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In my stories Heart of Shadow and Cut Strings, my interpretation of the Dark Side, while sharing certain similarities with the canon such as its usage of intense emotion, also differs in that I try to portray the Dark Side itself as morally neutral (I feel similarly about the Light Side). There's a lot of reasons I feel this way, but here I want to talk about just one of them: the assignment of fear to the Dark Side.
The whole thing about fear being the domain of the Dark Side is one of the reasons that I can't agree with the binary Good/Evil distinction of Light and Dark as given in canon.
Fear is not inherently evil. Fear is a survival mechanism. It can be unhealthy, but even intense fear is not necessarily a bad thing. Brain damage to the amygdala can prevent someone from feeling fear, and this can prevent them from taking normal precautions for immediate threats to their safety. Furthermore, people not feeling sufficient fear for less immediate issues, like heart disease or climate change, puts us in more danger, and causes more suffering, not less.
Disorders that cause excessive fear cause problems, but under the fear is evil doctrine of the canon, you must necessarily mark these people as evil for the fear they feel. People who are afraid of heights, or death, or pain, or experience excessive social anxiety, or suffer from PTSD, are not inherently evil. People don't choose to suffer from phobias or PTSD, and those disorders don't make them bad people.
Feeling fear isn't something to eradicate from people--it's a normal, and needed, part of life. We feel fear if we are attacked or our current surroundings are dangerous. Fear can help focus our attention on problems that we need to address. We may not enjoy it, but sometimes we need it to address the problems we face.
Perhaps someone would protest then that these are not the type of fear that is meant to be of the Dark Side, but if a very specific type of fear is meant, canon never clarifies how to distinguish this sort of fear from good fear, and I would venture to say that that interpretation would be just as much outside what the text addresses as my interpretation of the Dark and Light sides of the Force being morally neutral.
The whole thing about fear being the domain of the Dark Side is one of the reasons that I can't agree with the binary Good/Evil distinction of Light and Dark as given in canon.
Fear is not inherently evil. Fear is a survival mechanism. It can be unhealthy, but even intense fear is not necessarily a bad thing. Brain damage to the amygdala can prevent someone from feeling fear, and this can prevent them from taking normal precautions for immediate threats to their safety. Furthermore, people not feeling sufficient fear for less immediate issues, like heart disease or climate change, puts us in more danger, and causes more suffering, not less.
Disorders that cause excessive fear cause problems, but under the fear is evil doctrine of the canon, you must necessarily mark these people as evil for the fear they feel. People who are afraid of heights, or death, or pain, or experience excessive social anxiety, or suffer from PTSD, are not inherently evil. People don't choose to suffer from phobias or PTSD, and those disorders don't make them bad people.
Feeling fear isn't something to eradicate from people--it's a normal, and needed, part of life. We feel fear if we are attacked or our current surroundings are dangerous. Fear can help focus our attention on problems that we need to address. We may not enjoy it, but sometimes we need it to address the problems we face.
Perhaps someone would protest then that these are not the type of fear that is meant to be of the Dark Side, but if a very specific type of fear is meant, canon never clarifies how to distinguish this sort of fear from good fear, and I would venture to say that that interpretation would be just as much outside what the text addresses as my interpretation of the Dark and Light sides of the Force being morally neutral.
