The galaxy didn’t shatter in outrage.
It cracked in disappointment — a quiet, precise fracture, the kind you only hear if you’ve carried something for a long time.
I grew up wanting to be cool like Han.
But I wanted to be like Luke.
Han was swagger.
Luke was aspiration.
Han was the guy you quoted.
Luke was the man you should try to become.
Luke was the myth and the moral grammar.
Luke was the promise that goodness wasn’t naïve — it was a discipline, a choice you made again and again, even when it hurt.
He was the axis the story’s path orbited.
Even in The Force Awakens, the entire narrative moved with one assumption: find Luke, and he’ll make things right.
And then The Last Jedi arrived.
People kept insisting it “challenged the myth.”
But it didn’t.
It inverted the myth’s moral grammar.
The man who threw away his weapon in front of the Emperor —
the man who believed in the sliver of light inside a monster —
the man who refused to kill his own father —
— was suddenly a man who ignited a lightsaber over his sleeping nephew.
A man who ran away from everything because he lost hope,
and then abandoned his duty.
This wasn’t subversion.
It was contradiction.
It felt like losing a mentor twice:
once in the story,
and once in the soul.
This was the moment the emotional contract snapped,
the moment the myth broke.
Not bent.
Not challenged.
Broken.
Because a myth can survive reinterpretation.
A myth can survive imperfection.
A myth can even survive contradiction.
But it cannot survive the inversion of its own moral grammar.
And I want to be fair here, because fairness matters.
The Force Awakens didn’t leave an easy path.
It set up mysteries without answers, conflicts without foundations,
and a galaxy that somehow reset to zero without explaining the cost.
It handed The Last Jedi an impossible task —
continue the myth while also inventing the scaffolding the first film skipped.
And then The Last Jedi, in turn, left The Rise of Skywalker
an even more impossible task:
rebuild a myth it had just deconstructed,
restore a character it had already inverted,
and conclude a trilogy whose emotional grammar no longer matched itself.
None of these films were working with a full deck.
Each one inherited fractures from the last.
I don’t pretend to know the One True Version of the story.
What I imagined afterward wasn’t a rewrite — just the version that came to me as an old Star Wars fan trying to understand what felt broken, and how it might have been healed.
In my bones, I always thought Luke’s Jedi academy should have failed despite his best intentions, not because he faltered.
A failure born of the New Republic’s fractures —
infighting, corruption, old Imperial loyalties resurfacing —
the kind of slow, systemic decay that even a good man can’t stop.
Ben Solo’s fall, in that version, wouldn’t come from a moment of panic,
but from the cracks in the world he inherited.
A galaxy that wanted peace but refused responsibility.
A political order already rotting from within.
And Luke’s exile — in the version I imagined —
would have been a pilgrimage for wisdom,
not a retreat into despair.
A search for the missing piece,
not a surrender.
I don’t claim this is the right version.
It’s simply the one that feels true to the myth I grew up with —
the myth that shaped me.
This is the heart. Everything else in the cycle orbits this injury.
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