However, I spent much of my youth trying to build my ideas of the world based on the stories I knew and spent no less than the last four years questioning all of that. I want to do fiction (for some reason) but I find it harder to write when I sit down for it because I can't just let the muse in. I am self-conscious about every previously held underlying assumption and trying to be aware of the assumptions of others that I might account for wildly different perspectives without the goal of pleasing everyone, but the desire to be understood clearly.
At the risk of self-promotion, I made Hindsight MMXX because I believed Disney had presented the materials for another story appropriate to Star Wars that went untold. I would characterize it that the Disney trilogy has good visuals with a bad story whereas my content is the reverse (including ransom-note-style dialogue, because there were places they didn’t come close enough to where I wanted to go).
Apologists in favor of the Disney trilogy tend to assert that their story is the mature one and that we can’t expect Luke to be the hero we used to see.
The argument for Luke's transformation goes something like this: people change, there are no heroes, the world is going to wear you down into entropy so get used to it. And they pre-suppose entropy is the truth whereas Yoda said, "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."
So the people who presume to impose the truth of the world onto Star Wars are in direct opposition to Star Wars' ethos on what reality is.
I appreciated this poster's reference to the psychological aspect. Barring spiritual faith, equating the symbolism of the mind with the powers of the Force squares Star Wars with our mundane reality where you and I cannot jump 50 feet in the air under our own power.
Disney has a very strange relationship to the Force. The Last Jedi “deconstructs” without accurately defining what came before. We each have an internal self. Rey does not explore herself and in the last movie is even afraid to do so. And she doesn’t learn about herself from others. In Rise of Skywalker, she stabs Ren, Leia enters her mind and so Rey stops more for Leia’s sake than seeing herself in Ren.
Luke’s revelation both on Dagobah and in taking Vader’s hand is that he and Vader were one and the same. I challenge anyone who enjoys the Disney trilogy to point to a similarly powerful revelation, which transcends what most people take as the real world in favor of a spiritual reality where even the original Jedi feared to tread, because it is an exacting responsibility. That was one point of the prequels, that there was a reality revealed by the Force that even the Jedi won’t explore.
So Luke spurred his drive in wanting to save Vader, which he was initiated on the journey by the family connection, but he founded the faith in a more profound reality where it is as though he is saving himself so he strived to save his father at all costs (dramatized in Luke nearly dying and pleading for Vader to save him.) By that point in the Return of the Jedi, symbolically, it's not about how likely Vader is to save Luke but by Luke's sacrifice he learns the same lesson that Luke did, steps out of the moment and looks between his son and the Emperor and accepts the free choice to not be Vader anymore.
This is the stuff that most people don’t articulate why Luke’s portrayal betrayed his character so badly, but people say simply this; you don't stake out on the theological view that I am not any more worth saving than Darth freaking Vader and then try to kill your nephew in his sleep. We're not talking about the same person by that point.
Instead, Luke could be or become too ready to sacrifice himself.
So my story's answer was to maintain Luke's position in that radical ethos of self-sacrifice which was in large part foreign to the Jedi before Luke. They had an inkling of it throughout canon, but if we're being honest with ourselves that comes from the authors working backwards from what Luke did and a more accurate view of the Jedi is to kill all Sith combatively wherever you find them before ever thinking about converting them. This is the unspoken alteration Luke made to the very identity of the Jedi that is betrayed when you go outside George Lucas' movies.
I didn’t think the myth was done, because self-sacrifice can be abused. So how do you keep it without teaching young girls to believe in the Beauty and the Beast story “I can change him.” Answer, if there is change to be had it is to realize yourself. This too can be abused if twisted.
I watch Stefan Molyneux videos. Not understanding where or why our families go wrong can destroy us. Luke was trying to save himself and his means was to inform his father he still had a choice. Symbolically, to restore responsibility to his father already saved Luke from the responsibility of all the actions he didn’t do, but his father did. In this light, Vader stepping in should not be understood as a literal reconciliation in the family between abused and abuser, but the abused to understand the abuser freely did evil so that you do not overshadow yourself with hiding that fact. If you act like your life is fated then you don’t have to confront what really happened to you. But the lesson of Vader is easily taken wrong and so the story is not finished.
The Return of the Jedi plays out that Vader changed, but notice that he did not live. I know how unlikely family is to change. But I learn the wrong lesson if I expect to change my family with self-sacrifice. For good and bad I need to see themselves in me so that I can go forward unencumbered by ignorance.
I therefore conclude that the Last Jedi critiques its misunderstanding of the meaning behind the end of the Return of the Jedi rather than the true lesson that should be taken from it.
If Luke were to develop a flaw, in my view, it might be to lean too heavily on self-sacrifice and become one with the Force as soon as possible because he got himself killed (instead of hiding out on the island in the Disney version). And then that could prove mal-adaptive to defending the next generation against the legacy of what he faced.
But with all that said, yes, I believe Disney wildly missed the mark. But then I don’t know too many people who articulate what I have said. There were malicious actors in the making of these movies, but then also a general ignorance regarding the symbols they are in custody over.
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