You've mentioned you never get asks, so I figured I could send one more ^^
This time it's more like discussion. Maybe you're familiar with the two possible interpretation of "balance in the Force". One says that "balance" means when "Light and Dark side are equally powerful". The other is that "The Force is naturally at balance; Dark side is a poison which corrupts and damages the balance, Light side is an antidote which keeps the balance by eliminating the Dark side."
I'm curious about where you stand on this. I personally have pretty strong opinion about which one is correct, but I won't tell, since I want genuine opinions of a like-minded person :)
Thank you so much for the lovely ask!!
My personal standpoint is the latter. I think the people who believe that an equal amount of Dark Side users and Light Side users with an equal amount of power means balance in the force have completely misunderstood the point of Star Wars and GL's understanding of the Force and balance. I think it's a too simplified and a western idea of simple balance and picturing the two sides as objective weights or some sort of ingredients important for a meal.
I've mentioned this a couple times I think but the light side is never explicitly mentioned in Star Wars, it's simply "the force", only the dark side is mentioned as that. And already from that we can gather that the light side is the forces natural state. It is balance. Dark Siders and so the Sith bring chaos, corruption und disharmony. I mean come on, we know for a fact that dark side users feed on and relish in negative emotions, hatred, greed and things such as slavery. And I absolutely do not believe that Slavery is necessary for a balanced galaxy, I mean that's just ridiculous.
I wrote a post a long time ago about kyber crystals and how they are inherently attuned to the light side of the force. The Dark corrupts it and for a Dark Sider to use one, they need to "bleed" it, which tells you enough I think about how the Dark Side only disrupts the force's natural state. Even the recent episode "Aau's song" in Visions season 2 talks about exactly this and how the light side restores balance and harmony to the crystals and the dark side poisons the crystals.
Even if we look at the Jedi and their practices, their whole thing is balance within and inner peace. Fear, anger and jealousy are unbalanced attitudes, they disturb inner peace, so Jedi strive to keep them in check, to face them, to overcome them and to come to the conclusion that acting on them and letting them control you would only disrupt your inner state and destroy you slowly from within. (Any east asian philosophy and multiple others will tell you this as well.) So Jedi are inherently in balance by keeping their darkness under control (they do not ignore it as some ppl state, but rather the opposite) and everyone has dark attitudes within them, there's no questioning that, but what matters is how we interact with them and whether we act on them. Anyways, that concept can be used for the entire galaxy. The Jedi therefore also try to keep the balance and the peace of the galaxy by keeping the Dark Side at bay. Their genocide, as some people say, did not lead to any sort of balance and it certainly wasn't necessary. Which is honestly an appalling thing to say, that a genocide was necessary.. It completely took the balance away. I mean when we watch the OG trilogy, nowhere does it seem as if the galaxy is doing well and as if it’s balanced, even though now we have approximately the same amount of Sith and Jedi (in hiding). At the end however, when Luke confronts the Emperor and both he and Vader die, only then is balance restored. And that means no Sith at all.
There's so much more that can be said about this and more details that could be talked about, but I think that's enough for now lol
Just one more thing, the love for "grey" and "equal amount of light and dark" probably just stems from the obsession with "morally grey" characters and a need to justify them and make them the right path. It's the complete and willful ignoring of responsibility and consequences, mostly unconscious ones, that fully acting on every desire and negative emotion can bring. And the story of Star Wars tries to explain these exact consequences and show us all that could go wrong. Anakin's whole story is a cautionary tale after all. And yet, people still just ignore it and try to make their fanon canon.
