A thought about lightsabers

[cnoocy]

It's official canon that a lightsaber is a short beam of very powerful destructive force, like a chainsaw or a blowtorch. Only Jedi (or Sith) can use them because you need the skills of a Jedi not to injure yourself or someone else with such a powerful weapon.

But what if it's the opposite?

It actually makes more sense to me if the blade of a lightsaber is an extraordinarily weak, but extremely precise force. The Jedi are so attuned to the Force that they can find the spaces between individual atoms and sever the bonds holding a wall or an arm together. Similarly, they can find the force of another lightsaber and block its passage. But a non-Jedi like me or Admiral Ackbar would find it easier to injure someone with a laser pointer.


This idea is based on the Taoist text Cutting Up an Ox in which a butcher explains that his skill at ox-dividing is due to the Way. He sees the "spaces in the joints" and makes so little effort that his blade is still sharp after 19 years of use.

Comments

[joxn.livejournal.com]

I had a similar thought -- that lightsabers might be a beam of, uh, force, but you need to specifically and precisely use Force powers to tune them to a cutting edge. So in the hands of some non-Force-user they would act like low mass, high-rigidity bonkers. That way, baby Jedi are unlikely to cut their own limbs off; and also it would make sense that a Jedi might try to knock some high-mass thing flying towards them away with their saber (if they were successful in cutting through it they'd just have TWO lower-mass things flying at them...)

[cnoocy]

Interesting. It occurred to me that we often see baby Jedi using their lightsaber to interact with lightsaber-specific training equipment. Things like the training ball Luke uses on the Millennium Falcon may be designed to send bolts that can be deflected by an inexpert lightsaber user.

[joxn.livejournal.com]

Or it could be that in their high-rigidity, low-mass bonker mode, they are very good at deflecting other low-mass objects. Anyone could use them to deflect blaster bolts, but then you have the problem that you start to need need (presumably Force-enhanced) coordination / precognition to do it successfully.

[cnoocy]

True. I think it was the GURPS Space Opera book where I first saw "Precognitive Parry" as the skill used to block blaster bolts.

Isn't deflecting moving objects with minimal force part of non-Jedi martial arts practice as well?