The trouble with ‘Luke Skywalker has vanished’ is that it gets crushed right into that first line, and it’s bugged me ever since I first saw the movie. The original TFA crawl has this issue in several places, actually, and is one reason why I’m so set on making sure every word has sufficient space. I’m not too concerned with ‘the last Jedi’ being the sequel’s title since that’s the sequel’s problem, and leading with a title instead of a name immediately puts the conflict in big, general terms before getting down to the specifics later on.

Maybe waning stars is better than darkening, though I feel like the general term ‘darkening’ implies a more general and reversible change in the galaxy instead of ‘waning’ which implies a more permanent change, at least to me.

I dunno, the crawl as it is feels pretty good to me.