Star Wars has always deliberately kept a veil of ambiguity over the concept of the living Force and its opposing sides. Now, the galaxy far, far away fandom is once again debating the moral implications of the so-called “balance” on social media.
It is a canonically accepted truth that Anakin aka Darth Vader fulfilled prophecy and brought balance to the Force when he chucked Papa Palpatine down a reactor shaft in Return of the Jedi, but the Skywalker Saga never really determines what it means to bring that balance. By definition, balance should mean neither the dark side nor the light — something like a morally gray area — but the three trilogies never follow that logic.
Of course, there’s another obvious question that many Star Wars stans have been asking for years. Do the Jedi deprive themselves of crucial knowledge by hanging to the light side and refusing to gain knowledge of that tempting darker aspect of the living Force?
Most people seem to agree that Palpatine is just manipulating Anakin, and everything he says to him serves that end. So, all those people upvoting this post may have fallen for the big bad’s devious fallacies.
Besides, did the Sith also deprive themselves of important wisdom by refusing to acknowledge the light?
For years, Star Wars fans have been theorizing that both the Jedi and the Sith are hypocrites, and true balance is something more in the vein of what Ahsoka Tano decided to pursue when she left the Order in The Clone Wars.
The canon has never acknowledged that thought train, however, which is why as far as we know, Anakin brought balance by destroying the last living Sith in the galaxy, since the dark side is inherently a corruption of that balance.