Something else I hadn’t mentioned yet was the issue of Luke’s ideology in TLJ. One of the things TLJ got praised for was tying itself back to the prequels by having Luke call out the failings of the prequel-era Jedi Order.
The thing is, there are plenty of legitimate issues to be raised about the prequel Jedi: the fact that they separated Force-sensitive babies from their parents and never let them know their own families; the fact they encouraged an unhealthy level of emotional repression and detachment from the outside world; and the fact that they remained servants of the Republic even as it grew more corrupt and self-serving, going so far as to lead a war against a faction trying to secede.
These are all legit grievances that could’ve been brought up. The problem is, TLJ doesn’t mention any of those. Luke says some stuff about how the Jedi allowed Sidious to destroy them, which means they apparently deserved to be destroyed, for some reason? He says the legacy of the Jedi is failure, despite the fact that the Jedi had been able to keep the Republic together and thriving (for the most part) for thousands of years. And he says that the Force doesn’t belong to the Jedi, which isn’t some groundbreaking statement. Everyone already knew that. The Jedi never claimed that the Force belonged to them.
I get that the point is that Luke is supposed to be wrong, so we can see him have a change of heart at the end. The problem is that Luke’s whole anti-Jedi stance in the first part of the movie is such a flimsy, poorly constructed strawman that there’s no way Luke would have believed it for 6 years. He would have seen through it before then, because of how little sense it makes.
There’s also the fact that Luke, given his unconventional path to knighthood, would definitely not have been the traditionalist, prequel-like Jedi the new canon portrays him as. He would have reformed the Order to correct its flaws, rather than just throwing the whole thing out without trying to change anything. But, I’ll save that for another post.
All fair points I’d say. If you don’t mind though, I’d like to provide my counterarguments and to begin? I’d argue that part of being cynical at times is that you rationalize it through these strawman arguments. Bear in mind, aside from Porgs, the caretakers and I’m assuming the ghosts of his masters, Luke never had anyone to truly test those points against. Moreover we also don’t know when he exactly came to this decision and for all we know this could’ve been something he decided after a long period of self-reflection on the island and after he learned all he could about the Jedi of old. Plus there is the fact that this is a two hour movie that doesn’t have the luxury of being able to spend all the time in the world on one argument so narrowing it down to him bringing up the Jedi’s legacy being failure and his example being that the Jedi allowed Darth Sidious to rise to power and the creation of Darth Vader makes sense for most filmgoers who have even a cursory awareness of the prequels and it sells to us how cynical he is. He’s not focusing on the finer details because that’s not what his state would allow, he’s so jaded he can’t help but look at things through that mindset and we see that he himself due to having really no one to challenge this point truthfully might not even believe it fully like when Rey mentions that he himself redeemed his father and he has that moment of pause before cynically talking about how he became a legend.
Looking back at the OT, there’s nothing there that implies he would’ve just reformed everything because of how he became a Jedi. Bear in mind, he wasn’t training in the ways of the Jedi to be the guy to bring back the entire Jedi Order in the movies, he was doing so to help the Rebellion to stop Vader and the Empire and then after his encounter in ESB, he kept training for a year for that inevitable second duel and decided in that time he would try to bring Vader back to the light. Restoring the Order became a goal he had later basically after he became a legend. Bear in mind because the EU post-OT was set up around the idea that we’d see the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Leia Organa continue well after the movies? It meant by default Luke would face more and more hardships and learn so much more about the Order to actually make it better. The post-OT new canon isn’t centered around that so they took a different path and portrayed Luke as a well-meaning guy who certainly has changed since the OT but he still makes mistakes and one of his mistakes here is that he bought into his own hype and when he made one critical error that due to timing he couldn’t reconcile and later learned about how the Jedi had consistently screwed up? The man’s whole belief system crumbles and thus he exiled himself, believing the galaxy is better off with no Jedi, no legends, nothing like that. For his father it led to him becoming Darth Vader and for Palpatine to take control of the galaxy and for him, it caused his instincts to take over reason and it resulted in his nephew, the son of his best friend and sister, completing his turn to the Dark Side and thus it set that potential future he saw into motion and unlike the last time where a look into the future led to him making a mistake? It was a much more critical error and he was left looking over much more death and destruction on his own.