my current force #takes (oh god why is it so long):
the force is not sapient and does not have a will/agency/etc. it's like gravity or electromagnetism. it exists, it affects the world, it's kind of alive, but it is not a person with an agenda. it does not care about you, it does not want anything in particular, it just IS.
"balance" is meaningless; it's a concept used by specific people at specific points in history to achieve specific political ends, and the concept differs across time and culture. the PT-era jedi's idea of balance is not the same as the ancient je'daii's, or the KOTOR/SWTOR-era jedi's, or luke's new jedi order.
the chosen one prophecy is, like most long-term prophecies, so vague that you can confirmation-bias your way into basically whatever interpretation you like. this prophecy is not necessary for the PT/OT to make sense and be emotionally impactful. the OT stands on its own without it, the PT works just fine if qui-gon was wrong to put so much stock in the prophecy and the whole thing just made anakin's adolescence even more of a miserable pressure cooker.
light & dark is just one framework through which to view the force; historically speaking it is the most COMMON framework due to rakata, je'daii, jedi, and sith influence, but it's not the only useful way of looking at things, and not all force traditions map cleanly onto light & dark because whatever they've got going on is orthogonal to that framing. it's a social construct, not an axiom of the universe.
the force is timey-wimey and allows people sensitive to it to catch glimpses of things happening up or down the timestream (or sideways, in the … space … stream)
these glimpses typically cluster around things relevant to you--people you love or hate, causes or places or objects of interest, events you can personally influence. the force connects all life, but not all life is directly connected to YOU; the more distant, unfamiliar, or impersonal the connection, the harder it is to get useful information, and the less information you'll probably get if you go looking.
the course of events/the future is not set in stone, free will is indeed real, but some outcomes are more likely than others. when you get a vision of the future, you might be seeing the most probable outcome given the current worldstate, or you might be seeing a POSSIBLE outcome that requires specific actions on your part to achieve. sussing which it is causes no end of headaches and is a large part of why premonitions are often regarded with caution/skepticism.
if the thing in your vision doesn't happen, then something else will happen instead. you don't get a game-over screen for going off the rails.
this is NOT the best of all possible worlds. this is just the leg of the trousers of time that you happen to be in.
the light side approach to the force demands that you empty yourself of emotion and ~let the force flow through you~ so you can follow its guidance. that guidance is not the force's will. or, well, it IS, but what the jedi call "will" is not actual intention--it's an extension of short-term precog. you're actively looking for a favorable-to-you outcome, so you're getting force feedback that will get you closer to that outcome. it's like a metaphysical objective marker on your mental mini-map.
this is why ~the will of the force~ so consistently aligns with what's convenient for the jedi. it's not what the force wants. it's what THEY want. and they have the institutional power to make that happen and convince everyone (and themselves!) that their aims are legitimate.
the dark side approach to the force demands that you channel your emotions into power in order to enact YOUR will. this fucks up lightsiders' medium-term precognition ("the dark side clouds everything--impossible to see, the future is") because you are smashing through the probability soup that the light side draws on to provide navigational data to its wielders. the force is a weapon or a tool; if it's a person, it's a subordinate. you are the one calling the shots, not the force.
both light and dark have failure modes! both failure modes are extremely bad! this is why the ancient je'daii were so gung-ho about INTERNAL balance between the two and insisted that everybody learn and use both!
if you get eaten by the light side, you stop caring about anything but your own serene purity, and you find anything dark/passionate spiritually disgusting and therefore a threat that needs to be annihilated. you end up like wyellett in the sith warrior storyline: passively sitting around in a cave doing fuck-all because total self-abnegation and abdication of all responsibility to HELP ANYBODY or participate in the business of, y'know, LIVING, is just sooooo awesome and virtuous, maaaan.
if you get eaten by the dark side, you stop caring about anything but your own impulses and desires, and you find anything light/serene completely suffocating and therefore a threat that needs to be annihilated. you end up like DS jaesa, also in the sith warrior storyline lmao: a violent, out-of-control murderhedonist.
trained lightsiders are not empty husks and trained darksiders are not frothing berserkers. most jedi AND sith are capable of self-control, long-term thinking, and moral decisionmaking. the PROBLEM is …
the force is like sex: conservatives love to push ignorance-based non-education about the "other" side in order to control people and ensure they can't escape the blinkered, dogmatic paradigms they're trapped in (all who gain power are afraid to lose it, babyyyy~), and this makes everything so, so, SO much worse for literally everybody in the galaxy.
if a lightsider flips to the dark side, they run a very real risk of getting hurt or hurting other people, because they are COMPLETELY UNPREPARED to use the dark side safely. this is how you get … most fallen jedi, tbh. they're used to following the feedback they get from the force--but if you're using the dark side then the feedback you're getting is NOT glimpses of favorable futures, it's your own desires and impulses reflected back at you and amplified until you, like, explode. the more you act on them--because you're used to going with the flow!--the more the situation spirals out of your control.
trained darksiders who flip to the light are less likely to get eaten by it because they already know how to hit the brakes on the force's feedback and NOT blindly follow it.
this is part of why "flip rates" are so uneven--it is a lot easier to accidentally go from light to dark than from dark to light because jedi training primes you to completely fall apart if you ever dip a toe in the dark side.
the other big reason is just, like, cultural conditioning--if you BELIEVE that it's impossible to flip away from the dark side, you won't be able to do it.
light and dark force users do not intrinsically need to murder the shit out of each other over a useful but incomplete social construct!!!
the je'daii went millennia using both sides without anything bad happening! (at least not as a result of their alignment situation. bad things did happen, i.e., the despot war, but that was down to like. politics and psychology)
the first great schism was a missed opportunity for the jedi order to unclench and either reopen study of the dark side internally (xendor's first choice) or set themselves up as just, like, institutionally focused on the light side but not OPPOSED to sects specializing in the dark side (xendor's second choice). then someone did something stupid (and all deliberate ambiguity notwithstanding my money's on the jedi) and whoopsie doodles we gotta just flat-out exterminate the darksiders i guess! lol.
the alliance enclave does not care how you use the force, only what you DO with it, which makes it a really interesting shift towards the force being a means to a political end rather than an end in and of itself? kinda love that, actually, that's fascinating. if anything does come of it, it obviously won't last forever, but i do like it!
… in conclusion alignment is nbd, kreia was wrong but she was asking a lot of the right questions, and xendor did nothing wrong ever in his entire life.
