Channel72 said:
My point is just that the final script contains vestigial traces of changing motivations and relationships from earlier drafts throughout the writing process, revealing a more muddled story, rather than the straightforward story we all have in our heads, where Vader wants Luke for his own secret purpose and is not aligned with the Emperor on this issue from the very beginning of the movie. If the ending twist had existed since the very first drafts, the whole Hoth sequence would probably be written differently
Channel72 said:
but I find the topic interesting because it’s a window into the evolving story behind the scenes.
I took some time to think before responding because there’s been a broader point on my mind that I couldn’t quite put my finger on during our debates over relative minutiae, and I didn’t want to keep arguing about trees when it’s the forest that’s really nagging at me.
I think it’s that I’m wary of us assigning too much authority to Leigh Brackett’s draft as The State of The Star Wars Storyline Circa 1978, which is something I think fans have been doing since even before it got put on the web. There’s a tendency to regard the Brackett draft as “the way it was going to be” and that subsequent drafts sort of retroactively applied changes to its baseline, rather than it being an interpretation of Lucas’s storyline that he rejected because it got it all wrong. Like I’m pretty sure after she died Lucas put her draft in a drawer and never consulted it again, by all accounts when he got on the script himself it was a page one rewrite.
I think I was reflexively pushing back against what I perceived was tacit acceptance of the Brackett draft’s depictions and the notion that subsequent drafts were a retcon, when I feel pretty strongly from the available material that Brackett’s draft reflected a misunderstanding of Lucas’s intentions and that his subsequent drafts were a correction.
This is all actually sort of beside the point you were trying to make - even assuming I’m right, it’s certainly still possible that just having her draft fresh in his mind could subconsciously influence how Lucas set up certain scenes, misunderstanding or not. And while I still don’t personally see any real issue with the story’s integrity in the finished film, it’s probably good that I realize what the bush I was beating around actually was before I let it drag me into any more pedantic arguments, lol!