Servii said:
I wondered at the time why this moment bugged me, and it’s because Holdo was giving off Dolores Umbridge vibes.
It’s funny that you say that, when I saw The Last Jedi for the first time in 2017, my friend leaned over during this scene and said “This is Umbridge”. I wonder if that made Holdo easier to swallow for me.
I don’t think you have to invoke Hanlon’s razor for the ST. For example, Luke is now a failure whose accomplishments are undone and who unleashes evil onto the galaxy, whose only redemption is that the fake image people have of him might eventually lead to other people cleaning up his mess. I don’t think it’s malicious, because I and a lot of other people thought it was a compelling story and gave Luke some of his best character moments in the saga, but at the same time, he didn’t accidentally stumble into subverting Luke’s entire purpose in the story, and couldn’t have naively thought it would be received well by everybody.
IMO, it’s a symptom of the ST being glorified fanfiction. Rian Johnson is a fan who wrote what he thought was a good story with little input from the original creator of the series, and TLJ would probably fit better if it was a spinoff or AU than as the canonical ending of Luke Skywalker’s story.