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

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

Apparently I can't sleep and am overly hung up on the concept of the Star Wars canon. For me, the Star Wars canon consists of three (and only three) movies. However, my interpretation of the movies is heavily colored by many sources I was exposed to more or less contemporaneously with the movies, not limited to the Marvel comics adaptations of the movies, the Marvel comics spinoff series, the Kenner toys, the "Making of Star Wars" and "SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back" documentaries, the Bantha Tracks official fanclub newsletter, the Star Wars arcade game, The Empire Strikes Back Atari 2600 video game, and fanzine fiction.

There are many other materials that could be considered part of the canon, including the novels, the Star Wars Christmas Special, the Ewok movie (or movies?), the prequel trilogy movies, the Clone Wars TV series and movie, the video games, the role playing game, the Dark Horse comic series, and Star Wars reference books. (And even things like fan edits of the prequel trilogy, which can't be said to be the canon but potentially change the interpretation of the canon.)

All of these sources have varying degrees of authority and "officialness", and indeed how official they are has changed over time. I don't know if Lucas asserts an official Star Wars canon, and I'm tempted to not give his assertion any weight anyway. (I prefer to think of the prequel trilogy as fan fiction written by someone who is, ironically, not a fan.)

So when you assert that there is a canon explanation for how lightsabers work, I find myself wondering about your source. As far as I can recall, there's no explanation for how lightsabers work in the original trilogy. Any attempted explanation should account for the fact that the only people we see who choose to use lightsabers on a regular basis are Luke, Obi-Wan, and Darth Vader, but also that Han does use the lightsaber to cut open the Tauntaun in The Empire Strikes Back, as mentioned above.

I remember having conversations about this last fact before Return of the Jedi came out, in which it was suggested that having control of the Force was a necessary condition for using a lightsaber and therefore Han had at least some control of the Force. But (again, as far as I remember. Sadly, I do not have instant recall of every event in the Star Wars movies) I don't think there's a textual justification for the idea that you need to be able to control the Force in order to use a lightsaber. The closest you get is that Jedi use the Force and that the lightsaber is the weapon of choice for Jedi (and they are apparently not used by non-Jedi, although I don't believe there is direct textual support for this).

So, is the Star Wars canon well defined? Given a definition of the canon, is there a single non-self-contradictory explanation for how lightsabers work? If there is an explanation for how lightsabers work, how reliable is it? (If the source is an omniscient honest narrator, it is more reliable than if it is the characters' possibly flawed understanding.) Once we have these basic issues established, we can move on to alternative explanations and possible implications.

[cnoocy]

I have to think more about canon when I've been awake for more than 10 minutes, but my source in this case for official canon was Wookieepedia.

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

Late update: Wookieepedia has a long page on the definition of the Star Wars canon. However, I'm not sure whether this provides a coherent resolution to what the Star Wars canon is, and I'm not convinced that Wookieepedia has any more authority as to what the canon is than any other potential authority.

[cnoocy]

I think that "canon" is always going to be defined somewhat subjectively. Some definitions are more concise and elegant than others, but it's always going to be a bit messy, especially with extended texts like the Star Wars universe.

[cnoocy]

Also checked on Wookieepedia before posting: the fact that Admiral Ackbar did not turn out to secretly be a Jedi.