HEY, GUESS WHO’S HAVING LUKE SKYWALKER FEELINGS? ME, THAT’S WHO.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much Luke really did struggle with everything, because we get so used to how there’s such goodness in his heart and how much he cares, how iconic it was that he threw away his lightsaber rather than kill his father.
It’s easy to forget that everything wasn’t easy for Luke himself. He struggled with his restlessness and recklessness, he was angry and letting his frustrations eat into him on Dagobah, he rushed off to Cloud City before he was fully ready and basically was ready to almost commit suicide because he couldn’t handle the truth he learned. He’d come so far, he was learning to control his fear, so much so that even Vader remarks on it (but can clearly still feel it), but when it’s dealt a real blow, he can’t handle it.
Even in Return of the Jedi, it wasn’t an automatic thing for him to throw away his weapon–first he was FURIOUS, his anger and his hate were absolutely roiling inside him and he was going to town on Vader:
The Emperor’s taunting him, using his friends against him, they wouldn’t have any place or meaning in the story if they weren’t something Luke had to overcome. The most iconic moment in Star Wars, when Luke throws away his lightsaber, after Sidious taunts him and tells him to take his father’s place, and says, “Never. I’ll never turn to the dark side. You’ve failed, your highness. I am a Jedi. Like my father before me.”
All of that doesn’t have the same importance if Luke didn’t struggle to get there.
This is why I came around on The Last Jedi, because this is something Luke has always struggled with, that he feels responsible for others, he feels their deaths on his hands, even when he’s not actually responsible for them. He retreats when he feels like all he’s going to do is get more people killed, he struggles with getting lost in those feelings.
And that’s why Return of the Jedi’s iconic moment is so iconic. Because he had to work to get there, because it was the culmination of so much struggling with his feelings, to triumph over them.
And this is why I really love this moment in the comic, because it continues that in a way that fits perfectly with Luke’s character. Vader kills all those slaves he was trying to help rescue, because Luke feels he’s not good enough yet. Leia is so gung-ho in this moment, we’ve seen her just come off a scene where Ackbar and Mon are telling her that they cannot keep going full steam, they don’t have the resources or the reserves, even Leia’s team is already fraying at the edges.
She’s pushing herself and her team so hard, of course she is, she just lost Alderaan and she’s so angry, and they struck a blow, she can finally start to destroy the thing that took her entire world!
There’s so much going on with her, she’s so driven and then she goes to talk to Luke, hoping to find someone as driven and on fire as she is, but he can’t do this, he’s struggling and he can’t do it. He can’t even avoid the droid remote’s stinging shots! He’s certainly no Jedi, he just got his ass handed to him by Vader, there’s no way he can stand up to him again.
All of this on top of how everyone he knows and was counting on was dead because of Vader and the Empire. Luke cannot handle another death, when his world was already ripped away from him twice.
Luke and Leia both lost their entire worlds and are struggling with trying to find a purpose in going on. It’s so fascinating that it’s these two who seek each other out and are being contrasted against each other. Yes, they’re twins, but it’s more than that. It’s about how they both lost everything and everyone they knew and how they react to that. How they try to light the fire inside them. How they’re different–how Luke has nearly blown out, while Leia’s fire rages all the hotter.
AND ALL OF THAT MAKES FOR A REALLY GOOD SCENE IN THIS COMIC.
There’s also an interesting character note here in the less flattering way Luke resembles his father – notice how self-involved this blame game is. He’s worried about his friends, yes, but he frames it around his own failures, his own feelings. There’s a careful line between responsibility and narcissism that you have to tread there, and a large part of doing so is admitting your lack of control over the universe.
THAT’S A GREAT OBSERVATION. It’s especially great because of the comparison and the contrast. It’s a self-involved, self-blaming sort of reaction, as you said, that it’s about Luke’s feelings on what happened. The comic is really inviting us to consider a lot of the ways that Luke is struggling and the ways he is like his father.
I mean, the whole comic at this point is structured around Luke and Vader’s storylines that are taking place at the same time–Star Wars and Darth Vader are meant to be read together, they overlap and even the next few issues are specifically about both of them going back to Tatooine to dive into their past. Of course we’re supposed to consider the parallels!
But we’re also supposed to consider the contrasts and where Luke is struggling with–and will continue to struggle with, until all the way through ROTJ–the same things Anakin did, we’re already seeing that Luke does have the inner strength to really do some self-examination.
Yes, he puts the whole situation down to a, “It’s all about me.” context, but he also says this:
“Until I’m something more than I am now…” implies that this isn’t meant to be a permanent state of affairs.
Luke’s last scene of the issue follows this up, too:
Star Wars is all about echoing and rhyming, this comic is SUPER AWARE of the references it’s making to other Star Wars moments and you can’t tell me that it’s not also aware of the narrative parallel and contrast it’s making–that Luke and Vader’s stories have parallels is one of the most classic things about the entire franchise.
(Never mind that loads of other people’s stories can be also compared/contrasted against Anakin’s story, as makes sense given that he’s the central character of the Saga, that the Star Wars Saga is the story of Anakin Skywalker, of course characters like Luke and Rey and Ben and Ezra and even more minor characters like Qi’ra are going to parallel and contrast his story!)
Luke struggles with being self-involved about his pain and responsibility, but already we see that he’s doing what Anakin couldn’t–taking a very long, hard look at himself and saying, “Here’s what I need to do to figure out who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing.”
He’s going to struggle with this all his life, there’s no finish line on this sort of self-examination or this sort of self-involved reaction to failure. Ultimately, this is why TLJ works for me, because it’s Luke falling into a pit that he’s struggled with before and having to pull himself out of it like he did before.
He’s going to fail pretty hard after the tremendous blow that was Ben’s turning and Luke feeling that the failure was his own fault, to the point that he blamed the Jedi religion for his own personal failing (as Rian Johnson has explicitly said that’s what was going on), there’s a thread of narcissism in that movie that, frankly, isn’t coming out of nowhere.
Luke is an incredible person, but the really phenomenal thing about him for me isn’t that he’s perfect from the start, but that he has the strength of character to pull himself back out of that pit. That’s incredible, to fall into depression and self-blame and to be able to dust yourself off and go, no, I was wrong, I’m going to get back up and keep going, to find the core of strength that was in him all along. That he nearly falls into rage and fury on the second Death Star, nearly does kill Vader in his anger over his friends being threatened, but he stops and really looks at himself and finds his core of strength. That he has to actually look at himself during his Jedi training and his fears and insecurities, the ones that are seething under the surface that make him snap at Yoda, that make him see terrible things in the Force cave that he brought with him.
That Luke can look at himself when he falls into the trap of, “This is all my fault, I have to tear down everything I was trying to do before.” and pull himself back up out of that and get back in the game. That’s what makes me love Luke fucking Skywalker forever and ever.
Raf's rants 