iirc the actual amount of time dedicated to the intersection between those alternative Force-users and the rest of the Galaxy is quite small, and yet the impact of that completely changed the direction of the trilogy, literally saving the day due to their having taught Luke Skywalker a new set of powers - well, at least just one or two:-). Most of the books are dedicated to setting up this totalitarian regime that was going to overwhelm and conquor the galaxy, and on the Jedi side the search for these alternate users.

One scene that stuck in my mind was when these two people attacked Luke and his companion, and how she did not condone his having struck them down - despite it having been done entirely in self-defense, they were pacifists to such a large degree that even then they did not condone the killing. This ofc reveals them to be VERY different than the Jedi, most of whom kill without a second thought about the matter, despite how their claim is to revere “life” (their justification ofc being that they mean it on the larger scale, but the “life” of an individual or two or twenty thousand doesn’t matter all that much).

I’ll give you the tiniest of (really non-) spoiler for the Jedi Academy: yeah it doesn’t turn out well:-). Though that’s okay, b/c there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path, and it was what he (Luke) needed to have done to get from there to where he arrived later. Perhaps the larger part of his failures there is not due to how he was trained, but that he never finished - remember when he abandonded Yoda to go rescue his friends? Yoda kindly said that he knew enough… but he could have been taught so much more. So like, enough… “for what”? Enough to destroy the Emperor’s stranglehold on the galaxy? Enough to resurrect the Jedi order? Enough to train new members in the ways of using the Force? And what about when the Yuuzhan Vong show up later in the New Jedi Order to conquer everything - the Emperor had a whole society geared around defeating them, with fearsome technology like planet killers and star killers and rigidly disciplined clone armies and the ability to make as many more of them as needed, but did Luke have “enough” training to handle all that was to come?

Or perhaps things like survival of a species or even a galactic empire don’t really matter, in the long run, when the entire universe will fade into dust and cease to fight against entropic forces anymore, some day. Maybe all that matters at the end of the day is how we face our ending, like did we remain true to ourselves? (and perhaps that in turn depends on how “inspiring” such scifi stories were, which correlates with how profitable they were to sell in the past and thus in turn make more of in the future…:-P)

I never consumed DBZ, in any form - it seems too old to be worthwhile, but do you think there is merit in it still? Sadly, there seems nothing at all that escapes enshittification as a result of capitalism. Doctors are overworked, as are scientists, engineers, teachers - and that is even just merely STEM, but then we can start going through the list of non-STEM too: lawyers, accountants, architects, … and you mentioned the entire set of “creative” fields such as actors, artists, designers, etc. - yeesh!:-( But are there perhaps better publishers, which we can support and thereby encourage better practices?

Watching SWO a couple times is totally “enough” - not everything needs to be all-consuming, and while I think the story was well-implemented (as you say, it is nowhere close to being unique: I never got into :Hack//Sign but there are even more ancient series like Tron that also played up that same concept, and I am sure many fantasy concepts that pre-date modern technology like if you die in a dream then you die irl), there is a ton of irl stuff to read and learn and do about as well. e.g. when I watched Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey, it totally fucked me up for years afterwards, trying to re-think my entire worldview of how I thought the world worked - and more importantly, should work. Trigger warning: that philosophy might be too heavy to get into and so you may want to avoid it if you aren’t ready to know.

I am going to specifically avoid commenting on BattleStar Galactica b/c… well, you’ll see. I’ll just say that it is very “interesting” how the whole series evolves - and as it does, reiterates tropes that occur irl too. But I can leave it behind and switch to StarGate instead: especially with those nanobot beings - why terraform a planet when you can just flip a switch and planetform yourself into something that can breathe that atmosphere and otherwise adapt to those conditions? As the 2001 A Space Odyssey and more pertinently its sequels show, terraforming is something that a society may do only briefly along the development of its technical capabilities - b/c it’s an enormously expensive undertaking, and it’s far easier to simply… not do that, and adapt ourselves instead (genetically I mean, as in not merely DNA but the “stuff” that makes us up). Those are kinds of FASCINATING thoughts that I LIVE to see/hear/read/imagine in scifi & fantasy settings!:-P

Btw zombies are an example of where that kind of thinking goes wrong, but with just a bit of tweaking… what if we had something like a T-virus that actually worked as intended, and basically gave the people that took it superpowers? Obviously, some evil mastermind would have to kill all the researchers that made any contributions to it at all, thereby preventing anyone else from having access to such, and preserving their immortality (not quite the same as total invulnerability, though getting closer to that as well) for millenia?

I think “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” is a little bit like you are saying where people basically have to try to save the planet, or even better (so long as we aren’t being picky about it being “Earth” that is attempting to be saved:-), “Avatar”:-).