Star Wars Gives the Light Side a New Name, and It's Called the Shine
May the Shine be with you.
Star Wars has a new name for the light side of the Force, and it comes from the most unexpected people possible. In Marvel's Star Wars: The Fall of Kylo Ren comic, the Knights of Ren call the light side "the Shine" and the dark side "the Shadow" (The Direct).
The terms first started making the rounds after issue #2 in September (Dork), and this week they took over Star Wars fan circles, with a lot of people asking if the Force just got renamed.
Did Star Wars actually rename the Force?
Not really, because the Jedi and the Sith still say light side and dark side. These are the Knights of Ren's own words for the Force, which is how a group with its own long history and rules would end up talking about it (Pirates & Princesses).
The Shadow isn't brand new either. Charles Soule and Will Sliney's 2019 comic The Rise of Kylo Ren already had the Knights talking about the shadow, and it introduced "the Ren," the Knights' word for a lightsaber (ComicBook.com). The Fall of Kylo Ren finally gives the other side a name, and issue #3 adds "radiant," which seems to be their word for Force users.
What is The Fall of Kylo Ren about?
It's a five-issue series from Soule and Sliney set between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. Kylo has just become Supreme Leader, Hux and Pryde are scheming behind his back, and he goes back to the Knights of Ren and their leader, Tava Ren (ComicsBeat).
Issue #3 came out on October 21 and has Kylo taking "brutal control" of the Knights while an assassin droid keeps coming back stronger (Marvel). When the series was announced, Soule summed up his three Kylo books by saying "First the Rise, then the Reign, and now the Fall."
Has Star Wars done this before?
Yes, and it goes back to George Lucas. In Star Wars Rebels, the Bendu calls the light side the Ashla and the dark side the Bogan, names that started in Lucas's early drafts of the original movie (Pirates & Princesses).
Fans are split this time, since some think the Force never needed more words and plenty of others can't stop thinking about Jack Nicholson in The Shining (Here's Kylo!). Others like that different groups see the Force differently, the way real people talk about the same thing in different ways.
My read is that it's a great bit of worldbuilding, because the Knights of Ren were one of the biggest missed chances of the sequel trilogy and never got a single line of dialogue in The Rise of Skywalker. Giving them their own language makes them feel like an actual order with a past, and that's what the movies should have done in the first place.
If you want to read the whole Kylo saga, start with these three books. As an Amazon Associate, Church of Nerds earns from qualifying purchases.
- Star Wars: The Rise of Kylo Ren
- Star Wars: Legacy of Vader Vol. 1, The Reign of Kylo Ren
- Star Wars: The Fall of Kylo Ren (collected edition)
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Comic covers courtesy of Marvel Comics.
