Never really associated Star Wars with capeshit. I always figured its rival was Star Trek. Semi fantastic semi realistic space fighting with spaceships and lasers and Oton torpedoes.
Star Trek makes capeshit look positively realistic. If Superman fought against the Empire, they'd be losing entire battle groups trying to put him down until Sidious discovers a weakness and uses Sith magic or something to kill him. Sidious would most likely die in the attempt, as well.
Meanwhile, if Superman fought against the Federation, Q can snap his fingers and make him as weak as the average dork in a costume with no powers, or Picard can fire some technobabble beam on him and rearrange his genetic code to make him human, then shoot him in the face with a phaser.
Mass Effect, Star Wars, Warhammer 40K, these are sci-fi worlds with rules and limits. Star Trek tech and space magic does whatever the fuck the plot needs it to do.
I admit, never looked into comic heroes. They look silly and their antics are silly, Darth Vader, Shepard, Spesssh Mehreens were much more serious and cool and edgy. Plus I hate their staple multiverse crap, hated it in Star Trek too.
You're not missing much. The best superhero comics don't dip too hard on the powerscaling and are usually slice-of-life tales or one-shots.
Nah, I preferred how the tabletops handled it; that using dark side powers was inherently tempting and very easy to fall into the trap of abusing until you fall.
Then by that case, would telekinesis cause you to fall? That's basically all Vader does, and yet he's fallen far into darkness more than most Sith in history. Fucking Count Dooku isn't as corrupted as he is, and that old man can shoot lightning from his fingertips. Vader sticks strictly to Jedi powers, but he uses them for nefarious ends. We haven't seen him shoot lightning or use Sith sorcery; all he does is the same laser sword + telekinesis combo that most Jedi have, except he's using them to crush people.
It goes to show that even if you stay away from Sith sorcery and specifically Dark Side powers, you can still fall. Vader in the movies literally sticks to the same powers the Jedi do, yet he's more evil than most lightning-chucking Sith in the setting.
Also, if the Light Side is stronger than the Dark Side, can't you use the Light to conquer the Dark? Bend the Dark Side and make it your instrument to work for the good of all? If anything, such a fear of Dark Side powers goes to show how weak the Jedi Order's faith in the Light Side truly is.
Again, I genuinely think Greyside garbage is specifically the autistic desire of being able to do both in media because it looks cool. And sure, the stuff does look cool. The problem I have is the refusal for that usage to have a cost and the attempt to justify why you don't battle with your darker desires when you use it. It just comes off as bad fanfiction otherwise to me.
Actually, it does have a cost. The fact that a Grey Jedi is close to neither the Light nor the Dark means that using either side is harder. A Light Side Jedi will have an easier time using Light Side powers, a Dark Side Sith would have an easier time using Dark Side powers. It becomes more natural to them. Meanwhile, a Grey Jedi will not be natural to either side.
I do genuinely uphold there are moral absolutes in the setting. When there are cosmological forces and emotions based casting, there generally is, even if it's allegedly only the Sith that believe in it... which was George fucking reeing at Dubya btw.
The only moral absolute in Star Wars is that only the Sith deal in absolutes. The only common lesson in all SW media is "don't be a dick", which most bad guys in the setting break.
Not to mention the fact that the Jedi were wrong multiple times.
Kenobi tells Luke that Vader killed his father, Vader is Luke's father.
Yoda tells Luke that the Jedi only use the Force for knowledge and defense, but he later wants Luke to take his knowledge of the Force and use it to kill Vader and the Emperor.
Yoda tells Luke that the only way forward is to kill his father, Luke saves his father through love and mercy and convinces the man to help them against the Emperor.
The Jedi believed that love is the enemy and that all emotions are to be avoided, instead, love is something that can save a soul in the grip of darkness.
The Jedi believe that being detached from the affairs of the galaxy is a good thing, being detached is what gets them killed when the galaxy that they detached themselves from doesn't give a shit when a popular politician orders the army to wipe out the Jedi Order on a charge of treason. They don't even question it; the Jedi detached themselves from the affairs of the galaxy, so the galaxy doesn't care when they get wiped out. They even cheer for the madlad who did it and made him Emperor for life.
Literally, if we're to judge things by either the films or the Expanded Universe, the Jedi teachings come from a good place, but they're inherently misguided and wrong. Especially about love and detachment. So if they're wrong about that, they can be horribly wrong about the Dark Side, too. Especially when Lucas' version of George Washington for the Rebel Alliance is a Sith who throws lightning everywhere and who uses rage and hatred within the Force to protect his Alliance friends and the ones he loves. Yet when he died, he became one with the Light.
I'm only judging the series by what it put out. Lucas' version of the Alliance founder used the Dark Side but died in the Light because his heart was filled with love for someone else, and the most iconic Sith in the series, the first Sith we see, uses nothing but the standard Jedi power set of telekinesis and lightsaber swordfighting, but his soul is still blacker than most of the Sith in the series, darker than even most of the sorcerers who chuck lightning and make stars go nova.
