swan2swan:

I always shake my head at the hatred of “midichlorians” because if the Jedi Order is this thing that has existed for a thousand generations while everyone’s been flying across the galaxy and shooting laser beams and making laser swords and healing people by dunking them in tanks and rocketing on jetpacks, it’s logical to assume that they would at some point have studied and quantified Force ability.

And then TCW still has an episode where ancient beings are like “Um, sure, midichlorians, you can call them that, if you’d like.”

I’m sure plenty of people were complaining about atoms and molecules, too, back in the day. Midichlorians are simply something that had a noticeable pattern among people who could attune themselves to the Force, and by studying the patterns over thousands of years the Jedi finally managed to learn how to scientifically study them. It’s still magic, it’s still an energy field, the “magical midichlorian measurement device” is just equally magical (it’s not even known if non-Jedi can read the results). For all we know, it picks up on vibrations or fluctuations in the subject’s energy, and the Jedi decided “well, if it vibrates twelve times a second, that means there are twelve hundred midichlorians in that sample of blood”. “What does a midichlorian look like?” “Heck if we know, they’re too small to see, have you ever seen an electron?” “No.”

It would be far more absurd to assume that the Jedi failed to find a way to quantify the Force over their millennia of existence. I’m sure it was deemed heretical and blasphemous, that it caused splits and divides, but eventually it just became a matter of “Well it doesn’t actually make a difference, it’s just useful knowledge”. They never learned how to manipulate them and infuse people with midichlorians to grant them Force powers, or to extract them and deny them Force abilities; it was just a measurement.