Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett. If you don't wish to be spoiled, feel free to not read further. This post will still be here once you've got caught up, if you so wish to return (and I, of course, hope you do).
If someone were asked who their favourite Star Wars character was, it might just give them pause. What are we including in the question? The original trilogy? The prequels? Sequels? The expanded universe, canon or non-canon? I mean, there's a lot of material to cover. How about overall, out of the entire franchise?
Overall, I used to be able to confidently pop off with 'Luke Skywalker', but these days... I'm not so sure.
It might be a bit dull of me, my favourite character being the primary main character of the original trilogy, but it is what it is. Luke had always been my favourite. He was one of my two earliest little kid 'crushes' (the other being Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation), and he was actually the first person I ever tried to draw an actual portrait of (it was awful.... I can still see it clearly in my head, haunting me with its too wide eyes and over accentuated nostrils). When I played Star Wars pretend with my super awful Mary Sue of a fancharacter that I made up when I was like, 12 or sommat, she always ran around with Luke to have fun adventures (don't judge me).
When we meet Luke in A New Hope, he's a nineteen year old kid living on his aunt and uncle's moisture farm on Tatooine, bored and naïvely dreaming of a more exciting life out in the stars. He gets his wish in the worst possible way: finding out he's magic, but then finding out his aunt and uncle were burnt to a crisp while he was off finding out that he's magic. He ends up running off with Obi-Wan to save Leia and destroy the most ridiculously OSHA violating space station a person could conceive (though the Empire, and subsequently the First Order, managed to make even worse violators).
In Empire Strikes Back, which is the best of all the films (and I am not saying that out of bias just because it's my favourite one), we get Luke travelling to Dagobah to train with Jedi Master Yoda. It might not seem like it, but he was apparently there for a couple of months, at the very least, but in the end he opted to run off and save Leia (and Han and everyone else) yet again. In Cloud City he learns a hard truth: he's the son of none other than Darth Vader.
Oops... Spoiler alert?
Anywho, in both of these films, Luke is naïve and hot-headed, as many young people his age are. By the time we get to Return of the Jedi, however, Luke is now twenty-three years old and has become a wiser person. Well, he at least pretends (but he's still hot-headed). He has also claimed the title of Jedi Knight, and in the end he ends up saving the galaxy (helping to, anyway) and bringing his father back from the Dark Side to the Light. Not a bad resume for someone who four years prior pointed a fucking lightsaber at his own face.
You know, I've heard that that scene makes Mark Hamill cringe, but can we not forget that Obi-Wan-fucking-Kenobi, Jedi Master, sat there and just calmly watched him do something that could have completely ended the story right then and there if Luke had accidentally turned the bloody thing on? Maybe he was too busy using the Force to make sure that switch didn't get flipped to actually bother to simply tell him not to do that? Or all the years of being on Tatooine scorched away all of his available fucks to give? Saa...
Timeline continuity-wise, the next time we see Luke Skywalker is at the end of The Mandalorian's second season. (I'm not gonna lie, when his X-wing popped out of hyperspace, my brain did not make that connection at first. Yes, I feel ashamed of myself.) He proceeds to be a fucking badass and take out that entire platoon of dark troopers (minus the one Din Djarin handled), all while my little geeky heart was sqee-ing at almost inaudible levels of excitement. Having single-handedly saved the day (pun intended), he takes little Grogu off to train him in the ways of the Jedi.
In The Book of Boba Fett we get to see what this entails, and bloody hell, just... why? Luke has pretty much sequestered Grogu away on whatever planet or moon it is he's decided to build his Jedi school on. He proceeds to 'train' the little guy by continually attacking him with the little floaty ball droid that shoots lasers, not letting him have any sort of actual fun, and using the Force to awaken very painful and terrifying memories of Grogu's last moments at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. Keep in mind, Grogu is 'round about a toddler, yeah? Who had just been separated from his adoptive father after years of being held in the dark and hidden away.
Luke feels like Grogu's heart isn't in it, and seriously, do you blame him? Okay, I get it. Other than Leia, Grogu is Luke's first student, and it isn't like there's any reason to think that this guy is going to automatically be good with kids, but, as a rule of thumb, maybe torturing them isn't the best way to go about things.
Din, having had the Armorer turn part of the beskar from his spear into the most adorable little chainmail shirt for his Foundling, stops by for a visit. Ahsoka also happens to be there for a visit, and she makes a point to not let Din meet with his son, feeling that allowing such a reunion would just make it all the harder for Grogu (who, again, is, what... maybe three in human years?) to focus on his training. So a very dejected Din Djarin leaves the gift with Ahsoka (as it's Grogu's right to have it) and leaves.
Grogu, being able to sense that his papa was nearby, watches as Din's (ridiculously impractical) ship flies away...
And then Luke proceeds to do almost the dumbest shit newer Star Wars makes his character do: He gives little Grogu a choice. I'm going to tell you, fam, that it isn't the choice that bothers me, it's how he goes about it. This knob legit sets out the beskar armor that Din brought for Grogu and fucking Yoda's lightsaber (retrieved from gods know where), side by side, and makes this baby choose. Take the the lightsaber and study the path of the Jedi and never see your dad again, or take the gift and give up the path of the Jedi... also forever, apparently.
For a dude who has embraced the whole non-attachment thing (that the Jedi are so insistent at getting abso-fucking-lutely wrong in the first place, but whatevs), he sits there and tries to bribe this child into giving up the only family he currently has, has had in almost thirty years, for a shiny laser sword. (And, again, can I point out that Grogu is a fucking toddler? That is so utterly irresponsible it's not funny.)
Yeah, it's no wonder Grogu took the beskar and bounced.
But, okay. Okay. We can sort of forgive Luke for this. As I mentioned previously, Grogu was his first real student (other than his already-an-adult sister who doesn't actually count, because she never intended to be an actual Jedi). And dude has only been a Jedi himself for, what... six-ish, maybe seven years at this point, most of which was him being self-taught through texts he found? There's gonna be a learning curve.
In The Force Awakens, which takes place sommat like twenty years later, we learn that Luke Skywalker has run away, leaving his sister, his friends, his droids, the whole bloody galaxy behind. The Resistance needs him, they think, so they're looking for him pretty hard, but he's done a bang up job at disappearing into oblivion. Well, he thought he had, anyway. He was not super excited when Rey showed up on his doorstep:
I'm not even going to be mad at him for running away, though, as it seems to be a long standing tradition for the Jedi to nope out and disappear when things don't go their way.
But! Now we get to the actual dumbest shit new Star Wars makes his character do.
It comes to light in The Last Jedi (which is the worst of the films, no lie, and I had to force myself to re-watch it to make sure I had the info correct for this post...) that the thing that didn't go Luke's way, that caused him to bail on everything and everyone he ever loved, is because he fucked up and tried to kill his nephew, thus being the final nail in the coffin of Ben Solo's transformation into Kylo Ren.
I'm sorry, what?
Yeah, so... when Luke first tells Rey about this incident, his part in it is very passive. We see him in a flashback standing over young Ben Solo, who is asleep, but then apparently shit kinda just happened and in among it Luke got knocked out. When he woke up, his school was all but destroyed and most of his other students were dead and the rest had run off with Ben. On the flip side, when Kylo Ren tells (shows?) Rey this story, Luke's part was much less passive, as he actually attacked young Ben with his lightsaber. So Ben was just defending himself, and then sort of went nuts and retaliated and killed most of his fellow students, etc, etc, etc. (Whether this is actually how Ben remembers it, or he was embellishing in order to manipulate Rey, who knows...?)
The second version of this story quite reasonably pisses Rey the fuck off, seeing as it would mean that Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, hero of the Rebellion, fucking legend, gave rise to one of the galaxy's most dangerous threats because he was a knob. So she does what any hot-headed person her age does and rather angrily, rather physically confronts Luke about it. As one does.
Then the truth (or what is probably much closer to the truth, anyway) actually comes out. Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, sensed the darkness encroaching on his nephew's heart, saw the influence Snoke was having on him... and decided that it was too much to handle, that Ben Solo was lost to the Dark Side. And in a moment of, I dunno, complete fucking dumb-assery, he does, in fact, ignite his lightsaber over his sleeping nephew. His boy of a nephew, who might have been in his mid-teens at most? And though he snapped out of his madness and decided maybe murdering a child wasn't the best course of action here, it was too late. Ben woke up, saw his master, his uncle, standing over him with lightsaber drawn, and in his terror and his anger, he retaliated.
To put this bullshit in context, this is the same guy who allowed himself to be captured by the Empire, taken aboard the second Death Star, and faced down fucking Emperor Palpatine himself, all because he felt there was still a spark of good in his father. His father, whom he had witnessed striking down Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whom he knew had tortured his friends just to draw him out. And, while Luke prolly didn't know about it (especially considering that it prolly wasn't actually part of Vader's backstory when Return of the Jedi was filmed), we're also talking about the same guy who marched into the Jedi Temple and fucking killed everyone he ran across, including an entire room of Younglings. Not to mention that he went fucking ballistic on a tribe of Tuskens because they killed his mother, which also included murdering the children.
We, as the audience, know that Kylo Ren is conflicted, much more conflicted than Darth Vader was ever shown to be... That his move to the Dark Side isn't complete. But there's also the fact that Snoke knew it. Ben struggled with it. Leia held out hope for it. Even Rey picked up on it. However, Luke Skywalker, the same Luke Skywalker that was willing to give up everything while grasping at straws to bring Anakin Skywalker back to the Light after over twenty years of servitude to Palpatine and the Dark Side, gave him up as being taken by the darkness. His own student. His own family. A child.
And the fucker never actually changed his mind about it, either. He fucking faced down Kylo Ren on Crait (though working from home, mind), still thinking that he was lost to the Dark Side.
And then he died.
It makes it very difficult to hold him as a favourite overall when he just keeps being a fucking clotpole the whole of his character arc, you know? It's enough to almost (almost, mind you) make me agree with the hoards of fanbois screeching that the EU is canon, was always canon, and should forever remain canon (even though it isn't, never was, and never will be). Luke still has his stupid moments, but at least he actually grows and becomes a wiser person in the novels. Instead, though, we got scaredy-cat Luke Skywalker who decided, even if it was for only a fleeting moment, that child murder is okay. Who lost the hope and the belief in the ability to turn back to the Light, no matter how Dark you've gone. Who fucking gave up until the very last moments of his life, and even then his hope was in Rey and not in the possibility of redemption for his own family.
Joke's on him, though. I have issues with Ben Solo's redemption in The Rise of Skywalker, but he did, in fact, have one. He did turn back to the Light, as everyone except fucking Master Jedi Luke Skywalker thought he would. So suck on that, Luke's Force ghost.
And, hey... At least I still have Poe.
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