#Dark Side | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gffa · 12 hours

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could you give your opinion, or examples from canon, about balance and the light and dark sides of the force? I keep running across fics where people argue that the Jedi are wrong and the dark side is just as necessary, and I feel like canon was clear that’s not what balance means in the Star Wars universe

Hi! First off, I'll say that I would recommend going around arguing with people's fic (not you're necessarily planning to do this! just that I think it's a good reminder), because those people must be allowed their space in fandom, just as we're allowed our space in fandom. I have found that I actually have a much better time in fandom when I'm just in my own space doing my own thing and ultimately this is just fandom, what other people do in their fic, so long as it's not hurting real people, is their choice and not mine, if I let that kind of thing go, it gives me more time to have fun with the things I do enjoy.

That said, sometimes we often get people coming into our spaces to argue and I do like to have my citations ready when it comes to that. Within canon, you're always going to be able to argue about unreliable narrators, even when you point out that all the Force-using dark siders are pretty much miserable villains, there's going to be people who argue.

And one thing that's tricky in my opinion is that the dark side is "necessary" in that it exists. It will always exist. It exists within the Jedi--but they have never denied that it exists or that it's part of life. It's just that they don't embrace it, they don't let it bite into their heart, because Yoda's speech in The Phantom Menace is 100% accurate. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.

And if people want to argue about in-canon stuff like that, my response is usually just to go, "I tend to follow George Lucas' Star Wars." and leave room for others to enjoy Star Wars from other creators, if they wish. It's not a value judgement, if someone wants to enjoy something from the Legends continuity--that's what it's there for! And it's not my place to tell them that they're not allowed to enjoy it or follow that version instead. I hope they're having a blast! We'll just agree that we're working with incompatible views on authorial intentions priorities. People are not obligated to take Lucas' commentary with the same weight that I do, so I always advise that we learn to let go of things when someone doesn't hold the same views as we do on this kind of thing, because ultimately that is the message of Star Wars!

SO, THE DARK SIDE, here's what George Lucas directly has said about it:

“The core of the Force–I mean, you got the dark side, the light side, one is selfless, one is selfish, and you wanna keep them in balance. What happens when you go to the dark side is it goes out of balance and you get really selfish and you forget about everybody … because when you get selfish you get stuff, or you want stuff, and when you want stuff and you get stuff then you are afraid somebody is going to take it away from you, whether it’s a person or a thing or a particular pleasure or experience. "Once you become afraid that somebody’s going to take it away from you or you’re gonna lose it, then you start to become angry, especially if you’re losing it, and that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. Mostly on the part of the person who’s selfish, because you spend all your time being afraid of losing everything you’ve got instead of actually living. "Where joy, by giving to other people you can’t think about yourself, and therefore there’s no pain. But the pleasure factor of greed and of selfishness is a short-lived experience, therefore you’re constantly trying to replenish it, but of course the more you replenish it, the harder it is to, so you have to keep upping the ante. You’re actually afraid of the pain of not having the joy. "So that is ultimately the core of the whole dark side/light side of the Force. And everything flows from that. Obviously the Sith are always unhappy because they never get enough of anything they want. Mostly, their selfishness centers around power and control. And the struggle is always to be able to let go of all that stuff. "And of course that’s the problem with Anakin ultimately. You’re allowed to love people, but you’re not allowed to possess them. And what he did is he fell in love and married her and then became jealous. Then he saw in his visions that she was going to die, and he couldn’t stand losing her. So in order to not lose her, he made a pact with the devil to be able to become all-powerful. When he did that, she didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore, so he lost her. "Once you are powerful, being able to bring her back from the dead, if I can do that, I can become emperor of the universe. I can get rid of the Emperor. I can make everything the way I want it. Once you do that, you’ll never be satiated. You’re always going to be consumed by this driving desire to have more stuff and be afraid that others are going to take it away from you. And they are. Every time you get two Sith together, you have the master, the apprentice, and the apprentice is always trying to recruit another apprentice to join with him to kill the master. The master knows that basically everybody below him wants his job. “Only way to overcome the dark side is through discipline. The dark side is pleasure, biological and temporary and easy to achieve. The light side is joy, everlasting and difficult to achieve. A great challenge. Must overcome laziness, give up quick pleasures, and overcome fear which leads to hate.” –George Lucas, Clone Wars Writers’ Meeting

“Happiness is pleasure and happiness is joy. It can be either one, you add them up and it can be the uber category of happiness. “Pleasure is short lived. It lasts an hour, it lasts a minute, it lasts a month. It peaks and then it goes down–it peaks very high, but the next time you want to get that same peak you have to do it twice as much. It’s like drugs, you have to keep doing it because it insulates itself. No matter what it is, whether you’re shopping or you’re engaged in any other kind of pleasure. It all has the same quality about it. “On the other hand is joy and joy is the thing that doesn’t go as high as pleasure, in terms of your emotional reaction. But it stays with you. Joy is something you can recall, pleasure you can’t. So the secret is that, even though it’s not as intense as pleasure, the joy will last you a lot longer. “People who get the pleasure they keep saying, ‘Well, if I can just get richer and get more cars–!’ You’ll never relive the moment you got your first car, that’s it, that’s the highest peak. Yes, you could get three Ferraris and a new gulf stream jet and maybe you’ll get close. But you have to keep going and eventually you’ll run out. You just can’t do it, it doesn’t work. “If you’re trying to sustain that level of peak pleasure, you’re doomed. It’s a very American idea, but it just can’t happen. You just let it go. Peak. Break. Pleasure is fun it’s great, but you can’t keep it going forever. “Just accept the fact that it’s here and it’s gone, and maybe again it’ll come back and you’ll get to do it again. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It’s all about your pleasure, it’s about you. It’s a selfish self-centered emotion, that’s created by self-centered motive of greed. “Joy is compassion, joy is giving yourself to somebody else or something else. And it’s the kind of thing that is in it’s subtlty and lowness more powerful than pleasure. If you get hung up on pleasure you’re doomed. If you pursue joy you will find everlasting happiness.” --George Lucas, Academy of Achievement Speech, 2013

"Knowing that the film was made for a young audience, I was trying to say, in a simple way, that there is a God and that there is both a good side and a bad side. You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you're on the good side." --George Lucas Interviews

”[The Jedi] trained more than anything else to understand the transitional nature of life, that things are constantly changing and you can’t hold on to anything. You can love things but you can’t be attached to them, You must be willing to let the flow of life and the flow of the Force move through your life, move through you. So that you can be compassionate and loving and caring, but not be possessive and grabbing and holding on to things and trying to keep things the way they are. Letting go is the central theme of the film.“ –George Lucas, Star Wars Archives 1999-2005

BILL MOYERS: “Do you know yet what, in a future episode, is going to transform Anakin Skywalker to the dark side?” GEORGE LUCAS: “Yes, I know what that is. The groundwork has been laid in this episode. The film is ultimately about the dark side and the light side, and those sides are designed around compassion and greed. The issue of greed, of getting things and owning things and having things and not being able to let go of things, is the opposite of compassion–of not thinking of yourself all the time. These are the two sides–the good force and the bad force. They’re the simplest parts of a complex cosmic construction.” --George Lucas and Bill Moyers 1999, Time Magazine

“The core issue, ultimately, is greed, possessiveness - the inability to let go. Not only to hold on to material things, which is greed, but to hold on to life, to the people you love - to not accept the reality of life’s passages and changes, which is to say things come, things go. Everything changes. Anakin becomes emotionally attached to things, his mother, his wife. That’s why he falls - because he does not have the ability to let go. “No human can let go. It’s very hard. Ultimately, we do let go because it’s inevitable; you do die, and you do lose your loved ones. But while you’re alive, you can’t be obsessed with holding on. As Yoda says in this one, [The scene in which Anakin seeks Yoda’s counsel] You must learn to let go of everything you’re afraid to let go of.’ Because holding on is in the same category and the precursor to greed. And that’s what a Sith is. A Sith is somebody that is absolutely obsessed with gaining more and more power - but for what? Nothing, except that it becomes an obsession to get more. The Jedi are trained to let go. They’re trained from birth, they’re not supposed to form attachments. They can love people- in fact, they should love everybody. They should love their enemies; they should love the Sith. But they can’t form attachments. So, what all these movies are about is: greed. Greed is a source of pain and suffering for everybody. And the ultimate state of greed is the desire to cheat death.” --George Lucas, The Making of Revenge of the Sith, 2005

“The thing about Anakin is, Anakin started out as a nice kid. He was kind, and sweet, and lovely, and he was then trained as a Jedi. But the Jedi can’t be selfish. They can love but they can’t love people to the point of possession. You can’t really possess somebody, because people are free. It’s possession that causes a lot of trouble, and that causes people to kill people, and causes people to be bad. Ultimately it has to do with being unwilling to give things up. “The whole basis here is if you’re selfish, if you’re a Sith Lord, you’re greedy. You’re constantly trying to get something. And you’re constantly in fear of not getting it, or, when you get it, you’re in constant fear of losing it. And it’s that fear that takes you to the dark side. It’s that fear of losing what you have or want.

“Sometimes it’s ambition, but sometimes, like in the case of Anakin, it was fear of losing his wife. He knew she was going to die. He didn’t quite know how, so he was able to make a pact with a devil that if he could learn how to keep people from dying, he would help the Emperor. And he became a Sith Lord. Once he started saying, “Well, we could take over the galaxy, I could take over from the Emperor, I could have ultimate power,” Padmé saw right through him immediately. She said, “You’re not the person I married. You’re a greedy person.” So that’s ultimately how he fell and he went to the dark side. “And then Luke had the chance to do the same thing. He didn’t do it.” --George Lucas, The Phantom Menace, An Oral History, 2019

“The secret ultimately like in Star Wars is that you have to not be afraid. Fear is the enemy; fear is the Dark Side. If you afraid, you are going to the Dark Side. The Light Side is compassion. As long as you love other people and treat them kindly, you won’t be afraid. So, the secret is to just love everybody - I know that sounds very 60s but that’s what I grew up in - but it its fear that cause the problem. So you have to stop being afraid and be kind to everybody. “The main theme of Star Wars is that compassion is the good side, fear is the bad side.” --George Lucas, Mellody Hobson George Lucas - Virtual Speaker Interview, 2021

“The thing with Anakin is that he started out a great kid he was very compassionate, so the issue was how did he turn bad. How did he go to the Dark Side? He went to the Dark Side, Jedi aren’t supposed to have attachments. They can love people, they can do that, but they can’t attach, that’s the problem in the world of fear. Once you are attached to something then you become afraid of losing it. And when you become afraid of losing it, than you turn to the Dark Side, and you want to hold onto it, and that was Anakin’s issue ultimately, that he wanted to hold onto his wife who he knew, he had a premonition that she was going to die, he didn’t know how to stop it, so he went to the Dark Side to find, in mythology you do to hades, and you talk to the devil, and the devil says ‘this is what you do’ and basically you sell your soul to the devil. When you do that, and you’re afraid and you’re on the Dark Side and you fall off the golden path of compassion because you are greedy, you want to hold on to something that you love and he didn’t do the right thing and as a result he turned bad.” --George Lucas, Mellody Hobson George Lucas - Virtual Speaker Interview, 2021

“Obviously, there are people that just do the easy thing, and the easy thing is to be angry, which turns to hate. It’s not an active thing; it’s a passive thing. Being angry with somebody is a passive thing. You have to work not to be angry, and if you don’t work at it, you’ll just be angry for the rest of your life. Bitter, angry, and of course that leads to suffering - it’s the bad side.” --George Lucas, The Star Wars Archives: 1999-2005

“In this film, [The Phantom Menace] you begin to see that he has a fear of losing things, a fear of losing his mother, and as a result, he wants to begin to control things, he wants to become powerful, and these are not Jedi traits. And part of these are because he was starting to be trained so late in life, that he’d already formed these attachments. And for a Jedi, attachment is forbidden.” --George Lucas, CNN, 2002

There's probably more, if you want to scan through my Jedi Culture and Teachings in Canon guide, just look for chapter 2 of any given part, the section on "How the Force works" is where I put any of these quotes, and you can look around if you're looking for more examples of how the dark side needs to be faced and overcome, that it's part of the nature of life, but that we and the Jedi both should be choosing the light, because that's the way to eternal joy, the dark is the way to eternal suffering. (Check out "Jedi and the need to focus, to be calm when using the Force" section especially, because the Force becomes unreliable for a Jedi when they get angry.)

Overall, it's about how the dark side is consistently, repeatedly tied to attachment (the fear of living without someone, so desperate that you'll let a thousand people die to save that one person you can't live without, as it's more aligned with the Buddhist meaning), tied to fear and anger and hate, which are parts of our lives, but that we must work to overcome. The Jedi don't deny this--look at any scene where they express negative emotions, Mace does it on Geonosis, Yoda does it at Palpatine before their big fight, Obi-Wan is mad on Geonosis when Anakin almost abandons his post, etc., but they don't let it bite into their heart, they let those feelings pass, they let them go and find their way back to calm and peace, because "the world works better when you're on the side of good (the light side)".

#lumi.txt #star wars #the force #jedi order #light side #dark side #george lucas #meta #long post

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