Lit Could midichlorian manipulation be used to make yourself stronger?

Where was that established?

But that's not the same thing as being Force-sensitive or using the Force the way the Jedi ( or Sith ) do. Similarly, the example of Mother Talzin doesn't have much applicability to an average individual's potential of using the Force in Jedi fashion.

 

Ah, it explains so much... Anakin might have had a count over twenty-thousand, but only because he got the rejects nobody else wanted.

 

Personally, I don't see why people claim that midichlorians "de-mistify" the force or make it scientific or anything like that.

Single celled organisms are no more inherently scientific than multicellular ones like humans.

Magic bacteria are still magic.

 

I don't think there's any indication he was ever tested - and in the pre-TPM era you needed Jedi Search paddles, right? She's just assuming a lack of "inborn aptitude" on his part. And I can't fault Zahn for not knowing about midichlorians in advance of TPM's release. ( Though it is interesting that the "you need inborn aptitude to be a Jedi" angle appears at all in a pre-PT work, given the prevalence of the belief that this concept was a PT invention. )

 

Everyone is Force-sensitive on some level, because everyone has midi-chlorians. Jorj Car'das just got some really good training, apparently. I don't think we need to bring "super" midi-chlorians into this.

It could be an inborn, instinctual thing, though. They may have a lower level of midi-chlorians, but their minds and bodies evolved such that they can easily make use of their few midi-chlorians to naturally generate a shield, but not much else. So "count" definitely isn't the sole factor, but I think that, all other factors being equal, it does indicate whether it will be easier or harder for someone to manipulate the Force.

 

I wasn't invoking "super midi-chlorians" to explain Car'das. The Bantam EU and early post-prequel EU is filled with characters whom aren't deemed Force sensitive by the Jedi, and yet are still able to use the Force. Akanah failed Luke's mind probe test, in which a Force sensitive has an innate defense to telekinetically strike someone probing a certain part of their mind which Luke discovered in the Jedi Academy trilogy, for instance, and Car'das was clearly intended by Zahn to not be a Force sensitive and yet could teleport objects using the Force through his Aing-Tii training. The Hero's Guide to the WOTC D20 RPG introduced the Matukai, of which it is said "One of the unique aspects of Matukai training is that it allows any being with otherwise negligible strength in the Force to develop into something formidable using their body as a focus." There's also that Rogue Squadron comic where various baddies were using Sith sorcery, but I dunno maybe they were Force sensitive.

So I guess non-Force sensitives/low midi-chlorian count people can use non-Jedi powers like Fallanassi illusions or teleportation or Sith sorcery or general self-enhancement like the Matukai, but they just can't do telekinesis or mind tricks. I've always looked at it as midi-chlorian count being the floor rather than the ceiling, and the Jedi in their dogma and expedience need their initiates to reach certain milestones by the time that they are selected to be a padawan learner at 13 or they're shipped off to the agricorps, and most people that didn't meet their subsequent midi-chlorian count threshold ended up getting shipped off to agricorps so they imposed the threshold.

I always found Lucas' take on the midi-chlorians to be amusing, because he's trying to quantify someone's Force ability, and so he claims that once Vader loses his extremities he loses some of his potential. But he still has a midi-chlorian count higher than Yoda and he still has more biomass than Yoda, so he should still be more powerful than Yoda and thus a match for someone like Sidious, but that doesn't fit Lucas' narrative. And I suppose Yoda was lying when he told Luke that "size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?" Apparently you only judge someone by their midi-chlorian count. And I guess per Lucas' logic, their size matters too, since Yoda would have less midi-chlorians distributed through his body than a larger creature.

 

Making midichlorian count a determinant of innate Force sensitivity does not mean that it must be the sole determinant of Force potential. In Vader's case his potential can be limited by physical damage even when his midichlorian count remains the same. Lucas never said specifically that Vader's lost potential was due to missing midichlorians; though he mentioned Anakin's loss of limbs he also cited Anakin getting burned up in the same context and said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2005 that "The road to the Force is through the breath".

TPM Anakin was also a small creature. According to the implication of TPM, Yoda most likely has the highest midichlorian count among the Jedi excepting Anakin, and it is the midichlorian count as a cell concentration which is measured and cited as being relevant to Force potential, not "total midichlorians in the body".

 

I've always liked to go with Qui-Gon's description of "listening" to the midi-chlorians and them telling him the will of the Force. Even if it was just a metaphor, I like how it kinda implied that the more midi-chlorians you have, the louder the sound, making it easier to hear. So a guy like Car'das? He might not have enough for the Jedi to (a) view training him worthwhile, or (b) to pose a threat from lack of training; but he could still, with the right training and dedication, eventually attune his mind to hear the whispers... it's just probably a lot harder to do, and not as guaranteed to be successful -- yes, we could all run a marathon, but... -- and so I figure the Jedi ultimately just had to work with the resources they had, and the reality they couldn't train everybody.

But this is indeed why I love the Aing-Tii and the idea that there are things even the Jedi don't know.

 

After the Empire, that is not to hard

 

Yes. In the Plagueis novel Darth Plagueis gets to be so good at manipulating the Midichlorians that instead of getting older (and physically weaker), he gets younger. Even Sidious was amazed.

 

Well, Force ability has always been quantified to some extent. For example, we've known since at least as far back as Episode VI that the Skywalker family has more Force ability than your average Joe. We didn't have numbers attached to this fact, but does it really make a big difference?

And Yoda was right when he said "size matters not". It doesn't, as long as your mind is up to the task. Yoda may have less midi-chlorians than Luke or Anakin, but that only means Yoda had to listen harder and focus his mind better to achieve the results that he did, all things that have nothing to do with size or stature. Maybe Yoda is just naturally better at these things, or maybe he worked harder; we don't know, and it doesn't matter. But it's likely such factors have far more to do with properly wielding the Force than simple midi-chlorian count. Midi-chlorian count is just a measure of potential.

And for whatever reason, it appears to be the number of midi-chlorians per cell that determines your ability to tap into the Force, not the total number. Why this is we can only speculate at, but perhaps it's as a result of the way midi-chlorians work in concert with the body and other biological processes. I don't recall Lucas specifically saying that it was the loss of Anakin's total number of midi-chlorians that caused his powers to diminish. It was because Anakin became less than a whole person, more machine than man. Anakin's midi-chlorian count stayed exactly the same when he became Vader, but his bodily connections became twisted and his biological processes were converted into mechanical ones. I think this probably had far more of an effect on the communicative and symbiotic properties of his midi-chlorians than a simple loss of biomass did.

 

The EU has espoused -- more than once -- the silly idea that the midi-chlorians are only in your blood, or that a blood transfusion ostensibly would improve your Force sensitivity, due to the fact that a blood test is performed to determine your count -- completely misunderstanding the concept of cellular organelles. I'm told that in the YA novels with Qui-Gon, he loses his blood volume and this reduces his ability to use the Force because he has less midi-chlorians! And silliness aside, that would suggest that it was more than per cell rather than total count in the body.

Anyway hearing about that made me really sad. The EU makes me really sad a lot.

 

That's dumb if that's the way it was explained. But I think it makes sense for massive blood loss to make it harder for you to use the Force, for the same reason Anakin's crippling did. Disrupting natural bodily processes disrupts the ability of the midi-chlorians to communicate with each other, with the Force, and with you, because their operation is based on a symbiotic link with the body.

But yeah, a lot of the EU thinks it has to do with total count. But that's as the result of a misunderstanding of the concept on the part of EU authors. Ironically, they take the concept of midi-chlorians far more literally than was meant.

But has a blood transfusion ever successfully improved anyone's Force ability in the EU? I know Dooku tried it with Grievous, but didn't that end up a failure?

 

Plagueis says the midi-chlorians from two different life forms won't mix (in Book of Sith). There's so few cells in the blood that I can't see why it would be efficacious even if there was a cumulative effect, which is why it's so silly.

But I don't agree that the count for a single cell is all that matters -- I think it is cumulative for the organism. The EU has taken this stance -- but it also tends to get caught up on blood transfusions so YMMV I guess. But I don't see how you can suggest because some midi-chlorians are disrupted by injury means that they all are, and so long as the ones in say, your brain are doing just fine, why would that affect your Force ability? By that logic, Anakin should have been robbed of potential just by losing his forearm, because the midi-chlorians were disrupted. Likewise with Luke and his hand.

I mean, my interpretation of what you're saying is that the cumulative midi-chlorians in an organism aren't important, just a single cell's count, but at the same time any disruption of the organism negatively affects them, which means that any injury should actually be more disruptive than it would if we're just acting as though cumulative midi-chlorian count is a DBZ power level.

Edit: http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/2013/06/24/so-what-the-heck-are-midi-chlorians/

Some interesting info:

“Midi-chlorians are like a single entity: meaning each one doesn’t think individually and have a life to itself; they think as a unit because there’s so many of them and they’re everywhere. They’re in every single cell. And sometimes there’s more than one in a cell. Sometimes there’s a whole bunch in a cell. But there has to be at least one in a cell, otherwise the cell can’t reproduce. All cells. Plant cells. Every life form has a midi-chlorian living inside of them.”

I suppose it's worth noting as well that the dialogue in Episode I about "over twenty thousand" being an unbelievable number and "no Jedi has" a count that high suggests that Anakin's count is astronomical compared to the norm for Jedi, and yet practically speaking the actual effect isn't quite so astronomical that we see in the films, thus suggesting that there's something of diminishing returns or that the astronomical count doesn't quite translate practically speaking to substantial ability, and indeed it does seem that primarily things merely come easier for Anakin rather than him being able to do more with the Force than other Jedi.

Overall, I suppose I agree that midi-chlorians are pretty poorly understood in general, but I'd argue that a lot of stuff in SW has been distorted, not just by popular perception but by the EU (which frequently has contradicting viewpoints). It seems to be fan supposition that Vader's injuries diminished him in power due to loss of midi-chlorians -- unless there's a more substantive Lucas quote than the Rolling Stones interview -- but it's more in a general sense the cyborg nature of Vader that diminished him in the Emperor's eyes.

 

But the movies very strongly imply that it is in fact the cell count alone that matters, both because that is all that is ever talked about and because the later movies' "size matters not" would be a contradiction otherwise (and I don't think it's very likely Lucas changed his mind about that or unknowingly created a major inconsistency in Force philosophy).

And yes, I think any disruption in the body can reduce your Force ability. Your body works best when it is a complete whole*, and if your body's integrity is compromised, so is the integrity of the entire network of midi-chlorians within your body. Anakin's Force ability was robbed from him a little bit by losing his forearm, but the loss was probably negligible. This isn't just a matter of quantification; it ties into the larger metaphor of Anakin's humanity being robbed from him by his body's ever-increasing reliance on machinery.

*But this isn't to say that cripples and amputees are inherently less human or somehow "lacking" in some sort of spiritual completeness. I think if you're at peace with your injuries and with the new state of your body, your midi-chlorians may become at peace with their new home, and your full connection will be restored. One of Anakin's problems is that he never accepted what happened to him; instead he refused to own his past, he took a new name for himself, and he became a diminished, evil person. There was no way to overcome this as long as he was a Sith, because Sith philosophy precludes serenity. But when he returned to the light in Episode VI, his full power was restored and he was able to withstand the Emperor's soul-sucking lightning long enough to kill him. I think this is one of the ways that the light side is stronger than the dark: whereas the dark forces you to draw on your despair for strength, the light gives you the strength to overcome your despair.

 

I'm having difficulty correlating the importance of the integrity of the network of midi-chlorians in an entire body with their cumulative irrelevance when it comes to a midi-chlorian count.

That one Lucas quote suggests that a cellular midi-chlorian count might not be consistent throughout the body -- certainly some human cells are more prevalent with mitochondria such as muscle cells. Ultimately I don't think this is very important to quibble about and I'm pretty satisfied with the conclusion that it's more of a "head start" in Jedi training than a ceiling, that it makes the Force come more easily than anything else.

Edit: Actually, I suppose I do get what you're saying, using the NJO's analogy to the midi-chlorians. Sekot is the collective "world soul" of all the life forms living on the surface of Zonama, produced as a consequence of their symbiosis (which is fairly unique in the SW galaxy). The number of life forms cumulatively on the surface doesn't affect Sekot's potential, but the symbiosis of the ecosystems does, and the complete disruption of this symbiosis would kill it as it did Yuuzhan'tar.

 

That's pretty much how I've always liked to view Anakin too, yeah.

I mean, if you have a leg amputated, yes, you can learn to walk again on a prosthetic, and some people win marathons against people with two working legs, but... it's not exactly easy, as you have to learn how to walk all over again, and that's something that requires, to use the Yoda quote, unlearning what you have learned, and I can see that being the kind of mental hurdle that a guy like Anakin would have had trouble getting past -- especially without the right teacher, and Palpatine... wasn't exactly that.

 

Where? Because that is contradicted outright by Qui-Gon's TPM dialogue.

This was also expressed in Darth Plagueis. I guess the Sifo-Dyas blood transfusion that Grievous got was just for the lulz.

Or it represents undamaged Anakin's potential as opposed to actualized ability. It's arguable that Anakin never reached his full potential. This would be consistent with the fact that all the hyperbolic descriptions of his power during the PT are made in the future tense.

What difference would it make? Lucas quotes don't constitute fan supposition. The bottom line is that Lucas never said that, but some fans assumed it to be the case. Fan supposition has also held that "balance of the Force" means "Jedi/Sith head count", despite all the evidence to the contrary.

 

I've always believed Anakin's inability to achieve his full potential, at the end of the day had more to do with his own mental and emotional blocks than anything else; and his own unwillingness to accept himself as he'd become, and the things he'd done.

 

I just realized I could totally see Bendis using this in Marvel Comics; Midichlorian Growth Hormone dealers.