DuracellEnergizer said:
I don't see anything wrong with shades of gray in Star Wars. Hell, one of the main reasons that the PT-styled Sith suck so much is because there are no shades of gray in the way they're written.
QFT.
(Though I can see how Anakin's turn was supposed to be identified with, I think.)
Antagonists - and protagonists, for that matter - who are each simply avatars for one side of a binary system of objective morality are boring and hard to identify with.
I don't think the OT was fully black and white, and I don't even mean the fact that Anakin showed the possibility of redemption. Even in SW77, Vader's motivations for learning the dark side (in the backstory) might have been understandable. For example, I got the sense that he was frustrated with his lack of progress under Obi-Wan, and was tempted by the easier way to access power. This impression was only strengthened by ESB. The Empire was about ruling and maintaining a rigid hierarchy and inflexible standards.
Those are all understandable motivations. Even if I tend to disagree with people who actually evince them, I can often see where they're coming from. I know they're called the 'evil Empire' in the scroll, but I think the brutality of their methods can account for this; their goals being overtly 'Evil' is unnecessary, and uninteresting. GL said around the time ROTS came out, no one counts themselves as evil. Everyone does things for reasons that are right to them. And in that, I think he was right.
Note also that at the time of the OT, only Vader was called a Dark Lord of the Sith. GL knew this was to refer to a dark side group, but neither the Empire nor Palpatine himself were called Sithly. Also, (possibly as a result of this) the Sith were presented in the EU as a culture, one that focused on dark side magic, but not the only one. Dark siders didn't necessarily have to have any particular cultural affiliation, and light siders didn't either (which is how you saw a lot of Dark Jedi and also light side sects like the Aing-Tii).
In the PT, I definitely got more of a binary between the Jedi and the Sith as representatives of the two sides of the Force.
(As an aside: for me, the Force works better as simply Power, a Life Force for the universe, which can be accessed within normal natural constraints (light side) or by ignoring those limits (dark side). If the universe is a bottle containing the Coke of the Force, a light sider would access it by unscrewing the cap, which is a bit more complicated and time-consuming, while a dark sider would just break the bottle and let it pour out. But I digress.)
I think in the PT and the EU after it, the Jedi and Sith were placed in binary opposition and their conflict was upscaled from simply involving two groups of Force users who chose different methods with very different levels of collateral damage to one involving the structure of the Force itself. To me, this is different from much of what we saw in the OT.
EDIT: Maybe that last sentence really gets at something: it might be different if the OT gave the impression that the Empire was about the return of a dark side Culture and their desire to rule the galaxy. But given the way we mostly see the admirals, stormtroopers, etc, and the fact that while both Vader and the Emperor use the dark side they don't seem to have any explicit shared cultural affiliation except 'Imperial,' making the Empire instead "really" about Sith factional domination feels mismatched. It seemed to me like it was about certain political ideologies, for which the dark side was a tool of enforcement.
