Stop Waiting for Space Wizards
Why the Galaxy Keeps Breaking When We Look for Chosen Ones
The redemption arc in Star Wars always bothered me.
Not because I hate Star Wars. I love Star Wars. I grew up on it. I still feel something when the music swells and the twin suns hang in the sky.
But if we’re being honest — the moral math doesn’t quite add up.
Darth Vader helps destroy planets. He hunts children. He enforces a fascist regime across a galaxy. Then, in the final act, he saves his son, tosses the Emperor down a shaft, and suddenly he’s glowing blue beside Obi-Wan and Yoda like it’s all square.
We’re supposed to accept that he finishes as Anakin Skywalker.
As if the sum of a life can be recalculated in its final seconds.
Sure, he dies. He gets burned on a pyre. But if becoming a Force ghost is rare — if it requires spiritual alignment and mastery — why does he get it? Why does the universe itself seem to validate him?
What about the billions on Alderaan?
Where do they go?
They don’t get glowing immortality. They don’t retain identity. They don’t show up smiling in the afterlife. They just… dissolve. Become “one with the Force.” Cosmic background radiation.
Meanwhile the guy who pressed the button gets continuity.
That’s not justice. That’s hierarchy.
We’re told the Force is symbiotic.
That it’s balance.
That it’s neither good nor evil.
But look at the pattern.
Every time the Jedi rise, they centralize power. They train children. They claim moral authority. They suppress emotion. They detach from ordinary life.
And every time?
Collapse. Corruption. War.
Yoda lives nine hundred years, masters the Force, guides an order for centuries — and dies alone in a swamp after failing to see the Sith operating in his own political system.
Obi-Wan Kenobi ends up in exile in a desert.
Luke Skywalker isolates himself on an island.
Anakin Skywalker burns on Mustafar, loses everything, becomes more machine than man.
Nobody gets out unscathed.
Nobody retires peacefully surrounded by loved ones, reminiscing about a balanced life well lived.
It’s always lonely.
Always tragic.
If that’s symbiosis, it’s a strange one.
Maybe the Force isn’t good or evil.
Maybe it’s just power.
And power — mystical or not — amplifies whatever is already inside you.
Fear becomes tyranny.
Love becomes obsession.
Discipline becomes dogma.
Conviction becomes blindness.
The Sith are consumed by it.
The Jedi are rigid because of it.
Both reorganize their entire identities around managing it.
And the galaxy keeps paying the bill.
Maybe the Force isn’t a parasite.
Maybe obsession with transcendence is.
Because here’s what I’ve started thinking:
Maybe we shouldn’t be looking to space wizards to save us.
Maybe life isn’t worse because we can’t move objects with our minds.
Maybe it’s better.
No prophecy.
No chosen ones.
No cosmic hierarchy.
No spiritual elite with a higher midichlorian count.
Just gravity.
Entropy.
Impermanence.
Choice.
Physics doesn’t play favorites.
Physics doesn’t forgive or condemn.
Physics doesn’t hand out glowing afterlives to the powerful while the ordinary dissolve into anonymity.
It just is.
And within that “just is,” we build meaning ourselves.
Star Wars is myth.
And myth exaggerates.
It gives us destiny, balance, redemption in the final second.
But the strongest characters in that universe aren’t the ones who manipulate cosmic energy.
They’re the ones who:
Fix ships.
Show up for their friends.
Act without certainty.
Fight without prophecy.
Bleed without guarantees.
They don’t get cosmic validation.
They get scars.
And they keep going.
So no, I’m not hating on Star Wars.
I’m just saying maybe we shouldn’t be cheering for the return of mystical elites every time they fade away.
Maybe there’s a reason the Jedi Order keeps collapsing.
Maybe there’s a reason “balance” never sticks.
Maybe the universe doesn’t need wizards bending it.
Maybe it’s enough to be dust in the cosmos — obeying the laws of physics, aware for a short while, responsible for each other without waiting for glowing saviors.
Fact check me.
Maybe the problem isn’t the dark side.
Maybe it’s the idea that anyone should wield that kind of power at all.