Is Star Wars about the Galaxy, or the Force (to you)?

Well, one thing is certain....it isn't about the Skywalkers any more!

 

It's about the hero myth and force is a big part of that...

The galaxy serves as a background/playground for the story.
But through popularity and fascination with the world itself, it grew bigger, so now we have stories about background characters in the galaxy and the galaxy itself.

But I'd still say, that in it's core, it is about the heroes and the force that is the deus ex machina.
It is a myth from a long time ago.

I am fine with cool series like Andor, as it is basically an appendix and extra telling the story of rebellion, which Luke was part of later.
Without Cassian and later Jyn, there won't be no death star plans to make Luke disabling his targetting computer easier.
But I am a bit afraid of the material steering into a fatigue and relegating Star Wars into a sci-fi world that focuses on the world itself, abandoning the epic scale of movie saga. I guess it's one of the reasons while we are still hovering around the eras close to the films and hope that in time, someone will return Star Wars to a big screen with a new myth, that won't be a Rogue Squadron, or some bunch of simple people trying to make their living in a galaxy, unless it is integral part of a new and grandscale myth.

Same as Greek Myths... who cares about farmers and salesmen. It's all about the gods, demigods, great kings and grand conflicts that supposedly shaped the world that came later on back of these heroes and people bigger than life.
High Republic basically follows this idea and I really enjoyed the first four books (haven't read the rest) and that gives me more hope for SW in the future.

For me, as a kid first seeing Star Wars, Obi-wan saying to Luke: I have fought in the Clone Wars with your father a Jedi Knight - it was mesmerizing. And this whole conflict against evil galactic empire. There is no such thing as luck etc. we all know it. It's the integral part of the story and Han Solo would be one of plethora smugglers running around galaxy, if the force and the heroes who were part of the conflict didn't cross. We have no idea who the other smugglers are, but we know The Smuggler slash General, Han Solo!

...and his history in the mud pit where he first met Chewbacca

 

I agree. And I disagree. For me as a child, I too was mesmerized by Jedi knights and the starfighter pilots... I know people for whom that is what Star Wars is. One of my oldest friends, we stood in line for the midnight premiere of all 3 prequels, and 2 of 3 sequels, but he finds it crazy that I would watch any of the animated series, or be on an internet forum discussing SW philosophy. But I find it ludicrous that he would spend thousands of dollars each year to whack a little white ball around, and even configure a family vacation around it... We can still sit around and watch ESB like a couple of 10 year olds. I asked him what he thought of Andor, and his reply was, "meh, I'll check it out someday"

My view is this- just as there is a wide audience for a variety of styled content, there is also an audience who only wants the big screen spectacle movies. I can't be mad at them, that's their Star Wars. My Star Wars is sitting up until 2am on Tuesday night to watch new episodes and relentlessly debating what the prisoners are building on Narkina 5. Maybe I need to dust off my clubs and go whack a little ball around...

--- Double Post Merged, Nov 15, 2022, Original Post Date: Nov 15, 2022 ---

But to answer the question, Star Wars is about The Galaxy and the Force, which is in all living things and binds the Galaxy together.

 

Star Wars for me is about the heroes journey and growth, for example: Anakin, Luke, and Rey.

 

We'd all wake up & find ourselves in Modesto, on the first day of June in the year 1962....

 

Star Wars is about the denizens that traverse the immense galaxy around them. Each and everyone can tap into a force that surrounds them, binds them together within the galaxy superabound. Some may tap into it better then others, but it is there waiting for the proper conduit, it awaits the hero of a thousand faces.

 

Neither. It's a blue print for how to bring Aristotle's treatise on mythical tragedies to the screen.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Alright, since I can't sleep and have some time, I'll expand my previous answer as I don't think the brief answer well accomplishes the goal of communication (if by that we mean understanding) to most.

Firstly, let's start with the question:
Is Star Wars about the people or the force?

This is somewhat like asking if a taco is the shell or the filling.
This isn't fence sitting. It's baked right into the bones of this piece of art.

This is a snip of a short film that radically affected George Lucas.

Seriously. Take a moment and watch it.
You can also watch the full video (it's not long) here:

The point here is you can't really have one without the other. Without the world of Star Wars, all the talk of The Force is pointless. Without The Force, the world of Star Wars is empty of its soul.

This is because it's like this short movie, 21-87. Without pavement and cities, the talk about nature is pointless. Without the talk of nature, the pavement and cities are meaningless spectacle.

They are two in one parts of the same.

And this goes deep into the history of the art. Which is why I said Star Wars is a blueprint of bringing Aristotle's treatise on mythical tragedies to the screen.

And, in an attempt at some level of brevity, I'll summarize (painfully) Aristotle's description of a tragedy through the following quote.

"There are six parts consequently of every tragedy: a Plot, Characters, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, and Melody." - Aristotle, Poetics, 1450 3-28

Defined as follows (I'm paraphrasing very long sectional descriptions).
This is his order of importance:

1) Plot is the imitation of action, of happiness and misery.
2) Characters define the quality of the actions, the moral purpose.
3) Thought is a meaning conveyed through characters but is indifferent of the character. That is, the message or messages the story is attempting to convey or assert.
4) Diction is the way in which the story is delivered. Obviously dialogue, but also in a broader respect of the visual arts, that encompasses much more than merely the words.
5) Melody is the music, but he's rather specifically meaning that the music speaks in concert with the story in such a manner that they are blended and inseparable from each other. That if you turn off the music, the meaning changes.
6) Spectacle is the artifice of the story, but here he is very specific once again (even if at first somewhat dismissive), as the spectacle artifice must be in place and used to evoke Fear and Pity. That is not to say all the time, but it is there to serve that end. It's worth noting that Fear and Pity, to Aristotle, are emotional ends which are provoked through an arc of Peripety (sudden change of fortune) and Discovery (revelation).

Now, it's worth noting that to Aristotle (and Greek theater), a tragedy is not required to end on a down note. It can be happy or sad in its end, but if it doesn't have fear or pity along its way as the chief emotional connections, then it is seen as a low-grade quality, and he praises those who employ peripety and discovery as mechanisms to deliver us through tangent to fear and pity.

Now, this is pretty much Star Wars to a T.
The point I'm making here is that you can't really convey the Thought without the rest. Not very well, anyway.
And without the thought, you sort of have an empty conveyance of things sort of just happening.

The Thought, in this case, for Lucas was this idea of connectedness. Of being more than a world full of people. Of being inexplicably connected to life and others around us. Don't forget he's a self-proclaimed hippy.

So, you can't really pull the pieces from each other and say Star Wars is more about this aspect or this other aspect any more than you can pull apart Beethoven and say this symphony is about this instrument or that instrument.

Tragedies are monuments to a human condition and a reflection of the nature of our actions in context to some asserted ideal consideration. One might as well ask whether iconography is really about symbolism or its art.

A lot of movies don't work this way. Most don't. Overwhelmingly there are very few that do.
But Star Wars does. And it's startling how complicated it all is to accomplish and keep track of in the mind during creation.

But this is exactly what Lucas set out to do, and it's what he accomplished. He brought this fully connected narrative artform to the screen so that he could convey his thought about our "samsara" of life.

Is Star Wars about People or Force? It's about the Force of People.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Everyone has always enjoyed the Star Wars stories in books and comic that talk about people who are not Force users. And now we have 'Andor', wherein the closest we get to the Force is offhand mentions of the Emperor in the dialogue, and there have been plenty of stories written about 'mundane' characters living day-to-day in that world. I think there's plenty of storytelling to go around without the Force being in the picture at all.

Star Wars Galaxies, for example, was much more popular and successful before just anyone could play a Jedi.

The Republic Commando game didn't have the Force in it and it was a blast (minus the mediocre multiplayer).

The Fantasy Flight Games SW tabletop RPG system (mostly) separated the Force into its own niche, putting that kind of adventuring in the 'Force and Destiny' series and giving us 'Age of Rebellion' for Rebel soldier and pilot types and 'Edge of the Empire' for all those Fringers who wanna bounty-hunt, smuggle, scam, and be merc pilots, and so on. (I'm running an EoE campaign myself, built around a team of spies, beginnig February 2nd over Discord.)

I think a broader view of life in the SW Galaxy is more interesting in the long run, so for me, it's about the Galaxy and the people in it, and the Force is a part of it... from time to time.

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 28, 2023, Original Post Date: Jan 28, 2023 ---

In fact no religion at ALL has any context without people and the world first. God (whether you believe in Him or not) made the world and what's (and who's) in it, but people make religions... in order to relate to divinity (Nature, God, general spirituality such as in Bhuddism, etc.). It can't be any different for the Force. After all, without all the beings and worlds, what is it going to permeate and bind together? Qui-Gon Jinn demonstrated a belief in the Living Force and therefore presented us with a much more 'down-to-the-ground' Jedi with no pretenses nor arrogance.

 

Okay, I might be wrong but I did read somewhere that Lucas used The Lord of the Rings as an inspiration.
If this is true, you can see the similarities in the LOTR films.











Star Wars was always sword and sorcery in space - it was what made it unique.

 

No, like Tolkien he used Wagner's Ring Trilogy symphonic composition as inspiration, so they have that in common.

 

You're not wrong, BUT...
That could be the definitive answer about a trilogy, or a completed story. Star Wars is getting more and more immense by the week. If every story, every character, everything is Force-related, it dilutes the strength. The sheer fact that we see the Galaxy from the views in Andor, illustrates the rarity of the sword and sorcery, which in turn shows how unique and special the stories of Luke, Obi-Wan, Asokha, Rey, etc... truly are. If everybody in the Galaxy knows a Jedi or wields a lightsaber, then there's nothing special about it. As we see more and more of the time and space of the GFFA, we need to see more of the 'normal' everyday Galactic population as well as the Force-heavy stories like we will no doubt see in The Acolyte.

 

I've been mesmerized by Star Wars since I was in sixth grade... months before I even finally saw it in 1978. We couldn't find a theater that still had tickets. I read the book before I ever saw the movie, and was already collecting the cards. I wish I still had them. Right from the beginning and ever since, it's become this massive, all-pervading mythos that no one can escape. If you're still a toddler, and you see it, it's an infection.

At the end of the day, I think the reason people like _me_ like Star Wars so much is because... it's so much more interesting and colorful than this place. It reeks of adventure, the way this world probably used to.

 

I'd say 70% galaxy/characters/ships to 30% the force/Jedi.

I was 4 and a half when I saw ROTJ in the cinema, I'd watched ANH & TESB on our Betamax VCR before that so the attraction to Star Wars for as long as I can remember was always the ships and characters who can go anywhere in an expansive galaxy, not to mention the toys!!. That's why at 44 years old I am still unashamedly a Millennium Falcon and Han Solo fanboy.

Back then the Force and Jedi were always secondary for me, they were an added bonus. Since then with the PT, Clone Wars and Obi-Wan, my interest in the Jedi and the force has grown however it still remains secondary to me.

 

Before Andor, my answer might have been different.

But then R1 came along and intrigued me with the storyline

And then Andor exploded onto the screen for me and made up my mind.

for me, SW is about the people in the GFFA

 

Well said. For me, it was a source of much needed escapism during a childhood marred by bullying - but my parents, RIP, also loved it.

--- Double Post Merged, Jan 30, 2023, Original Post Date: Jan 30, 2023 ---

https://www.google.com/search?q=rid...#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:c5e8cdae,vid:xeRwBiu4wfQ

 

Unfortunately, I've never been able to get into Wagner. I just don't connect with him. I like Smetana, Beethoven, Debussy, Mozart, Holst, Bach. Just can't dig Wagner.

 

The divergence, between the OT and TPM is an attack by TPM on the OT, of the sociology mysticism concept. The combination, sociology mysticism, somehow represents the actuality of existence of TPM, alas, not as a representation, but, as a sync identity.