#force discourse

[benperorsolo]

It's bad enough we have the official tros not getting it, I keep seeing people in the fandom saying shit like all the Jedi could help Rey while all the Sith helped Ben and then ~balance~. And even some new shit about how he should reject the family entirely and it'd be so much better if he embraced the name Kylo and went by it without being evil. There's no refuge. The fix-it fics are half as bad as tros or sometimes AS bad. How can Star Wars be so simple and so hard for people to understand.

Legit two seconds ago I saw a post in the tags that said that “yeah Palpatine is evil but he doesn’t represent all the Sith” and my life flashed before my eyes like I’m sorry, TROS is garbage, but the Sith being evil wasn’t an element that TROS itself made up and this is embarrassing. 

imo it’s because it’s simple that people find it so hard to understand or deliberately want to complicate it because they think that this makes it more mature. Except at the end of the day Star Wars is for children. Lucas has stated many times that he wrote Star Wars as a morality tale (of which I pick this quote out of the extensive quote list I gathered in that post):

“I wanted to make a kids’ film that would strengthen contemporary mythology and introduce a kind of basic morality. Everybody’s forgetting to tell the kids, ‘Hey, this is right and this is wrong.‘” (x) 

And besides this, I think it actually betrays a very simplistic view of ethics to believe that a moral system where good and evil are real entities is actually childish or easy. Believing that right and wrong exist (as the SW universe unequivocally does and which many real-world religions also do) doesn’t mean that a) it’s easy to know what right and wrong are in a given complicated moment or that b) doing right is easy or c) that moral ambiguity doesn’t exist. It’s just that the moral ambiguity comes from the fact that everyone is trying to find the Good, but isn’t sure about how to get there. This is the type of ambiguity we actually see in SW– as with Ben, who isn’t a “morally ambiguous” character because he thinks like DJ that good and evil is a crapshoot and you’re better off not joining, but because Ben is trying to convince himself that what he’s doing is good, even when his conscience knows it’s not. Redemption as a concept doesn’t even make any sense if you’re saying that what Ben (or Anakin, or any dark sider) did was Good From A Certain Point of View if the dark and light are true ethical equals.

The ethical drama of Star Wars is that you have very real entities of good and evil –no, the Jedi aren’t perfect, but they were still seeking the Good (a la ’the Light doesn’t belong to the Jedi’ speech in TLJ which solidifies that Goodness is an external concept, not something the Jedi own or which is tarnished when the Jedi fall short), while the Sith were definitely not– and then there are normal people caught between, trying to find their way to the Good. The drama isn’t that actually you need to embrace half good half evil, and I’m sorry but you have to deal with the fact that the Light is Good and the Dark is Bad in SW; I didn’t make up this morality system and if you want something less literally black-and-white in this way you have lots of stories to choose from. 

Balance is accepting that humans are imperfect and contain darkness, and being at peace with the fact that your dark impulses do not condemn you so long as you do not embrace them but are aware of them and strive for good anyway. The Jedi’s issue was that they embraced a rigid dogma that punished people for Having Bad Thoughts and therefore things they never acted on, and that they believed that once so tainted, a person could never be redeemed. As I say all the time, the Light Side isn’t Repressed Virginity and the Dark Side isn’t Feeling Feelings.

[benperorsolo]

I even feel like the "light=selflessness" "dark=selfishness" dichotomy gets interpreted overly literally sometimes. The selflessness of the light doesn't mean you have to give up everything about yourself or forsake your own personhood or desires, and yet people act like the light and dark are two extremes and balance is finding a perfect midpoint between them.

^^^ this exactly. 

It reminds me of commentary that George Lucas and Dave Filoni have made about Anakin and what ultimately caused his fall to the Dark-- George describes Anakin in a nutshell as (and this might as well be Ben as well) “it’s about a good boy who was loving and had exceptional powers, but how that eventually corrupted him and how he confused possessive love with compassionate love.”

The issue was not at its heart that Anakin married or loved Padme-- yes, it was against the Jedi’s own rules, but as Luke has said in TLJ and proved as basically the entire thesis of the OT when he disregards Obi-Wan’s and Yoda’s orders to kill his father and winds up saving him, the Jedi and the Light aren’t mutually inclusive. Serving the Light doesn’t always mean serving the Jedi when they have strayed from the Light’s true ideals-- but you are breaking the Jedi code to serve the Light, not to break away from it, as with Ahsoka. 

The real heart of Anakin’s problem, the true issue beyond the Jedi’s own baggage, was that Anakin tried to possess Padme-- he was so obsessed with fighting death, fighting what he couldn’t change, that he became the thing he was fighting. And this too applies to how he slaughtered the Tusken raiders after Shmi’s death-- Shmi was already dead, and no slaughter was going to bring her back. It was just more killing. Likewise Anakin never told Padme, either, about what he was doing to ‘save’ her. He just did it, because he “couldn’t live without her.” It’s not about Anakin loving Padme; it’s about Anakin feeling a right to Padme, to her very existence, to the point where he stopped respecting her actual personhood (and choked her when she begged him to stop) and only saw her as a symbol to be gained or lost.

The light side isn’t about apathy and the dark side isn’t about Feeling Feelings. The light side is about respecting that you are part of something larger. You are a person, but so is everyone else, and you can’t go around imposing your will on others; believing that they are objects to have or not have. It’s not about forsaking personhood; it’s about recognizing everyone’s personhood, and about the larger reality of the Force that connects everyone, that is bigger than anyone.

[benperorsolo]

this fandom seems to forget that the light side isn't equivalent to the jedi. the jedi are an integral part of sw lore and they're not going to go away anytime soon, so i don't think any of the 'rey eliminates the jedi and creates a brand new order' predictions will happen, but it's not like lucas wanted people to admire the jedi uncritically either. stuff like not having attachments isn't part of the light side, it's just part of the jedi. you can have your emotions on the light side

It's almost like TLJ explicitly made note of this or something

[benperorsolo]

This fandom's interpretation of 'balance' is basically the 'Solomon cutting the baby in half' solution applied to morality.

'Just as it is bad to have no baby, it is equally bad to have a whole baby'

[benperorsolo]

Did you see that post about how the new Qui-Gon book totally validates the balance=equally light and dark, dark is great misinterpretation (even though it doesn't)? Then I saw another one about how the Force is pretty much all dark and light just means it's dilute. Then I turned the computer off and went outside to stare into the sun.

Yeah, idk how this can get much more unambiguous 

or this

or this

or this

and definitely not this

If anything, the comic is a gentle criticism of current fandom insisting that the Dark Side is some sort of equal and defanged opposite of the Light Side, and that balance means equal dark and light. The comics et al continually refute this. Balance is about confronting the dark side and finding a way through it to the light; it’s about not ignoring the darkness until it festers, but facing it so that the wound can be cleared. And when Qui-Gonn remarks that unchecked, the Jedi could become agents of the very thing they’re fighting against, it doesn’t mean ‘Actually the Jedi are just as bad as the Sith’; it means, if unchecked, anyone can fall from the light to the dark, because as Yoda says, it’s certainty that leads to the Dark side, just as with Luke the night he lets certainty over Ben’s fate for a moment push him to want to end his life, with disastrous consequences. This wasn’t proof the light side is also corrupting (I’ve heard this take an embarrassing number of times); it was proof that even paragons of Light can slip into darkness. 

None of this comic invalidates the existence of the light. In fact, I don’t even think the movies refer to a ‘Light side.’ Yoda speaks of the Force, and he speaks of the Dark Side– again, matching the Rousseauian point I talked about in another ask, about how the GFFA views evil as a corrupting force, not a natural counterbalance. And it’s equally interesting to note how Qui Gonn says that he seeks “the Living Force”. Within the Living Force, yes, there is darkness and light– there is life and death, there is peace and violence, there is all of those things Rey spoke of in TLJ. But within morality, there is no such thing. There is right, and there is wrong. 

[benperorsolo]

Some excellent tweets retweeted today by the LF Creative Art manager.

[benperorsolo]

I know it isn't true but of all the so-called leaks from IX, the one I desperately wish would be true is the one where Kylo is the light side of the balance and Rey the dark side of the balance (if there's going to be a dichotomy there at all, I do have Issues with the way the dark is sometimes interpreted as an Equally Valid walk of life, I would hope someone embodying the "dark" of a balance would mean they're at peace with their own darkness and able to use it without falling in completely)

(Apparently this ask was the perfect excuse for me to write some long-winded spiel about fandom interpretation of the Force, for which I deeply apologize, I promise this was supposed to be on topic):

‘I do have Issues with the way the dark is sometimes interpreted as an Equally Valid walk of life, I would hope someone embodying the “dark” of a balance would mean they’re at peace with their own darkness and able to use it without falling in completely’

^^^  I have serious problems with the way most of the mainstream Reylo fandom interprets balance, as though it means the Light and Dark are equal but opposite and both are fine, because…no. They’re not. I’ve never written a full post about my thoughts on this because it’s such an involved topic that I’m sure would garner Lots of Discourse, but I think Dave Filoni’s description is perfect and one I come back to a lot (especially since he’s a current content creator, so you know this view is being used to shape current canon):

Star Wars is about the light and the dark, selflessness and selfishness, the path to enlightenment and the path to oblivion. (x) (x)

“One of the fundamental things to always understand about the light side and the dark side of the Force and the intentions that drive those things are willingness or will to be selfless or selfish…from those two key points of starting grow out either in enlightenment of selflessness or greed and fear and anger and hate, and you just go spiraling down and down and down, but those are the building blocks that George [Lucas] would always talk about’ (x)

In the end, while those skills [that Luke learns in the OT] are a vehicle, an ability to get him to that point where can make a critical choice, it really becomes the choice of throwing away that power and saying, “None of that matters, because I love my father more than anything…It’s the power of ultimate selflessness and being in totality with the universe and every living thing that’s true power and immortality. (x)

The last bolded sentence is the most important to me in how I see the Force and what LF intends the Force to be. imo current SW canon is not going the way I think a lot of fandom thinks, where the Dark and Light are set up as equally valid life decisions, and Ben and Rey are just these avatars for these two camps like they’re Pokemon teams or Hogwarts houses and it’s just some aesthetic choice. The stories of Ben and Anakin’s falls to the Dark ought to be proof positive about what is to be found there— despair, loneliness, and destruction, until even your very soul is annihilated. There isn’t a middle ground to be found between the Dark and the Light as moral entities. They represent diametrically opposing lifestyles, one which gives life and one which gives death. That’s the whole power of Star Wars’ type of morality play: that it allows characters to be complex and confused and not know which way is right and wrong while also not saying that there is no right or wrong to find. As Dave Filoni says in the last quote, ‘selflessness’ is what allows you to be ‘in totality with the universe’ and to find ‘true power and immortality’. And as we see in his other quotes, selflessness is the domain of the Light Side.

What I think a lot of people misinterpret about this is that they take it to mean that any person who ever has emotions, or gets angry, or fucks up, is sitting on the Dark Side’s doorstep and that’s why balance means allowing a person to have both. This is literally exactly the Jedi’s mistake and why they failed. The Jedi are not the equivalent of the Light. Following the Jedi way is not the only way to belong to the Light Side and is almost certainly not the best way. In fact many non-Jedi Light-siders like Ahsoka, Leia, Maz, and Rey (who is a Jedi only in name and who knows very little about their dogma) have succeeded as beacons of this selfless Light where actual once-Jedi, like Anakin and Ben, failed and fell to the Dark. Hence:

Note that Luke doesn’t throw away the concept of the Light in this scene. He throws away the concept of the Light as being defined by what the Jedi say it was defined as.

Anger itself, or fear itself, or despair itself, or any other negative emotion is not automatically of the Dark side. And death and violence are natural parts of life— but that doesn’t give you moral permission to deal them out of vengeance or hate. What is of the Dark side is dwelling on these things so that they consume you. So that you live only for yourself, for the elevation of yourself above all other living beings. So that you become selfish. As Filoni says, the powers themselves are only vehicles. What matters is why you’re fighting. Are you fighting to destroy what you hate? Or save what you love? 

That’s what I think balance is (or should be) as we move towards the end of the ST. It isn’t about Dark and Light as moral equals, because you cannot aspire to good while also allowing yourself to be complacent in evil. That’s a meaningless koan-type contradiction and also why I deeply dislike the idea that Ben represents the Dark and Rey the Light (or even as you said, vice versa). Even on these people’s own terms, the logic breaks down, because if having ‘too much’ of one side is so bad, why do Ben and Rey each represent the one side? Is that not bad? Ben himself is also so incompetently Dark (he hoists himself by the petard of his own light and compassion so much that Snoke berates him for it constantly, especially in the TLJ novelization) that this doesn’t make sense, and Rey, while certainly often angry, uses that anger for selfless motives— to defend her friends; to defend Ben’s honor from Luke. Her anger, far from being Dark, is actually much more closely aligned with the Light.

You can’t be selfish and selfless. And by this I don’t mean that Light siders are never allowed to think about themselves, ever, but that they cannot let their pursuit of self blind them. What I think balance should be is much as you said: the ability to know and acknowledge that as a living being all emotions live inside you. That you will have good impulses, and evil impulses. That this doesn’t make you an evil person but rather a human person, and what’s important is what you do with this impulse. That you choose as close as you can to good, in good faith, and allow the Force to guide you there. And unlike the Jedi, who seemed to believe that people, once fallen to the Dark side, were lost, the Light side must learn to believe that all people can be redeemed, every time, and that no mistake is ever too great to come back from. In my estimation, a redeemed, balanced Ben would be a Ben who has come to terms with all of the good and evil parts inside of him, and who knows that despite this, he can choose good. That he is allowed to be angry and fearful and fuck up, that he is allowed to have fucked up in the past, but that always, always, the aspiration is there, to be better. To be kinder not just to others, but to himself. 

That’s all the Light demands. Not perfection. Just love.