Here are some of my thoughts/musings on why some people (like myself) might be feeling that the ending of TROS leaves us with an imbalance:
So a big thing about the force, a big theme about how the force has worked in this universe in this saga, is LOVE.
Anakin was this over-midichlorianed chosen one who could have brought balance to the force in response to Darth Sidious’ huge overpowered evil. BUT in order for there to be balance, he needed to be able to adjust to always falling somewhere on a scale from powerful dark to powerful light since him being an overpowered purely light force user getting rid of the overpowered evil would then leave the force unbalanced in a way that would just bring forth a new form of powerful evil to balance out the overly pure good/light left behind after Sidious’ destruction.
SO, Anakin WAS the chosen one who could have brought balance to the force BUT the timeline he came to power in had that rule against Jedi falling in love. This is ultimately what corrupted his power since it allowed for Sidious to be able to manipulate him into thinking that going toward the dark ways of the force (which his purpose of bringing balance gave him full ability to do) was the only way to save his loved one in such a structured and strict force world. So LOVE, a power that makes sense as part of what can bring balance to the force - love being a healing power toward true light but also something that can be manipulated toward true darkness - is what led to Anakin’s downfall because of the latter, and because of the Jedi rule that set Anakin up to fail like that.
So what does the force do? It tries a new tactic to bring about balance: With pretty much every light side force user wiped out and two overpowered dark force users left behind, and at the same time that Anakin gets sealed into his dark fate, the Force burps out two powerful, mostly light-leaning force-sensitive beings, Luke and Leia (who also have the potential for darkness, but not as much as Anakin), and they are born of Anakin thus still going with the prophecy. They do bring balance to the force, even if it’s mostly just through Luke being able to return their father to the light and for long enough to kill, or at least weaken for a good deal of time, the overpowered dark force user that Anakin was originally meant to be the one to kill anyway.
Okay so if we’re going with Sidious being mostly defeated but not completely, then sure, it can make sense that there was, for a moment, balance brought to the force after ROTJ - with Vader no longer there on the darkness side of the scale, but with Sidious still out there on that side in a weaker form, while Luke and Leia were on the light side of the scale and maybe in line to then be the ones to take down Sidious once and for all and TOGETHER when Sidious would eventually make his return (especially since by the end of ROTJ both Luke and Leia seem like they’ve matured to the point of being able to be balanced in the force themselves, and therefore wouldn’t potentially tip the scales too far to the light, leaving that unwanted vacuum). BUT then LOVE steps in again - the love between Leia and Han which then brings about Ben, which leads to Leia choosing to stop her training (and here again this happens in time for a child soon to be born). When she stops her training, it means she is no longer going to be part of what balances out the force with Luke when Sidious comes back to power. SO the force needs to prepare for yet another variation of balance, and again, still starts with the Skywalker bloodline - with Ben.
Ben is basically set up to be another Anakin with potential for both powerful light and powerful dark - again, so that when Sidious is defeated, there isn’t this vacuum of darkness that needs to be filled. HOWEVER, this time, the force is like, “alright so you Skywalkers are really into love, that’s cool, I don’t punish it like the old Jedi used to, that was never my intention. I can totally adjust for that, and to prove it to you, I’ll make the adjustment for Leia falling in love AND this time I’ll have love be an integral part of the power I bring about to create a more lasting balance.”
And this is how we get both Ben and Rey as powerful Jedi, both with matching/mirroring potential for both great darkness and great light, bonded in the force. They’re meant to be able to defeat Sidious TOGETHER and then both survive TOGETHER in a way that FINALLY brings balance to the force - in their relationship with each other they are able to balance each other out and, in doing so, balance out the force. Once Sidious is finally truly gone, they can then live their lives in relative peace, always landing somewhere in the middle of their potentials for powerful light and powerful dark, but always balancing each other out - them having each other would be a huge part of what keeps them balanced and the force balanced.
Breaking that bond, by having one die while the other survives, seems like it would throw off the balance yet again when that’s not what we should get at the end of the story. Now it feels like the story still isn’t over - there isn’t a lasting healing that we get to close out on. Them surviving TOGETHER could have left the audience with the feeling that, with the two of them as a team and the two of them with love as part of their power and not a weakness for them, it’d be safe to think that yes, they really are capable of keeping the balance with each other and in the force - we can now leave this story/this saga feeling that balance. We’d also be left with a lasting feeling that the force is adept at correcting its own imbalances, adding to the sense of peace in concluding the story.
*** Disclaimer: I agree with the notion that the Ben/Kylo presented to us in these movies isn’t exactly livably redeemable. I do feel like the deeper information about him and his past that can be found in the comics, books, etc that have been released in the past few years *does* help to put him more in that redeemable place, but that stuff isn’t clearly spelled out in the movies so it’s kind of a moot point. All that being said though, I still feel like in order for there to be a balanced feeling at the end (which we definitely should have gotten for the end of the *entire main saga*), Ben should have survived, and maybe the reveal of Rey being a Palpatine could have been even more reason for the two of them to stick together with their checkered pasts/lineages/potential for great darkness/etc since no one would ever be able to fully accept/understand either of them except for the two of them - they would need each other as balancing forces.
(I’m not sure where the top two gifs are stolen from (the first one seemed to link to a now defunct Tumblr). The Rey and Ben one is from hot-chocolate-escapades but cropped to match the size of the others. As always, thanks for the gifs, gifmakers!)
you don’t understand the force is an energy the force is an organism the force is dead and the force is living the force has no mind or body or spirit the force is nature the force is a parasite the force is life the force is a god the force is inevitable the force is a part of the universe the force is a web the force is a future the force is destiny the force is not fate the force is there until it isn’t
My first attempt at Anakin Skywalker before his fall to the dark side and his time as Darth Vader. Here he is during the Clone wars, looking ready and raring to go. Whether it be a mission for the jedi council, a little errand for the supreme chancellor or as the maverick general liberating galaxy from tyranny.
Instead of massacring the Jedi and clones at the Temple of Eedit on Devaron, Savage Opress is captured, frozen in carbonite, and brought to the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. But what can the Jedi do to counteract the Nightsisters’ magical hold on him?
I was learning the ins and outs of Clip Studio Paint with this one. SO many brushes and options, and the possibilities are pretty much endless! There’s a lot that I’ve learned, as to what you should and shouldn’t do.
NEVER assume the file in Clip Studio is going to be ‘Clip Studio’ unless you have clicked the file option that says so. If you get a warning about the layers not being able to be saved with the same information, that’s a sign that you have not saved it as a Clip Studio file.
If when you click save, and the files explorer shows up, that means it is not yet saved as a Clip Studio drawing.
Be sure you don’t make the same mistake I did; it took longer than it should have with all the re-drawing of lines and whatnot I had to do after it was a solid picture.
I highly recommend this program, despite my troubles!
One of the things that was so good was Leia and the Force, that her way isn’t to have lightning fast reflexes because she sees things a moment before they happen or any kind of physical dexterity, but that her way with the Force is that that girl looks at someone and deadass stares right into their fucking soul.
She nails her cousin to the wall, almost otherworldly when a calm descends over her and she eviscerates him by exposing his desperate desire to have his father like him, that he just repeats what he’s heard without understanding what it means, she saw into that boy’s soul like it was nothing, this little girl is just as fuckoff power in the Force as her brother is.
She does the same with Obi-Wan, she just fucking looks at him and reads him like a book, “You think the less you say, the less you give away, but, really, it’s the opposite.” and she doesn’t seem like a ten year old in that moment and I love how weird the Force makes people in particular moments, that you get used to them being feral chaos gremlins or gentle teachers or the whole gamut of personality types, and then there’s a moment where it’s otherworldly and strange and I love that, but also that Leia’s powers are not like her brothers, her way with the Force is entirely her own and the show was so good at showing that.
A lot of fic is predicated on the assumption of the Dark Side being a potential break-glass-in-case-of-emergency Hail Mary power-up. It’s in like a zillion of them; the hero is losing the fight, he unzips Dark Side and wins, then gets unfairly persecuted for just trying to survive. But–like Force exhaustion–I don’t think there’s much evidence of that, either.
TPM:
Maul vs Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon: there’s no indication that Obi-Wan leaned into the Dark Side here, or, rather, that Obi-Wan won because he leaned into the Dark Side. He wins after he calms down, even.
AotC:
Anakin vs Dooku: if Anakin tried to summon more power here, it sure didn’t work.
RotS:
Anakin vs Dooku: Anakin does win this fight after getting visibly upset, but Anakin was also always meant to win this fight. This was a fixed encounter, and I hesitate to use it as weighty evidence.
Anakin vs Obi-Wan: if Anakin tried to summon more power here, it sure as shit didn’t work.
ANH
Dark Side didn’t keep Vader from being punted into space like a field goal
ESB:
I’m not sure what you could even suggest as potential line-toeing here. Ironically, neither Luke nor Vader achieves their objective on Bespin. If the Dark Side is a hax power-up, nobody used it here.
RotJ:
Luke vs Vader and Sidious: so here’s the clearest case for a Dark Side power-up–Luke goes from getting bodied by Vader to just hammering him. A version of the script says this:
Itdoes say “realizes he is using the dark side” right there! But it also says that Luke has grown much stronger since Bespin. I can agree that Luke drew on the dark, but I don’t think his moment of superiority came solely from the dark side. I don’t think this was a Super Saiyan level of magic power jump.
And Vader was not on his A-game, either; even Like can feel how conflicted he is, and Darth Vader absolutely does not want anyone to know he feels like that.
I also think it’s worth pointing out that being able to pound Vader like that didn’t actually save the day for Luke. If he had killed Vader right there and attempted to finish off Palpatine still in full loyalty to the Rebellion, he would have gotten fucked--as he does immediately after this scene, when Palpatine accepts his refusal and effortlessly fries him. It was not a case of “Luke could have won if he’d just taken a lil bit of dark side, as a treat”.
tl;dr I don’t the dark side is a powerlevel button. Sith are not powerful because they can throw chairs around harder than the Jedi ever could, they’re powerful because they’re willing to do that unethically. They all talk it up as hot shit because the entire arc of every Sith is someone who starts buying their own bullshit.
e: actually, that’s a better way of phrasing it–the dark side is exactly like cocaine in that you FEEL like it’s given you all sorts of power but its effect is nothing more mystical what than you’d have gotten from an adrenaline rush.
We also have, in ESB, Luke asking whether the Dark Side is stronger and Yoda emphatically answering that it’s not. I suppose a viewer doesn’t have to take Yoda at his word but there’s really nothing to suggest he’s wrong about this when he’s not just there to teach Luke, but also the audience about the Force.
I think a lot of the misconception stems from the popular trope (outsideof Star Wars) of characters getting mad and that’s what lets them win. But Star Wars is, in some sense, an active rejection of that trope.
If anything, doesn’t Star Wars support the idea of the light side being more powerful?
TPM: Obi-Wan uses anger and then is about to get killed (would have if Maul didn’t waste time gloating). He calms down, uses (and trusts) the Force to get himself out of the pit, grab the lightsaber, and defeat his enemy.
AOTC: Dooku gets defeated by Yoda. He has try to crush Obi-Wan and Anakin, while they’re defenseless, to distract Yoda so he can get away. Because Yoda is skilled with a lightsaber and is able to use the Force to not be hurt by lightning (which was awesome).
ROTS: Obi-Wan manages to win the battle against Anakin, and Palpatine fails to kill Yoda
ANH: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful then you can possibly imagine” and Obi-Wan becomes a ghost. Also, Luke uses the Force (probably as calmly as he could in that situation) and manages to blow up the Death Star.
ESB: Not really an example here, Luke was defeated because he wasn’t ready.
ROTJ: Yes, Luke beat Vader while he was angry (and it does seem he tasted the dark side), but he would’ve been killed had he done anything to Palpatine. Bringing Vader back to the light ends up being what defeats Palpatine and saves the galaxy.
The dark side seems able to grant someone some power at extremely high cost, with the person’s mental health going to shit and the people they care about getting hurt. Anakin trusts the dark side to save his wife, then he commits genocide and his wife dies, largely because of him. He isn’t even any more powerful either.
The light side has people work really hard to learn abilities. Yoda literally had to fight his own dark side in order to learn how to manifest himself after death. But the abilities actually work, they do get more powerful, and it doesn’t come at crazy high costs like being responsible for genocide.
note on my advice in the next paragraph: you don’t have to take it if you don’t want to. I’m not here to police how other people’s fics go. The advice is just something I think would help fics feel more Star Wars and more enjoyable for me to read.
My advice for any Star Wars fic writers who want to give their characters a power-up, have them get tested by the Force and then give them the power-up. This could also give an extra chance for character development or introspection. And you don’t have to worry about your character being shunned! And if you just want something lighthearted or humorous (but still want the power-up), make the test lighthearted and/or silly. Who says the Force can’t have a sense of humor?
The dark side is alluring because it’s easy to give in to frustration and anger, because the dark side is quicker andeasier, but it comes with the cost of your mental health going to shit and you generally don’t get what you actually wanted/you drive everyone away because you’re being an absolute asshole.
The light side is a lot harder, it takes a lifetime of discipline to choose the light every day, to do the hard work to build yourself up, to face and let go all the toxic crap inside you, to really earn your skills.
The dark side is powerful, but it’s not more powerful. It’s an easier shortcut that will always, by narrative structure, come around to bite you in the ass again.
Vader was going to be extremely powerful, but he ended up losing his arms and legs and became partly a robot. So a lot of his ability to use the Force, a lot of his powers, are curbed at this point because, as a living form, there’s not that much of him left. So his ability to be twice as good as the Emperor disappeared, and now he’s maybe 20% less than the Emperor. That isn’t what the Emperor had in mind. He wanted this super guy, but that got derailed by Obi-Wan.
― George Lucas
It’s interesting what he says, especially since it has nowhere been said that the power of power depends on “the amount of body you have”. Qui-Gon-Jinn makes it clear that the Force is related to the amount of midichlorate. If it were so easy to get rid of them, Vader would not be such a powerful Sith.
You know, with all the language throughout Star Wars about “giving in” to the Dark Side, how the Dark Side makes you more powerful, how the Dark Side makes you age strangely and destroys you, it sure doesn’t sound like an “opposite side of the coin” so much as the “deeper end of the pool,” like it’s actually the true form of the force and being a Jedi is about keeping it tamed so it doesn’t eat you the way it actually wants.
the force is entropy
Eldritch Jedi pls
This is one of the reasons i love the second Knights of the Old Republic game, wherein one of the major characters (who defines herself neither as Jedi nor Sith) actually views the Force this way, saying “I hate the Force. I hate that it seems to have a will, that it would control us to achieve some measure of balance, when countless lives are lost.”
It’s also the game that gave us the two most entropic, eldritch characters in the franchise: Darth Nihilus, whose dark-side-borne ability to feed on the Force and consume life itself has twisted him into a half-living “wound in the Force”, more presence than flesh
and Darth Sion, whose entire body is a ruin, his flesh nothing but ragged scar tissue, every bone and muscle broken and torn, kept animated by will alone as he forces himself, second by agonizing second, to exist
I wish there were more horrifying perspectives on the force like that
This is one of the reasons the term “Light Side” never felt right to me, even before it was used in any official media; The Force always struck me more like an ocean than a binary concept: the deeper you go, the darker and more crushing it gets — at a certain point becoming an effectually consistent darkness — and while light filters down and fades for some distance, if there isa truly light “side” it’d be the surface.
Which isn’t to say “the Force is evil unless you flounder about near the top” — just that it’s a natural force, and as such is something you need to respect and be adequately prepared for. (Take electricity, for example: super awesome and pretty dang useful, but OH HOLY SMOKES don’t try and harness it unless you REALLY know what you’re doing!)
In this sense, being tempted by the Dark Side is less a case of “Hey, I wonder what’s on the other side of this coin it looks pretty cool haha oh whoops I’m Space Walter White now,” and more one of “The deeper into this thing you go, the harder you’ll need to fight to resist the ever-increasing pressure, to remain whole, even to just see whatever the heck you’re actually doing.”
(which is why Jedi training is so important: those padawans gotta build themselves a mental Deepsea Challenger!)
THIS META BLESSED ME
Okay but let’s suppose, for a moment, that the Force is actually malevolent.
That would make a lot of sense.
Consider, for a moment, an eldritch parasite. This ancient being feeds off of the life-force of other creatures. Not that unusual, as most living things also consume other living things, to various degrees. But this one is technically somewhat removed from the usual structures of biology. It is a passive and opportunistic predator, for the most part. Whenever a living being that is connected to it - however weakly - dies, it consumes part of its energy, and gets bigger.
As life in the galaxy flourishes, and time passes, this singular entity gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Like a catfish; the only limit to its growth is how much it can consume to fuel it. The larger it gets, the more it is able to sink its invisible claws into other living beings, until eventually there is hardly any life out there which hasn’t been ‘infected’ by it, and slated to become its spiritual dinner as soon as its biological form gives out.
And here we actually come to - of all things - the midichlorians. Which, the Jedi use to measure someone’s sensitivity to the Force, which works because midichlorians are the vehicle for the predatory parasite to infest living beings. The immune systems in some people begin to develop a certain degree of resistance to them, which is why some folks have more, and some have less, and this directly correlates to their Force sensitivity. The more midichlorians you have, the worse your immune system is at fending off the parasite.
The Force counters the risk of being bred out of subsequent generations by developing camouflage, and adapting itself into a more seemingly-symbiotic relationship with its prey.
What the Jedi see as the ‘light side’ of the Force, is a reflective layer that this predator has created via its connection to all living things. This network is the honey trap that encourages the beings still strongly connected to it, to spread that connection, because it affords them advantages while they are still alive. But its elements are comprised mostly of echoes and reflections of their fellow prey organisms. Force Ghosts that resemble the departed. Emotions that are transmitted along this layer and between individuals. Small amounts of power that can be siphoned off to impact the environment, and can also spread the Force to whatever living thing it comes into contact with.
This being is huge now, it needs a lot of juice in order to maintain its existence, let along continue to grow. And like most predators it’s willing to expend a certain amount of energy in order to guarantee a bigger pay-off.
The deeper you go into the Force, the more the Force starts exerting its own will through you. And the less you see of the reflected camouflage of it, and the more apparent it becomes that the Force wants large swaths of death to feed it. Which is why Dark Siders often become so preoccupied with things like Death Stars.
But it’s a balancing act. A large population of relatively peaceful Force sensitives, like the Jedi, cost more than they’re worth, because beyond a point they take too much energy from the Force and don’t kill enough people to pay for it. A single individual abusing their powers for self-gain and murdering left and right, though, accomplishes the goal of feeding it. The Force obviously doesn’t want its food supply to die out completely, but this explains the persistent cycles of the Star Wars universe - as a soon as a group of peaceful Force users becomes prominent, they get wiped out by a few Dark Siders who have tread too deeply past the reflective surface of the Force, and become actual vessels for its will.
And then when the Dark Siders have finished killing a whole bunch of people, it’s time for them to go, too, so that they don’t wipe out the entire populace and kill off the Force’s food supply beyond its ability to reasonably recover. The peaceful types then see an upswing, as they are more adept at spreading the Force. So the cycle goes - Jedi spread the Force, Sith kill the Jedi and feed the Force, Jedi kill the Sith and resume spreading the Force. It’s a planting and harvest cycle, and the galaxy is populated with the Force’s living spirit crops. Anakin Skywalker, who was arguably one of the beings most closely connected to the Force, and had an extremely high midichlorian count, basically lived this cycle in its entirety as an individual - he spread the Force as a Jedi, he killed people as a Sith, and then he ended it all in order to preserve his progeny for the next round.
tl;dr - the Force wants to eat your soul. The reason the ‘light side’ types always get so up in their own asses is because what they perceive as the Force is basically their own reflections dangling in front of them like an angler fish’s lure. The reason the ‘dark side’ types get so messed up is because they’re basically the equivalent of those grasshoppers who get infected with a parasite that makes them drown themselves.
This point of view would actually explain both No-Attachment rule and the Order’s cradle-robbing - some more self-aware Jedi saw the Force for what it is and pushed for a rule that potentially would cut births of Force-sensitive kids to a bare minimum. And those who were born Force-sensitive thanks to a quirk of the Force are to be taken from the society in the quickest way possible before they mess up, given tools to keep it at bay, and indoctrinated to never want to dabble in the deeper ends of their ability. It would also explain the whole debacle of Unifying vs Living Force and why Jedi seem to prefer the former - all of the description of the Living Force I came across present it as more ever changing, nearly organic entity and Jedi that use is as more responsive to its nudges, so potentially more inclined to being “corrupted” by it.
The Force as an Eldritch Horror explains a LOT about why people who go to the Dark Side really REALLY quickly jump off the slippery slope
Like
In the course of what is, in universe, LESS THAN A WEEK, Anakin goes from “Maybe the dark side can help me save my wife and unborn kids? If I use it for good?” to “I am going to Kill These Specific Jedi for Selfish Reasons” to “Okay time to butcher a bunch of kids and then take part in a galaxy wide genocide I guess”
And then proceeds to murder his wife and try to kill the Only Other Person Who Has Ever Been Nice To Him just because
One of the things that was so good was Leia and the Force, that her way isn’t to have lightning fast reflexes because she sees things a moment before they happen or any kind of physical dexterity, but that her way with the Force is that that girl looks at someone and deadass stares right into their fucking soul.
She nails her cousin to the wall, almost otherworldly when a calm descends over her and she eviscerates him by exposing his desperate desire to have his father like him, that he just repeats what he’s heard without understanding what it means, she saw into that boy’s soul like it was nothing, this little girl is just as fuckoff power in the Force as her brother is.
She does the same with Obi-Wan, she just fucking looks at him and reads him like a book, “You think the less you say, the less you give away, but, really, it’s the opposite.” and she doesn’t seem like a ten year old in that moment and I love how weird the Force makes people in particular moments, that you get used to them being feral chaos gremlins or gentle teachers or the whole gamut of personality types, and then there’s a moment where it’s otherworldly and strange and I love that, but also that Leia’s powers are not like her brothers, her way with the Force is entirely her own and the show was so good at showing that.
When Scavengers like Rey go looking for machine parts to sell them, they frequently come across small, fragile and valuable parts. Here’s a quick backpack concept for Scavengers on Tatooine, replete with a sensor on the shoulder that helps you scan the environment!
One thing I wish Star Wars media would do more is focus less on the Force as a “magic superpower plot device” and more on the Force as “metaphysical power that connects all life.”
Like, it could go a long way towards explaining the radical differences between Jedi and Sith. Like, the more you access the Force, the more you become aware of that deep spiritual connection to all things. Everything is one. Separation is an illusion.
For Jedi, that provides some sort of enlightenment, and bolsters their ideas of pacifism, as using the Force forces them to develop empathy. All things are one, or at least connected, so hurting others doesn’t make sense as you’re ultimately hurting yourself as well. But for Sith, who are, by their very definition, selfish, it creates a self-defeating spiral of pain and excuses. As they hurt more people with the Force they hurt themselves as well, but they excuse it away and the cycle just keeps repeating.
I dunno. I just think you could do more with a all-powerful all-connecting energy than “superpower magic”.
