EEEEEEEEEEVIL + Day 11
I've been pondering fantastic!evil for awhile, and finally collected my meandering thoughts together in a ... um, essay may be putting it strongly, but at least a post. I mostly just ended up confusing myself, but here it is.
The One Ring and the Dark Side (aka, the Problem of Evil)
[ETA: Warning! TV Tropes!]
[ETA2: I happened to check my f-list and found that irnan, who is pretty much a goddess of SW meta, just posted -- basically the same thing, only her version is coherent, concise, and has actual conclusions. Well, and there's no Middle-earth. Anyway, mine may be completely incomprehensible, so her post is here and is awesome and I wildly rec it to the ... uh, two or three of you who are SW fans.]
[ETA3: I use the generic 'we' a lot. I'm not saying that every single person reacts in this way, just that I do and I keep finding other people who do, too. So, for example, I do realise that Túrin Turambar does not inspire stabbity rage in everyone -- but it's not just me, either.]
I don't mean this to be a deep philosophical treatise on the nature of real evil. This is about the more fantastic kind, à la the Ring in Lord of the Rings and the Dark Side in Star Wars.
[The last ETA no really: I'm using these in particular because SW is what got me thinking about it in the first place, no discussion of trends in epic fantasy is complete without LOTR, and they're pretty much the ultimate examples anyway. However, I think the issue is, ah, applicable to any number of other works.]
The idea that evil is abroad in the world as an active, independent, supernatural force is not anything new. However, it's particularly ubiquitous in modern epic fantasy -- qualified by contemporary sensibilities, of course. Today's audiences aren't about to accept the raw version (evil is out there and it's out to get you). When presented with "demons made her do it" or "his doom caught up with him," we feel almost cheated.
Actually, take out the almost. We do feel cheated. Demons and dooms don't make satisfying character arcs. Often they don't even make satisfying characters.
(Note: I'm referring to modern, mainstream fantasy, not the tragic epics of yesteryear. They're the products of different times, written in completely different styles, and different rules apply.
Usually. Odysseus, you arrogant, smarmy, womanising asshole.)
Take Túrin from The Silmarillion (which, admittedly, is in a sort of no-man's land between "modern" and "tragic epic of yesteryear"). His life is pretty much one long string of disasters -- but not because of the numerous personal flaws that actually lead to his epic failures. It's because he's cursed. Um, did Morgoth curse him to be a self-absorbed, hot-tempered jerkass who refuses to learn from his errors or even accept the smallest responsibility for them? I don't think so.
No, Túrin isn't just a tragic hero with ultimately crippling failings that lead to destruction and despair and a long, long fall. No, the thing with Túrin is that even when his latest horrific misadventure is all his own fault, it isn't really. He's just that doomed.
Túrin Turambar: most frustrating character in Middle-earth, y/y?
Anyway, today's fantasy usually sanitises classic evil-is-out-there into something that doesn't make modern audiences want to stab our eyeballs out. Oh, it's still out there. It's still out to get you. It's still almost impossibly overwhelming, and it's still a source of ~absolute evil.~
Nevertheless, it's not the ultimate source of evil. It may be capable of turning a reasonably decent human being into something unimaginably awful with more haste than anything natural could possibly do, but it is not the root of all evil.
How do we know? Easy. While this source of evil (whatever it may be) always has an intense corrupting influence, that influence is sharply limited in some way.
Maybe the evil is tied to a magical force, like the Dark Side, and only affects those who can access it -- the verse's wizards. Sometimes it's limited even further, and only certain kinds of wizards can access it -- in The Wheel of Time books, for instance, only male "wizards" are exposed to the crazy-inducing taint on saidin.
Or maybe it's simply a matter of proximity, as with the Ring. Éowyn is never vulnerable to the lure of the Ring because she's never near the Ring. (This, I can't help but feel, is for the best.)
... In fact, even without the limitations of distance, the Ring can't possibly be the source of Middle-earth's evil. It's a relative newcomer, after all; people were quite capable of doing horrific things before it ever showed up (hi, Fëanor!).
So we've got evil represented, per tradition, as a malevolent, near-overpowering supernatural force -- but with an added caveat. It can only affect an infinitesimal fraction of the universe's population.
Yes, I understand that it's just a representation of evil, not a straightforward allegory, that it has to work this way to avoid epic Values Dissonance, blah blah blah. The problem is that nobody wants to write a story where maybe a dozen characters are innately susceptible to evil, regardless of their personal flaws or virtues, while millions of other people are blissfully invulnerable. So they don't.
Instead, these universes have normal, real world-style evil too. This leads to a peculiar situation, where people who are evil in ordinary ways come off as infinitely more horrifying than archvillains up to their ears in the POWERS OF DARKNESS.
Governor Tarkin from Star Wars is much worse than Vader and every bit as horrifying as the Emperor without the slightest influence from the Dark Side. Voldemort, sunk in the Dark Arts, pales in comparison to the genuinely chilling Umbridge. Gríma's betrayal is infinitely worse than Boromir's, and he doesn't have some eldritch artifact whispering in his ear and eroding his scruples.
Of course, for a particularly winning combination, there are also those characters who get the best (worst?) of all worlds. They're evil in the mundane sense, like the Tarkins and Wormtongues, but at some point they also get access to the eldritch Source of Evil. And what happens to them then?
(1) Nothing. They're so incredibly evil on their own, that the malevolent, evil-amplifying force of this thing has no effect whatsoever, except to give them the raw power needed to accomplish their evil, evil ambitions.
(2) They go off the deep end. They were evil in a calculating, practical way before, but now it's all UNLIMITED POWAH!!111! and maniacal laughter and, often, incredibly nonsensical mistakes.
It's not always clear to which category your local Big Bad belongs, since some scenery-chewing villains cultivate a veneer of sanity and competence, only to drop it when their plans come to fruition. Palpatine, of course, is the obvious example, particularly since he seems far more effective and competent in the prequels (as a raging OT purist, it hurts me to say it ... but he is: OT!Palpatine comes straight out of the Evil Overlord list). I suspect the same goes for most Big Bads in these kinds of universes.
Then there are people who are unpleasant and, at best, morally ambivalent before this thing comes along. Left to their own devices, they're unmitigated assholes, but they are not evil. Then the Source of Evil comes along and cranks their (comparatively minor) flaws up to eleven.
Thus Sméagol is an acquisitive, malicious snoop, but emphatically not a murderer. When he stumbles across the Ring, however, he almost immediately turns homicidal. Oddly, it's easier to blame him for his lesser crimes. He lies and sulks and cheats. He uses the Ring to sneak around and blackmail people. Later he's deceptive and untrustworthy. We quite easily blame him for these things.
And I think it's because he's more culpable for them. These are all the sorts of things that Sméagol -- the nasty little hobbit he was under his own power -- would do. The Ring did not put these ideas in his head, it simply gave him the power to realise them - rather like the Big Bads. The murder of Déagol, however, is not the sort of thing that Sméagol would do. So we find ourselves blaming him more for the weakness and meanness of spirit that caused him to fall so quickly to the Ring's power than, you know, the murder.
Gollum and Sméagol are not split personalities à la the movies, of course, but nevertheless there is a distinction made between his "real self," a rather unpleasant little boy who nevertheless loves, pities, and so on, and the maddened, homicidal creature he is under the power of the Ring. Moreover, a real possibility is held out that the Ring's hold on him could be broken. In that case he would presumably be affected by his centuries of torment, but nevertheless he'd essentially revert to sneaky, selfish, not-at-all-murderous Sméagol.
Tolkien talks about this possibility in one of his letters -- interestingly, it wouldn't have changed the basic plot. Redeemed!Sméagol would have done almost the exact same thing he did in canon, but on purpose: so his death would have been a Heroic Sacrifice rather than an "accident." (If I recall correctly, Tolkien felt that that would have made it Sméagol's story -- just as Vader's redemption turned Star Wars into Anakin Skywalker's story, long before the prequels -- and decided against it.)
These characters (like those in the first group) are responsible for their actions to a significant degree, but (unlike their purely villainous counterparts) not wholly. They're much more divided than either the first or the next group, where the original personality is either unaffected or almost crushed into oblivion by the Source of Evil. They're not annoyingly cleared of all culpability -- a good part of it all is genuinely their fault -- but at the same time we can't blame them entirely when they're assaulted by this enormous supernatural power.
Tolkien is clear that nobody could have used the Ring without falling to it. If Frodo had stayed with the Fellowship, they all would have fallen eventually. Boromir was more vulnerable, yes, but how much of what he did was really Boromir? What does falling for a few minutes say about who Boromir is? What's the character, what's the Source of Evil? Are their real selves distinct from the effects of the SOE, preserved in their original states -- or have they become inextricably bound together? How culpable are these people, really? Would any of us have done any better in such a circumstance? Are they despicable or simply pitiable?
Then there are people who are genuinely heroic. They have flaws, often serious ones, but they're far too principled, too good, to fall to ordinary evil. Instead, they're trying to accomplish some noble goal, and becoming increasingly desperate. The scale of their desperation may be wholly their own, but more often it's fuelled by the Source of Evil as part of a really squicky kind of seduction. After considerable resistance (often exhausting every other option), these heroes finally despair, turn to the supernatural force--
--and go batshit insane.
Seriously. The moment they consciously attempt to use this thing, they lose some essential part of their identities. Again, think of Boromir, who straddles both categories -- what is it Gandalf says? If Boromir had taken the Ring, with every intention of bringing it to Minas Tirith for the good of Gondor, by the time he got there you would not have known your son. It's true. These people might retain some of their original abilities and quirks (or not), they might retain the original goal (or not!), but they're not the same. They'll mow down anyone who gets in their paths, regardless of what their previous feelings about (1) murder, and (2) their victims, were.
Within approximately thirty seconds of turning to the SOE (TM!), they're effectively gone. These people are not themselves.
Obviously they're prime candidates for redemption, since they never wanted this and whatever fragment of their original selves has survived the whole thing is in constant torment. Fatal redemption, usually, but usually that's the best thing they can hope for.
These characters tend to be really, really popular. Most of us have caved at some point and made a seriously wrong decision, in full knowledge that it was wrong, without the help of some malevolent psychically-intrusive evil thing screwing with our minds. These -- anti-villains? -- well, they're less responsible than either of the above. They would never, never, never have done anything like this, left to their own devices. Not only would they not have killed people, they wouldn't have stolen from the cookie jar either.
But. They make their choice. Maybe it's made under unimaginably high pressure, maybe they're all but crushed under the power of the Thing, but nevertheless they do make a choice. More often they make several choices. Frodo's surrender to the Ring was the final, irrevocable step, but it was only the culmination of a path he'd been on for a long time.
Yet nobody could have resisted it. In that place, Sauron himself couldn't have destroyed the Ring -- er, had he felt so inclined. Frodo is honoured and celebrated because he did what nobody else could have: he survived -- that is, he retained his essential Frodo-ness -- long enough for Fate/Eru/whatever to intervene. So what he did under the Ring's influence -- well, it's unquestionably a case of diminished responsibility. The only question is how diminished.
In other universes, there's slightly more responsibility -- that is, whereas it was not humanly possible for anyone to resist the Ring at the height of its power, it is possible to resist the Dark Side.
... Barely. Even a shining beacon of light like Luke Skywalker is on the very edge of falling, and every indication in the OT is that Anakin Skywalker was exactly like him and, in that split second, failed to turn back from the brink. After all, only the spectre of Darth Vader brought Luke to his senses.
(I suspect this is one of the many things that certain people, myself included, dislike about prequel!Anakin. The OT made it clear that he was Type 3, the shining hero fallen under the sway of this unimaginable evil, but in the PT it's very hard not to see him as at least borderline Type 2. Even without the Dark Side, he's kind of a jerk. Anyway.)
So: if Luke strikes down an Evil Overlord who can shoot lightning from his fingertips, he's doomed to everlasting darkness or whatever. If Han Solo shoots some asshole in the face, he's ... Han Solo. Luke -- no matter how pure he seems -- is inherently vulnerable to this thing in ways that Han never will be, because he is Force-sensitive and Han is not. Even the most morally ambiguous of Luke's compatriots aren't capable of falling anyway near as far as he very nearly does. Simply because he's using the Force and they're using blasters.
So it's not just ... raw power, neutral in itself but power corrupts, or killing people messes you up or whatever. It's something else. And we can tell because it exists alongside those other things and looks completely different.
In fact, it looks ... kind of bizarre, at this point, particularly when you try to find anything remotely like a real world analogue. Intentions don't appear to matter; the kind of person you are may influence your type of evil -- e.g., we're told that, as Ring-lord, Gandalf would have been self-righteously evil rather than merely controlling, like Sauron, or evil-for-the-sake-of-evil, like Morgoth -- but the best of intentions don't make you less evil, they just inform the shape of your evil.
Luke Skywalker (very briefly) falls to the Dark Side to protect his sister -- from falling to the Dark Side. This would not make dark!Luke any less evil than Vader, who appears to be driven by a desire for order, or the Emperor, who's just ... for the evulz. Dark!Galadriel would not be an improvement over Sauron, nor dark!Sam or dark!Faramir or whomever.
So this is something which (1) certain people are innately and arbitrarily vulnerable to, (2) exerts an intensely strong influence on those people, (3) impairs their general mental processes while they use it, and sometimes afterwards, (4) sharply diminishes their judgment and sense of self, leaving them culpable for using it in the first place but less so (to varying degrees) for what they do under its influence, (5) is incredibly addictive, and (6) is possible, but very difficult, to stop using -- however, if they successfully break free of it, they’re once again recognisable as themselves, though they remain highly vulnerable.
Oh, and gives thems superpowers.
Um. So they’re literally high on evil? Because this sounds like the bastard child of fanon!drugs and EEEEEEEEEEVIL (TM).
I'm so confused. :(
Day 11: What is your favourite weapon?
Lightsabres, of course.
My favourite one is the blue lightsabre Luke inherits from his father. He never does anything particularly badass with it -- okay, except when he pwns the AT-AT -- and even though he's hopelessly outmatched at Bespin, it's kind of hilarious that Vader's being attacked with his own sword -- but it's still my favourite.
Legacy weapon + first lightsabre EVER = awesome.
The One Ring and the Dark Side (aka, the Problem of Evil)
[ETA: Warning! TV Tropes!]
[ETA2: I happened to check my f-list and found that irnan, who is pretty much a goddess of SW meta, just posted -- basically the same thing, only her version is coherent, concise, and has actual conclusions. Well, and there's no Middle-earth. Anyway, mine may be completely incomprehensible, so her post is here and is awesome and I wildly rec it to the ... uh, two or three of you who are SW fans.]
[ETA3: I use the generic 'we' a lot. I'm not saying that every single person reacts in this way, just that I do and I keep finding other people who do, too. So, for example, I do realise that Túrin Turambar does not inspire stabbity rage in everyone -- but it's not just me, either.]
I don't mean this to be a deep philosophical treatise on the nature of real evil. This is about the more fantastic kind, à la the Ring in Lord of the Rings and the Dark Side in Star Wars.
[The last ETA no really: I'm using these in particular because SW is what got me thinking about it in the first place, no discussion of trends in epic fantasy is complete without LOTR, and they're pretty much the ultimate examples anyway. However, I think the issue is, ah, applicable to any number of other works.]
The idea that evil is abroad in the world as an active, independent, supernatural force is not anything new. However, it's particularly ubiquitous in modern epic fantasy -- qualified by contemporary sensibilities, of course. Today's audiences aren't about to accept the raw version (evil is out there and it's out to get you). When presented with "demons made her do it" or "his doom caught up with him," we feel almost cheated.
Actually, take out the almost. We do feel cheated. Demons and dooms don't make satisfying character arcs. Often they don't even make satisfying characters.
(Note: I'm referring to modern, mainstream fantasy, not the tragic epics of yesteryear. They're the products of different times, written in completely different styles, and different rules apply.
Usually. Odysseus, you arrogant, smarmy, womanising asshole.)
Take Túrin from The Silmarillion (which, admittedly, is in a sort of no-man's land between "modern" and "tragic epic of yesteryear"). His life is pretty much one long string of disasters -- but not because of the numerous personal flaws that actually lead to his epic failures. It's because he's cursed. Um, did Morgoth curse him to be a self-absorbed, hot-tempered jerkass who refuses to learn from his errors or even accept the smallest responsibility for them? I don't think so.
No, Túrin isn't just a tragic hero with ultimately crippling failings that lead to destruction and despair and a long, long fall. No, the thing with Túrin is that even when his latest horrific misadventure is all his own fault, it isn't really. He's just that doomed.
Túrin Turambar: most frustrating character in Middle-earth, y/y?
Anyway, today's fantasy usually sanitises classic evil-is-out-there into something that doesn't make modern audiences want to stab our eyeballs out. Oh, it's still out there. It's still out to get you. It's still almost impossibly overwhelming, and it's still a source of ~absolute evil.~
Nevertheless, it's not the ultimate source of evil. It may be capable of turning a reasonably decent human being into something unimaginably awful with more haste than anything natural could possibly do, but it is not the root of all evil.
How do we know? Easy. While this source of evil (whatever it may be) always has an intense corrupting influence, that influence is sharply limited in some way.
Maybe the evil is tied to a magical force, like the Dark Side, and only affects those who can access it -- the verse's wizards. Sometimes it's limited even further, and only certain kinds of wizards can access it -- in The Wheel of Time books, for instance, only male "wizards" are exposed to the crazy-inducing taint on saidin.
Or maybe it's simply a matter of proximity, as with the Ring. Éowyn is never vulnerable to the lure of the Ring because she's never near the Ring. (This, I can't help but feel, is for the best.)
... In fact, even without the limitations of distance, the Ring can't possibly be the source of Middle-earth's evil. It's a relative newcomer, after all; people were quite capable of doing horrific things before it ever showed up (hi, Fëanor!).
So we've got evil represented, per tradition, as a malevolent, near-overpowering supernatural force -- but with an added caveat. It can only affect an infinitesimal fraction of the universe's population.
Yes, I understand that it's just a representation of evil, not a straightforward allegory, that it has to work this way to avoid epic Values Dissonance, blah blah blah. The problem is that nobody wants to write a story where maybe a dozen characters are innately susceptible to evil, regardless of their personal flaws or virtues, while millions of other people are blissfully invulnerable. So they don't.
Instead, these universes have normal, real world-style evil too. This leads to a peculiar situation, where people who are evil in ordinary ways come off as infinitely more horrifying than archvillains up to their ears in the POWERS OF DARKNESS.
Governor Tarkin from Star Wars is much worse than Vader and every bit as horrifying as the Emperor without the slightest influence from the Dark Side. Voldemort, sunk in the Dark Arts, pales in comparison to the genuinely chilling Umbridge. Gríma's betrayal is infinitely worse than Boromir's, and he doesn't have some eldritch artifact whispering in his ear and eroding his scruples.
Of course, for a particularly winning combination, there are also those characters who get the best (worst?) of all worlds. They're evil in the mundane sense, like the Tarkins and Wormtongues, but at some point they also get access to the eldritch Source of Evil. And what happens to them then?
(1) Nothing. They're so incredibly evil on their own, that the malevolent, evil-amplifying force of this thing has no effect whatsoever, except to give them the raw power needed to accomplish their evil, evil ambitions.
(2) They go off the deep end. They were evil in a calculating, practical way before, but now it's all UNLIMITED POWAH!!111! and maniacal laughter and, often, incredibly nonsensical mistakes.
It's not always clear to which category your local Big Bad belongs, since some scenery-chewing villains cultivate a veneer of sanity and competence, only to drop it when their plans come to fruition. Palpatine, of course, is the obvious example, particularly since he seems far more effective and competent in the prequels (as a raging OT purist, it hurts me to say it ... but he is: OT!Palpatine comes straight out of the Evil Overlord list). I suspect the same goes for most Big Bads in these kinds of universes.
Then there are people who are unpleasant and, at best, morally ambivalent before this thing comes along. Left to their own devices, they're unmitigated assholes, but they are not evil. Then the Source of Evil comes along and cranks their (comparatively minor) flaws up to eleven.
Thus Sméagol is an acquisitive, malicious snoop, but emphatically not a murderer. When he stumbles across the Ring, however, he almost immediately turns homicidal. Oddly, it's easier to blame him for his lesser crimes. He lies and sulks and cheats. He uses the Ring to sneak around and blackmail people. Later he's deceptive and untrustworthy. We quite easily blame him for these things.
And I think it's because he's more culpable for them. These are all the sorts of things that Sméagol -- the nasty little hobbit he was under his own power -- would do. The Ring did not put these ideas in his head, it simply gave him the power to realise them - rather like the Big Bads. The murder of Déagol, however, is not the sort of thing that Sméagol would do. So we find ourselves blaming him more for the weakness and meanness of spirit that caused him to fall so quickly to the Ring's power than, you know, the murder.
Gollum and Sméagol are not split personalities à la the movies, of course, but nevertheless there is a distinction made between his "real self," a rather unpleasant little boy who nevertheless loves, pities, and so on, and the maddened, homicidal creature he is under the power of the Ring. Moreover, a real possibility is held out that the Ring's hold on him could be broken. In that case he would presumably be affected by his centuries of torment, but nevertheless he'd essentially revert to sneaky, selfish, not-at-all-murderous Sméagol.
Tolkien talks about this possibility in one of his letters -- interestingly, it wouldn't have changed the basic plot. Redeemed!Sméagol would have done almost the exact same thing he did in canon, but on purpose: so his death would have been a Heroic Sacrifice rather than an "accident." (If I recall correctly, Tolkien felt that that would have made it Sméagol's story -- just as Vader's redemption turned Star Wars into Anakin Skywalker's story, long before the prequels -- and decided against it.)
These characters (like those in the first group) are responsible for their actions to a significant degree, but (unlike their purely villainous counterparts) not wholly. They're much more divided than either the first or the next group, where the original personality is either unaffected or almost crushed into oblivion by the Source of Evil. They're not annoyingly cleared of all culpability -- a good part of it all is genuinely their fault -- but at the same time we can't blame them entirely when they're assaulted by this enormous supernatural power.
Tolkien is clear that nobody could have used the Ring without falling to it. If Frodo had stayed with the Fellowship, they all would have fallen eventually. Boromir was more vulnerable, yes, but how much of what he did was really Boromir? What does falling for a few minutes say about who Boromir is? What's the character, what's the Source of Evil? Are their real selves distinct from the effects of the SOE, preserved in their original states -- or have they become inextricably bound together? How culpable are these people, really? Would any of us have done any better in such a circumstance? Are they despicable or simply pitiable?
Then there are people who are genuinely heroic. They have flaws, often serious ones, but they're far too principled, too good, to fall to ordinary evil. Instead, they're trying to accomplish some noble goal, and becoming increasingly desperate. The scale of their desperation may be wholly their own, but more often it's fuelled by the Source of Evil as part of a really squicky kind of seduction. After considerable resistance (often exhausting every other option), these heroes finally despair, turn to the supernatural force--
--and go batshit insane.
Seriously. The moment they consciously attempt to use this thing, they lose some essential part of their identities. Again, think of Boromir, who straddles both categories -- what is it Gandalf says? If Boromir had taken the Ring, with every intention of bringing it to Minas Tirith for the good of Gondor, by the time he got there you would not have known your son. It's true. These people might retain some of their original abilities and quirks (or not), they might retain the original goal (or not!), but they're not the same. They'll mow down anyone who gets in their paths, regardless of what their previous feelings about (1) murder, and (2) their victims, were.
Within approximately thirty seconds of turning to the SOE (TM!), they're effectively gone. These people are not themselves.
Obviously they're prime candidates for redemption, since they never wanted this and whatever fragment of their original selves has survived the whole thing is in constant torment. Fatal redemption, usually, but usually that's the best thing they can hope for.
These characters tend to be really, really popular. Most of us have caved at some point and made a seriously wrong decision, in full knowledge that it was wrong, without the help of some malevolent psychically-intrusive evil thing screwing with our minds. These -- anti-villains? -- well, they're less responsible than either of the above. They would never, never, never have done anything like this, left to their own devices. Not only would they not have killed people, they wouldn't have stolen from the cookie jar either.
But. They make their choice. Maybe it's made under unimaginably high pressure, maybe they're all but crushed under the power of the Thing, but nevertheless they do make a choice. More often they make several choices. Frodo's surrender to the Ring was the final, irrevocable step, but it was only the culmination of a path he'd been on for a long time.
Yet nobody could have resisted it. In that place, Sauron himself couldn't have destroyed the Ring -- er, had he felt so inclined. Frodo is honoured and celebrated because he did what nobody else could have: he survived -- that is, he retained his essential Frodo-ness -- long enough for Fate/Eru/whatever to intervene. So what he did under the Ring's influence -- well, it's unquestionably a case of diminished responsibility. The only question is how diminished.
In other universes, there's slightly more responsibility -- that is, whereas it was not humanly possible for anyone to resist the Ring at the height of its power, it is possible to resist the Dark Side.
... Barely. Even a shining beacon of light like Luke Skywalker is on the very edge of falling, and every indication in the OT is that Anakin Skywalker was exactly like him and, in that split second, failed to turn back from the brink. After all, only the spectre of Darth Vader brought Luke to his senses.
(I suspect this is one of the many things that certain people, myself included, dislike about prequel!Anakin. The OT made it clear that he was Type 3, the shining hero fallen under the sway of this unimaginable evil, but in the PT it's very hard not to see him as at least borderline Type 2. Even without the Dark Side, he's kind of a jerk. Anyway.)
So: if Luke strikes down an Evil Overlord who can shoot lightning from his fingertips, he's doomed to everlasting darkness or whatever. If Han Solo shoots some asshole in the face, he's ... Han Solo. Luke -- no matter how pure he seems -- is inherently vulnerable to this thing in ways that Han never will be, because he is Force-sensitive and Han is not. Even the most morally ambiguous of Luke's compatriots aren't capable of falling anyway near as far as he very nearly does. Simply because he's using the Force and they're using blasters.
So it's not just ... raw power, neutral in itself but power corrupts, or killing people messes you up or whatever. It's something else. And we can tell because it exists alongside those other things and looks completely different.
In fact, it looks ... kind of bizarre, at this point, particularly when you try to find anything remotely like a real world analogue. Intentions don't appear to matter; the kind of person you are may influence your type of evil -- e.g., we're told that, as Ring-lord, Gandalf would have been self-righteously evil rather than merely controlling, like Sauron, or evil-for-the-sake-of-evil, like Morgoth -- but the best of intentions don't make you less evil, they just inform the shape of your evil.
Luke Skywalker (very briefly) falls to the Dark Side to protect his sister -- from falling to the Dark Side. This would not make dark!Luke any less evil than Vader, who appears to be driven by a desire for order, or the Emperor, who's just ... for the evulz. Dark!Galadriel would not be an improvement over Sauron, nor dark!Sam or dark!Faramir or whomever.
So this is something which (1) certain people are innately and arbitrarily vulnerable to, (2) exerts an intensely strong influence on those people, (3) impairs their general mental processes while they use it, and sometimes afterwards, (4) sharply diminishes their judgment and sense of self, leaving them culpable for using it in the first place but less so (to varying degrees) for what they do under its influence, (5) is incredibly addictive, and (6) is possible, but very difficult, to stop using -- however, if they successfully break free of it, they’re once again recognisable as themselves, though they remain highly vulnerable.
Oh, and gives thems superpowers.
Um. So they’re literally high on evil? Because this sounds like the bastard child of fanon!drugs and EEEEEEEEEEVIL (TM).
I'm so confused. :(
Day 11: What is your favourite weapon?
Lightsabres, of course.
My favourite one is the blue lightsabre Luke inherits from his father. He never does anything particularly badass with it -- okay, except when he pwns the AT-AT -- and even though he's hopelessly outmatched at Bespin, it's kind of hilarious that Vader's being attacked with his own sword -- but it's still my favourite.
Legacy weapon + first lightsabre EVER = awesome.