So the Messiah in Star Wars is supposed “to bring balance to The Force,” but I never understood what it meant.
Star Wars is extremely dualistic–there is a good side and an evil side, a light side and a dark side, the Jedi and the Sith. Every plotline is based around a manichean struggle where only one side can win by annihilating the other.
The “good side”, the Jedi, are explicitly looking a savior to provide “balance” while at the same time imposing all sorts of restrictions on which force powers are allowed and which aren’t. For an order whose messiah is based on Taoist equilibrium, they are positively Christian in their obsession with purity.
I think there is an implicit subtextual critique of the Jedi Order in the prequels that they incompetent, as you might expect from the leaders of a theocracy, but that’s about as far as it goes.
I think the closest we get to ANY real discussion of balance is Luke’s vision on Degobah, where he must see himself as potentially Darth Vader, which can be interpreted as an attempt towards wholeness OR as a warning to not stray into evil.
Can anyone square this circle?
Edit: It’s funny to me that there are more comments than upvotes. People want to share. I love it.
That’s not what balance means for the Force.
its balanced right? In the Republic, it was really imbalanced as there were thousands of Jedi but only two sith.
“Balance” when it comes to the Force doesn’t mean equal number of Jedi and Sith or equal amount of light side and dark side. That’s like saying balance is an equal number of non-cancer cells and cancer cells in a body.
The dark side is imbalance, it must be removed for balance.
Balance is just another name for the light side. The dark side brought chaos. The Jedi themselves were also unbalanced themselves because they were serving a corrupt government, so they wouldn’t have survived Anakin either way.