A couple of questions about the Force (in SW)

[Silvercrest]

Being Force sensitive and being trained in the ways of the Force are two different things. In fact strictly looking at the movie, being Force sensitive means nothing until you are trained. And since Luke was the only person left who received any training, Luke would go on to rebuild the Jedi Order, leaving no way for a Sith to receive any kind of training.

Who says the Sith need to come back? There will be darksiders out there. That's normal. But the existence of the horrendously evil Sith is abnormal, just as the existence of the old Jedi Order (so blindly self-righteous that they couldn't see beyond the ends of their noses) was also abnormal.

I agree with you that Balance shouldn't simply mean the light side of the force. But how does the Force define what is a bloated organization? From our point of view, the Jedi Order certainly seemed bloated where as the Sith were agile and nimble (as an organization). Why would the Force decide to take out both?

I paraphased too much. The Jedi were bloated, the Sith were corrupt. Having either in charge is provably a bad thing.

 

[David cgc]

According to George Lucas the light side represents balance and the dark side represents unbalance, so Anakin brought balance by turning back to the light, killing the Emperor, and then dying, thus destroying the sith and by extension unbalance. Balance, in the form of the light side, prevails as Luke survives to carry on the Jedi legacy.

Sorry, shipmate, but that just doesn't work. Even though I believe that's what Lucas said.

At the very least, if we agree that definition is correct (which I don't): light = balance and dark = imbalance, then the Force is already balanced at the beginning of Episode 1.

Far be it for me to act as though George Lucas knows anything about Star Wars, aren't all references to a "light side" of the Force in the films implicit? By which I mean, the Sith constantly are described as using the Dark Side of the Force, but with the Jedi, they only talk about the Force, without mentioning any side or division.

So there's the flaw in suggesting that "Balance in the Force" is a balance between Light Side/Jedi and Dark Side/Sith. As far as the films go, it's the Force/Jedi and the Dark Side of the Force/Sith.

Also, the Force is far from balanced at the beginning of Episode I. There's that whole thing with Palpatine being the culmination of a multi-millenial plan by the Sith to take over the galaxy and knocking over the first of his dominoes. Remember, if they hadn't lucked in to finding Anakin, Palpatine still would've successfully maneuvered himself into becoming Chancellor, paving the way for the Clone War and the destruction of the Jedi. Except there would've been no little Skywalkers to stop him in the end.

 

[Gaith]

The "will of the Force" bunk is yet another reason to join the Star Wars Prequel Rejection Society.

I hear people say that the Anakin in the Clone Wars is nothing like the Anakin in the PT.

Indeed, nothing like. Well, apart from his bride. And the fact that he knows Artoon and Threepio. And his basic TPM/AOTC history.

 

[Silvercrest]

David cgc wrote:

So there's the flaw in suggesting that "Balance in the Force" is a balance between Light Side/Jedi and Dark Side/Sith. As far as the films go, it's the Force/Jedi and the Dark Side of the Force/Sith.

Also, the Force is far from balanced at the beginning of Episode I. There's that whole thing with Palpatine being the culmination of a multi-millenial plan by the Sith to take over the galaxy and knocking over the first of his dominoes. Remember, if they hadn't lucked in to finding Anakin, Palpatine still would've successfully maneuvered himself into becoming Chancellor, paving the way for the Clone War and the destruction of the Jedi. Except there would've been no little Skywalkers to stop him in the end.

You've got some good points there. I'll have to rethink my position on light side/dark side. But as far as Palpatine goes: Yes, he would have become Chancellor and started the Clone War, but that's all we can be sure of. It's a lot less likely the Jedi would have fallen without Anakin around, Palpatine's inside man. If Anakin doesn't join them, the Sith aren't necessarily as great of a threat.

So if we're taking the position that the Sith are the imbalance and need to be removed: well, yes, he "balanced the Force" in the end, but it also means he helped unbalance it in the first place by turning to the dark side (AFTER Episode 1). And that skews the meaning of the prophecy quite a bit.

 

[Skywalker]

The Force was already out of balance, even before Episode I, because of Palpatine, Darth Maul, and all the other Sith in the millennium before them.

 

[infinix]

The Force was already out of balance, even before Episode I, because of Palpatine, Darth Maul, and all the other Sith in the millennium before them.

Umm.... so the Force could've been balanced if Anakin simply stood by and let Palpatine be killed by Windu? And no, please don't start an argument about whether Palpatine was faking it or not.

Its just really hard to understand the prophecy in the scope of the 6 films. The PT Palpatine was able to predict and manipulate just about every person at will, yet he didn't know about the prophecy, and couldn't foresee that Anakin was going to turn against him?

But I just had a very interesting thought. What if Palpatine was the person that started the prophecy non-sense in the first place? and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy?

 

[Thestral]

Perhaps this "prophecy" couldn't be fulfilled until both the ossified Jedi Order and the Sith were done away with and clean slate prepared for the Force to work. I mean, it's a pretty nasty requirement that the Force users go through a hard reset and ultimately makes Qui Gon Jin look sadly hoodwinked by his own idealism, but hey, that happens.

 

[Bishop76]

Here's the explanation. It's gonna blow your mind:

Lucas never bothered to think up the prophecy or write it. The whole thing is just made up on the fly and makes little to no sense as a result. In the first movie, the Jedi didn't know the Sith had returned so the prophecy was that the boy would just "bring balance to the force". In ROTS, the Jedi had learned that the Sith had returned and so the prophecy was changed to "destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force". It's bad, lazy writing and he had no idea where he was going with the story.

I mean, if the prophecy had been "to destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force" in TPM, wouldn't the Jedi have dismissed it because there were no more Sith? Why would they worry about this prophecy if the Sith hadn't been around for over 1000 years? Again, it makes no damn sense in any logical way.

 

[RoJoHen]

I feel like this is being interpreted far too literally. The Balance of the Force isn't a numbers game. If you kill all the Sith Lords, you haven't suddenly balanced the Force. Everybody is corruptible, and any good and noble Jedi Knight could potentially be turned over to the Dark Side given the right circumstances. I mean, what makes you a Sith? The ability to use Force Lightning? That's way too simplistic.

I truly think the Force sought balance within itself by doing all it could to eliminate as many Force Users as possible, until all that remained was good, honest, incorruptible Luke Skywalker. Really, by the end of ROTJ, who has Force Powers besides him? Luke IS the Balance in corporeal form.

 

[Hound of UIster]

So if I were a Jedi master during the times of the old Republic, my first reaction to this prophecy should most likely be "What do you mean bring balance to the Force? The Jedi Order is stronger than ever."

In the prequels the Force is already slowly coming out of balance as the Republic slowly falls to corruption and moral decay.

When the war began, and when I started getting a sense that the dark side of the Force is strong and clouding my senses, I would be extra careful and told all my fellow Jedi to always watch their backs.

Or you would go with the natural conclusion that Anakin was brought forth to fight and defeat the Sith Master thus bringing balance to the Sith.

 

[Hound of UIster]

The PT Palpatine was able to predict and manipulate just about every person at will, yet he didn't know about the prophecy, and couldn't foresee that Anakin was going to turn against him?

He wanted Anakin as his apprentice since he had the potential to become the greatest Sith Lord even more powerful than he was. Remember he believed Anakin was a result of the Dark Side experiments of Darth Plagueis. But once Anakin took the lava bath, he really didn't see Anakin as a threat to his power and kept him around as his servant.

 

[DWF]

The PT Palpatine was able to predict and manipulate just about every person at will, yet he didn't know about the prophecy, and couldn't foresee that Anakin was going to turn against him?

He wanted Anakin as his apprentice since he had the potential to become the greatest Sith Lord even more powerful than he was. Remember he believed Anakin was a result of the Dark Side experiments of Darth Plagueis. But once Anakin took the lava bath, he really didn't see Anakin as a threat to his power and kept him around as his servant.

There's nothing in the movies to indicate that Palpatine believed that Darth Plagueis created Anakin. But Vader did tell Luke that Palpatine forsaw him(Luke) destroying him, so I doubt if Palpatine was too worried about Anakin.

 

[infinix]

Or you would go with the natural conclusion that Anakin was brought forth to fight and defeat the Sith Master thus bringing balance to the Sith.

But Anakin was anything but a model Jedi. He was so tainted with emotion that anybody could have and should have seen what was going on. Well, anybody except the person that loved him like a brother and the Jedi who are supposed to be masters at sensing emotions.

 

[Hound of UIster]

Or you would go with the natural conclusion that Anakin was brought forth to fight and defeat the Sith Master thus bringing balance to the Sith.

But Anakin was anything but a model Jedi. He was so tainted with emotion that anybody could have and should have seen what was going on.

What was going on? Aside from his lack of control, he had never previously disobeyed their orders. None of them realized the control Palpatine had over him in the form of the knowledge to prevent death since they didn't know he was married to Padme.

 

[infinix]

What was going on? Aside from his lack of control, he had never previously disobeyed their orders. None of them realized the control Palpatine had over him in the form of the knowledge to prevent death since they didn't know he was married to Padme.

But Anakin was very obviously emotionally disturbed and he lets it all out every time he is with Padme. I just can't imagine any Jedi not sensing Anakin so close to an emotional breakdown. Maybe it was like Yoda said, the dark side is clouding the Jedi's senses. Well, shouldn't the fact that the dark side of the Force was clouding observations of Anakin been a HUGE warning in itself?

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I feel like my taste in seeing more of Anakin Skywalker has been permanently soured.

I thought that too until I decided to see if people were right when they said this:

Though I hear people say that the Anakin in the Clone Wars is nothing like the Anakin in the PT.

And they were right.

But I'll never watch the PT again (or the ending of ROTJ).

Within the strict confines of the movie, is "the Balance of the Force" defined as the complete destruction of the Sith and the dark side of the Force? That sure doesn't seem like Balance to me.

It's not. That's just one of the silly notions from the PT that TCW is trying to rectify, in this case, through direct contradiction of what's already been established.

According to George Lucas the light side represents balance and the dark side represents unbalance,

Since Lucas presumably reads the scripts to TCW, he's changed his mind. (Or maybe he just isn't paying that much attention.) The Mortis Arc establishes that "balance" means balance between Light and Dark. Neither or evil; evil comes from imbalance between the two.

It's not about killing all the Force-users, it's about destroying the bloated, corrupt organizations who were stifling growth. Yes, the Jedi Order in ROTS.

Neither the PT nor TCW (so far) is pointing an accusing finger at the Jedi. There are things they certainly could be accused of - countenancing the manufacture of sentient beings to be used for cannon fodder is the top of my list.

The Jedi also seem to be incompetent at running a war (this is more from TCW), but that's not all their fault. The political and military leaders of the Republic are also responsible for making sure their society is adequately defended. A whole galaxy full of people can't pull together an army to defend themselves, without depending on clones or Jedi? Pshaw, they deserve to lose their freedom.

And neither of these faults is "corruption" per se. The clones thing is moral blindness (maybe it's normal in their society to treat sentients that way?) and the latter is incompetence. If the people of the Republic are so lazy that they're allowing the clones and Jedi to screw up the war, because they can't be bothered to fight, then the people are corrupt. The Jedi are just fools for defending a corrupt society that doesn't deserve to be defended.

But everything is still so muddled that that's mostly speculation. I have no clear idea what exactly I'm supposed to think about Jedi or clones, and while TCW seems to be making the Republic appear corrupt, it's not accusing the larger population of the Republic along with the honchos.

But Anakin was very obviously emotionally disturbed and he lets it all out every time he is with Padme.

TCW solves the "what, were they frakking BLIND???" problem by depicting Anakin as a basically mentally stable, heroic, nice guy with a few flaws - too impatient, too prone to recklessness and ruthlessness, disobedient towards authority - but being careful to couch these faults in terms of being useful and even admirable. He does something ruthless and saves Ahsoka (his padawan in TCW). He gets jealous and bent out of shape when Padme goes on a mission, but it's a good thing he followed her, because she really was in danger.

Stuff like that makes it much more plausible that people who know him well would think, "hey he has his foibles, but sometimes those foibles avert real disasters, so maybe we shouldn't complain about having a guy like that around." Plus, he's charismatic and likable, the kind of person who would get a pass that a surly punk like the guy in the PT wouldn't.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Here's the explanation. It's gonna blow your mind:

Lucas never bothered to think up the prophecy or write it. The whole thing is just made up on the fly and makes little to no sense as a result. In the first movie, the Jedi didn't know the Sith had returned so the prophecy was that the boy would just "bring balance to the force". In ROTS, the Jedi had learned that the Sith had returned and so the prophecy was changed to "destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force". It's bad, lazy writing and he had no idea where he was going with the story.

I mean, if the prophecy had been "to destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force" in TPM, wouldn't the Jedi have dismissed it because there were no more Sith? Why would they worry about this prophecy if the Sith hadn't been around for over 1000 years? Again, it makes no damn sense in any logical way.

This is all good evidence that the Jedi were making shit up as they went. They're just a bunch of warrior monks who've been assigned to do a job they can't handle - run a galactic war - by a society too corrupt, cowardly and lazy to do the job itself.

Being reclusive and not mixing much with the rest of the Republic, the Jedi have a naive idea about the society they are serving, and don't realize that they're being played for chumps. Since they are scrambling to justify this BS situation by their own ideology, they glom onto the "Chosen One" nonsense and use it to rationalize whatever they need to at the time.

Because the Jedi are convenient suckers, nobody pays too much attention to how badly they're botching the job until it's too late. Anakin is the only Jedi to see the truth, so of course he joins the other side. Frak, so would I.

 

[infinix]

Because the Jedi are convenient suckers, nobody pays too much attention to how badly they're botching the job until it's too late. Anakin is the only Jedi to see the truth, so of course he joins the other side. Frak, so would I.

Wait a minute here.... Are you agreeing with what Anakin did in RotS?

Its one thing to turn away from your former teaching because you believe they were wrong. It quite another to butcher children.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I'm definitely not agreeing with Anakin in the PT movies, because he was a nasty, stupid, spoiled punk who screwed everything up massively because he threw a temper tantrum at not getting his way. He had absolutely no good motives for what he did, either personally or politically. I doubt he even knew what he was doing. He behaved with all the self-awareness of a toddler with a soiled diaper.

I have nothing but the most thorough contempt for Anakin in the PT, and also for Obi-Wan, Padme, the Jedi Council and everyone else in the galaxy who were too moronic to see this obvious trainwreck coming. Only Palps behaved like a reasonably intelligent person although it's hard to have all that much respect for his manipulative skills either, considering how easy everyone made it for him.

However, TCW is confusing things mightily. Anakin is not being portrayed as he was in AOTC or ROTS. (Which is very confusing considering that TCW is between AOTC and ROTS - it can't be a character arc, more like a character yo-yo.) He's far more emotionally stable, intelligent, and aware of the situation around him.

And the writers are making efforts to foreshadow reasonable motivations for him to do what he did: he's learned that being the Chosen One means he is beyond the petty limitations of Jedi and Sith, with the implication being that, whatever "balance" means, he needs to do it on his own, and if the Jedi don't understand what he's doing, that's only to be expected.

They're also putting a lot more effort into establishing that the Jedi are on the wrong track politically and militarily. The Republic is definitely corrupt, so that even well-meaning, intelligent people would join the Separatist cause (it's a toss-up whether it's better to try to reform the Republic or just give it the boot and start over). The Jedi really aren't prepared to run a war, and the military officer caste of the Republic are getting restless about the screwed up situation. Anakin is seeing that the Republic might not be worthy of the Jedi, and that the Jedi might not be the right people to defend it, anyway.

The oddity is, this very interesting foreshadowing simply doesn't synch with ROTS, where Anakin's motivation was panic over Padme, stupidity and ego. To pay off the foreshadowing in TCW would require a run-through of ROTS again, except with a whole new set of motivations for Anakin.

As for killing the kiddies, that's still beyond the pale. Anakin as written in TCW would not do that. But the Mortis Arc also established that at least in some cases, and as far as we know, in all cases, the Dark Side is simply mind control. A person who falls to the Dark Side becomes a different person and does not know what they are doing.

So is this the "real" story? Faced with the knowledge that as Chosen One, he must act on his own, and having no faith in either the Republic or the Jedi, Anakin joins the Dark Side because he isn't afraid of it. The Chosen One is capable of controlling both Dark and Light Side. And he's also desperate - someone has to do something, and nobody else has the ability. But he underestimates his ability to control the Dark Side, and it ends up controlling him. From that point on, Anakin vanishes and is replaced by Vader. It's Vader who kills the younglings, not Anakin.

Padme has nothing to do with it. Notice how Anakin is not required by the story to be stupid, egotistical or immature. It's the classic Icarus myth - the hero who overestimates his abilities. It works great as a story, much better than the PT atrocity.

 

[infinix]

^
The more I hear people praising TCW, the more I loath the PT. What does it say about the movie's story and character that it requires a cartoon series to bring sense and logic to them?

I wonder what goes through Lucas' mind as he realizes what a horrendous disservice the PT was to the entire SW saga. Actually, I doubt he cares. I'm sure he believes the world revolves around him.