I, too, won’t forget my first viewing of the sequence and how riveting it was for a lifelong Luke aficionado, like Rey was. I was so overcome when he and Leia shared their scene, partly because of the bitterness of the reality that it would be the last time that would truly be possible due to real life. When Luke was revealed not to have been cut in half, I thought to myself, “He’s already dead! He’s been dead the whole time, maybe for years!”
(Then again, during TFA I so thought the lightsaber was going to fly into Luke’s hand.)
After the duel, the movie kept jerking me around. ‘Nope, he’s not dying,’ then ‘he collapsed and might be dead,’ to ‘nope, he’s getting up,’ to ‘uhh’ and then to ‘oh no, he is dying, but why is he dying though?’