Star Wars Personal Theory II

Before I made it to Attack of the Clones in my trip through the Star Wars movies for this year, most of my thoughts about what "personal theory" I might set down about it had to do with ideas of just when, how, and why Count Dooku had turned to the Dark Side and become Darth Tyrannus. As I got to thinking about ways to present the three new movies as something other than "Palpatine's precisely premeditated plan," though, I got to remembering the idea he'd only suggested Obi-Wan, and his apprentice, guard Padme because he wanted to get Anakin frustrated at the Jedi over "things he couldn't have." That's not a "personal" theory, though, as I recall first seeing it suggested in a classic look at the movie, "The Shroud of the Dark Side." With that in mind, though, I did remember an idea that does seem to be all mine: "the 'attachment is forbidden' rule, for the ordinary Jedi, doesn't require uncomfortable repression, washing hands afterwards, or even quick cheap flings; the Force can be used to switch off certain biological urges."

A bit of this might well come from the carefully quantified and qualified rules of the role-playing game that got adopted into the early novels as "hibernation trances" and the like, but I suppose more of it comes from my own peculiar habit of not being really interested in "pairing off" fictional characters not undeniably defined as such in their stories. Where some people seem to not want characters to go through life without a defined helpmate, I seem to be content with giving them a bit of privacy. When the romance is undeniable, though, I do seem ready to get gushy over that, and I suppose that leads into the obvious objection of "so what about Anakin?" I try to answer that by thinking that while "biological urges can be switched off," emotional attraction is harder to deal with.