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Post #1506591

Author
Vladius
Parent topic
Anakin/Vader and mortality
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1506591/action/topic#1506591
Date created
5-Oct-2022, 2:57 PM

I agree with everything G&G Fan said. I’ll also add some things:

  1. The idea of “balance between the light side and dark side, Jedi and Sith” is nonsense. The light side doesn’t represent lack of emotion and the dark side doesn’t represent emotion. The dark side is a supernatural evil that exerts supernatural influence over people that are strong in the Force, specifically through the emotions of greed, hatred, and ambition. It’s not just any old emotion like romantic love or frustration or protectiveness. It’s not nature, it’s a perversion of nature, which is why it gets associated with looking gray and sickly, cybernetics, and the pursuit of immortality.

  2. Individuals not living up to their own ideals doesn’t mean that those ideals are wrong. The Jedi probably don’t expect every Jedi to be perfectly selfless 100% of the time. As a religious person in real life I see this kind of thing all the time. Someone who is very openly religious or pious will make a mistake and then everyone pounces on it to call them a hypocrite. Even though those people live at a much lower standard of moral behavior, they think it’s somehow worse to try to be good and make mistakes than to not try at all. Having standards and trying to live them is not the same thing as arrogance or thinking you’re better than other people, even if sometimes there are individuals that act that way.

  3. The Jedi don’t expect everyone to be Jedi. They never say that everyone is supposed to live the way they do. They practice self-discipline because they have more power and ability than other people, but they don’t tell average people on the street to be monks. George Lucas clearly wants the audience to take away the message of avoiding fear, greed, and selfishness, but obviously he’s not telling the audience to wear brown robes and leave their families.

  4. There might be some loss of face if Anakin left the Jedi, but it wouldn’t be insurmountable or dangerous to him. They wouldn’t hunt him down and kill him. He would still have plenty of friends who would wish him well. It would be perfectly understandable if he really loved Padme that much.
    Them thinking so highly of Dooku actually backs this up. As does the number of Lost 20 being only 20, after 10,000 years. It turns out the Jedi are pretty decent at retaining people and keeping them from going to the dark side, so it’s not this thing of the Jedi being inherently unstable and deserving destruction for the crime of suppressing emotions or whatever.