Star Wars can be a little light on the details when it comes to the Force and the more esoteric concepts in the story, leaving fans to discuss amongst themselves until they find an interpretation they like. Many viewers have found themselves a little lost when it comes to the “chosen one” prophecy that steered Anakin Skywalker’s life. It predicted that he would bring balance to the Force, and on the surface, that would seem to mean balance between he dark side and the light. Some fans feel this means Anakin was always destined to dabble in the dark side, and perhaps even join the Sith temporarily before balancing the two. Others think this is an incomplete interpretation of the idea of “balance.”
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A discussion of the “balance” in Anakin’s prophecy cropped up this week on the main Star Wars subreddit, and commenters there noted this wasn’t the first time they’d handled this topic. The original poster wondered “how was Anakin meant to bring balance to the Force without turning to the dark side?” The top comments generally agreed that it wasn’t as simple as culling the Jedi to bring the number of Sith and Jedi closer to equal. Beyond that, it was hard to reach a consensus.
Many users argued that the Force itself would be in better balance if the Sith were eliminated altogether, since the Sith used the dark side as a tool to reach their own selfish goals rather than learning to live in harmony with it. Fans raised an old quote from George Lucas who reportedly said that the dark side is like “a sickness” within the Force, and it needed to be excised to return the galaxy to balance.
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For this point, it’s helpful to understand the circumstances of Anakin’s immaculate conception, which are easy misinterpreted based on the movies alone. In Episode I, Anakin’s mother Shmi says that Anakin had no father, and in Episode III, Palpatine claims that his Sith master could manipulate the Force to create life itself. This led many fans to believe that Anakin was created by Darth Plagueis, but in reality, Palpatine was exaggerating his master’s powers to entice Anakin to join him.
As we now understand it, Anakin’s fatherless conception was actually the will of the Force itself, as one user explained. “The Force created Anakin in response to Plagueis manipulating the Midichlorians, not in response to the Jedi, but to the Sith and their unnatural ways of manipulating the Force, which was a corruption to it,” they wrote. They also noted that the dark side is most often characterized by anger, while the light embodies compassion. “Balance in Star Wars is understanding we are all capable of good and bad but not allowing that darkness to control us,” they wrote.
Do the Jedi Need to be Destroyed?
Along these lines, some suggested that the bloated Jedi order of the prequel era may have had its fair share of corruption as well, so perhaps destroying it did help to balance the scales on some level. This is debatable at best, especially since a lot of the evidence for Jedi corruption came from material that is now part of the Legends timeline, not the main canon.
That idea may have picked up more traction in the wake of the prequel trilogy, which interrogated the Jedi teaching and traditions in a way that earlier content rarely did. Episode VIII seemed to hint that Rey would find her own path somewhere between the dark side and the light, and now some fans suspect Rey will give rise to a new order of Force users who don’t even go by the name Jedi.
Whether that’s true or not, it likely won’t change the generally positive legacy of the Jedi and the negative reputation of the Sith in a galaxy far, far away. However, with the new Rey movie now in pre-production, we may get an idea of where the Star Wars franchise is heading sooner rather than later. In the meantime, all the mainline Star Wars movies and TV shows are streaming now on Disney+.
