ROTJ, in 1983 what did people think Palpatine was?

There was a great throw away line in the Clone Wars show about midichlorians, in a dive bar this ditzy looking barfly says “oh I should get his midichlorian count”. :stuck_out_tongue:

Making it seem as if it is the SW universe equivalent of a horoscope.

I didn’t really know what he was before I saw the movie or even after. Not until the third prequel is where things are finally cleared up.
From things Vader says we know that he has the clairvoyant powers of the other Jedi, but we don’t see him do anything until ZAP! he’s shooting fricking lightning out of his fingers.
Maybe he’s like a Force capacitor or a Force induction coil or merely dragged his feet over a Force infused carpet.

(bolding mine)

I would change that to “trained Force users”. Two points:

  1. I heard/read, somewhere, a mention of a species of animal on some planet that, it was discovered, used the Force to hunt.

  2. Young Anakin in The Phantom Menace

In the first case, we have a (presumably) non-intelligent animal that inherently uses the Force to detect prey. In the second case, we have a human who, until he’s discovered by actual Jedi, uses the Force completely unconsciously … the same way those animals do. Heck, Luke himself was completely ignorant of the Force until Obi-Wan told him about it. Prior to that, he was simply really good at blasting womp rats from a fast-moving landspeeder in Beggar’s Canyon. Leia, as was revealed in one of the EU novels, was remarkably skilled at diplomacy, likely due to her own inherent Force sensitivity.

That suggests to me that there are plenty of untrained Force-users who are completely unaware of what they’re doing. The effect is that they appear, to themselves and other “normal” people, to simply be very good at something. In Anakin’s case, he had an uncanny knack for dealing with mechanical things, as well as a bit of prescience/clairvoyance. But to the untrained eye, he was simply remarkably bright for his age, and had really good reflexes. That suggests that there were probably millions of “ordinary” Force-users spread throughout the galaxy, simply living their lives and excelling at something, going about their business none the wiser until/unless somebody with training stumbles across them and gives them some training (for better or worse).

Not if they are in the Republic, then the Jedi psychically find them as infants and come and kidnap them from their parents.

It is mentioned in TPM and there were some episodes of TCW that featured it too, Palptatine acquires a list of every person with force potential in the galaxy in TCW and I guess we as viewers are to believe he is going to go a cullin’ once the Jedi are dead.:eek:

I"m not sure if it can be called a “line”, more like a root node with two child nodes.