What Lightsaber Colors Can Teach Us About The 'Star Wars' Universe

When we are first introduced to the lightsaber in A New Hope, Ben Kenobi calls it "an elegant weapon for a more civilized age." To be perfectly honest, this line always rubbed me the wrong way; can any instrument of death and destruction be considered "elegant"? Plus, Kenobi sounds like an old fogie waxing nostalgic over the good ol' days before millennials came around and ruined everything, including weaponry.To develop the concept of the lightsaber, George Lucas harkened back to the fantasy adventure movies of the '40s, where romance and chivalry reigned supreme. Lucas also fixated on the "spiritual" nature of samurai sword fights, encounters that eschewed brute force and instead embraced skill and honor. And so, the lightsaber was born: a throwback to a more Romantic era, sporting a tweaked design in order to give whole space saga thing a retro-futuristic touch.While the original trilogy fights were modeled on fencing movements, the prequel trilogy required an entirely new form of swordplay to represent the strength and awe of the Jedi Order in its prime. For The Phantom Menace, stunt coordinator Nick Gillard answered the call, choreographing the jaw-dropping "Duel of the Fates" between Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Darth Maul by synthesizing movement styles from kendo, rapier, samurai, and even tennis and tree-chopping.In the real world, the art and science of lightsabers is somewhat mundane. Original Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt came up with the iconic lightsaber sound by combining the hum of an idling projector with the electrical interference of some loose wires. (Hey! No loose wire jokes.) At some point, the revving of a vacuum cleaner was incorporated as well. Current sound designers Matthew Wood and Ren Klyce recently revealed that the sound of a lightsaber powering up in The Last Jedi was achieved by pulling the red tab on an airplane life vest and recording the "whooshhh" sound as the vest filled up with air. In a Lucasfilm featurette on the birth of the lightsaber, George Lucas explained that the original lightsaber hilt used on set for A New Hope was merely a flash attachment for a 4x5 camera.Meanwhile, scientifically speaking, a plasma sword hot enough to melt through solid metal would also be hot enough to melt your face off before you could even activate it. And if a lightsaber blade were actually made of light, it wouldn't be very effective as a weapon, since it wouldn't have any mass. However, science could potentially explain the different colors emitted from different lightsabers, as spelled out by Nerdist's Kyle Hill in his "Because Science" video on lightsabers.But within the Star Wars universe, lightsaber colors can tell us a lot about the lightsaber wielders themselves – and about their place in the galaxy far, far away.

The kyber crystals themselves, however, are inherently attuned to the light side. As spelled out in Ahsoka, Sith acolytes forge their lightsabers by bending the kyber crystals to their will – by "bleeding" them, hence the blood-red coloration of Sith lightsaber blades. (Though we know it's possible to "purify" a Sith-infected kyber crystal, as Ahsoka did with the Inquisitor's crystals to forge her own.) Thematically, the red hue certainly resonates: red represents passion, violence, fire, and fury – all elements that make up the dark side.In my expert opinion, Darksiders have much cooler saber designs: from the dual-bladed saber that Darth Maul wields in The Phantom Menace, to the helicopter-like blades carried by the Inquisitors in Star Wars Rebels, to the uniquely curved hilts Asajj Ventress fights with in The Clone Wars. Each of these designs indicates a sort of perversion of the reserved and straight-laced Jedi ideal, expressing the darksiders' unrestrained ferocity and savagery.Kylo Ren's saber epitomizes this theme in an even more literal way. We see in the flashbacks in The Last Jedi that Ben Solo possessed a regular, blue-bladed lightsaber when he was a student of Luke's. Sometime after turning against his former master, Ben – now Kylo – constructed the signature crossguard lightsaber that we first see in The Force Awakens. As the visual dictionary from The Force Awakens explains, the side vents are not just aesthetically Extra™, but also functionally necessary: the cracked kyber crystal emits so much "raw, untamed power" (as Snoke describes Kylo) that a single, lateral blade would not be able to contain it, hence the two lateral vents. The visual effects in the films support this concept as well, depicting Kylo's blade as a crackling flame of unsteady rage, as opposed to the immovable blue beam that Rey wields against him.Kylo's lightsaber is the perfect symbol of his entire character struggle: Like his lightsaber, Kylo Ren's persona is fueled by torment, since he is constantly, as he tells his father Han Solo, "being torn apart." Every activation of his red-hued saber is a supreme act of will, an anguished dive into a Dark Side that he still hasn't full embraced. It seems clear that the kyber crystal in his current saber is the same one that was contained in his original blue lightsaber – but Kylo was so tortured by his own turn to the Dark Side that the crystal bled and cracked, resulting in an even more unstable weapon, and symbolizing an even more unstable soul.

Ask anyone off the street what color a Jedi's lightsaber is, and they will most likely respond with either green or blue. Back when the Star Wars universe was in its nascent stages, the lightsaber dichotomy was simply a choice between red (for Sith) and blue (for Jedi). Two films later, green was added into the mix; anecdotally, Luke's new lightsaber in Return of the Jedi was actually just changed from blue to green in post-production in order to offset the blue of the sky. Aside from that, it seems that the kyber crystal stores that the Jedi had access to only produced blue or green saber blades because, well, George Lucas said so.Non-canonical distinctions aside, the blue and green blades are a shining symbol of the Jedi Order at its zenith. The prequel trilogy depicts a more militant Jedi Order, but the ideal purpose of a Jedi has always been to protect. As Yoda teaches Luke on Dagobah, "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack," a lesson that – perhaps paradoxically – can be applied to a Jedi's weapon of choice as well. As George Lucas describes it, the lightsaber was primarily designed as a defensive tool, first and foremost used for blocking attacking weapons like blasters.In Lucas' words, the lightsaber in the original Star Wars was "more of a symbol than it was an actual weapon," and indeed, the symbolism of the lightsaber is even stronger than its effectiveness as an in-universe weapon. The lightsaber is present – or purposely tossed aside – in most (if not all) of the most memorable and emotional sequences in the Star Wars saga. There's Qui-Gon's death and Darth Vader's redemption, of course, but also the "Battle of the Heroes" between Anakin and Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith, with their mirrored blue blades clashing against the backdrop of the raging lava of Mustafar; there's Ahsoka versus Anakin on Rebels, with Ahsoka's newly minted white sabers coming up against her former master's corrupted red one; and there's Sabine Wren's fraught training session with the Mandalorian Darksaber, a symbol of her people's warrior nature as well as her own complicated history. The action sequences themselves are epic, to be sure, but it is the emotional history between two meeting blades that lends each scene its pathos within the Star Wars saga.There is one blade in particular whose history connects several key characters in the Star Wars universe and could indicate the direction in which the saga is heading. As a padawan, Anakin Skywalker started out with Qui-Gon Jinn's green lightsaber before building one of his own. When that lightsaber is destroyed in the droid factory on Geonosis in Attack of the Clones, Anakin builds a new, blue-bladed lightsaber that he would carry throughout The Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith. After Anakin's defeat on Mustafar, Obi-Wan picks up his former Padawan's lightsaber and keeps it in his hut on Tatooine until he presents it to Luke in A New Hope. The lightsaber is seemingly irretrievably lost when Luke drops it – along with his hand – down an air shaft on Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. And yet somehow, during the 30 years between the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy, the lightsaber ends up in the possession of Maz Kanata (How? "A good question for another time," and that "time" better be Episode IX, J.J.!), whereupon she hands it over to Rey.Just like Kylo and his lightsaber, Rey's relationship to Luke's lightsaber represents her own internal struggle. She resists the hero's call when Maz first tries to hand her the lightsaber on Takodana, but she triumphantly embraces her destiny later on when she summons the lightsaber before her duel with Kylo Ren on Starkiller Base. In The Last Jedi, she backpedals a bit by trying to pawn the lightsaber off to its previous owner, Luke, and then briefly shares possession of the saber with Kylo during their fight with Snoke and the Praetorian Guard. But in her subsequent struggle with Kylo, Rey realizes that Kylo is still too extreme, too enslaved to his Dark Side passions. When we see Rey at the end of The Last Jedi, cradling the two halves of the saga's most historic lightsaber – literally torn apart by the conflict between the light side and the dark – it's a tantalizing tease for what's to come. Since Rey has come to learn that it's important to let go of some of the past, I imagine her new lightsaber (or lightsabers!) will involve a color change as well. Personally, I'm rooting for white, like Ahsoka's, or yellow, as a nod to the Old Republic. Either one would constitute a fulfillment of Luke's pronouncement in The Last Jedi – that it's time for the Jedi, as represented by the blue and green blades, to end.