Kicked Anakin’s ass into a lava pit for Reasons, lies about it to everyone who wasn’t there.
Spent twenty years day-drinking on Tatooine instead of training Luke, blames it on Uncle Owen.
Eventually considered the best way out of a barfight to be fucking laser-sword dismembering a dude whose blaster he could have just yanked away with the Force.
Basically lets Anakin kill him to permanently fuck up his relationship with Luke or, possibly, just to avoid having to train another Skywalker.
As a Force-ghost, pretty much ignores Luke whenever it won’t literally kill the kid.
Anakin Skywalker
Extremely talented but picked up later than period-typical for Jedi training.
First apprentice to novice knight because nobody else wanted to train him.
Training and path subverted by Sith master who probably wasn’t too keen on getting killed by his own student.
Like 90% machine thanks to lava-pit incident.
Barely kicked Obi-Wan’s ass in the rematch.
Consistently failed to pick up on either of his kids in spite of literally walking into one of them at one point.
Murders high-ranking Imperial officers to deal with his feelings.
Luke Skywalker
Being informed the Force exists.
Five hours with a lightsaber and a floating taser?
Repeatedly being told to believe in himself by a voice in his head that self-identifies as a dude he barely knew.
A year of using his dad’s child-murder lightsaber as a fancy can-opener?
Maybe like a week or two with a classically-trained Jedi master who didn’t want to train him and was three months away from dying?
A few conversations with Obi-Wan’s lying-sack-of-shit Force-ghost.
Spends a month or so practicing the shit he’s seen Obi-Wan, Vader, and Yoda do.
I mean, seriously, I don’t think Yoda taught him how to mind-control people, considering Yoda was like “You’re a hot mess and also you’re going to die.” He managed to figure it out.
Literally told he won’t be a full Jedi until he kills his fucking dad? What the hell, you guys?
Somehow still eventually kicks Vader’s ass.
Is absolved of any guilt for his actions thanks to Anakin’s Force-ghost joining Team Patricide?
I mean, I think we might be dealing with the Dark Side and the So Long As We Don’t Kill for Fun Everything’s Cool Side.
Whatever he could piece together from the deliberately-suppressed records and teachings of pre-Empire Jedi culture/pry out of the Force-ghosts.
Ben Organa
Full-time training from a young age with the above-mentioned trainwreck.
Deliberately trained poorly by a twenty-foot hologram of Andy Serkis.
Constantly waffling about how evil he wants to be.
So out of control he routinely pitches destructive Force-tantrums that would put Dark Helmet to shame.
Idolizes dude who never met an underling he didn’t want to Force-choke, still seems to focus on property damage during Force-tantrums?
Maybe everybody just glossed over the Force-chokings? Come to think of it, did any of his relatives actually see Darth Dad mind-strangle anybody? Maybe this was excised from the history books to save on underling replacement?
Basically it seems like a lot of his post-Luke instruction has focused on making him useful to Darth Gollum instead of making him good at Forcing, is what I’m getting at here.
Rey
Seems to have grown up hearing that you could do literally any batshit thing you could think of with the Force if you were a Jedi.
Gets told she’s got a bad case of the Force.
Really, really believes in herself.
Doesn’t see why she can’t do it if this knob can do it.
I bet Luke sensed Rey was coming and made her walk up all of those stairs anyways so he could have his grand entrance scene on the cliff because he has been the drama queen of the galaxy since the day he was born
there’s so much good stuff on the spread about rey’s speeder that i don’t even know where to begin
she made it herself! like! she scavenged or traded for all the parts and then built the thing from the ground up
it’s a hybrid of a speeder and a swoop, which means that it can carry heavy loads but it’s also really fucking fast (because of course it is look who we’re talking about)
to protect it from other scavangers when she’s away from it, it 1) won’t start without her fingerprint and 2) will electrocute anyone who tries to touch it
there are literally tiny tractor beams under the seat to make sure that she stays on it when traveling at high speeds.
i’m just gonna go ahead and quote the book because i can’t improve on it: “rey’s speeder is ridiculously overpowered when lightly loaded… when away from prying eyes, rey lets her craft take flight, performing barrel rolls and other maneuvers that push both her speeder and her piloting skills to the limit”
rey can’t be a descendant of padme because everyone with the padme gene dedicates 50% of their money to fashion………like leia and luke are the only ones who have multiple costume changes in the orig trig and like have you seen how hard it is to put together a kylo ren cosplay? that’s because kylo ren is bringing the #amidalastyle to the sith where his grandfather never could
okay whoa whoa whoa we’ve established that rey grew up destitute and starving on a nigh-deserted junkyard planet with NO money to spend on fashion AND YET she has somehow delicately maintained her exceedingly stylish three-bun hairstyle for years, she has devised yeezy season 2 looks out of abandoned rags, she has created couture sunglasses out of smashed-up stormtrooper helmets? she has no resources and she is still making it fucking #work, truly she is padme’s descendant.
@the Star Wars fandom: I’d like to throw my two cents in on the whole “Leia was never even tempted by the Dark Side” trend that is seemingly going on right now. Firstly, yes, I understand the joke–gosh darn those whiny Skywalker boys, the girls are so tough and strong (and they are, they absolutely are, don’t get me wrong). But…all the same, guys, I just can’t see it that way. This girl wasn’t just tempted by the Dark Side, she flirted with it on like a daily basis for probably years (both before and after she knew what it was). I mean:
Leia Organa burns with anger. She was horribly, incalculably hurt, more than once, and one of the ways she coped with that was by being angry. (In fact, Carrie herself has described Leia as such, and as having played Leia as such–as a very wounded and broken girl who is incredibly, incredibly angry.) And as we know, according to the Jedi:
“Fear leads to anger Anger leads to hate Hate leads to suffering”
But that doesn’t make Leia any the weaker for it. In fact, I would even say that it goes to show just how strong she was. Because yes she was hurt. (She was hurt so, so badly, so many times.) She had every right to be angry, and hurting–and she did. She was angry. She did hurt. And it would have been so, so easy for her to give into the temptation of the Dark Side through that. Because of that. Because there are so very, very many kinds of temptation–and honestly, with Leia’s anger being such an integral part of her and part of her main coping mechanism, I personally can’t see Leia not being tempted by the Dark Side for years–since before she even knew it was truly a Thing, let alone that it had a name. Because oh, how easy it would have been for her anger to consume her–for her rage and her hatred to supplant all else, until she was nothing but a driving force of nature, a wildfire bound in human flesh that burned all in her path.
But you know what? She didn’t fall. Despite everything, Leia Organa did not fall. And that, to me, shows an incredible strength–one that supercedes even a claim that she was never tempted. (Because to me, saying that she was never tempted strips her of the fury of her wrath, the burning of her pain, the blazing of her power. Because to me that says she wasn’t wounded in the very soul by what happened to Alderaan, to her mind beneath Vader’s probe, to her heart again and again–and she was. Oh, she was. Because to me, taking away Leia’s anger and the rawness of her hurt means taking away what made her such a real character, a real woman, a real survivor.)
Ironically enough, it was love that brought her back from that possible path, just as it brought Vader back from the brink. Because I would eat my left shoe if it wasn’t Luke and Han, Chewie, Threepio and Artoo who kept her grounded, kept her here, gave her something other than anger and fear and hatred and revenge to live for.
Anyway, that’s just my two cents on the matter,
Thank you, Seren. I wish I could find the article now, but there was a good write-up on women being allowed to be portrayed as monsters rather than the virtuous heroine or the victim. We all have a dark side, a dangerous streak. To deny that women have the capacity for evil is to deny that they are fully human.
Leia Organa has indeed flirted with the dark side. She is still fighting the good fight when we see her in TFA but I don’t think that her inner battle is over and her victories have not come easily. Leia has straddled the line between dark and light a few times, but ultimately clawed her way back to the light before she could be consumed by the darkness. Let’s giver her credit for struggling against her demons, rather than treating her as an empty, innately good character.
When Leia speaks of Snoke’s influence over Ben, you can see on her face that she has empathy for her son. She was disgusted with Vader, she didn’t want to understand him, but she has walked a long road with Ben and the appalling things he does do not shock her, she gets it.
This is a woman who has done a lot of growing in order to overcome her darker tendencies and it is a battle that she must engage in daily.
Everyone please sit down and be schooled by Seren. Girl knows her Leia meta.
