This was inspired by Schizophrenic's post in that wonderfully unappreciated thread "Sith Ewoks."
Midichloreans: yay or nay?
I'm with Schizo, I think it was a bigger mistake even than Jar Jar.
Perviously, the force was something akin to faith, a mysticism, with the tacit understanding that anyone could come to the force if they just accepted it and opened themselves up to it.
Now, there's a biological determinism which undercuts the open, egalitarian nature of force-attunement. Faith goes right out the window- either you have it or you don't. It's like any other quantifiable attribute from birth- IQ, strength, dexterity, Midi count. How pedestrian.
Anyway, I'll open it up to general thoughts.
Except edkookyburns. He doesn't have any.
.....
:greedo:
Ok, first of if you want lots (and I do mean LOTS) of oppinions and thoughts on the subject of midis check out this article-type-thingy. (
http://www.theforce.net/midichlorians/)
As for what I think, I was originally thinking that it was a really bad idea. And had much the same arguments as you. Now I dont really know... I am not for it yet, but I'm kinda interested in seeing where they are going with this whole thing. Ill just wait awhile and decide for sure sometime after ep. 3 probebly...
I think it's good. It explains why the Jedi were almost extinct.
i think it was a big mistake to put that in there..
i dont think that you should be able to measure how powerfull a jedi can be
that ruined part of the hole mystery thing for me :-(
1: its no way near as bad as including Jar Jar
2: Greedo Mahone: you are wrong saying "anyone could come to the force if they just accepted it and opened themselves up to it"
because to be eligable to be strong in the force you have to have the mysterious force (now known as midichlorian count) in you to start with
how else could yoda sense the power in young anakin? if it was the fact that anyone could be a jedi then everyone would be evenly powerful
and anyway, lucas can make it how he wants to be so if midichlorians exist then it is DEFINATE that not anyone can be a jedi/sith....if he wanted to he could add a thing to the films where the characters open a console and type "setForceAll5" and then they can be whatever they want- admitedly he wont do that but u get my point
3: I think that they shouldnt have created midichlorians because it ruins the mystery around the force. the only benefit of having it is that it proves that not anyone can be a jedi/sith
Originally posted by Divine Spirit
1: its no way near as bad as including Jar Jar
2: Greedo Mahone: you are wrong saying "anyone could come to the force if they just accepted it and opened themselves up to it"
because to be eligable to be strong in the force you have to have the mysterious force (now known as midichlorian count) in you to start with
how else could yoda sense the power in young anakin? if it was the fact that anyone could be a jedi then everyone would be evenly powerful
I see where you're going, but perhaps I was not clear enough with my original point. When I say "anyone could come to the Force" I don't mean that everyone could become Jedi Masters. Certainly a level of talent, of aptitude would come into play. Everyone can paint, but not everyone is a da Vinci, right?
It's a fine line (was da Vinci's talent merely a product of biology?), but no finer than that which separates reason from faith.
Originally posted by Greedo Mahone
I see where you're going, but perhaps I was not clear enough with my original point. When I say "anyone could come to the Force" I don't mean that everyone could become Jedi Masters. Certainly a level of talent, of aptitude would come into play. Everyone can paint, but not everyone is a da Vinci, right?
It's a fine line (was da Vinci's talent merely a product of biology?), but no finer than that which separates reason from faith.
yeah, i see youre point know. i agree with your ealier point then
"The Force is still a mystical energy field..." but remember how the line goes? "Created by all living things." Now, my theory is that the midichlorians, being living beings inside of the body, add to the Force that is actually generated from that body. The more midichlorians someone has, the more lives are inside of him making the Force, and since they're symbiots the Force generated by the midichlorians and the Force generated by the host merge and create a kind of "super-aura".
The Jedi has more access to the Force because he's more connected to the Force. There are many instances in the EU of this happening between people and even objects. The Jedi Students combined their powers to push away a fleet of Star Destroyers; Luke and Leia (and the unborn Anakin) use their powers to defeat Palpatine's clone; Luke and Mara's powers become merged while they're fighting droids in Spector of the Past. Sith Lords use crystals to augment their powers, and in one of the early drafts of A New Hope, Vader was after something called the Kaiburr Crystal which could also augment the Force. Later, the Kaiburr crystal was a feature in Alan Dean Foster's book Splinter of the Mind's Eye.
I'm betting that the midichlorians are also going to be used by the Empire to track down and kill Jedi in the purge. In Anderson's books, they used devices that could read the level of someone's ability in the Force, and midichlorians would be a good explanation of what they were reading.
I like midichlorians, it doesn't change the essence of the Force, and it offers great new plot devices to be used in the movies, games, comics and novels.
My original post:
Originally posted by Schizophrenic in another thread...
Oh god... make the midichlorians go away...
I can handle just about all the mistakes that George has made over the years, but adding those into the story was THE worst thing he has ever done. It turned the Force from something mystical into something scientific, and ripped away the mystery and wonder of it by doing so.
Instead of "His midichlorian count is freakishly high, even higher than Yoda's", it should have been something like "I can sense the power in him, he may even be more powerful than Yoda".
BLEH.
Nothing more I can add to it.
the midichlorian thing doesn't really take away the mystic feel of the force for me. probably because in my psychology class i learned that IQ has biological connections, but still doen't have a yes because of this biological factor this person has a high IQ. there are still questions. so to me the midichlorians are just some way the jedi can predict a good jedi. there is a strong relationship between the amount of midichlorians and how strong they are in the force, but there can still be some people outside the norm who can dispute the relationship. so the fact that obi-wan stated that anakin has a higher midichlorian count than yoda is just of way of saying, if anakin fits the norm, he has a high probability of becoming a strong jedi, but it isn't certain.
I don' think Midichlorians wrecked the whole Force thing....
Look at it this way, as some of the people have posted above me, it's more of a case of that the higher the count, the more receptive the person is to the force.
From the original trilogy, it was never just a religion, remember that they state the children of Anakin, if he had any, would be strong with the force, therefore making it something more biological than faith based. Leia is receptive to the Force by the end of TESB, hearing Luke's call for help.
Just because someone has a high midichlorian count doesn't mean that he will be a jedi/sith - Anakin was lucky to be found. It's more of a case of how strong they CAN be with the force, not how strong they ARE with the force. If Anakin remained undiscovered, all his high midichlorian count would've done would be to give him the extremely quick reflexes to fly Pod Racers, people would've seen him as a gifted human. By not being found, it doesn't change his midichlorian count....
I think that it makes those that have a high enough midichlorian count more special, rather than thinking it was every man and his wookiee that could just become trained in the force.
So in an age that surely has great medical advances and faster than light travel, NO ONE HAS INVENTED SYNTHETIC MIDICHLORIANS?
I find that VERRRRRRY hard to believe.
Lucas has lost his freakin mind. First the Ewoks, then the Gungan, then a love story between Vader and Padme, and freakin midicholorians??? WTF has happened to the Star Wars I grew up and loved.
He is strong in the midichlorians
I call BS.
Just another reason why I'm going to wait for the crowds to thin before I see E2. If I do.
SW is about the mysterious and mystic, not science.
Originally posted by JaWaz
So in an age that surely has great medical advances and faster than light travel, NO ONE HAS INVENTED SYNTHETIC MIDICHLORIANS?
I find that VERRRRRRY hard to believe.
Lucas has lost his freakin mind. First the Ewoks, then the Gungan, then a love story between Vader and Padme, and freakin midicholorians??? WTF has happened to the Star Wars I grew up and loved.
[quote="Yoda"]He is strong in the midichlorians
I call BS.
Just another reason why I'm going to wait for the crowds to thin before I see E2. If I do.
SW is about the mysterious and mystic, not science.
You can't miss the clones attack!!!
i didn't read but the first few posts, but here is my opinion:
'the force is strong with-' is something heard even in the old movies. wasn't that said about Luke (and leia?) early on? before he was using the force strongly?
it wasn't just a religion, it was something people had in them.
how can the force 'be strong with-' someone before they're opened to it?
Originally posted by JaWaz
So in an age that surely has great medical advances and faster than light travel, NO ONE HAS INVENTED SYNTHETIC MIDICHLORIANS?
I find that VERRRRRRY hard to believe.
Lucas has lost his freakin mind. First the Ewoks, then the Gungan, then a love story between Vader and Padme, and freakin midicholorians??? WTF has happened to the Star Wars I grew up and loved.
1: perhaps the mystical thing about the midichlorians is that they cant be copied...or if they were copied then they die out after a certain length of time (like a cloned human in A.I.)
2: Padme was NOT in love with vader!!! it was anakin!! cant u remember obi-wan refering to them as two different people? he said:
"Your father was seduced by the dark side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader.
When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed."
then a love story between Vader and Padme
Where the heck did Luke and Leia come from, then? :rolleyes:
more immaculate conception?!?!:rolleyes: anywho, i think not, it will most likey be explained in the end of Eps2, or the beginning of Eps3... i highly doubt we will get a show though ;):D
Qui Gon says that midichlorians live in cells (mitochondria!?) and help relate the force to the larger organism. They way I always thought of it was that the higher the count the easier it was to start the path of the Jedi. Lower midichlorian counts would mean that you would have to work harder to reach the same affinity. It would just be like a natural skill. The Force is still a mystical energy... the midichlorians just our way of seeing it. Like light and eyes. Which actually opens up possibilities of some nice storylines where someone may be force crippled because they have no midichlorians.
But I am nowhere near as big a SW fan as most of the people here.
Well, my thoughts on this are my own opinion, no flames please. First, I don't agree or disagree with Midi-chlorians, they're there, I have to deal. Note that Episode 1 takes place when there are approximately 10,000 jedi. Don't you think they'd understand the force and the nature of it a little bit better than in a time when the only "jedi" left are an untrained boy and a cripple? It's still a mystical energy created by all life, it's just that they have also found a technological explanation for it. Even the Jedi don't know how it works, they just know that Jedi have Midi-cholrians, regular people don't(or jedi have very high amounts of them compared to regular people). Also this may explain how the emperor holds Vader's leash, he's the frickin' chosen one, higher midi-chlorian count than yoda for cripes sake(based on the fact that Midi-Chlorians relate force potential). Remember Ben kenobi saying "he's more machine than man". Well, less man may mean less midi-chlorians. I know, that leaves a lot of loopholes as to how he destroys the Jedi, but maybe he's still powerful enough, just the emperor takes him down a few notches. This is all 100% pure speculation, remember that. Just my thoughts.
Also, George Lucas has stated the Midi-Chlorians were meant to parallel Mitochondria.
it was a stupid idea meant to cater to all the parents who were worried about their kids believing in the force as some sort of religion.
Much the same as with Jar-jar Lucas wanted to bring the widest audience possible without ‘offending’ anyone.
As to “the force”
some people minds are more open to ideas than others.
that acceptance and the inherent understanding could make you more or less “strong in the force” (and the ability to manipulate it), with time and practice (and a good mentor) you can increase your abilities. This means that there is no theoretical limit on anyones ability, and even leaves open the possibility for “home grown jedi” people who pick up the ideas and abilities on their own.
having a "biological" reason is silly.
so now we are supposed to believe that these things exist in every form of life? no matter what element it may be based on, or what environment produced it? still sounds a bit "god-like" to me.
He would have been better off leaving it unknown and unexplained.
the Zen philosophical leanings from ep 4-6 were just enough to allow suspension of disbelief. He should have left well enough alone and focused on the story telling and the characters, destroying the mystery of the force was a VERY BAD IDEA.
perhaps there is an explaination for this that just occured to me.
darkness causes an increase melatonin (spelling?) in our bodies, causing us to be sleepy.
it's kind of the idea of the pardox. what came first, you know?
things we do change our bodies, yet sometimes we think that our bodies changing enables us to do these things.
perhaps midichloreans increase when people use the force. perhaps anikan's count was so high because he was a pod racer, and used the force (unknowingly) for the races.
that as much was said, that he used the force in pod races. they figured his instincts and stuff were because of his high count of midichloreans, but perhaps his high count of midichloreans was caused by use of the force.