You Were Supposed to Bring Balance to the Force, not Leave it in Darkness!

Taking a break from my series on watching the SW saga backwards ... I wrote this bit as a thread on Twitter and got enough positive response on it that I figured I'd post it here too. The context is the contention by some in fandom that Palpatine's return in The Rise of Skywalker ruins Anakin's fulfillment (in Return of the Jedi) of the Prequel-era prophecy of the Chosen One.

The importance of the Chosen One prophecy in the PT is that the Jedi simultaneously place too much importance on it and don't take it seriously enough. That exactly parallels how a lot of fans treat the prophecy.

The Jedi believe in the prophecy, but instead of saying, "We're going to trust in this prophecy and see where it goes," they say, "The boy is too old," and "He's too dangerous to be trained." Instead of trusting their Chosen One's instincts to be right, they tell him to repress his emotional attachments and ignore his awful premonitions. They train him and tell him he's incredibly important, but they refuse to trust him. And that leads to their downfall. Their fear leads to his anger and hatred, which leads to mass suffering.

It's the same with fans. They seize upon Anakin's importance, but they refuse to have enough faith in that importance to trust the Sequels and look for all the ways the ST provides closure to the prophecy.

The balance needed by the Force was never about defeating a particular bad guy. It was always about undoing the misguided Jedi insistence on repressing certain emotions. As guardians of the Force, the Jedi had decided that they should avoid mistakes at all costs ... even at the cost of shutting themselves off from normal human relationships. Luke's triumph in ROTJ showed that they were wrong about the Dark Side being a path from which one could never return. But his training still focused on fear and anger being emotions one should avoid.

It took the hard lesson of losing Ben Solo and retreating into ineffective solitude for Luke to understand the truth that he conveys to Rey in her final lesson in TROS: Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi. Not avoiding or suppressing it, but facing it and recognizing that through mistakes, we grow -- if we choose to learn from them.

The people who cling to Anakin being the Chosen One as a key message of the PT/OT sequence miss the point entirely, because in our daily lives, we don't have a Chosen One walking around doing stuff. There's no lesson in that aspect of the narrative for us to learn from. But we *can* learn to confront our fears, forgive our mistakes and the mistakes of others, and grow as people by taking in the lessons of those mistakes.

That's what Star Wars is about. That's why it's important.

Not because some fictional Chosen One prophecy was or wasn't completely fulfilled when a hero tossed a villain over a guard-rail.

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong and there's somebody out there who has been in that precise circumstance and, thanks to Return of the Jedi, was able to voluntarily disarm themselves so their dad would chuck an evil emperor down a hole.