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 tried to become.
Luke was the myth and the moral grammar.
He 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 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 insisted 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 from the world because he lost hope.
A man who abandoned his duty because he believed he had nothing left to give.
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.
But the injury remains.
The ache remains.
The sense that something essential — something moral, something mythic — slipped out of alignment.
I don’t pretend to know the One True Version of the story.
I only know the moment the myth broke for me,
and the shape of the absence it left behind.
This is the heart.
Everything else in the cycle orbits this injury.