@The:
Maybe instead of jumping right to murder he could've I don't know…talked to the kid?
He'd been training him. For years. What else could he say that he hadn't been saying and teaching? "Hey, stop slipping into the dark side? Being bad is bad."
We're not talking about him murdering an innocent 8 year old, or slaughtering a temple full of prodigies, he was going to stop a fully trained Jedi on the cusp of becoming the next Vader.
Lets say he DID talk to him, and Kylo still went full dark side a few weeks or months later, and killed a bunch of people. THEN is it okay to chase him down and fight him to the death on a lava planet? After harm has been done? At what point morally and dramatically does it become okay for the hero to takes steps to stop the protégé turned villain? After a dozen deaths? After the murder of his best friend? After the death of entire planets?
And why wasn't Anakin around to talk to Ben as well? He could've shut that shit down faster than Luke. By talking to him.
Force ghosts have limits? Why don't they always solve all problems? Because you can only see them if you're receptive to them? You normally only talk to them if you saw them die? It's a light side thing and Kylo was too dark for it? Because Snoke/Palpatine was blocking it? The rules on them are fuzzy.
Are you seriously comparing blowing up a planet destroying genocide machine in order to save the galaxy with blowing up said planets? They are one hundred percent not the same
YOU asked if murder was a skywalker trait. And it absolutely clearly is. (Possibly on a genetic level after… whatever Palpatine did to make Anakin.)
No, they're not the same. Luke was in the right and saving lives. But he STILL killed countless people. "Badguys" sure, but still a lot of lives. (Of course Death Star 2 was full of construction workers)
So "kill a person to save others" is 1000% in his moral code. He wasn't a perfect pacifist that refused to take lives or was unwilling to maim people. He went and fought the emporer and he cared about saving Vader, but he didn't care for a single second about the thousands of other lives that were on the station.
Kill a badguy to save billions of lives was absolutely an acceptable line to THINK ABOUT.
and now I'm sure you're just trolling me. Holy shit, Robby.
I don't troll by making multi-paragraph arguments that pretend I feel a certain way. Because I am disagreeing with you and seeing different aspects does NOT mean I'm actively trying to harass and insult you.
When I think something is stupid or outright wrong, I come out and say that.
I will sometimes use sarcasm, and that may come off hard in text form. ANd sometimes, depending on the specific question being asked or the angle being approached on a topic, I may seem to have two different opinions on a topic, but that's because there is NUANCE in things, and different specifics of a question lead to a different response, and most things, especially in fiction, don't have a just one right answer.
If you ask me "Do you LIKE the route Luke went down" my response is no, that's not the character as I knew him or imagined him. And we're not supposed to like it.
If you ask me "Can you see Luke doing that" the answer is yes, as presented that's perfectly valid, and consistent with his character. Unexpected, but I can see it.
If you ask me "Is it okay if Luke intentionally murders dozens of innocent children" the answer is of course not and there's no probably no way to present that scenario to make sense.
If you ask me "Is it okay if Luke kills people?" the answer is yes, sometimes stopping evil means taking lives, and he's already killed a ton.
So depending on the conversation you can get a different response.
I agree with you, the Luke in TLJ is not the Luke we knew and not how I think of the character, and probably not how I will in the future. I disagree that its a complete and impossible betrayal of that character.
I do not at length take contrarian stances just to piss people off or waste their time and mine.
Who the hell has time to just troll people?
The lesson was that negative emotions are a slippery slope. To be mindful of them, and not let them consume you in a moment of weakness. To be on guard against yourself.
Sure. And I'm betting most days Luke is good about that.
You still have BAD DAYS. Especially when you have a force vision showing you that YOUR student is going to go kill billions of people soon.
The fact that I'm having to explain basic jedi philosophy to you shows me that you just didn't grasp the character on a fundamental level. I'm done with this.
There's a difference between following a philosophy and ideals, trying to be your best self, and being a soulless robot that is always perfect 100% of the time.
Luke had ONE really bad day. In 40 years. He slipped for a few minutes as he THOUGHT ABOUT IT. He didn't actually do it, he didn't bring h is saber down and then get parried, he THOUGHT about it. Then he caught himself, turned the saber off, and didn't actually do anything. He probably would have tried talking the next morning
Except Kylo saw it and it went downhill from there. He then regretted it the rest of his life, isolated, and punished himself for it.
He's human, not superman. He's not the one true perfect flawless hero of the franchise.
It's not the direction I would have written or taken the character either, it's not something I'd think to do with Luke, not how I picture him either. It's not what anyone would have expected of him and not what most writers would have done.
If this movie took place five years after the original trilogy I wouldn't buy it either. But now that I've seen it? Yeah, I can see how it gets there. That's within the character as we've known him.
It's not the obvious path that a thousand fanfic writers took but it is a reasonable path. It's interesting. That's what happens to people after a war that never ends. Not the ideal version we've been left with for decades of spinoff media where he become perfect, but it does reflect the guy that was actually on camera.
You're judging Luke by his very worst day, his worst two minutes even, and not his best day at the end. Which is what the movie was leading to. The movie betrayed everything that Luke was about? Then why did he show up for the ending and give up his life the way he did? And nonviolently? In the overall most powerful jedi display we've ever seen? Where he DID stand up to an entire army and not a single person was harmed and his legend spread even further than ever and he gave up his life for the cause?
We're SUPPOSED to be disappointed and disillusioned in Luke… because Rey is our POV. And she is upset that the legend isn't the perfect legend that he was supposed to be. That's not subtext, that's the actual text. He has the arc of being burnt out and jaded... and then refinds his path and goes out the legend the universe, and audience thinks he is.
Yes, Luke wasn't perfect. And that's okay. He never was. Flaws and moments of weakness and mistakes are what make characters interesting.
