Okay, I've heard that in the novel Darth Plagueis, Anakin being the one foretold to restore "balance" to the Force is explained as being the result of a ritual performed by Plagueis and Sidious make the dark side of the Force more powerful, while diminishing the power of the light side, with Anakin being created by the Force to fix this problem. In The Clone Wars Season Three, we're introduced to the Ones, composed of the Father (the Keeper of the Balance) and his two children, Son and Daughter, who embody the light and the dark sides respectively. How well do these two interpretations fit together?
At the start of the Mortis arc, I don't see the Son being particularly more powerful, which would correlate with the Plagueis/Palpatine idea. However, he did make the first move against the Father. In that way, perhaps it's related. Plagueis and Palpatine made the first move. Although to be honest, how "balanced" are you to begin with if you've got 2 Sith and 10,000 Jedi?
Yeah, I've never gotten the impression that the innate "power" of either side is at all related to the actual population of Jedi or Sith. Though it has occurred to me in the past that the Force might prefer to be rid of both.
Let's not forget that in the Mortis episodes, after the Son kills the Father, he is then slain by the Daughter....so neither aspect of the Force has an avatar. How all this ties in with what's depicted in Darth Plagueis, I really don't have a clue. Was the author aware of the episodes when he wrote the book?
Kreia was basically just a huge emo. Nobody should listen to her. Especially if--as I do--every time you see Kreia in the game, you just think of @Lord_Hydronium.
I don't think they tie into each other nor do they contradict each other (besides Mortis being symbolic of Anakin's future).
Balance of the Force is not a balance of Force-users. I prefer to use the terminology "align with the light and dark sides respectively", which I think I heard in the opening narration of one of the episodes, if memory serves. The Daughter and Son are not actually the light and dark sides of the Force, or else the arc would have left both sides of the Force killed off. Apparently; he claims some things in the book are references to Mortis.
"So, yeah, the Son represents the dark side but, uh, he's also falling to the dark side, and urm, lol, whatever guys it's Friday night and I'm drunk. LIAM NEESON!" - Mortis, TCW
If it were up to me, the word "balance" wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the prequels. I don't see the Force as something that requires fixing.
Though almost certainly not what Lucas intended, I like to think the Force is only out of balance from reality's reference point. It's then less about "fixing the Force" than it is the galaxy's relationship to it.
I'm still not sure exactly how Anakin killing Sidious restores balance. It becomes even harder to figure out when one considers that, in the EU, Sidious didn't die, but actually transferred his consciousness into a clone body, surviving for quite a number of years.
The prophecy had been around for ages before they performed the ritual, so it is not the result of it. And i don't really see how those 2 situations are directly related, why wouldn't they "fit together"
While conjecture on my part, since reading Plagueis's section in the Book of Sith I've taken to the idea that Palpatine's "survival" was... let's say stunted, and hence his clone's seeming insanity. In particular, this section... ...leads me to suspect Palpatine's failure to just jump straight into a clone -- his spirit laboured in space until Jeng Droga could pick it up and take it back to Byss -- meant that his consciousness had already partially-degraded by the time it anchored itself. So whatever imbalance Darth Sidious embodied ceased on Endor, and all that reached Byss to be reborn was a wraith that was by then only half the man the original Emperor had been. Or put differently, part of his consciousness may have already begun returning to the Force by the time Droga got there, so the creature on Byss was now understandably furious with the Force, knowing that it had "lost" a part of itself, and was only Palpatine's lingering rage and hate. Still a threat, arguably even more dangerous than the original--but no longer the imbalance it had been.
Plagueis and Sidious do perform some ritual to increase the power of the dark side though, and it does appear to somehow be connected to themselves. This doesn't necessarily mean the imbalance was already present when the prophecy was first told, just that it was another of the events foreseen by it. Maybe...
The first Byss clone- the old-looking one- seemed to come across as pretty like the original. It was when that clone died and the younger clone activated, that subtlety tended to go out of the window.
The Daughter is slain when the Son tries to kill the Father - and then the Father kills himself, allowing Anakin to kill the Son. Plagueis alludes to Mortis quite heavily at one point, even describing the Celestials. In the first of the trilogy, Anakin has a choice to make which will keep the Son and Daughter in balance. He refuses, and the Son grows stronger and all hell breaks loose. I assumed the Sith were pushing the Force towards darkness - also killing the Father - and so the Son's increase in power was a symptom of it. As a meta point, the Son tries to use Anakin to change the future... trying to release Mother maybe?
Double posting because this thought seems to warrant a separate post: The idea that the Father is dying and that is causing the imbalance, or that the Sith are causing the imbalance, seem to be linked in some shape or form. But because of the tendency of these 'imbalances' to converge at points in the timeline, could we theorise that the Sith's imbalance, and the subsequent terrible war and chain of causation leading to Mother escaping (and the Son and Daughter being dead when it happen), is contributing to Father's death? Is the Sith's rise symptomatic, or the cause, or both?
All this confusion arises from the fact that in Lucas' eyes, the prophecy was fulfilled when Anakin killed Sidious, thereby destroying the Sith forever.....accept that clearly is not what happened when one takes the EU into consideration.