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Post #1470602

Author
sade1212
Parent topic
Community Focus Thread 1: The Phantom Menace
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1470602/action/topic#1470602
Date created
4-Feb-2022, 10:26 AM

I think the important distinction to draw, as Lucas and Filoni do in those snippets, is between compassionate selfless love and possessive selfish “love”. Lucas is very much about selflessness vs selfishness.

In the PT, we see Anakin’s selfish, possessive love of Padme cause issues. He wants to keep her alive more for himself than for her: it’s “I won’t lose you Padme”, “I can’t live without her”, “you will not take her from me!”; he never asks her what she wants or thinks, even when she’s literally begging him to stop. And in the OT we see selfless, compassionate love: Anakin gives up his own life so Luke can live. He’s doing it for Luke, not so that he can keep Luke for himself or recruit Luke as an apprentice or whatever.

Where the idea of ‘attachment’ and the PT Jedi come into it, IMO, is that in order to avoid the risks associated with “selfish” love, the PT Jedi opt to forego all love entirely (on a personal level, they still supposedly maintain a general compassion/unconditional love towards all things, as Anakin mentions in AOTC), including the good, selfless parts. But that winds up being just as unhealthy. It leads to them being unable to appreciate the potential positive effect that Luke and Anakin’s bond could have, and instead write Anakin off as so far gone that he just has to be killed - a belief which Luke proves wrong.

This is one thing that I think TROS nailed. As a general rule, stopping people from dying (or even resurrecting the recently-deceased) is a Good Thing - here in the real world we call it medicine - so Yoda’s insistence in ROTS that Anakin not even bother trying to save Padme at all comes across as callous and heartless. By the end of the original six movies, the only people we’ve seen show any interest in using the Force to heal people are, bizzarely, the Sith. But then ROTJ is pretty unambiguous in its messaging that Vader opting to save his son was a Good Thing, a “light-side” choice that redeems him and allows him to become one with the Force and manifest as a spirit and all that. So we’ve seen that the old Jedi thought that trying to use the Force to save people from death was bad (even though it seems like it should be good), but also that selflessly saving people from dying definitely is good according to, essentially, the Force itself. Ben sacrificing his own life to resurrect Rey manages to combine these ideas while respecting the selfish/selfless love dichotomy: you can resurrect people from death on the “light-side”, but it can’t be done selfishly or possessively, only selflessly, because it kills you.

Sorry, this is not relevant to TPM lol.