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Message: <blockquote data-quote="epithet" data-source="post: 7303464" data-attributes="member: 6796566">The more time I have to reflect on the movie, the more it bothers me. Luke Skywalker was an iconic hero, a character that had faced temptation and rejected the dark side to remain strong with the light. Rian Johnson retconned all of that by making Luke a complete failure as a jedi and a teacher, who had an episode of utter weakness that led to the destruction of the jedi he was responsible for training. He then gave up, went into hiding, and severed his connection to  the force. Rian Johnson rewrote Luke Skywalker into the worst Jedi he possibly could. He didn't introduce new threats or challenges, he just used his episode to tear down the heroes of the previous generation and crap all over their legacy.He did the same thing to Leia. JJ had already exiled her from the Senate and casually destroyed the Republic she had fought so hard to restore, but Rian had to go one further and show us how Leia was an ineffective commander, whose subordinates disregarded her orders and followed their own plans. We saw how Leia's resistance was utterly decimated by her failure to evacuate the base in a timely manner as well as the culture of insubordination she fostered. Then, as a last insult, we saw that the allies Leia counted on had abandoned her and left her and her resistance to be finally snuffed out by the New Order.Luke is a bad Jedi that caused the destruction of the new Jedi Order. Leia is a bad leader who failed to motivate the Republic to oppose the New Order and failed to lead the resistance to anything but annihilation. We'd already established Han Solo as a failed husband and father, and even a failed smuggler who had lost his ship years before and had every gang of organized criminals he'd worked with hunting him down to kill him. The only reason he got his ship back was that the hero of the new generation brought it back to him.It's not like this is part of some overall trend of making all the characters in Star Wars "nuanced." Rey, Poe, Finn, and Kylo are all super iconic archetypes. No, the objective here seems to be just to wreck the image of the heroes that George Lucas provided to my generation; to single out their iconic strength and strip it from their character. These characters who grew into heroes by developing character strengths and prevailing over adversity slipped, after the credits roll on Return of the Jedi, into a 30 year pattern of "suck, fail, die."I'll admit that when Disney bought Lucasfilm and wiped the slate clean of all the Expanded Universe fiction, I was enthused. I thought the entire Vong story line was horrible, and even though I would have liked to keep or canonize the Knights of the Old Republic lore I agreed that it was best to just start over, picking elements of the "Legends" material to use as the new story lines called for it. Now, however, I'm looking at the Legends as being a better overall treatment of the GFFA, simply because those stories didn't undermine the iconic heroes of the original trilogy.To be honest, one of the things that is making this more difficult for me to handle gracefully is the fact that a fair number of commenters seem to actually like the fact that the heroism of Han, Luke, and Leia has been undermined and invalidated. Kylo Ren's call to burn down the past seems to resonate with many in a way I cannot relate to. Some are crowing in exultation over the dubious, anticlimactic, and (in my opinion) misleading assertion that Rey is the offspring of morally bankrupt junk scavengers instead of (as all the hints from TFA suggested) related to Luke Skywalker. It's not enough, apparently, to move on after Ep 9 to stories beyond the Skywalker saga... for some it seems to be immensely satisfying to retroactively strip away the importance and destiny of the Skywalkers and minimize their role in shaping galactic events.Maybe these are just the times in which we live, I don't know. Maybe JJ Abrams, who is only a few years older than I am, has an amazing plan that will restore my enthusiasm for the franchise. I am afraid, however, that I've lost something that I've managed to hold on to since childhood, and it's something I'll never be able to find again. Maybe this is what it means to get older.I don't like it.</blockquote>

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