ever was. I'm not even sure if the medbay/bunkroom and there dorsal lift hatch glimpsed at in ESB were part of the same build or were separate set pieces like the cockpit.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII I gotta love a diagram that labels the secret compartments.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII ^ That is incorrect. The balance of the Force is between the light and dark sides, so the Force in balance has both light and dark sides. This is the natural state of the Force, as emphasized by Lucas' quotes on the subject over the years and more recently by the Mortis arc of TCW. Balance does not mean all of one thing and none of the other; in fact, that's totally unbalanced. In ROTJ it is the Sith Order that is destroyed, not the dark side itself. It's the balance of the Force, not the balance of the Force-users. Force-users are not the Force.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII All this is why Star Wars has gotten off track. In my opinion.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII The information I was going off of came from quotes from Lucas, as well. This certainly wouldn't be the first time he's changed his mind over time, though.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Yes. My guess is that is this just another example of Lucas pulling some BS out of his ass in an attempt to back peddle. He was probably trying to draw from Confucian Harmony [He], since so much of Force philosophy--or at least Jedi philosophy---is based on Dao/Confucianism. In super-duper simple terms, true harmony is obtained between opposing parties only when those parties maintain a state of perpetual and mutual conflict. So thee has to be both darkside and light side. But you said that already. But, like you say, at the end of ROTJ just the Sith were destroyed, which is why: Then it still doesn't make any sense. If the Force is simply some ethereal concept that exists beyond the common realm and it and Force users are mutually exclusive, then any "balance" is fleeting and Ani/Vader's actions in the physical world meaningless and irrelevant. If, on the other hand, it is as I said: Then my initial point still stands. It's sort of like the "If a tree falls in the woods..." conundrum. While it may exist without Force sensitives, it doesn't do anything without Force users. Therefore the only way to quantitate it is by the number of users. So basically: "If there are no Sith, then does the Darkside still exist?" Or "If there are no Jedi, does the lightside of the force still exist?" I suppose the counter argument would be, "Yes. The Force just is." But there again this implies the Force is some de facto thing that just sits "out there" and is totally unquantifiable, in which case any balance or harmony would be arbitrary.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII There aren't any Lucas quotes I know of which take that position. As far as I know this isn't a case of Lucas changing his mind. It's just that his statements on the subject don't agree with the beliefs held by a subset of the fanbase. But the light side and the dark side aren't those "opposing parties". Sith oppression is usually perceived as a bad thing. Getting rid of it is hardly irrelevant or meaningless to those facing extinction at the hands of darksiders. Can the restoration of balance be seen as ultimately impermanent? Of course - but this would be true in either scenario. It's "fleeting" either way, because new dark side users can always appear. ( There's a hint in the final Clone Wars episodes of some kind of "victory for all time", but we don't yet know if that will be developed in the ST or what exactly it means. ) Yes. ( Kenobi's "ghost" even said so in chapter 2 of HTTE: The Emperor is gone, but the dark side is still powerful. Never forget that. ) Yes. The Force is generated by all living things, not just Jedi and Sith. That may not be precisely accurate. For example, the Force may have been responsible for the creation of Anakin. On a more subtle level it seems to influence people and I don't think this influence is limited to what we call "Force-sensitives". During the prequel era there were thousands of Jedi and only two Sith, yet the Force was unbalanced toward the dark side. The Jedi at that time hoped for the restoration of balance. They presumably didn't assume this meant that most of them needed to be killed off. They wouldn't view Jedi-Sith parity as something that would be good for the galaxy, because it wouldn't be. It may be "out there" but it is also all around everyone, as Ben and Yoda said. It is everywhere in the galaxy. I don't know why it should be "quantifiable" in any sense, other than to say whether or not the sides are in balance at any given point. IMO it was never on that track in the first place.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII But see that's just it. I don't much care one way or the other, but ... It doesn't make any sense.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Speaking of balance in the force, in my TCW watching I just got to the story arc with (what I call, even though its not remotely accurate) the three force fairies (Good, Bad, and Old Guy). I was familiar with them because they were mentioned in the last SW book series before the EU was thrown away, and I thought the idea was stupid there. It was worse on screen, so I only watched the first half of the first episode, then stopped and skipped the next two. Honestly, the force fairies might be more damaging to the idea of the force than midi-chlorians.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Well, they're apparently all dead by the time of ROTS onward, so we don't really need to worry about them too much. Unless one of them ghosted... What doesn't make sense is the notion that the Force must be "quantifiable", and must be so in a way that reduces "balance of the Force" to "Force user head count". We have more than enough evidence to show that that particular substitution is an invalid one.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Because it's impossible to "balance" (whatever lame definition you're using) something that's completely arbitrary. It's not complicated. And let us not forget, Lucas himself quantified the Force when he introduced midi-chlorians. He did so the same time as this "balance" nonsense. Force sensitives and Force users are then the measuring stick of those midi-chlorians. Personally, I would have preferred Lucas kept the Force as the ethereal concept that existed solely in the tenuous state it was in the OT. And left the midi-chlorians--the one thing I absolutely despise about the PT--and that balance crap out.
Re: New Casting and Story Rumors re: EPISODE VII Yeah, if that were the case then with two Sith ruling a whole galaxy and at least two Jedi in hiding (plus Luke & Leia), in theory the force should have already been "in balance". Clearly that was not the case. Indeed the inbalance started when there were thousands of Jedi to two Sith, so it makes even less sense. What seems to make a difference is the degree to which one side or the other can exert influence over the living force (i.e. life in general.) Hence two Sith were able to dominate a galaxy and shift it towards darkness, but since the Jedi were passive in nature, their prevalence didn't upset things. I suppose if the Jedi, or another order of light side users ever took active control of the galaxy to impose order then a similar inbalance would be created....but that seems antithetical to what defines the light side, so perhaps any such attempt would be doomed to corruption and a fall to the dark side.