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.
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.
Agree with everything except one thing.
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.
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 found this universe that might be medieval scif-fi:
Dragonriders of Pern
You beat me here. Great series and one I always use as an example in sci-fi Vs fantasy comparisons.
Dragons AND space ships!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.”
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
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”.