What are you? Jedi or Sith? Do you choose the right-hand path or the left-hand path? Do you serve the world within or the world within-and-without? Life is an MMORPG. Choose your faction.
I have seen the argument that “balance” is a *temporary* thing, that it's "balance not Balance," etc, but that's unsatisfying storytelling. Why would you want there to be six films revolving around an ancient prophecy in an old galaxy... a teleology, a single moment, a punctuation mark in history, if you will... a single moment in which one individual person takes an unexpected action and restores Balance (not balance) to the galaxy--a Balance that had been lacking for many many millennia!--but then… only a few years after that... it’s out of balance again, for the exact same reasons, and some new person (who was not prophecied), just shows up and fixes it. And after that, this new person--not Luke Skywalker, the man who saved darth vader's soul!--gets to have her own Jedi Order with her own philosophy. What is her philosophy, though? Is it as "light-sided" as Luke's? or is it drunk with Disneyvision? What did Rey learn throughout these films? What did she learn from Luke, or Leia, or from anybody? What is Rey gonna teach her students? "Just be innately powerful." The word for this is "hogwash," people. Luke was killed off by the Mouse so the Mouse could control the future of the most popular depiction of magic ever made.
Yes, the idea that *both* Anakin and Rey restore balance makes no sense. What do we mean by "balance" in that case? It means "destroying the Sith," I guess, but either Anakin ended the legacy of the Sith, or Rey did. They can't both have done it. A legacy is only destroyed once, unless you bring it back from the dead... You've heard of necrophilia? This is Necrocinephilia, even worse.
Yes, the idea that “Balance was restored, but it's temporary,” makes Anakin's story less significant. Much less so, it would mean it's *not* about the destruction of the Sith, or the Rise and Fall of the Empire. That would mean the climax of Return of the Jedi is *not* a teleological moment, not a cosmic Event that the history of the galaxy had been leading to, it was not the mythic Moment of Apotheosis--the evolution of the galaxy as a whole, not just one man.
No, this is not how sequels work. This is how remakes work. Sequels do not hit “reset” and make all the characters regress to their un-evolved selves. Sequels do not magically restage the same conflict again--with the exact same villain, mind you! Sequels at the very least get new villains. They build upon the previous films, turn the accomplishments of the first film into the curses of the second. Sequels complicate, they push forward, they break away from, they get bigger, sure, but they should get more specific, more nuanced, more charged, more emotional. Yes, I want Difference and not just Repetition. Yes, I’m willing to fight about this.
My good friend Venator's Class (https://youtu.be/fXDej2rn1Cw?si=oD0UICxNfgEQ3Zt2) and also this guy Thor Skywalker (https://youtu.be/qEP-2sqDtfc?si=5C3J3vuQvNL8Br3s) have gone over a lot of this before. It's not a new argument to say (Balance is not about having "Equal number of Sith and Jedi" but rather having no Sith at all, because the Jedi seek balance), but I've never heard anyone connect the Force with the tradition of "Magic" more generally, nor with indigenous "magic systems" here on planet earth.
"Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force." - Lao Tzu
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