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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

The Last Jedi was an abomination, filled with misdirection for misdirection’s sake, at the cost of a coherent or entertaining narrative. It’s also filled with awful postmodern tropes that it conjures out of nowhere. “Hey, it turns out there are ancient Jedi texts” But their whole purpose in the film is so that they can be burned and discarded. “Oh, they were never all that important anyhow, just make your own rules.”

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I dunno, compare that to any holy book. It's incredibly important, but also it never really mattered anyhow. Of course it matters because of its impact on society, but the lessons are universal with or without the sacred text.

But what if you’re 15 books into your fictional universe, and during one chapter, it turns out a major faction has extremely important ancient texts. And then as soon as those texts are discovered, they’re flippantly burned because actually they’re not important at all! The most important thing is to just be yourself.

It’s bad writing. If they wanted to discard something sacred, they could have taken something which was actually in the series and discarded _that_. They sort of did this by ruining Luke’s character, only to reverse it at the end and have him save the day anyway. Really, Luke’s characterization really follows the same pattern. He was strongly characterized in all the other Star Wars films. Then Last Jedi throws this out the window for no reason whatsoever. Then by the time you’ve accepted that he’s a loser now, he steps up and saves the day. All more or less within the blink of an eye.

They’re just setting up a subverting expectations for the sake of doing so. It’s terrible writing, and terrible storytelling.

> They sort of did this by ruining Luke’s character, only to reverse it at the end and have him save the day anyway. Really, Luke’s characterization really follows the same pattern. He was strongly characterized in all the other Star Wars films. This was thrown out the window for no reason whatsoever.

This complaint about TLJ resonates the least with me, as a (super, at one time) fan from well before the prequels. The seeds of this later Luke and of the situation of the Jedi are there in the OT, and I’m not sure what else you do with hermit-Luke in the setting established for the new trilogy. Sticking with “he’s still a gung-ho hero” doesn’t break “routine” (Johnstone’s terminology) and wouldn’t be good storytelling, and the way in which the routine will be broken has already been hemmed in by choices in VII (he’s withdrawn from taking an active role in galactic politics). At least with this direction, there’s somewhere to go with the character, and conflict for his scenes that’s not a straight repeat of him and Yoda in Empire.

The books weren't actually destroyed, there is a shot of Rey with them on Millenium Falcon at the end of the movie when they pick up all the survivors. I was actually really excited about this foreshadowing a Jedi reformation - a rediscovery of true orthodoxy a la Luther and a rejection of the corrupt ediface of the Jedi Order, as seen by its fruits. This was further paralleled by the stable boy at the end using the force to summon his broom - a parallel to turning over of interpretational authority of scripture from the ecclesiastics to the laity.

Of course, all this was thrown away in the next installment, so it turns out I'm the fool!

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