In Star Wars, what would it mean "to bring balance to The Force?"

Anakin killed every single member of both sides of that dualism, and then died on the process.

That is, until Disney got their hands on the story.

Ultimately, Star Wars is made by a lot of authors with a lot of different visions and external pressures. I’ve heard three main interpretations:

• Bringing balance to the Force means destroying the Sith, because darkness is inherently evil. Vader fulfills this by killing the Emperor and becoming redeemed in his last moments, “destroying” the last Sith. (Ignore the whole fleet of off-screen Sith retroactively placed there by Expanded Universe works.)
• Bringing balance to the Force means making the number of Jedi and Sith equal, and Vader fulfills this by killing hundreds of thousands of Jedi.
• Bringing balance to the Force means destroying the black-and-white view of Jedi and Sith, which definitely seems to be the position of the Bendu (an ancient loosely-all-knowing alien who shows up in a handful of episodes of Clone Wars, but has been treated by the broader franchise as disproportionately important). Vader fulfills this by breaking the boundary between Sith and Jedi in his dying moments—or maybe the prophecy was about Rey after all. (Doesn’t this make the shot of Luke’s face inside Vader’s helmet the most interesting? Almost as though it’s saying both “there is evil in you, but there is good in him too.”)

Which is “right”? Well, you’d have to ask Lucas, wouldn’t you? Or Rian Johnson, or Dave Filoni, or the entire writing team of Knights of the Old Republic, or any of the thousands of people who’ve written for Star Wars… There’s not just one answer.

I think any of these could be true, from a certain point of view.

Nothing. Nothing in Star Wars means anything. It's just mediocre sci-fi at best and explanations for pretty much everything are worked out backwards trying to fix all the inconsistencies and nonsensical ideas. "This monster will digest you for 1000 years!". So are people supposed to be kept alive inside of it for that long or you die immediately and it just takes 1000 years to poop you out? Just another silly phrase in a badly written script but I'm sure "the canon" came up with some crazy explanation for it ("you see the worm bends time and space in a way that one day inside of it feels like 1000 years!" or something).

Edit: Same as the something-something run in 5 parsecs or whatever. Clearly just a mistake the writers made but the canon worked out some silly explanation for it.

The prophesy was misheard. Originally it was “bring bell-ends to the force” which tbf ended up happening

The prophecy of "one who will bring balance to The Force" wasn't inserted into the franchise canon until 1999's "The Phantom Menace". Nothing in the original trilogy, nor any comic books or other lesser canon, points to this "bringing balance" notion before then.

According to actor Ahmed Best (Jar-Jar Binks, et al.), George Lucas explained "bringing balance to the Force" as purging all Sith / Dark Side influence. The Light Side is balanced-ness; the Dark Side is unbalance.

Knowing that, the prophecy is obviously a callback to the climax of Episode 6... But then in 2012, Lucas sold out creative control, so we started seeing post-Empire Dark Side masters anyway (Moff Gideon, Kylo Ren, Snoke etc.) So I think we have to downgrade expectations of the prophecy: it was important within its own stretch of the Star Wars tapestry, but its Balance was merely for a time, not all time.

Lucas himself kept it pretty simple. From interviews and the movies themselves, his narrative is that the dark side is a corruption and abuse of the force. Think like burning through natural resources, instead of using renewable energy. The Force is not a finite resource in that way exactly, but corrupting the Force can have wider effects psychologically and sociologically. This may seem overly simple at first, but I don't think it is when you consider just how evil the Sith actually are.

But you know, death of the author and all that. The expanded universe saved Star Wars in my opinion, and gave it a lot of much needed depth. There was a lot of info about lessons Luke had to learn about accepting all parts of himself, and learning how fear, even of himself, leads to the dark side. He hesitated using powers like force lightning or mind manipulation because of how evil it seemed. But he learned that it isnt an act itself, but the intention behind it that matters, as well as the reasoning/wisdom behind it. Dominating another's mind to aura farm or assert your authority is not the move, but a Jedi mind trick to save lives is acceptible,for example. This was expanded in more in the EU by those that walk a middle path, the Grey Jedi. Who were not all that different than Luke ended up being, though they were more fixated on the whole "duality of man" thing.

The Prequels reinforced this by highlighting how imperfect and ultimately impotent the Jedi order was at the time of Palpatine's rise.

While I don't believe the discourse online that Anakin killing all Jedi and Sith WAS the balancing of the Force, the Jedi Order DID need to be reworked. Just like how religion in real life isn't perfect and needs reform kn a regular basis, but we do need people to tell us to be nice to other humans and form a certain kind of worldwide standard of social accountability, and religion is a useful form of that. We certainly DON'T need an equal, "balanced" amount of people whose religion is mass genocide and "might makes right" to the degree that they kill their teachers (often guardians that raised them) as a rite of passage. Also, Jedi=/=good the same way religion=/=good. The Light Side is good. The Jedi, and religion, attempts to achieve goodness, but does not always succeed. The Dark Side, whether Sith or Dark Jedi, is fundamentally a rejection of accountability, the concept of goodness, and respect for the natural order of the universe. This so-called binary, ironically, comes from the idea that anything not approved by the Jedi order's dogma is the Dark Side.

This overly emphasized social pressure is a big reason Anakin fell. In his mind it was "well I did x so I'm not a Jedi anymore, so that means I have to embrace the complete opposite of everything I once stood for because I am now officially Bad™️". And while Anakin is responsible for his own actions, the Jedi Order is not "good" either for setting him up to fail like this. He seems like (and is) an idiot who was easily fooled and manipulated. But like, Padme was the only one who fully accepted him for who who was, even after he admitted to thr Sand People massacre. She never even looked at him with fear or judgment. Palpatine was similar. And that's a powerful thing.

But none of this means the Force decided "we need some more genocide and less people who care about trying to be good. Send in the chosen one." That's just dumb.

I'm not going to pretend there was any subtext to the sequels since there isn't even a main text.

Source: used to be WAY too much of a Star Wars nerd.

EDIT:

In the scene you mentioned, Yoda warns him not to take his weapons, which Luke ignores. When Luke asks what is waiting for him, he tells Luke "what you bring with you". Bringing weapons/violence to "win" at his training is missing the point of what Yoda was trying to teach him. Obviously violence IS sometimes necessary, some people are too far gone, and Yoda himself later tells him he'll need to defeat his father. But the lesson is this: when your main tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Luke learned the lesson, and by committing to the bit while staring death in the face, was able to save even Vader.

Balance to the Force meant basically all light side.

Trouble was that the Jedi have become arrogant and hypocritical. They were also corrupted by the dark side, they just weren't realising it. They had become political puppets instead of guardians of peace and justice.

I wish George Lucas had been a little more overt about that.

Apparently it meant kill all the super light-side users and all the super-dark side users, and just have ethically questionable middle-of-the-road force users.

The "balance to the force" was misread by the Jedi council as meaning a complete Jedi victory over the Sith. Even in the first and second movies, Yoda and Windu both express doubts about the accuracy of the prophecy.

What a more pragmatic view would be is that a the force wanted a new type of force wielder philosophy where emotions don't rule over you(what the Sith ended as) but also one where emotion and connection are allowed to exist(what the Jedi outlawed.)

To that end, pre-Disney Luke and his academy were that new force wielder academy. One could argue that prequels Anakin struggled to meet that balance and his rebuff by the Jedi masters led to him being manipulated by Palpatine.

Luke can use dark and light side force abilities. What makes him different from other similarly capable users like Darth Tyranus or Yoda is that he didn't use the force to create a power structure. Everyone else, including Obiwan, was using the force to perpetuate an empire, a jedi temple, a senate, some sort of artificial construct that in would inevitably lead to imbalance in the force.

Luke trained Jedi with the goal of protecting life in general.

Taoish equilibrium

While the most obvious explanation of the incoherency is that SW exhibits a mostly haphazard implementation of a philosophical aesthetic only loosely related to Taoism, an artifice on loan from the cultural fixations of the era, if we set that aside and assume the premise charitably in an attempt to reconcile, we arrive at an inevitable conclusion.

The Jedi order of the republic represented a decaying and overextended ideal terminally corrupted by its marriage to the state and its crusades. The council’s inability to see the coming reign of fascism, a future “shrouded in darkness,” should have been evidence enough, but they were blinded even to that, and incapable of setting aside their Force goggles long enough to reasoning deductively about current events. A new order was thus necessary which entailed near-complete destruction of the old.

That is to say, the council’s misunderstanding of the prophecy of “balance” as an event that could only increase their power and influence was just another symptom of their corruption. Their obsession with hierarchy and use of violence to maintain order in the galaxy through their various holy wars, for example, predicted the Imperial reign of fascist terror. Through that lens, restoration of balance required their apparatus be drawn to its inevitable conclusion and dismantled before the galaxy could begin anew.

I know nothing of SW. I just made this up.

Coming from someone who grew up at the best time to be a movie fan, the first movie I remember seeing in the theater was Jaws, the second was Episode IV, when it was just called Star Wars.

I used to think there was fleshed out detailed ideas on the story points of the movies. It has since been made clear that they were all winging it the whole time.

So what doest bring balance to the force mean? Nothing … Nothing more than some cool shit for a character to say.

Yeah always confused me too, there hundreds or thousands of jedi vs 2 sith? Seems like balance would be the last thing the jedi wanted

I think the Jedi were incredibly stupid in Episodes 1, 2, 3.
They had a prophecy about one to bring Balance in a time when the Jedi were unquestionably dominant. Well Balance during that time, would obviously require the Jedi to be taken down. Anakin was that balance. The Jedi order was destroyed and the Sith began their period of domination. Creating Balance.

The next obvious story for Episodes 7, 8, 9, would have been a the creation of a new order, neither Jedi or Sith, that fostered Balance within each member. That's where Rian Johnson was going with Ep. 8. But the idiot Glass Union came back and shat the bed trying desperately to unravel all that. He decided to go back to the same old thing all over again.

Did everyone share qui gon's view that Anakin was going to do that? Or was it just him and obi wan?

it's like a vibe you know?

edit: basically like when someone says "this would be chill" only with jedis and shit.

So there are some books were this relevant. I short: The force has no good or Bad. By forcing (lol) a direction on it like the sich and the Jedi did it got out of its natural balance. To live as one with the force is to follow its ways rather than forcing () your way in to it. The Jedi and the sith had to die to bring balance to the force.

Lots of highly detailed responses in the comments, and yet I'm still confused.

Definitely that everyone should be centrist.

Anakin brought balance to the force, for a small amount of time, there was only 1 jedi and 1 sith

the Jedi were just terrible at reading prophecies

Getting the force users to be evenly split between light side and dark side. That's why Vader brought balance to the Force; there were way too many good guys before he showed up. Since there are only ever 2 sith, there should also only be 2 jedi.

There were lots of Jedi but only two Sith... Jedi are a bunch of cheating bastards who wouldn't let the Sith play with their Senate. That's why Anakin got recruited, they just wanted to balance the teams for a fair game.

it's supposed to be that the jedi and the sith are always moving to equality. one rises, the other falls, vice versa.

the obsession with purity and all that is what leads to the downfall of the jedi.