Always two there are, no more, no less. A master, and an apprentice.
The Rule of Two is very clear. We do not count him.
He hits from angles you didn’t know existed. As a Sith move, I respect it. But Force lightning would be more helpful to the cause, you know?
Sith keep a respectable cover identity. Darth Sidious walks around as Senator Palpatine. Darth Tyranus is Count Dooku. The ordinary name hides the weapon.
Darth Analogous? I’m Rob Collie.
People have asked me, “Why choose a Sith name at all? Why not a Jedi name?” Well, because Jedi names are just their… names. No description of their power or technique. My Jedi name would just be Rob Collie, and that’s no fun at all.
(Though the Jedi could’ve benefited from the Sith approach. Anakin? Jeth Whinius. Yoda? Jeth Muppetus. Obi-Wan? Jeth Martyrus. You get it.)
Sith names are load-bearing.
They tell you what the Sith actually does:
- Vader — raw power, crushing force. Useful for open war.
- Sidious — insidious. Slow corruption from inside the institution.
- Plagueis — power over life and disease. Useful for, well, plagues.
- Maul — literally “to brutally beat.” A prophecy. Just, not in the direction he was hoping.
- Analogous — I draw unlikely connections between things and use them to teach life lessons.
Which is why the other Sith don’t really know what to do with me. My power is technically a power. It just doesn’t help with enslaving the galaxy. It mostly helps at dinner parties.
A mentor of mine — a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, decades of watching me — put it more specifically. I sent him a text one morning:
The Force, it turns out, has a sense of humor about all this.
Drawing unlikely analogies is a real superpower. It just isn’t one anyone pays for directly. There is no Chief Analogy Officer. No Chief Parable Officer. No Chief “It’s Just Like That Movie Scene” Officer. The skill only ever surfaces in a paycheck bundled inside something else.
The Force’s gift to me, in so many words:
“We’re gonna give you something unique. Good luck figuring out what to do with it. Lol.”
What this site is.
Essays written in the format “It’s just like X” — where X is something you would not expect to be an analogy for anything meaningful, and the post is an attempt to show that it absolutely is.
If I do the job right, you’ll come away seeing something familiar in a slightly weirder light. Or, occasionally, seeing something weird as something entirely ordinary. Both count.
Uncomfortable comparisons encouraged. Force lightning not included.