potty meister said:
I love this explanation so muchOh good! I’m glad that made sense. If you want to know why all the Disney STAR WARS stuff hits different, that is the reason why. Disney abandoned the spiritual narrative framework George was using to link the original six films together, probably because they never realized it was there, haha!
Just curious. What changes do you think they could have made to the sequels to make them align within this framework?
Technically, TROS ends with two sacrifices of love. Rey gives her life to stop Palpatine from killing her friends, and then Ben gives his life so that Rey can have hers back.
The short answer is that the Sequels simply cannot be aligned with George’s original six.
Here’s the long answer in two parts:
- The POV changed. The sequel trilogy has been reframed from God’s POV to Rey’s POV. When you study medieval literature and history one of the first things you run into is the “God’s POV” system. In other words, God (In STAR WARS’ case the Force) is the main character binding the story together and observing/passing judgement on the events. The reason Lucas used this Medieval POV framework is so that the deeds of the Jedi and the Senate in the Prequels could be “judged” by the Force. Every character in the Prequels does not live up to their own ideals, and in the OT, all of the characters cast aside their initial ideals to align themselves with the Force’s ideals. Luke stops chasing adventure, and faces his sacrificial destiny, Vader casts aside his power to save his son, Han gives up his shifty ways to become a hero his friends can depend on, Yoda sets aside the grandeur of the Jedi Temple to embrace the swamps of Dagobah (His natural environment), Obi-Wan becomes Luke’s spiritual father to make up for his failure mentoring Anakin, Princess Leia transforms from a feisty Rebel into a wise and just political leader who can build the New Republic, and so on and so on and so.
In the Sequel Trilogy Rey writes her own adventure and decides to be a Skywalker instead of a Palpatine, rather than becoming the person the Force purposed her to be, because Rey is the Force, lol! The sacrifices Rey and Kylo make are part of a “cycle”. They do not lead to the creation of a new world, which brings me to the second reason.
- The Sequel Trilogy abandoned Lucas’ Christian Apocalyptic Framework, and turned the SAGA into a Pagan Cycle. So if you think of the Norse Saga’s they loop endlessly like the turning of a wheel. The Christian viewpoint is that God is not bound to cycles (Fatalism), and He can and will make “all things new.” The end of Revelation in the Bible doesn’t end with everything in the past being destroyed, instead it ends with the resurrection and glorification of Humanity and Nature with “Every Tribe, Tongue, and Nation” peacefully living together in the “New Heavens and the New Earth”. This is why our Heroes in Return of the Jedi are adopted into the Ewok Tribe, because the Force being brought into balance is not a redo of the corrupt Old Republic, it is the harmony of “Every Tribe, Tongue, and Nation.” In the Sequels it’s all about our main characters finding out who they are by burning the past, instead of realizing the part they were created to play within the story of the Force that leads towards the balance of all things. I would have done the sequels the way George was planning them, by focusing on the way Luke, Leia, and Han work together to build a just society through the New Jedi Order and the New Republic (New Heavens and the New Earth), rather than Disney’s take which is to cycle the “New Republic” into the same bureaucratic nightmare that the “Old Republic” was. Apocalypse in the Christian sense means “unveiling”. In George’s SAGA all of our character were “unveiled” so that we could see who they were meant to be. Disney threw all the veils back on and cycled Luke, Han, and Leia back to the point where we met them in A New Hope. I have no problem if someone likes one storytelling system over another, but I sure as heck cannot make a Pagan Cycle line up with a Christian-style Apocalypse, because the Apocalypses in the Bible were actually designed to challenge the Pagan view of the Cosmos, lol! Does that make any sense? George’s main idea for STAR WARS was “What if ancient Celtic Animism became institutionalized like Christianity?” All lot of the “Theology” George created for the Force is pantheistic/animistic, but the storytelling system George used was distinctly Christian. Probably why he jokingly referred to himself as a “Buddhist Methodist”, lol!