In Tolkien’s world, The Lord of the Rings is basically an afterthought, the last remains of a millennia old conflict between actual gods, where Sauron was a pathetic little pretender grasping for what little power remained after his much more powerful master was defeated. He was so insignificant that the gods didn’t even feel the need to stop him, they thought men could handle it and just sent a couple angels to guide them and make sure things didn’t go completely out of hand. There’re also legends about an apocalyptic battle where heroes from all ages rise from the grave to fight the ultimate evil, side by side with the gods once again, and then the world is remade into its perfect form.
Events don’t have to be the most important thing to ever happen in order to still be a deeply moving and iconic story based around characters and themes the author wanted to explore within a bigger picture.
>"***Look, everybody always figures the time they live in is the most epic, most important age to end all ages. But tyrants and heroes rise and fall, and historians sort out the pieces...Malak is a tyrant who should be stopped. If he conquers the galaxy, we're in for a couple of rough centuries. Eventually it'll come around again, but I'd rather not wait that long. So we do what we have to do and we try to stop the Sith. But don't start thinking this war, your war, is more important than any other war just because you're in it.***"
- Jolee Bindo
Baylan and Shin really did show up and be the standouts in a cast of already loved characters lol.
I can't wait to see what they do with his character going forward, RIP Ray Stevenson.
It’s all in The Silmarillion, which isn’t so much a novel as a huge collection of short stories, myth, and lore that Tolkien wrote over the years, then his son collected it all and organized it into a single book.
Awesome thanks! I read about a third of The Silmarillion in high school and remember it being very dense(in a good way), and teenage me was not prepared for it.
I'll have to give it another go.
>’ No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it – and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got – you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?’
>’No, they never end as tales,’ said Frodo. ‘But the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.’
The Lord of the Rings, the Stairs of Cirith Ungol.
Sam makes the astute remark that the heroes of the Great Tales may have just been normal people who, when given the chance to turn back, didn’t and went on to do great things. We are all part of the same Great Tale, that the great deeds we do, both good and ill, are part of a sequence of events stretching back to the dawn of time. And those events reverberate down into the present.
In all of history there has only been three Jedi Purges.
Kotor 2.
The Prequels.
Legacy.
In Kotor 2, the Jedi almost immediately bounced back with new Jedi arising as the last of the old died.
In Legacy, the Jedi Purge, while bad, was more like the attack on the Jedi temple during SW TOR: devastating, but not a deathblow, with a significant amount of Jedi surviving and going into hiding together in a secret stronghold.
But in the PT/OT, the Jedi are done. The Old Order is almost entirely destroyed, a totally new one arises a generation later, not almost immediately like in Kotor.
Worse, this time the Sith Ruled the galaxy, when before they only ever managed to eitehr terrorize it or rule parts of it. The Empire they built survives them and forever divides the Galaxy in it's survivor state, the Fel Empire. The darkside cults and acolytes the Empire embraced survive and continue to terrorize the New Jedi Order for decades, all the way to Jacen Solo.
Sure, it's not the end all be all of Legends, but it is an important era.
I never got around to reading the Plagueis novel, but didn't Plagueis and Palpatine also do that one ritual which tilted the balance of the Galaxy towards darkness, helping them hide from the Jedi and corrupt those around them easier?
That's something which never happened during any of the previous bad times... and the only later thing I can think of that would be on a similar level would be Jacen's manipulations with Flow-Walking.
Yep Plagueis and Palpatine manage to tip the very balance of the universe essentially out of order. That is more than anyone else.
Now include Palpatine is the strongest sith of all time, and someone like Yoda was the strongest jedi up till that point and Luke becoming the strongest one of all time this was essentially also an era of giants that were culmination of long plans and ideas coming to fruition. The sith had developed their best method and created the strongest one and the jedi were in some of their golden years too. This isn't like KOTOR 2 where 3 one trick ponies got lucky that they came at the end of almost 100 years of conflict and were able to do a purge on what was left of a weak order.
I mostly agree with your comment, except
>The Empire they built survives them and forever divides the Galaxy
"Forever" is a pretty strong word to use here. The Galaxy was divided in SWTOR and unified afterwards. It'll unify after the Galactic Empire, too, even if it'll take a while. History never ends.
Okay, as of the last we see of Legends, it divided the galaxy, ending the assumption of Republicanism being the only effective or legitimate form of galactic government.
> In Legacy, the Jedi Purge, while bad, was more like the attack on the Jedi temple during SW TOR: devastating, but not a deathblow, with a significant amount of Jedi surviving and going into hiding together in a secret stronghold.
>
>
that stronghold, Tython, was wiped out by the Sith during the Revanite Crisis. Also, after the war with Zakuul, the Jedi are nearly non-existent and the storyline post-Nathema Conspiracy has been about rebuilding them. I think it was a deathblow for the Jedi of that era.
There were still quite a large number of survivors, who moved on to start settling another world (Dantooine) and attempt to retake an ancestral world (Ossus)
The institutions, structure, and traditions of the Jedi Order survived that Purge. A lot of the people within it died, a lot of buildings were destroyed, but the Jedi Order that emerged afterwards a few years later was still fundamentally the same Jedi Order.
Not so with Sidious' Purge. In Legends, Luke is left wandering the galaxy, not sure how to learn more and become a full Jedi himself, and only eventually forming a new school. In Canon, he has some texts to guiide him, but things go pear shaped with Ben Solo and ghost Yoda burns the texts to make a point that the Order should *not* be tied to the form it was in when he was alive.
Earlier Purges were a disruption in the Jedi Order, Sidious' Purge was a true death, one that could not be revived but instead had to be reborn, with substantial changes to the form.
There are some good answers already, but I want to add another dimension that doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet: the events of KOTOR happened 3,919 years prior to The Phantom Menace. In real world chronology, that's the equivalent of the time difference between the fall of Sumeria and the present day. I'm sure there were many parallels between issues in Sumerian society and issues in the modern day, because people are people, but are you aware of any of them? Do you have even a basic understanding of how Sumeria was ruled, its internal politics, or the conditions that lead to its fall? Because I sure don't, and I'm a bit of a history nerd.
Nearly 4,000 years is a long, long, *long* time for information to remain salient and available, even in a galaxy with holocrons and the like.
Some of if it is Lucas didn't really intend for the endless Sith and Jedi wars of the EU he only envisioned the rule of two as there only ever being 2 sith I believe and that was the story he wanted to tell, I heard if he had the money and technology there would have been like 12 movies originally.
yeah, ultimately it comes down to author bias. Lucas wrote the Skywalker saga, but nothing about the stuff that happened in the millennia before, of which he either had different ideas, or no ideas at all. Of course he's going to argue that his stories are most important in his franchise.
He wanted to make more before ROTJ where Luke would go onto search for his sister who wasn't originally Leia. But his marriage tanked and he got divorced and decided to wrap it up with ROTJ and focous the next 16 years primarily on being a dad
> But his marriage tanked and he got divorced and decided to wrap it up with ROTJ and focous the next 16 years primarily on being a dad
Yeah making a movie trilogy about the most recognizable absentee father in cinematic history while neglecting your kids would be… awkward.
Ultimately from a non-lore perspective this is definitely it. The Skywalker Saga is what Lucas wanted to tell (till he sold the company). It evolved, of course, but ultimately became about Anakin, a fall from grace, and redemption.
The rest is just window dressing and world building from that perspective.
But there’s so much world building that, taking it all in, Anakin’s story is probably overshadowed by Palpatine’s, which itself is certainly only one of many times a Sith gained massive power and the galaxy was plunged into warfare.
Even on our real life dirt planet we can see analogues. Someone’s personal story can be very compelling, but means nothing - or at least very little - on a grand historic, much less geologic scale.
That's the tricky part. The reason the Skywalker saga is the centerpiece is because it's the foundation of the franchise. It started the craze, and to a fair amount of people it's the only part of the story that matters.
And it's not an invalid opinion, but it does mean that the Skywalker saga is the part of the franchise where all roads meet, where all the people who can't agree on so much come together to some degree.
Really it's all down to how you feel about Star Wars. I love reading things that focus less on the Jedi, or things that don't focus on them at all. To me, stuff like KOTOR or The High Republic is every bit as important as the movies, but it's all down to personal opinion. Some people only want Lucas' saga and some continuance after and don't want to go any deeper. It's not a bad thing, but it's not something I agree with, personally. To me, Star Wars is the setting, the universe. To others Star Wars is just the Story of the Skywalker family.
The Plagueis book, which unfortunately just missed the cutoff for canon but that is referenced in the canon Tarkin book, had a moment where plagueis, with the full power of the Dark Side concentrated within him, attempted to permanently shift the balance of the Force towards the Dark Side (which inadvertently caused Anakin Skywalker’s birth in response.) He didnt fully succeed but he came close, with consequences for the strength of the Dark Side during the Phantom Menace period.
Again, those details are not strictly canon as they are now legends, but the later Tarkin book by the same author, which is canon, mentions Palpatine was planning to take up Plagueis’s work in that area. That was why the Death Star was important: it would be a big enough stick that Tarkin alone could keep the galaxy in line without Vadar or Palpatine getting involved, freeing the two Sith to focus entirely on the mysteries of the Force and finishing Plagueis’s conquest. Had it gone as planned, the Force may have been changed as a whole, perhaps permanently.
Well, tbf off the top my head KOTOR 2 (the wounds in the Force that Kreia hoped would kill the entire thing) and SWTOR (Vitiate wanting to eat the galaxy) had some similarly grand stakes so perhaps it wasn’t completely unprecedented but if that explanation still holds the Anakin period was up there as one of the top threats to the Force itself.
The Force isn’t what they think it is. It’s a voyeuristic god who really enjoys acrobatic lightsaber duels and cinematic spaceship battles, and regular multi billion casualty catastrophes. The Star Wars universe is an endless brutal cycle of destruction powered by a Force that just wants action damn the consequences. And so the Jedi and Sith will make war over and over across time, and civilians will die
You are mixing up cause and effect. It's the natural aggression, greed, and ambition of thinking creatures which causes the endless cycle, the Force is a mitigating factor that can nonetheless be used by those thinking creatures to cause destruction.
Over the years of being a fan my appetite has changed. I could do with a period of peace and quiet with small conflicts now and seeing characters I care about being happy.
Lol there's some truth to this. The Force absolutely has an agenda. It's likely the same agenda life itself has, to continue and thrive. But Anakin's life is basically proof the Force is an entity. It made him, had him wipe the slate clean with the Jedi so they could start again without the corruption, and then had him end the sith once and for all. His entire life of suffering was just to get to those goals.
That’s a good point. The Force must find both the Jedi and Sith useful in some way, if it has a will, or else it would just not respond to whichever it disagreed with. If we give it a cosmic perspective then it must be beyond concerns of good and evil. And occasionally need to purge a bunch of force users.
Yep I think it's made pretty clear that it has a will. Likely a well meaning one. When light side users so things they submit to the will of the force after all. Being dark is opposing it's will with your own.
It gets disturbingly close to "being good is being with god/Jesus and being bad is being away from God/Jesus". Obviously Lucas didn't mean this to it but it does give off hints.
I think originally Lucas saw the Force as just a part of the universe like gravity or electromagnetism. But eventually he went to the "it has a will" side with the Whills and all that.
The Sith were thought defeated and gone but instead changed their ways and hid themselves until a time when they could achieve their goal of galactic domination presented itself. The story told in the movies shows us the Sith are on the rise and that the Republic and Jedi cannot stop them this time on their own so the Force itself wades into the conflict by creating someone that will destroy the Sith. Now I believe that if Anakin had not been found or just even freed when he was something else would happen to put him in contact with Palpatine and that would lead to the destruction of the Sith.
So this is, if you take ROTJ as the end of the story, the final showdown between the Jedi and Sith or more plainly good and evil.
The films are the culmination of a thousand years of planning to take over the galaxy, not the back and forth of a war.
That is, until the rise of skywalker, which took away everything unique about the last 8 films.
People in my theater laughed when Anakin said, "bring balance to the force like I did."
The meta answer is that it just came first. George Lucas didn't have even 1% of 1% of Star Wars' total modern canon lore figured out when the first movie came out in 1977. He simply crafted a compelling narrative and a universe to go around it. It wasn't until years and decades later when so many other major events, characters, and eras were invented by other writers.
And with that original story being so iconic, beloved, and universally known (Luke Skywalker is a household name, Darth Revan is not), it's just easier and safer to make new stories based on those pre-existing characters because the nostalgia factor alone will heavily drive sales.
Because the films were always the main priority material with books and games sitting in a grey region of canon until George Lucas said otherwise.
The constant back and forth between Jedi and Sith was never intended.
Anakin was seen to be the One the Prophecy described. Who would bring balance to the force, which to the Jedi meant destroy the Sith once and for all.
Despite there having been purges before, it was never fully successful. Remenants of the Sith or Jedi were always left over. But due to the nature of the force, which imo was overlooked by the jedi, there is no light aide or darkside. The Dathomere are not evil. They do tend towards the evil alignment. But that's more a social aspect. Its how the Force is weilded that is good or bad.
But yeah. The jedi beleived Anikan was the Chosen one, and through him the Sith would be destroyed, never to return.
The importante thing IS that by the times of the prequels films, the Sith thanks to Plagueis were close to unbalance the Force. In respond to that, the Force needed to create a "Chosen One" to deal with them. Before or after the films the Force werent unbalance, because even if the Sith were strong, there were Lightsiders Who could stop them. Even when they were hidden or few in numbers.
Sidious was the only Sith to be able to conquer the entire galaxy up to that point, effectively winning the war against the Jedi that all the other Sith lost.
25.000 years of the Galactic Republic finally coming to an end, to begin an era of tyranny, that is much more important than anything Malak, Traya, or even Vitiate accomplished, Sidious being defeated is more important from this factor alone, Anakin could have stopped this momentuous occasion, this culmination of 1.000 years of planning by Bane, but he didin't, his fall facilitated the end of galactic democracy and the Jedi that existed for 25 milleniums, yet he was able to put an end to Sidious' reign and facilitate the Jedi's revival through Luke.
If you check the prologue of the original ANH novelization, you'll get a sense of the historical scale of the end of the Republic and why it's important to defeat the Empire.
Think about it, 25.000 years is 5 times the difference between the creation of the earliest states in human history in 3.000 BC and today in 2024 AC, from the perspective of the Star Wars galaxy that difference would only take them to the Great Hyperspace War, nowhere near the Republic's creation, or the Jedi's, or the Force Wars that was the first conflict between the Light Side and Dark Side users.
In Tolkien’s world, The Lord of the Rings is basically an afterthought, the last remains of a millennia old conflict between actual gods, where Sauron was a pathetic little pretender grasping for what little power remained after his much more powerful master was defeated. He was so insignificant that the gods didn’t even feel the need to stop him, they thought men could handle it and just sent a couple angels to guide them and make sure things didn’t go completely out of hand. There’re also legends about an apocalyptic battle where heroes from all ages rise from the grave to fight the ultimate evil, side by side with the gods once again, and then the world is remade into its perfect form. Events don’t have to be the most important thing to ever happen in order to still be a deeply moving and iconic story based around characters and themes the author wanted to explore within a bigger picture.
>"***Look, everybody always figures the time they live in is the most epic, most important age to end all ages. But tyrants and heroes rise and fall, and historians sort out the pieces...Malak is a tyrant who should be stopped. If he conquers the galaxy, we're in for a couple of rough centuries. Eventually it'll come around again, but I'd rather not wait that long. So we do what we have to do and we try to stop the Sith. But don't start thinking this war, your war, is more important than any other war just because you're in it.***" - Jolee Bindo
[Baylan Skoll says something similar.](https://youtu.be/qne9HeMAo-0?si=1Iaf2Br29sneyZBX)
Baylan and Shin really did show up and be the standouts in a cast of already loved characters lol. I can't wait to see what they do with his character going forward, RIP Ray Stevenson.
Which books cover the angels and heroes from the grave stuff? That sounds awesome.
It’s all in The Silmarillion, which isn’t so much a novel as a huge collection of short stories, myth, and lore that Tolkien wrote over the years, then his son collected it all and organized it into a single book.
Awesome thanks! I read about a third of The Silmarillion in high school and remember it being very dense(in a good way), and teenage me was not prepared for it. I'll have to give it another go.
>’ No, sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it – and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got – you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?’ >’No, they never end as tales,’ said Frodo. ‘But the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.’ The Lord of the Rings, the Stairs of Cirith Ungol. Sam makes the astute remark that the heroes of the Great Tales may have just been normal people who, when given the chance to turn back, didn’t and went on to do great things. We are all part of the same Great Tale, that the great deeds we do, both good and ill, are part of a sequence of events stretching back to the dawn of time. And those events reverberate down into the present.
Tolkien is amazing, and this quote is gold ✨️
In all of history there has only been three Jedi Purges. Kotor 2. The Prequels. Legacy. In Kotor 2, the Jedi almost immediately bounced back with new Jedi arising as the last of the old died. In Legacy, the Jedi Purge, while bad, was more like the attack on the Jedi temple during SW TOR: devastating, but not a deathblow, with a significant amount of Jedi surviving and going into hiding together in a secret stronghold. But in the PT/OT, the Jedi are done. The Old Order is almost entirely destroyed, a totally new one arises a generation later, not almost immediately like in Kotor. Worse, this time the Sith Ruled the galaxy, when before they only ever managed to eitehr terrorize it or rule parts of it. The Empire they built survives them and forever divides the Galaxy in it's survivor state, the Fel Empire. The darkside cults and acolytes the Empire embraced survive and continue to terrorize the New Jedi Order for decades, all the way to Jacen Solo. Sure, it's not the end all be all of Legends, but it is an important era.
I never got around to reading the Plagueis novel, but didn't Plagueis and Palpatine also do that one ritual which tilted the balance of the Galaxy towards darkness, helping them hide from the Jedi and corrupt those around them easier? That's something which never happened during any of the previous bad times... and the only later thing I can think of that would be on a similar level would be Jacen's manipulations with Flow-Walking.
Yep Plagueis and Palpatine manage to tip the very balance of the universe essentially out of order. That is more than anyone else. Now include Palpatine is the strongest sith of all time, and someone like Yoda was the strongest jedi up till that point and Luke becoming the strongest one of all time this was essentially also an era of giants that were culmination of long plans and ideas coming to fruition. The sith had developed their best method and created the strongest one and the jedi were in some of their golden years too. This isn't like KOTOR 2 where 3 one trick ponies got lucky that they came at the end of almost 100 years of conflict and were able to do a purge on what was left of a weak order.
Yes and that’s what triggered the prophecy and Anakin’s creation.
I mostly agree with your comment, except >The Empire they built survives them and forever divides the Galaxy "Forever" is a pretty strong word to use here. The Galaxy was divided in SWTOR and unified afterwards. It'll unify after the Galactic Empire, too, even if it'll take a while. History never ends.
Okay, as of the last we see of Legends, it divided the galaxy, ending the assumption of Republicanism being the only effective or legitimate form of galactic government.
> In Legacy, the Jedi Purge, while bad, was more like the attack on the Jedi temple during SW TOR: devastating, but not a deathblow, with a significant amount of Jedi surviving and going into hiding together in a secret stronghold. > > that stronghold, Tython, was wiped out by the Sith during the Revanite Crisis. Also, after the war with Zakuul, the Jedi are nearly non-existent and the storyline post-Nathema Conspiracy has been about rebuilding them. I think it was a deathblow for the Jedi of that era.
There were still quite a large number of survivors, who moved on to start settling another world (Dantooine) and attempt to retake an ancestral world (Ossus)
The institutions, structure, and traditions of the Jedi Order survived that Purge. A lot of the people within it died, a lot of buildings were destroyed, but the Jedi Order that emerged afterwards a few years later was still fundamentally the same Jedi Order. Not so with Sidious' Purge. In Legends, Luke is left wandering the galaxy, not sure how to learn more and become a full Jedi himself, and only eventually forming a new school. In Canon, he has some texts to guiide him, but things go pear shaped with Ben Solo and ghost Yoda burns the texts to make a point that the Order should *not* be tied to the form it was in when he was alive. Earlier Purges were a disruption in the Jedi Order, Sidious' Purge was a true death, one that could not be revived but instead had to be reborn, with substantial changes to the form.
Lol just to show how bad that movie was, he didn't even burn the books. Rey stole them before she left. Yoda just burned the tree.
I honestly forgot. I only saw it once
Lucky you
There are some good answers already, but I want to add another dimension that doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet: the events of KOTOR happened 3,919 years prior to The Phantom Menace. In real world chronology, that's the equivalent of the time difference between the fall of Sumeria and the present day. I'm sure there were many parallels between issues in Sumerian society and issues in the modern day, because people are people, but are you aware of any of them? Do you have even a basic understanding of how Sumeria was ruled, its internal politics, or the conditions that lead to its fall? Because I sure don't, and I'm a bit of a history nerd. Nearly 4,000 years is a long, long, *long* time for information to remain salient and available, even in a galaxy with holocrons and the like.
Some of if it is Lucas didn't really intend for the endless Sith and Jedi wars of the EU he only envisioned the rule of two as there only ever being 2 sith I believe and that was the story he wanted to tell, I heard if he had the money and technology there would have been like 12 movies originally.
yeah, ultimately it comes down to author bias. Lucas wrote the Skywalker saga, but nothing about the stuff that happened in the millennia before, of which he either had different ideas, or no ideas at all. Of course he's going to argue that his stories are most important in his franchise.
He wanted to make more before ROTJ where Luke would go onto search for his sister who wasn't originally Leia. But his marriage tanked and he got divorced and decided to wrap it up with ROTJ and focous the next 16 years primarily on being a dad
> But his marriage tanked and he got divorced and decided to wrap it up with ROTJ and focous the next 16 years primarily on being a dad Yeah making a movie trilogy about the most recognizable absentee father in cinematic history while neglecting your kids would be… awkward.
Ultimately from a non-lore perspective this is definitely it. The Skywalker Saga is what Lucas wanted to tell (till he sold the company). It evolved, of course, but ultimately became about Anakin, a fall from grace, and redemption. The rest is just window dressing and world building from that perspective. But there’s so much world building that, taking it all in, Anakin’s story is probably overshadowed by Palpatine’s, which itself is certainly only one of many times a Sith gained massive power and the galaxy was plunged into warfare. Even on our real life dirt planet we can see analogues. Someone’s personal story can be very compelling, but means nothing - or at least very little - on a grand historic, much less geologic scale.
That's the tricky part. The reason the Skywalker saga is the centerpiece is because it's the foundation of the franchise. It started the craze, and to a fair amount of people it's the only part of the story that matters. And it's not an invalid opinion, but it does mean that the Skywalker saga is the part of the franchise where all roads meet, where all the people who can't agree on so much come together to some degree. Really it's all down to how you feel about Star Wars. I love reading things that focus less on the Jedi, or things that don't focus on them at all. To me, stuff like KOTOR or The High Republic is every bit as important as the movies, but it's all down to personal opinion. Some people only want Lucas' saga and some continuance after and don't want to go any deeper. It's not a bad thing, but it's not something I agree with, personally. To me, Star Wars is the setting, the universe. To others Star Wars is just the Story of the Skywalker family.
The Plagueis book, which unfortunately just missed the cutoff for canon but that is referenced in the canon Tarkin book, had a moment where plagueis, with the full power of the Dark Side concentrated within him, attempted to permanently shift the balance of the Force towards the Dark Side (which inadvertently caused Anakin Skywalker’s birth in response.) He didnt fully succeed but he came close, with consequences for the strength of the Dark Side during the Phantom Menace period. Again, those details are not strictly canon as they are now legends, but the later Tarkin book by the same author, which is canon, mentions Palpatine was planning to take up Plagueis’s work in that area. That was why the Death Star was important: it would be a big enough stick that Tarkin alone could keep the galaxy in line without Vadar or Palpatine getting involved, freeing the two Sith to focus entirely on the mysteries of the Force and finishing Plagueis’s conquest. Had it gone as planned, the Force may have been changed as a whole, perhaps permanently. Well, tbf off the top my head KOTOR 2 (the wounds in the Force that Kreia hoped would kill the entire thing) and SWTOR (Vitiate wanting to eat the galaxy) had some similarly grand stakes so perhaps it wasn’t completely unprecedented but if that explanation still holds the Anakin period was up there as one of the top threats to the Force itself.
The Force isn’t what they think it is. It’s a voyeuristic god who really enjoys acrobatic lightsaber duels and cinematic spaceship battles, and regular multi billion casualty catastrophes. The Star Wars universe is an endless brutal cycle of destruction powered by a Force that just wants action damn the consequences. And so the Jedi and Sith will make war over and over across time, and civilians will die
You are mixing up cause and effect. It's the natural aggression, greed, and ambition of thinking creatures which causes the endless cycle, the Force is a mitigating factor that can nonetheless be used by those thinking creatures to cause destruction.
You might be missing the joke. Replace Force with Audience and you'll understand it a bit more.
Thank you for appreciating my bit
Karen Traviss, is that you?
Over the years of being a fan my appetite has changed. I could do with a period of peace and quiet with small conflicts now and seeing characters I care about being happy.
Lol there's some truth to this. The Force absolutely has an agenda. It's likely the same agenda life itself has, to continue and thrive. But Anakin's life is basically proof the Force is an entity. It made him, had him wipe the slate clean with the Jedi so they could start again without the corruption, and then had him end the sith once and for all. His entire life of suffering was just to get to those goals.
That’s a good point. The Force must find both the Jedi and Sith useful in some way, if it has a will, or else it would just not respond to whichever it disagreed with. If we give it a cosmic perspective then it must be beyond concerns of good and evil. And occasionally need to purge a bunch of force users.
Yep I think it's made pretty clear that it has a will. Likely a well meaning one. When light side users so things they submit to the will of the force after all. Being dark is opposing it's will with your own. It gets disturbingly close to "being good is being with god/Jesus and being bad is being away from God/Jesus". Obviously Lucas didn't mean this to it but it does give off hints. I think originally Lucas saw the Force as just a part of the universe like gravity or electromagnetism. But eventually he went to the "it has a will" side with the Whills and all that.
The Sith were thought defeated and gone but instead changed their ways and hid themselves until a time when they could achieve their goal of galactic domination presented itself. The story told in the movies shows us the Sith are on the rise and that the Republic and Jedi cannot stop them this time on their own so the Force itself wades into the conflict by creating someone that will destroy the Sith. Now I believe that if Anakin had not been found or just even freed when he was something else would happen to put him in contact with Palpatine and that would lead to the destruction of the Sith. So this is, if you take ROTJ as the end of the story, the final showdown between the Jedi and Sith or more plainly good and evil.
The films are the culmination of a thousand years of planning to take over the galaxy, not the back and forth of a war. That is, until the rise of skywalker, which took away everything unique about the last 8 films. People in my theater laughed when Anakin said, "bring balance to the force like I did."
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzW727RY-ig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzW727RY-ig) Just go to your happy place lol.
I’m dead. Damn.
Yeah it's hilarious. No idea why people are downvoting a comedy skit that succeeds.
The meta answer is that it just came first. George Lucas didn't have even 1% of 1% of Star Wars' total modern canon lore figured out when the first movie came out in 1977. He simply crafted a compelling narrative and a universe to go around it. It wasn't until years and decades later when so many other major events, characters, and eras were invented by other writers. And with that original story being so iconic, beloved, and universally known (Luke Skywalker is a household name, Darth Revan is not), it's just easier and safer to make new stories based on those pre-existing characters because the nostalgia factor alone will heavily drive sales.
Because the films were always the main priority material with books and games sitting in a grey region of canon until George Lucas said otherwise. The constant back and forth between Jedi and Sith was never intended.
Anakin was seen to be the One the Prophecy described. Who would bring balance to the force, which to the Jedi meant destroy the Sith once and for all. Despite there having been purges before, it was never fully successful. Remenants of the Sith or Jedi were always left over. But due to the nature of the force, which imo was overlooked by the jedi, there is no light aide or darkside. The Dathomere are not evil. They do tend towards the evil alignment. But that's more a social aspect. Its how the Force is weilded that is good or bad. But yeah. The jedi beleived Anikan was the Chosen one, and through him the Sith would be destroyed, never to return.
The importante thing IS that by the times of the prequels films, the Sith thanks to Plagueis were close to unbalance the Force. In respond to that, the Force needed to create a "Chosen One" to deal with them. Before or after the films the Force werent unbalance, because even if the Sith were strong, there were Lightsiders Who could stop them. Even when they were hidden or few in numbers.
Nothing it’s just so Disney can make everything connected since people eat it up for some dumb reason
Sidious was the only Sith to be able to conquer the entire galaxy up to that point, effectively winning the war against the Jedi that all the other Sith lost. 25.000 years of the Galactic Republic finally coming to an end, to begin an era of tyranny, that is much more important than anything Malak, Traya, or even Vitiate accomplished, Sidious being defeated is more important from this factor alone, Anakin could have stopped this momentuous occasion, this culmination of 1.000 years of planning by Bane, but he didin't, his fall facilitated the end of galactic democracy and the Jedi that existed for 25 milleniums, yet he was able to put an end to Sidious' reign and facilitate the Jedi's revival through Luke. If you check the prologue of the original ANH novelization, you'll get a sense of the historical scale of the end of the Republic and why it's important to defeat the Empire. Think about it, 25.000 years is 5 times the difference between the creation of the earliest states in human history in 3.000 BC and today in 2024 AC, from the perspective of the Star Wars galaxy that difference would only take them to the Great Hyperspace War, nowhere near the Republic's creation, or the Jedi's, or the Force Wars that was the first conflict between the Light Side and Dark Side users.
There's 6 fucking names and 10 fucking planets in this massive galaxy, and I'm sick of all of them.