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Governing a large country
is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.
Center your country in the Tao
and evil will have no power.
Not that it isn't there,
but you'll be able to step out of its way.
Give evil nothing to oppose
and it will disappear by itself.
60
Tao Te Ching, a New English Version, copyright ©️ 1988 by Stephen Mitchell, published by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
If most Ph.D. programs require 120 credit hours, I have the equivalent of a Ph.D on Star Wars. 11 feature films (2.5h/each), 133 episodes of The Clone Wars (25 min/each), 75 episodes of Rebels (25 min/each) and 16 episodes from The Mandalorian (50min/each). So 127.5 hours to be exact.
I really enjoyed it, but that’s not why I did it. I did it because I wanted to answer a question: Why is this franchise so ridiculously popular? How can it possibly justify a total worldwide box office revenue of 10 billion dollars; the second of all franchises after Marvel Cinematic Universe.
What makes this story so special? Why this story and not another one? Is it a collection of a lot of things done right or does one or two haul everything else? Why are these characters so important to society? How can someone (like me) tolerate over 120 hours of basically the same plot over and over again?
The full extent of my discoveries will be explored in a future article, but there is one thing that popped in my mind over and over again while I was watching:
Evil is so obviously evil.
Darth Sidious, Darth Vader, Maul, Thrawn, whoever the villain of the moment is, toss around words like “revenge”, “destruction” or “hate” like they were paid each time they say them.
Its the same in every other franchise on that chart of course. Whether its Voldemort, Sauron or Lord Farquaad. Villains are evil and their opposing heroes are pious.
The characters in the stories we love are easy to understand. What you see is all there is. Even when there is a jump in character development it is always thoroughly explained. Only a bad storyteller would make a good character evil or an evil character good without giving you a precise and digested idea of why that happened.
The pervieved dichotomy of good and evil has been present since the first story ever written (The Epic of Gilgamesh), but using the same tools we use to decipher a character in a story to understand each other is a grave error.
Evil is not a supernatural force. It’s not even a natural force. It’s not an inherent quality of a person or even a pattern of behaviors. It only reveals itself in the form of temporary dissonance. Two independent sound waves that collide and create a screech in this a moment in time and space. As with any wave, time takes care of flattening it out, we just have to let that happen. In the presence of evil, pause the tune you are playing, and wait for the frequencies to untangle; they always do.
Quote of the Week
“To answer power with power, the Jedi way this is not. In this war, a danger there is, of losing who we are.”
– Yoda
Song Picks of the Week (Official TTT Playlist here)
Corde Sensible - Freedom Fry (Indie)
Pleasure Centre - Kraak & Smaak. Awesome Mediterranean vibes. (Electro-chill)
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Thank you very much for reading!
Until next Tuesday
Daniel