Lit Star Wars Archives Episode 1-3 The Prequels

Then we wouldn't have a EU

That's it....

 

So are we ready yet for The Whills, Midichlorians and the Cosmology of the Force?

Spoiler

I talked about it before, but now I go into more details. I can't post photos of the pages as they are spread over several and too long to excerpt properly, so I will quote some passages verbatim and hopefully deliver others with my elaborations so no misunderstanding can happen.

Here we go! First I rant a bit about the basics which I will follow up on with direct Quotes of Lucas, marked as such then, typed for your pleasure.

Symbiosis is key. Everyone is comprised of lots of tiny lifeforms that make up your body and soul. Likewise, everyone with everyone else is just a tiny part of a universal being/soul. Be it all life that makes up Earth (the Gaia hypothesis) or even larger, the galaxy and entire universe and God herself. That is what I called in my other posts, before Archives even, a fractal universe. Macrocosm and Microcosm are very much alike. Or for religious folks, as above, so below.

The Biology:
We know from science that lots of bacteria and other micro-lifeforms are essential for our body and that lots of cells have to come and work together to create us and keep us alive.

The Spirituality:
Not just our physical body follows that principle but also our soul and spiritual makeup. We are the sum of many parts working together. If every lifeform has a soul, then every microlifeform comprising us, has its own soul. Thus if we are the sum of all the biology within us, likewise their souls kinda in summation are what we are, our soul and very being.
Likewise, each human has a soul, so all human, anima, planet, etc. souls together may inform and shape the planetary Gaia soul, or the galactic soul, or the universal soul some do call God.

This basically is the micro to macro scale of how we, life, the universe works.

The other division is between Life and Death:

Since birth the Biology transforms energy for our Life purposes and upon Death that energy is released back to the universe. Life is short, just a period of time, before and after it religions claim heaven and hell or a netherworld to be. Others claim rebirth being possible or even that a soul can choose if it wants to be reborn or not and the ideal is to reach a state free of the rebirth cycle.

Now, if there is a plane where souls come from and return to, and if rebirth or a physical life in general is optional for them, then we can surmise that not every soul chooses to be born into a body. Therefore there maybe are a lot more bodyless souls than incarnated/embodied souls. Likewise if that plane of existance as religions clame has all those that died and are there now probably outnumber the living any day.

Head spinning already? Have some quotes:

Now we move on to the Whills finally, I promose!

Well there you have it finally...

Some comments from me before I let your brains process it all for a while:

While he talks about tiny once-cellular lifeforms he describes the physical side of his cosmology, the biology. At the same time, underlying this concept is a spiritual one, that mirrors lots of religious and esoteric concepts about souls, Gaia, etc. This one is more evident in TCW and his other works. In that regard I think, the Whills/Midichlorian relationship is more like the one between the Celestials/Ones/ForcePriestesses. There are many, only some become these special ones and interact with other lifeforms via incarnation in some shape or body temporarily.
George Lucas is a man loving his esoterics, even Indiana Jones is based on that side of his reading instead of proper hard science archeology. And I notive plenty of esoteric currents and works he must have studied but tries to reframe and rephrase for general audiences in more understandeable or accepteable versions, distilling them down like he did with history and mythology in his Modern Myth Saga.

The OT is the Modern Myth, where he distilled history, mythology and many old works, be it fiction or based on real events for modern audiences.
Likewise he intended the PT to continue the trend and include way more than previously science and spirituality, especially esoterics too distilled down for general audiences to make the stuff more accessible and spread the truths.

But his PT got coursecorrected thx to Midichlorian backlash of the fans and he postponed some out of the PT and into TCW and the rest into his potential ST, however it may have looked. Given Disney operated despite changes starting with his ST, a lot of it still is in there, even if more subtle and less direct, a lot of the crazy Forcepowers and myth elements in it are probably a callback to his ideas and concepts.

I hope people still buy the awesome book. You will enjoy it. I also hope fandebates won't be too out of context, cruel or anything like it given not everyone can discuss as civil as we do here on these boards. I really am very thankful to George Lucas for telling us so much, and so much more in the book you didn't see yet. He really was very open and I consider it a must read. I sincerely hope whatever social media junkies tear the book apart and report on it with clickbait youtube vids, websites and posts or heated twitter debates won't return to the bad image of fans that already ruined a lot of SW and lead to massive changes to the universe and franchise.

Also thx to all of you for the great insights, creativity and posts that I really enjoy. That is what convinced me to give you this Whills gift after all.

 

@ColeFardreamer

I'm honestly shocked even while in Europe more people haven't talked about this more.

Like seriosuly

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Not even a clickbait article of "DARTH MAUL IN THE SEUQEL TRILOGY"

Surprised this book isn't causing more discourse in general.

 

Well, me too. But that may be due to its size. I mean, to read it takes a while, most just browse the pics or put it on the shelf for later reading. I took the effort to dig in postponing novels and all for it. Maybe others wait with buying it due to money or wish it for Christmas.

Had I not recalled that it was rumored to contain ST and Midichlorian/Whills goodies, I'd probably not have read it all as quickly either. So thx @darklordoftech for reminding me with one of his early replies to this topic!

 

@ColeFardreamer Thank you so much for sharing all of this! It’s a lot of food for thought, for sure.

It’s indeed a breath of fresh air to get such a candid look at the making of these movies, not because Lucas hasn’t been open (he almost always has and that’s an awesome quality of his), but because it’s such a contrast to how hushed things are around Disney’s movies. Which is understandable, but still, I love that Lucas really seems to put as much if not more thought into the world he created as his fans do.

I’ll need to think some more on what you posted before I go into anything that needs to be spoiler-protected.

 

As a huge Prequel fan, this is a must buy for me.

 

Spoiler

We can "get the gist" of what happened, sure. But doing so requires the audience to ignore a rather large pile of question marks surrounding the role Sifo-Dyas played in the whole thing and just accept "the bad guys did it" as the end result. Straightforward? I guess?

 

I must say, all the stuff about the sequels is pretty interesting. To those who have the book, is there anything worthy to note regarding the pod racer pilots or the Separatists leaders? I always found those two groups to have really great alien designs and cool backstories.

 

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I wonder how the villain concepts talked about here tie into plans for Underworld and the Solo movie.

 

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I just never felt Sifo-Dyas mattered. He was a pawn in the Sith game, nothing more. You say there's a large pile of question marks, I say they're unnecessary details. Nuts and bolts for the EU to fill in later, but not anything essential to the story. Sidious and Dooku planned the clone army, Dooku was a Jedi, and between them they've been deceiving all of the galaxy's major power players - how exactly they tricked Sifo-Dyas (assuming they didn't just kill him and steal his identity) is pretty irrelevant to me.

It's both a strength and a weakness of the prequels that there's never a big monologue scene where Palpatine spells out exactly what his plan was and how he enacted it. We have to pay close attention and fill in the blanks with our own extrapolation.

Ultimately, if Sifo-Dyas was supposed to have been important he would have had more focus in AotC. That his "mystery" has spun out into this massive ongoing conspiracy seems like backpedalling on a sub-plot that wasn't made clear enough in the initial film. Blame Lucas for poor writing that only us super-mega-geniuses could figure out.

 

I mean there is a reason people argue Lucas should have gone all out and just make a 4 hour long Revenge of the Sith movie.

 

Well...

Spoiler

Honestly the only puzzle related to AOTC that I’m still not sure is fully resolved is who the heck paid for that galaxy-conquering clone army? Is this something any member of planetary nobility could theoretically do? But I also realize that’s not important. I’m sure there’s a Muun out there making sure the gears grind as they should.

So, not necessary knowledge for sure. But I do sort of like the idea that Sidious had more apprentices that we don’t know about. It makes me wonder if Lucas’s version of Rebels, if he’d done such a thing, would have has the Inquisitors be full-blown Sith who compete with Vader, and whom he ultimately kills.

It also resonates strangely well with Sidious in TROS, whose return would herald the return of the Sith. If he was thinking of rebuilding an Empire, maybe he would have trained more Force users to be Sith, feeling confident in his ability to pit them against one another rather than be successfully betrayed himself.

He simply doesn’t care so long as he ends on top. And that really feels true to his character. Going off on a weirder tangent, can you imagine a version of the ST where Snoke trained Kylo to fight Sidious, and Sidious tried to recruit Rey to combat them? Only for Kylo and Rey to turn against both masters.

 

@Sauron_18

Spoiler

To add to Sidious only caring about being on top...it sorta where I think (Or kinda hoped) they took his character in TROS were it's less about ruling the galaxy in like a practical sense but more "I'd rather be Emperor of the ashes" and I will "Burn them all" to get there with his Death Star Star Destroyer Fleet. Essentially Palpatine is desperate and just doesn't give a heck anymore.

 

And that in turns fits rather well with what the books had established with his Contingency.

Spoiler

Going back to Maul and Talon, thinking about how different Lucas’s story seems to have been, whether it would have worked or not, makes me appreciate once more the beauty that was Star Wars Legacy. We had a whole culture of Sith at the height of their power, the galaxy explored in many ways and through various lenses, paying homage to what had come before but building something very new and cool. War-time Krayt seated on his throne next to Talon and promising chaos resonates with this older Maul imagery teased in the interview.

 

Spoiler

I hope Lucas also gets asked about Underworld. Considering that Underworld was going to be about organized crime and the woman in Sheev’s backstory was described as a “gangster”, I wonder if it would have been revealed that Palpatine came from a family of crime bosses.

 

@ColeFardreamer

Ah...Now Star Wars reddit finally talking about the book.

The articles should finally come now.

Spoiler

Especially the Maul thing.

 

I hate reddit. My post to starwarsleaks got deleted by mods days ago. Now one oft their own stole my photo uncredited...

Gesendet von meinem FP2 mit Tapatalk

 

That really sucks about Reddit. Not looking forward to all the clickbait to come, but I suppose it's relatively easy to ignore.

Regarding the Whills...

Spoiler

It's interesting that Lucas said only the midi-chlorians can live inside human cells. In his interview with James Cameron he had mentioned how he viewed people as being vehicles for the Whills. Though of course, perhaps I'm misreading here, and he's not saying that the Whills can't live in humans, just that they don't live in their cells and thus they need the midi-chlorians to influence them.

To briefly add something to that notion of humans being "vehicles" for the Whills, I recently read in The Power of Myth similar wording from Joseph Campbell in relation to ideas that resonate a lot with the Force:

"You go past fear and desire, past the pair of opposites. . . . Into transcendence. This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is the carrier. That is the God. . . . Somehow it speaks to the order in your own life and leads to the realization of the very things that religions are concerned to render. . . . That you have to balance between death and life--they are two aspects of the same thing, which is being, becoming."​

In any case, this also makes me wonder about the force-wielders of Mortis. Like with the priestesses from the midi-chlorians' homeworld, I do get the impression that none of these beings are themselves Whills. Instead it seems like a force user who has an awareness of the Whills is more likely to be able to wield power on a level unseen in Jedi or Sith.

The excerpt that was shared does say that the Jedi mainly train to use the personal (living) Force, then the cosmic Force. But perhaps they are relatively inexperienced with the cosmic Force, and it is only older orders of Force users, or individual shamans, who have really plumbed the depths of that power. And this does match up with only Jedi like Qui-Gon and Sith like Plagueis getting close to obtaining power unknown to the Jedi or the Sith.

In that sense, for the Force-wielders of Mortis at least, I get the impression that they were, originally at least, members of an ordinary race in ancient times. But that their family specifically, like the Skywalkers in the movies, were particularly attuned to the Force, to a level that was dangerous to the galaxy at large. Perhaps there was an order of Force users back then, before the Jedi, which had advanced in their training to the point of being in closer symbiosis with the Whills, with the cosmic Force. And the Mortis Force-wielders were to that order what the Skywalkers later became to the Jedi.

This also seems to match up with some of Lucas's early ideas for the origin of the Jedi, with the first Jedi, the Skywalker, limiting Force knowledge only to his family to prevent others from being seduced by the dark side. Here are some quotes from an early draft to the original Star Wars:

LUKE:
In another time, long before the Empire, and before the Republic had been formed, a holy man called the Skywalker became aware of a powerful energy field which he believed influenced the destiny of all living creatures...
[. . .]

LUKE:
As you know, the "FORCE OF OTHERS" has two halves: Ashla, the good, and Bogan, the paraforce or evil part. Fortunately, Skywalker came to know the good half and was able to resist the paraforce; but he realized that if he taught others the way of the Ashla, some, with less strength, might come to know Bogan, the dark side, and bring unthinkable suffering to the Universe.

For this reason, the Skywalker entrusted the secret of THE FORCE only to his twelve children, and they in turn passed on the knowledge only to their children, who became known as the Jedi Bendu of the Ashla: "the servants of the force". For thousands of years, they brought peace and justice to the galaxy.

[As quoted in The Secret History of Star Wars]​

Now, clearly his ideas for the Jedi changed. But the focus on a family lines as part of origin for the Jedi makes me think that might somehow have come into play when the Force-wielders were introduced in the Mortis arc. And in that sense, the new family, the Skywalkers proper, could have been that next step for the Jedi, who either needed to be isolated from the galaxy to stop great suffering from happening, or who needed to find a way to use that enlightenment to bring peace. Which may have been precisely what the sequels would have been about, reaching that greater knowledge of the cosmic Force and using it to bring about a new era of peace.

 

All this confirms what I have suspected for quite a while: that a Lucas ST would have felt more like a sequel to the PT and to a lesser extent, TCW, as oppose to feeling like a sequel to the OT. For many years it became apparent that Lucas saw the PT as being his true "baby", as it was more or less a completely one-man-show, whereas the OT had many different voices attached. The ST we ended up getting looked and felt more like a successor to the OT, which I think thematically and commercially (yes, we have to take that aspect into account) was the way to go. I'm happy with what we got, but I would have preferred a Lucas ST any day of the week. But I'm not one to cry over split milk. It is what it is, and the ST we got has ended up giving me one of my favourite SW films, as well the new era in general having more positives than negatives IMO.

 

What did GL say about the offspring(s)? Not really how I imagined the Whills but that's ok. I guess until they release the full treatments, this general pitch is the best thing we got so far.

 

I’m sure they’re not the Whills anyone imagined, to be honest.

Spoiler

In a way, they are the perfect organism. They live in an ideal symbiosis with the Force, and they have the type of direct connection all other living beings can strive for. And because they’re so in tune with it, they act to protect it and preserve it. So they are the equivalent to angelic beings in Star Wars, always looking toward the Force and serving what is best for it and influencing other life to this purpose.

What’s interesting is that it seems like the Force is still unknowable, and Jedi only know its will insofar as it’s communicated to them. But the Force very clearly still has a will of its own, whatever that is pushed primordial life to create the more complex, multicellular world. In a way it reminds me a lot of both Shinto, where there is a spirit in every thing, as well as those cultures or religions that revere trees, which are old and everywhere, and on which other life depends, and which are in many ways symbolic of all life. (And yes, that might be an OA reference...)

It opens up a lot of interesting questions. And I’m sure Lucas does not necessarily have answers for all of these...

For example, are the Whills are monolithic and perfectly aligned with the Force, or are there Whills that are corrupted by the dark side of the Force?

If there are corrupted Whills, do those only exist in the living Force, as dark Jedi, or do they persist in the cosmic Force?

Can midi-chlorians continue to live without the influence of the Whills? If so, could the Whills in a given world then be killed without affecting other life? (Kreia, are you hearing this?)

 

Spoiler

THE CHOSEN ONE

George Lucas: When writing the movies, I tried to make sure that aliens and droids got killed, but not people.

Paul Duncan: A lot of stormtroopers died.

George Lucas: That's right, but you didn't know they were people. We did kill three humans and that was unfortunate. I was always bothered by it.

Paul Duncan: When was that?

George Lucas: On the Death Star, when Han and Luke go into the prison with Chewie to rescue Leia, they shoot three Imperial guys. The guards drew their guns and fired first, but it's still a shame.

Paul Duncan: Really?

George Lucas: Yeah, we very consciously didn't kill very many humans in those movies.

Paul Duncan: What about the stormtroopers? They look robotic, but they're not.

George Lucas: How do you know what they are?

Paul Duncan: Did you have a different idea of what they were?

George Lucas: Yeah, they started out as clones. Once all the clones were killed, the Empire picked up recruits, like militia.

They fought, but they weren't very good at what they did.

Paul Duncan: That's why they kept missing.

George Lucas: That's why they kept missing. Then after the Rebels won, there were no more stormtroopers in my version of the third trilogy.

I had planned for the first trilogy to be about the father, the second trilogy to be about the son, and the third trilogy to be about the daughter and the grandchildren.

Episode VII, VIII, and IX would take ideas from what happened after the Iraq War. "Okay, you fought the war, you killed everybody, now what are you going to do?" Rebuilding afterwards is harder than starting a rebellion or fighting the war. When you win the war and you disband the opposing army, what do they do? The stormtroopers would be like Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist fighters that joined ISIS and kept on fighting. The stormtroopers refuse to give up when the Republic win.

They want to be stormtroopers forever, so they go to a far corner of the galaxy, start their own country and their own rebellion.

There's a power vacuum so gangsters, like the Hutts, are taking advantage of the situation, and there is chaos. The key person is Darth Maul, who had been resurrected in The Clone Wars cartoons—he brings all the gangs together.

Paul Duncan: Was Darth Maul the main villain?

George Lucas: Yeah, but he's very old, and we have two versions of him. One is with a set of cybernetic legs like a spider, and then later on he has metal legs and he was a little bit bigger, more of a superhero. We did all this in the animated series, he was in a bunch of episodes.

Darth Maul trained a girl, Darth Talon, who was in the comic books as his apprentice. She was the new Darth Vader, and most of the action was with her. So these were the two main villains of the trilogy. Maul eventually becomes the godfather of crime in the universe because, as the Empire falls, he takes over.

The movies are about how Leia—I mean, who else is going to be the leader?—is trying to build the Republic. They still have the apparatus of the Republic but they have to get it under control from the gangsters. That was the main story.

It starts out a few years after Return of the Jedi and we establish pretty quickly that there's this underworld, there are these offshoot stormtroopers who started their own planets, and that Luke is trying to restart the Jedi. He puts the word out, so out of 100,000 Jedi, maybe 50 or 100 are left. The Jedi have to grow again from scratch, so Luke has to find two- and three-year-olds, and train them. It'll be 20 years before you have a new generation of Jedi.

By the end of the trilogy Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she ended up being the Chosen One.

 

Okay, folks: anything on the Force, the midi-chlorians, the Whills, all that esoterica, that you can post up here from that book will be a big help to me.

If you look at the attached image, you'll see why.

That's my personal take on how the phenomenon of the Force, both Living/Personal and Cosmic/Unifying aspects, is supposed to work with respect to you, the human individual. It's just the rough sketch; the final painting is in progress and should be finished soon. But I would love to know if there is anything I can incorporate, even at this late date, from what Lucas has had to say in his own words about these matters.

What happens when it's done? Who knows - I'm not so arrogant as to believe LFL will want to work with me, but not so bereft of hope as to believe they wouldn't. All I ask is if you can continue to post more direct quotes or even images of his quotes on those subjects, in the middle of all the equally valid interest in how the ST might have looked, or what was up with Sifo-Dyas.

Would y'all mind, if it's not too much of an imposition?

 

@ColeFardreamer, since you talked about macrocosmos (the infinity of the very large) and microcosmos (the infinity of the very small), you should like the multiverse on the top left and the atoms on the top right...

 

I don't buy a lot of the new books due to my lack of interest in them from what I do hear regarding some of the stories but also because I want to go back and read the old EU stuff I missed which is a lot as it is even though trying to find room on my shelf is becoming more difficult. Still this sounds like an interesting book and does seem to paint a larger picture of where we were going before the buyout and even where we went to some extent.

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Like people have said a lot of this stuff seems to have been repurposed and reused elsewhere. Maul being around in the sequel trilogy would have raised eyebrows amongst the casual fans but no different then him being alive through the Clone Wars until before A New Hope in new canon for anyone watching Solo. Could see that being used to flesh out his story from the end of Clone Wars to before Solo and then the end of that until whatever leads him to Malachor happens. You kind of wonder if they are kicking themselves for letting him be killed in Rebels? Dave asked if there was anything going on with him and they said no. Then Solo comes out and we have that twist and suddenly a whole story is opened that now whoever writes that is restricted to the Rebels events and eventually will have to make them line up somehow. But the other side to that is you want Maul to be defeated once and for all by Obi-Wan which is what Dave did so unless Obi-Wan's ghost came back to finish the job than he'd have to be killed by Luke at the end of this new trilogy or our new protagonist.

Still Maul as this guy who controls all the crime would have made for a different threat for sure rather than just another a full fledged new Empire even though it's First Order is supposed to be small remnants combined but still feels as big as it was when it was the Empire. Just how exactly small is a force of ships exactly to them? The remnants still being there just as one part of his leadership still allows for the Empire to be featured in someway even if George wants to get away from Storm Troopers. This idea of the remnants feels more like what we're getting with Gideon in the Mandalorian and even how the EU seems to have handled things. It took till Thrawn for them to reunite and while they set up various people to take power in the new canon the fact there's not a clear defined person leading until Snoke kind of shows that they are struggling to find some guidance at least from what I understand. The crime power vacuum also is hinted at and being fleshed out in the Mandalorian. I'm waiting to see if they'll do anything with the Hutts this season and what happened to Rotta if he is even old enough to inherit what is left of his father's empire and if not then where did he go?

Beyond the idea of him being a fan favourite it makes you wonder what the sudden fascination was from George with Maul and adding all this backstory all of a sudden? i know again some people don't care for the change which I'll mention in a minute regarding the EU and how that relates to it as a whole. Makes you wonder also if a revival of the Nightsisters could have happened?

While people try to say George disregarded the EU entirely it's pretty clear he did pay attention to it and would cherry pick what he liked from it and utilise it going all the way back Coruscant being in the Thrawn Trilogy. Then Aayla making her way to the films and Vos getting a mention in Revenge of the Sith. Whether he was involved in throwing out an idea or was simply asked to be given his approval for something like a Secret Apprentice for Darth Vader and then telling people how this worked or they wouldn't do that he was aware and also knew that the EU told the story of the grandchildren. But he also isn't afraid to add something if he felt like changing his mind and some people think that TCW shouldn't be in the EU timeline anymore and should strictly be in the new canon with some thinking it's almost like George wanted to use it and Underworld as a jumping point to create the new canon reboot which Disney ultimately did. I like TCW still but the more I research the EU and hear about it from people I'm beginning to see why there was division even before Disney de-canonised it completely because it almost seems like they were going to do that regardless if Disney bought the franchise. I don't know if anyone here thinks that but should they just keep the Clone Wars multimedia project as the EU Clone Wars and leave TCW out of it? A topic to discuss further I'm sure.

But again George does cherry pick stuff that it's possible he was also thinking of like Luke building a New Jedi Order of new and old Jedi again is a EU storyline. Makes you wonder if he thought about including Ahsoka in this story given that description seems to imply older Jedi are welcome. K'Kruhk was a member in the EU she could have been like a stand in? But who knows since he and Dave were divided about the nature of her fate maybe would have killed her at some point. Talon is also of course an EU thing even if it transplants her from a completely different era. This also ties in with the unfinished game and again George seemed to be involved with that game's development.

The idea of Leia being the chosen one seems to have been discussed in new canon as well more in relation to when Obi-Wan thought Luke was the Chosen One after Anakin's fall and Yoda is on the opposite end of that thinking it's Leia. Again don't know much but it's a thing some people I hear either don't care for are unsure about. I guess I need to see it in context.

And that's how I feel about this stuff really. I need to see it in context to see if it'll work or not. I gave the Sequel Trilogy the benefit of the doubt and wanted to see it come together to give a full judgement and ultimately it didn't for me. I don't know if this would have been better I could see it dividing people who don't like what the Sequel Trilogy did but would it have been as divisive? I guess it all depends on what people really were looking for. The big thing is people wanted a good send off for Luke, Han and Leia and it's also what Mark wanted. I don't know if this could be seen as an ending for them since there's no clear beginning middle and end just elements. If there was a complete script or an outline we'd know for sure but for now it's just another what might have been story.