I also entirely disagree with the […]
Thank you, sade!
I must confess, I haven’t watched Rebels (or any other animated series). But that sounds interesting, thanks for the tip!
Let me try to explain myself: Of course, the idea that Balance is some sort of “greyness” is just an exaggerated, artificial metaphor that can only appear in a fairy tale (which is what Star Wars is to me). Of course, there is no such thing as good and bad either—there are only the subjective definitions of what is good or bad, right or wrong for the person interpreting a situation, action, or object (this is what sociology calls the “interpretative paradigm”).
For me, balance in this story mainly stands for one’s own identity and the process that it is. The moral, the greater wisdom behind it could then be (or is for me) that you don’t have to be afraid of this process, you have to face it and you shouldn’t submit to ready-made, rigid doctrines – or at least critically examine them.
But I agree with you on the point you described regarding TLJ: As the quintessence of the film, I could have used Yoda’s tenet " The greatest teacher, failure is / we are what they grow beyond" (an I loved that right from the first time I’ve saw it in the movies) instead of Luke’s fairly pessimistic “It’s time for the Jedi to end”. From this one could have concluded that the Jedi – as you say – are in fact not fundamentally flawed and can’t be fixed, but simply need reform (and this reform is ultimately personified by Rey). This would also still fit perfectly with my whole identity-process-theme - as the great Adam Savage used to say: failure is always an option. Unfortunately, I find that TROS doesn’t give enough for that – it just reversed TLJ too much. So, I find the path I have devised to go not only more practical, but also philosophically more attractive.
But like I said, that’s all my personal world view. Thank you for your critical encouragement! It’s still an very early WIP, so it’s fun to logically take everything apart again and check if it makes sense.