The prophecy, balance, the awakening...

In that way of looking at it, I think we could argue that the entire build took from nature and repurposed the materials into an artificial and unnatural design and purpose - that purpose was to be supernatural (above nature).
I would say that was, on a smaller scale, going on with the Jedi in the PT - except they were taking the power of the Force and using it politically; thinking that they were right in what they did.

I see the two as different, however, thematically because the Starkiller and FO method isn't to take elements and then sit off in a synthetic utopia of their design at a distance.
They bore straight into a planet and converted the entire planet into a weapon, powered by sucking the life out of a star and running that power through the planet's core - effectively.
They symbolically turned the planet into a surrogate bearer to birth death from its womb instead of life.

That is so far more warped than taking kyber crystals.

There's an interesting running tangent from the PT to the OT in terms of proximity, where in the PT we're distanced from "nature" (everyone in the council is high up and surrounded by skyrises, and very stiff and wrapped up watching and tinkering with the running the world's politics. They are a metaphorical image of the gods of Olympus sitting "on high", removed from reality, yet dictating it.
By the end of it, they are fallen from Olympus and brought back to being 'mere mortals', forced to be back with reality and nature.
Subsequently, the Empire moves in the opposite direction thereafter, taking over the distances position and continuing the distancing tangent.

The FO goes just the opposite direction and doesn't show any sign of wanting to create a synthetic utopia and ruling at a distance.
They appear far more interested to dive straight into things and rip them up and warp it.

I think it's an interesting treatment of the idea of Star Wars thematic chiasmus to flip from the evil being the distance between man and nature that the machine can cause, to the perversion of nature that man can cause with the machine.
One examines, in allegorical symbol, the 60's and 70's concern of the modern world of man being pushed further from the relevance of "natural life", while the new ST examines the newer modern world of man now having the power to manipulate "natural life" into something quite unnatural.

I'm curious to see if they refrain this in IX again, or just leave it as a feather in the cap back in TFA due to having other things to attend to.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Certainly. My point though is that a modern reinterpretation of the Empire aligned itself, in this instance, with the ethos you’re ascribing to the FO. That, viewed through contemporary eyes, a perversion of nature found its way into a thematic structure that previously didn’t possess it. The ‘nature vs. man’ precept was amended due to a new storyteller, with a current viewpoint, reimagining that era.

 

Snoke lived and Snoke died, something dark animated his corpse and became Supreme leader then allowed itself to be slain by its apprentice. What ever it was, was known by DP. The Darkness that was in Snoke still exists.

 

We see now how flawed the prequel Jedi were... why do we put so much importance on their prophecy, still?

Sure, they seem to have accurately predicted the events of the OT (though much of which could have been a self fulfilling prophecy), but the magnitude of those events could have possibly been sensationalized when considering the larger picture of the galaxy.

Or, perhaps the Jedi were right, but not in the way they imagined. Perhaps balance was brought to the Force through the Empire's defeat, but that check wasn't cashed until the Jedi were born again through the catalyst between Luke and Rey. I think it's pretty clear that there were some issues even after ROTJ for Luke- but with Rey, we now have a character pretty well defined by balance. She can still be related to the prophecy without displacing Anakin as the Chosen One.

 

Considering Anakin only got involved with that power struggle on account of Qui-Gon believing him to be the ‘Chosen One’ in the first place, I’d say that’s pretty fair.

Purposely, on Lucas’s part, we don’t know much of anything about the prophecy or why the Jedi had such perceived regard for it. Who wrote it? When? “Destroy the Sith”? Aren’t they already gone? “Restore balance”? Is it even out of balance at this point? We don’t know because we weren’t supposed to know. That wasn’t really the point. Anything the ST might want to tack on would be valid, since it was intentionally left vague to start with.

 

I always figured that the prophecy didn’t mention the Sith but a period of darkness. So pre TPM the jedi sense something is up and put a little weight in the prophecy. During this time the Sith are corrupting the senate etc and so the balance is only starting to slip.

Then the Sith emerge and the Jedi realise that they are behind this imbalance and that Anakin could very well be the chosen one heralded in the prophecy that will bring balance. They then assume, correctly it turns out, that this means he will destroy the Sith.

Time goes by and the Sith orchestrate the clone wars and the galaxy falls into despair (evil is everywhere). This then upsets the balance and the galaxy remains in this state until Anakin eventually returns, destroys the Sith (and thus the power behind the empire) and brings hope back to the galaxy - this in turn restores the balance (equality of light and dark in the galaxy).

Now the hope was that this balance would last, but Vader’s legacy was too strong and mistakes were made by all again leading to the disruption of the balance once more.

 

Yeah, it isn’t clear whether the Sith are mentioned by name or they just assume it’s them. You could also make the argument that destroying the Jedi was part of the prophesy. The Sith aren’t waging any wars. They’re calling the shots, but it’s the Jedi that are actually doing their dirty work. They’re unwitting agents of the darkside in essence. Does the Force make a distinction? Maybe they both had to go. Hard to say.

I’m not saying that’s my interpretation, but it’s a valid one since we don’t really know the specifics.

 

Yeah I agree to a point, I don’t think it’s about the Force specifically “knowing” who is doing what. It’s the “what” that counts. And the Sith are manipulating events, including the Jedi, to spread evil. And so yes, technically the Jedi do not help the situation. But the point is that if the Sith didn’t exist, there would be balance as there would’ve been no manipulation and no spreading of the evil.

So I don’t think the Jedi had to go at all but at the end of the day they were making mistakes and the Sith took advantage of that.

 

I'd have to disagree. Lucas was very consciously addressing that theme. It's not a new perspective that's been applied by a new writing group or audience.

"What these films deal with is the fact that we all have good and evil inside of us and that we can choose which way we want the balance to go. “Star Wars” was made up of many themes. It’s not just a single theme. One is our relationship to machines, which are fearful but as — also benign and they’re — they’re an extension of the human, not mean in themselves."

-George Lucas​

"It's a metaphor: As your humanness is cut away, your become more like a programmed droid."

-George Lucas​

"Having machines, like the droids, that are reasonably compassionate and a man like Vader who becomes a machine and loses his compassion was a theme that interested me."

-George Lucas​

"There's a lot going in there thematically and idea-wise both on the mythological level and the basic human psychological level. And dealing with certain problems that face our society and [it is] thematic in terms of man/machine relationships."

-George Lucas​

"Obviously, people have a lot of different dreams of where America should be, and where it should fit into things. Obviously, very few of them are compatible, and very few of them are very compatible with the laws of nature.Human nature means battling constantly between being completely self-absorbed and trying to be a communal creature. Nature makes you a communal creature. The ultimate single-minded, self-centered creature is a cancer cell. And mostly, we're not made up of cancer cells.
If you put that notion on a larger scale, you have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever. "

-George Lucas​

He talks about this concept repeatedly in different ways and usually in small snippets, but it's all throughout his whole motif train of thought as one of the metathemes related to Star Wars - the social reflection aspect of the mythology. What is our role and relationship to our environment, to nature, to the larger picture of life as a whole system? Can we cut off from nature and rely on machines exclusively? Can we mix with machines? Can we use machines? What makes machines evil? What is their place in the scope of the big picture of our environmental relationship as a whole being? etc...

Which he answers variously throughout the film, and in interviews here and there, that being a machine removes your humanity, but a machine is itself not evil or good, but that we have obligations to life to use machines wisely and not substitute life with machines, especially not for malicious ends.

He's a self-defined hippy. He, of course, is going to address man vs. machine in a mythological tale.
His first hit on that note was THX. That film squarely hit on the idea of the machine's stripping of humanity juxtaposed to the longing urge of man to be one with his environment and have a connection to a living environment, ultimately in which they escape to in the film.

Some ideas even started out in THX and grew into ideas in Star Wars, like the Force - that originated as an expressed concept during THX, but was FAR more abstract and an undertone notion in THX, but it was there. It was this idea that if you remove people from being able to feel nature, feel the force of life in their environment, that they will eventually long for it even if they never had it, and want to go to it - to be called to it.

The Death Star, in this respect, is basically THX on steroids and we're looking at what the world beyond THX's internal synthetic world is doing.
You could very easily imagine THX's going on's being a form of likeness of what's going on inside of the Death Star and not likely be far off from Lucas' general notions.

In the 60's and 70's, there was a focus that we were becoming too distant from our environment - too ivory tower people.
Too much like THX, or Logan's Run. Too synthetically reliant. Synthetic buildings, synthetic land, synthetic food, synthetic clothes, and on.
The age of plastic and microwave food in full boom right alongside the age of cultural turmoil, riots, hate, death and a falling out with so many values held by that same system - "the man", or "the institution" - which is so representative of synthetic reliant compounds. Ergo, the entire hippy movement of free love and communing with nature and cosmic spirits; even going as far as to the point of the largest nudist movement in American history.

The new writers continued this theme motif and gave it a new spin, because it's more relevant to our modern period at this time to look philosophically at the relationship of humanity to its environment from the concept of twisting it around into something it wasn't because that's our current era's concerned with ... gene therapy, fracking, that whole GMO tangent - not just gene editing in crops, but forcing them to bear more and become more than they "naturally" would, the whole EMF = cancer scare, etc... we're awash in conversations now about whether we should do things to nature. We're not really talking about whether we should be more connected to nature anymore.

But the motif has always been a part of Star Wars - it's not a recon motif by new writing.


Cheers,
Jayson

 

You disagree with your own perspective? That’s rather novel.

Kyber isn’t just a pretty looking rock. It’s a substance possessing a natural resonance with the living Force. It’s attuned to the energy produced by life itself and amplifies whatever input you provide. That’s why they’re used by the Jedi to power their lightsabers. That’s why the Empire uses them to power its death machine. An element of nature, that exists in harmony with life, is perverted by man to bring mass death. That’s now an aspect of modern canon that wasn’t there originally.

The technological terror that the Empire constructed was initially presented as just that - a feat of technology*. In our modern era though, the “Death” aspect of that station is now attributed by virtue of an otherwise benign element that’s been twisted into something sinister.

*Originally, Lucas had planned the Deathstar’s weapon be powered by the Bogan Force and was instead a sort of spiritual weapon.

 

And the Jedi. Both the Sith and Jedi utilized or viewed the Force in extremes.

 

I see that I have misunderstood you once again.
I appear to have a talent for this with you; my apologies.

I see what you mean, and I realize you meant the retcon as the Kyber crystal addition itself; not the motif juxtaposition of machine vs man/nature.

Yes, though, to me, I still see these applications of a doom machine as subtly different.
The FO's feels far more gross and twisted to me, while the GE's feels more cold and distant.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

This is such a great discussion. I wish we could get to that level of talking about SW moren often - instead of riding that pointless "hated it / loved it" train round and round and round again.
Brilliant thread !

 

You answered your own question.

Awesome.

I love that you chose to seek answers as opposed to hating what you do not fully understand.

Lucas cleared things up quite a bit with both the 'Mortis' and 'Yoda' arcs from TCW.

So in my opinion your second theory is correct.

There are two possible extremes with various degrees.

Balance can be found between both.

The titles of 'Sith' and 'Jedi' are completely irrelevant.

Light (Positive)

Dark (Negative)

Chiaroscuro (Balance)

Most people are composed of an unequal combination of both sides.

The side you feed is the side you choose to be.

This naturally results in unbalance, unless you feed both sides equally.

True balance is a very difficult thing.

It's essentially apotheosis.

Which is another philosophical kcufdnim all of it's own.

Anakin was no more 'The Chosen One' than any of us.

We were all chosen.

We all have the freedom of choice.

This is known as Free Will.

We are each microcosms and our choices affect the macrocosm in which we operate.

Everything is always in flux.


"Ride the Tide"

-SOAS

 

“The Force is an energy field CREATED BY ALL LIVING THINGS...”

The Sith, and others like them, use the power of the dark side to spread “EVIL EVERYWHERE”. Thus all life across the galaxy is impacted and thus so is the Force itself.

Take note of how the balance is spoken of in TFA and why Leia understands the importance of Luke’s hope:

“I’ve see enough despair in the galaxy to know that without the Jedi there can be no balance in the Force”.

When Anakin destroyed the Sith, The Force wasn’t magically balanced because one guy died. It was balanced because hope (light) returned to the galaxy and balanced out the darkness. The Sith didn’t unbalance the Force by just existing and using the dark side. They unbalanced the force by corrupting the galaxy - from the senate to starting the clone wars to oppressing the galaxy.

The role of the Jedi is to find a way to defeat those who spread evil. Their job is to maintain the balance. The PT Jedi failed and were poor at that because they had become too arrogant and closed off from the living force.

I’d conclude by saying that it is possible that Luke’s great act in TLJ has in fact gone some way to restore balance and that IX will be more of a fair fight between light and dark - with the former ensuring that the latter doesn’t dominate and take over (to the extent it did with the Sith empire).