So, take away the death, destruction, etc. and what do you have? Well, if it's badly-written, you've got Scooby-Doo and should expect to find out that all Sith are Palpatine the Janitor and he keeps yelling "You meddling kids!" Or you have uncontrollable mush, where you wonder how they ever won the war if all they do is have private jokes and significant love scenes. The midground is a hard one to find.

This is not unprecedented for me. Last year, I found out that I needed surgery and would be having it in November. In the course of that year, I had killed Anakin Skywalker twice, Mara, Leia, Luke, Padme, Rieekan, and a barbaric horde of original and minor characters. One reader dared me to write a fanfic that would have no injury greater than a stubbed toe, so I started writing "A Knight on the Town," where Anakin gets caught sneaking back into the Temple after a wild night and is sentenced to be under Obi-Wan's constant surveillance for 24 hours. Branching off from that idea, I declared November to be Mushability Awareness Month. I declared that I was not allowed to have any angst for the entire month. I wrote humor, I wrote mush, and I somehow survived, despite being on painkillers for most of the month and that being around the same time that my marriage turned abusive.

So, I know I can go completely angst-free and I'll be repeating that tradition this November, but for one year, I can't kill a single character. That means all death might be implied, but never on-screen. This automatically presents the challenge of having significant character development happen in the absence of loss. Transition is the most obvious substitute. The entire plot of of the Original Trilogy is centered around that sort of transition, I would argue. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in The Empire Strikes Back, when we see the necessary maturity that a hero must develop in order to succeed. If you had told me that, for half of an adventure book, you'd be sitting there reading philosophy and odd conversations with a little green man, I might have once laughed and flipped through the section.

So, what makes the experience with Yoda so essential to the movie? Is it that it demonstrates a self-actualization that we all have experienced in one form or another and one that we are still striving for? I think the juxtaposition of Vader's search/obsession with the turning of young Skywalker is what fuels the interest. Otherwise, it's just another "damn-fool idealistic crusade" and all Ben Kenobi's fault. It's something straight out of all epics, with a sense of dramatic irony that you could cut with a knife. The admiration of the hero stems, in part, from the fact that he is developing this maturity as a matter of blind faith, trusting that he'll need it. We're the ones who know that there's a monster in the closet, so we know where all of his preparations will lead.