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Post #1296370

Author
DrDre
Parent topic
Episode VIII : The Last Jedi - Discussion * SPOILER THREAD *
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1296370/action/topic#1296370
Date created
11-Sep-2019, 4:44 PM

DominicCobb said:

Actually the Luke of TLJ is the one who has finally internalized the lessons of TESB. Rey says herself that Luke is purposefully ignoring his success in ROTJ (which repudiated Yoda and Obi-wan), but he has a reason for doing so - saving Anakin did not destroy the Death Star in the short term, nor the Empire in the long term. On the contrary, Luke sees his victory there and elsewhere as having a direct line to his hubris in training Ben.

And anyway, Luke in ROTJ is very pointedly not able to avoid the emotions affiliated with the dark side. He brings his weapon with him when he goes to see Vader. He gives in to his fear, anger, and hatred. It is only when he is on the verge of killing his father does his rationality come in, and he realizes what he has done - it is an exact mirror of the flashback in TLJ. Of course the argument then is that “he should have known better.” Well fine if you feel that way. But in my mind, the dark side is a constant temptation, and the factors leading to that moment in Ben’s hut were such that Luke was, in his arrogance, unaware of what he was getting into (it was a far more subversive challenge than the explicit manipulation of the Emperor on the Death Star). This arrogance is of course a mirror to the arrogance of the Jedi in the PT not realizing the fear and the anger they were giving into, which caused their downfall. Luke, seeing the cycle of things he’s found himself perpetuating, decides to end the Jedi for good. I don’t see any regression at all.

To me this presents a very narrow point of view, and just like much of Luke’s character development seems to be ignored, reducing him down to his mistakes at some moment in the past, so too the Jedi are reduced to their mistakes at the darkest time in their history. Like Luke there is much more to the Jedi than their mistakes at a specific moment in time. The Jedi guarded the peace in the galaxy for over a thousand generations. That to me is clear proof, that the Jedi code works, and that Luke in TLJ was turned into a fool, for not being able to look beyond the flaws of a couple of individual Jedi, and by no means seem to be representative of the Jedi over their millenia long history.