A shape-shifting hedgehog

Dr. Ryland Grace:

"Although Yoda clearly identifies fear, anger, and aggression as the dark side of the Force, and warns Luke not to use the strength that flows from them, as they will rule him and he will forever have to bear the consequences of what he has done under their sway, many fans and critics have distorted these teachings. The dark side is often asserted to be a malevolent metaphysical force or principle of wickedness that operates through fear, anger, and aggression. In the Expanded Universe novel Heir to the Empire, Timothy Zahn even altered Yoda’s teachings, writing, “Fear and anger, Yoda had often warned [Luke], were the slaves of the dark side.” In the 2000s, Matthew Stover spoke out against what he identified as the “dark-side-is-the-devil” perspective in the Expanded Universe, attempting to steer the narrative back toward Lucas’ canon. However, a few years later, in James Luceno’s The Unifying Force, Luke declared, “Anger by itself is not of the dark side,” and nevertheless insisted on fighting to “eradicate” the dark side, calling it “Evil” itself. Moreover, video games such as Knights of the Old Republic II portrayed drawing strength from the dark side as calling upon a mystical entity for magical powers through anger and aggression.

What Yoda teaches in the original trilogy is that evil behavior is the result of falling under the sway of, and being carried by one's own dark side - fear, anger, aggression, hate. In the prequel trilogy, he explains, all is rooted in fear. "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering" means, there's always fear behind anger, there's always anger behind hate, and these are adding up to suffering.

The arising of these negative states starts with the profound fear that you’ll be harmed in some way, that you won’t get what you want or that you’ll lose what you want to hold on to, and that you’ll be in pain as a result. Fear is closely related to attachment: the more attached we are to someone or something, the more we fear not having it or being separated from it. Fear is a predecessor to anger and hate – fear of loss, of not getting what you want, of pain etc. When fear arises, anger and hatred quick to follow. Anger acts as a strategy to protect ourselves and what we consider ours. This is the egoistic perspective that sees the “I” as the center of everything and “others” as sources of pleasure or pain that either keeps the “I” happy, thus must be attained by possession, or makes the “I” miserable, and thus must be pushed away and destroyed. This attitude eventually hardens into hostility and hatred.

In the original trilogy, Yoda tells Luke that the Jedi Knight feels the Force – the energy that flows through one and make one a living being with mental and emotional processes, rather than inert matter - running through him, and his strength flows from it. However, there is a dark side to this energy: fear, anger and aggression. They arise very quickly during a fight and they offer an easy, quick access to strength, but if you give in to them and let them carry you, there is no turning back, they consume you. This is what happened with Darth Vader - this is what makes him "twisted and evil." To discern these sources of strength from safe ones, "to know the good side from the bad," as Luke put it, one must enter into a peaceful, calm, passive state of mind.

The lesson is not that anger is "wrong" and "evil" and "bad" so it must never arise. The lesson is that whenever anger arises, a Jedi Knight should do as Yoda did in Clone Wars, when he tells the projections of his dark side: "Part of me you are, yes. But power over me you have not. Through patience and training, it is I who control you. Control over me you have not. My dark side you are. Reject you I do."

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a…

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I drew something

Tall and proud [Théoden] seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before:

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, A sword day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

With that he seized a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder [….]

Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and he sprang away.

There’s a lot more really incredible stuff about him essentially rivalling one of the Valar of old and so forth and so on, but this is Théoden at the beginning of the Battle of the Pelennor: fierce and joyful and fey and free in what he fully intends to be the last glorious act of his life, redeeming himself in blood on the field.

No, you see, the one who hits blank screaming nihilistic rage is, as noted above, Éomer Éomund’s-son, on discovering what he thinks is the body of his sister on the field. He grieves his uncle, but he perceives his uncle’s death the way that Théoden did - his words are in fact recorded as Mourn not overmuch! Mighty was the fallen.

Then he sees Éowyn.

He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart; and then his face turned deathly white, and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him.

“Éowyn, Éowyn!” he cried at last. “Éowyn, how come you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!”

Then without taking counsel or waiting for the approach of the men of the City, he spurred headlong back to the front of the great host, and blew a horn, and cried aloud for the onset. Over the field rang his clear voice calling: “Death! Ride, ride to ruin and the world’s ending!”

(This almost gets him killed, as it’s a stupid reckless charge that ends up with him and his immediate knights encircled on a hill, except instead he gets the most cinematic moment in fucking ever where he gets to spit defiance at what he THINKS is the approaching Corsair fleet only to have the wind unfurl Aragorn’s white-tree-seven-stone-seven-star standard instead, and for them to get to literally cut their way through the stricken and demoralized enemy to meet on the field.

Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.