u/Flat-Court-8512

He’s arguably among Batman’s most competent allies, and I say this as someone who’s not that big of a fan of this Tim Drake Robin. He rescued Batman pretty much single-handedly in the Harley Quinn’s revenge DLC, as well as the captured cops. I’d say Robin has every right to be as miffed as he was at not getting any praise, or even a simple thank you from Batman.

Tim’s honestly a pretty good and respectful sidekick. Even when he disagrees with what Batman wants him to do he still does what he’s asked. Whether it’s being ordered to not engage Talia’s ninjas, or being told to keep working on a cure for the Joker infected.

This is basically what happens in the third and final flashback of the incident between Luke and Ben in the hut. Luke has just finished peering into Ben’s mind. He slowly gets his lightsaber out and raises it to his face. Looks at it for a moment, then grips it more tightly while taking what looks like a deep breath before finally turning it on and stopping himself.

This to me doesn’t come across like a man impulsively springing into action like he did when he attacked and almost killed Vader in episode 6, which is the comparison a lot of people like to make. This is a man who’s giving serious thought and contemplation about what he should do. The way that Luke pauses in between getting his lightsaber out and turning it on makes it look like he’s psyching himself up to do something pretty drastic.

Funny how TLJ fans will say that we didn’t really watch the movie and only remembered Kylo’s version of events when it turns out that his side of the story is actually not that far from the truth. Luke did come very close to killing him. The only difference is that Luke didn’t actually attempt a killing stroke while looking like a deranged madman as he did in the second flashback.

I bring this up because there’s a point in HPB where Harry believes Snape is gonna give him a bad grade on an essay about fighting dementors. So what would Snape think the best way to deal with dementors would be if if to him it’s not as simple as simply just conjuring a patronus as Harry is naturally inclined to do? I can only assume it’s something occlumency related, and that it involves great emotional control. Or maybe something similar to what Sirius did in prison when he focused on how much he hated Wormtail for his betrayal?

Think about it. Snape’s job of spying against Voldemort required him to place himself in close proximity of a wizard who Snape credited as the greatest legilmency user in the world. In order to do that without screwing up, you would have to have phenomenal control over your thoughts and feelings at all times. Something that would be hard for most people if they were in the same room with the man who killed their beloved childhood crush.

It comes across like he genuinely thinks the flirty remarks in Russian he gets from Alya are genuine. This is a bit of a departure from how it was portrayed in the light novel and manga respectively. In those mediums, Kuze takes Alya’s flirting with a grain of salt. Thinking that she’s only doing this to be condescending and to mess with him.

In fact, the manga has Kuze believe that if he comes out and admits to Alya he understands what she’s saying, she’ll just end up mocking him and call him an idiot for ever believing anything she said. Makes sense, given that Kuze is meant to be pretty insecure due to past trauma.

In the cartoon, it mainly came down to two things due to how fast it all went. They found Azula to be a powerful and efficient leader to rally behind. One Agent even mentioning to Long-Feng how she’s both inspiring and terrifying. And according to Bryke in one of the DVD commentaries, self preservation after their crimes were exposed to the earth king. Which actually is something Azula mentions to the Dai-Li when she’s briefing them on the coming coup. That the earth king and his military council don’t trust them, so they need to seize control before they can be eliminated.

With that said, I have a feeling that Azula winning over the Dai-Li is going to be expanded on and fleshed out more in the Netflix show. I can see her leveraging the fact that it’s only a matter of time before the fire nation breaks through the walls and takes the city. Especially with this little thing called Sozin’s comet. So they might as well pledge themselves to the winning side. And it wouldn’t surprise me if Long-Feng actually fights Azula this time in order to keep his power authority over the Dai-Li, but of course, loses and maybe gets killed.

There’s definitely more than one reason, but the one I want to talk about is how it’s kinda tone wise at odds with how Luke and Rey met in episode 7. Luke’s face when Rey presents him his old lightsaber at the end of episode 7 is clearly conveying so many different emotions at once. He has what I would described as this sorrowful, tortured, haunted look on his face once it dawns on him why Rey has come all this way to his island with his old weapon. He honestly looks like he’s about to cry. I always thought this was a pretty emotionally powerful moment. Luke obviously doesn’t think he’s the right person to fix everything, but he still seems pretty sympathetic and understanding towards why Rey is here.

So when we get to TLJ where Luke just casually and flippantly tosses the saber over the cliff, and then proceeds to stomp off like a pouty child who’s been told to go to his room, it kinda takes away what previously had some emotional weight behind it with this please laugh vibe. I understand you can’t have Luke immediately accept this plea for help since it would cheapen why he ran away in the first place, but there were ways of having Luke reject the lightsaber that better lines up with the tone of the previous movie. One of the alternatives I’ve heard suggested is that Luke holds the lightsaber for a bit, but as his hands increasingly slacken and tremble, it falls to the ground with a thud, and then he solemnly walks away from Rey. I think something like that would have been pretty effective.

You can argue that it technically makes sense for the story that TLJ is trying to tell that Luke would throw away the lightsaber the way he does. The point is that he is suppose to be disenfranchised with how he and the Jedi have been put up on a pedestal. But it still feels weird watching these two different versions from two different movies of Luke meeting Rey back to back.

He believes he’s been on this little quest for 16 years. So from Marco’s perspective, he must have caused his loved ones a lot of emotional pain and trauma from his sudden disappearance. It certainly doesn’t seem like this is something that crosses Marco’s mind when he reunites with Star, and immediately starts raving about how awesome his past adventures were. He doesn’t even seem to find it all that peculiar that Star looks exactly the same from when he last saw her well over a decade ago.

Like it or not, Luke is meant to be at a pretty low and dark point in his life. So to have him immediately accept Rey’s silent plea for help would have cheapened that. That I totally get. The problem is that the way Luke casually and flippantly chucks the lightsaber away is tonally inconsistent with how the scene was originally presented in TFA.

There when Rey presents Luke the lightsaber, you can tell by Luke’s face that he’s experiencing so many overwhelming emotions at once. He honestly looks like he’s about to cry, which makes total sense. Of course Luke would be sympathetic and understanding about why Rey is here, but he sadly doesn’t think he’s the right person for the job of setting things right. This is one of the few things I think TFA did pretty alright.

Compare that to how Luke in episode 8 casually tosses the saber over his shoulder, and then stomps off like a pouty child who’s just been told to go to his room. I’ve heard plenty of better alternatives for how that moment could have gone down that better respects the emotional weight from the previous film. Luke holds the lightsaber for a bit, but then his hands tremble and slacken so much that it just slips from his grasp, and falls to the ground with a thud, and he solemnly walks away. Or maybe he tosses it in a similar manner to how he once did in Palpatine’s throne room?

I don’t know. I’m just spitballing here. Anything other than the please laugh vibes we got. Even if you think it’s kinda funny, it’s still not very appropriate tone wise.

On the surface, it sounds pretty much exactly like what we ultimately got. Luke has secluded himself in an ancient Jedi Temple, is in a dark place mentally, is found by a young force sensitive girl, and so on. But having said that, it seems like things would have turned out a little bit differently based on the information that’s available.

In this version of the story, Luke would have been found much earlier in episode 7 by the girl who eventually became Rey, and would have likely actually trained her after some convincing as opposed to the anti Jedi rhetoric Luke was spewing in The Last Jedi. And that’s another thing. I don’t think Luke would have been such an anti Jedi curmudgeon, or cut himself off from the force like in TLJ. Concept art of this alternate version of the story has Luke wearing Jedi robes, and even has his hair in a samurai bun.

There was also this idea of a floating dome for meditation that you can only access by lifting it with the force. One of the concept artists even said that this was meant to hint at how powerful Luke had become in the force. So make of that what you will. I think this lines up with how this version of Luke has been described as spending his days at the temple mainly meditating and reassessing his life. This whole arc of Luke getting out of his funk would have happened in episode 7 instead of 8. As for when he would have died. Pablo Hidalgo claimed it still would have happened at the end of episode 8, whereas Mark Hamil once said it would have been in 9. But either way, it seems we would have gotten more of Luke than what we ultimately got.

Obi-Wan and Yoda didn’t hide themselves out of shame the way Luke did. It was done out of practicality. They didn’t immediately join any resistance movement because there literally was no resistance movement like the rebellion at the time they exiled themselves. The majority of the senate was in favor of Palpatine creating an empire, and the Jedi at that point were branded as traitors and fugitives.

Luke by his own admission, went to that island to die. That’s a pretty big contrast between Yoda saying at the end of episode 3 that they’ll disappear until the time is right.

I don’t care that Luke just told Leia that he can’t save Kylo or that this is all meant to be a distraction. Given that Luke is supposed to feel really awful about the part he played in Kylo’s fall, I don’t think he would respond to his nephew’s question about if he’s there to forgive him and save his soul with only a smug no. I would think he would say something more along the lines of you’re not the one I’ve needed to forgive. And that saving Kylo’s soul is something Kylo himself has got to do at this point.

I certainly don’t expect Luke to be able to save his nephew from the dark side at this point, but there were ways to plant some seeds to get the ball rolling in a way that feels more in line with what Luke Skywalker would do. Like mentioning how he just got done talking to Kylo’s mother about how no one’s ever really gone because she was ready to finally give up on her son. Try and get Kylo to ask himself if he really wants Leia to be right about that.

It’s not lost on me that Luke does say I’m sorry to Kylo in the middle of their face off, but I think there’s a bit more for him to say there. Stuff like I should have realized a long time ago that what you needed wasn’t a bunch of Jedi tenets about non attachment. What you needed was your family.

Because some people almost act like it’s something to be taken literally ever since Luke’s little force projection stunt in TLJ, and even before that. The logic being that it’s contradictory to say that Jedi use the force only for defense when we see Jedi characters fight and attack people all the time.

It’s like these people forget that they’re called Jedi Knights for a reason and not Jedi Pacifists. That Yoda quote makes way more sense if you take it to have a similar meaning to a quote from Thor Ragnorak. A wise king never seeks war, but must always be ready for it. This perfectly encapsulates a Jedi’s mindset to me. They don’t go looking for fights, but when push comes to shove, certain actions must be taken to protect innocent people.

That game is set 5 years before the Kenobi show, and the base is established to have much tighter security when Cal Kestis and his crew go there. Like how it actually has shields that need to be disabled as part of the final mission there. There’s also Star Destroyers orbiting the planet, and the only reason the main characters get past them is because the nightsister, Merrin, uses her magic to temporarily cloak their ship.

So why oh why would the security at the fortress have such a downgrade in security in Kenobi when a Jedi had already infiltrated it and made a mess of things just a few short years earlier? Like how it doesn’t have any shields protecting it when it previously did in Fallen Order? People like to fall back on the explanation the show gives that it’s because nobody would be stupid enough to attack it, but I don’t think a laughably dumb explanation like that is any better than no explanation at all.

It’s one of the many stupid things about this show. The empire should at the very least be watching the family like hawks after everything that’s happened. Why? Because Reva’s whole master plan hinged on kidnapping Leia to get Obi-Wan to come out of hiding, believing that Bail would call him for help due to the imperial archives indicating a past connection between the two, and it worked.

This all the proof the empire needs that Bail had the means of getting in touch with a fugitive Jedi all this time, and yet they never seem to do anything about it ever again because in episode 4, Leia and Bail are once again trying to get Obi-Wan’s help with something. Who does the show think it’s fooling when Obi-Wan tells Leia that no one can know that they’re associated with one another because it could endanger them both when the empire already knows this?

It’s literally the legacy of what the OT heroes spent 3 movies fighting for, and it gets nuked off the galactic map halfway through episode 7 before we can learn anything about it. What makes this really depressing is that this was obviously done because the people that made that movie wanted to remind us of the movies we grew up loving. Even if it meant resetting everything back to that very same rebels vs empire status quo our heroes fought to free the galaxy from, and because the prequel politics weren’t well received. Not to be overly dramatic, but it just kinda seems like a slap in the face to someone like me who spent many years wondering what kind of world Luke and his friends created after defeating the empire, and what movies about that would be like.

And as a result, it seems like certain content has been working to explain how the republic got to be in a position where it could easily be destroyed like that. Namely that after the defeat of the empire, the new republic heavily demilitarized as a sort of overcorrection to how things played out during the time of the republic in the prequels, but ended up becoming just as weak and ineffectual as the previous government. There’s also a whole book about Leia trying to get the republic to take action against the first order. They refuse on the grounds that Leia is just gonna needlessly bring the galaxy back to the days of the last war. You wouldn’t know any of that from just watching the films themselves. All the films tell us about the republic is that they support the resistance in some capacity, but apparently not enough to give them more than just some X-Wings, and I guess those bombers in episode 8.

The game’s obviously packed with them, and of course not every one of them is a homerun. But there’s usually a diamond in the rough or two for certain people. For me they were queen’s blood, and that space ranger game at the saucer. The latter I liked in particular because it was like playing an arcade game from the 80s.

Yeah, Poe mutes his communications with Leia when she orders him to disengage after the evacuation is complete. But are we suppose to believe that Leia doesn’t have a line to any of the other people in Poe’s squad? Was it really just not an option for her to tell any of them or all of them to not follow Poe’s lead and come back?

There was plenty of time for her to get a message like that out. It takes Poe roughly another few minutes to deal with the dreadnought’s turrets and fighters after he mutes Leia and before the bombers show up. This is why I think Leia deserves at least some of the blame for the so called bomber disaster. I mean, it’s not unheard of for a commanding officer in a Star Wars story to give an order to retreat during a chaotic battle. But there’s no indication Leia even tried this beyond ordering just Poe to come back.

Fans of the sequel trilogy and of TLJ in particular say that this was a great way to send Luke off because he lives up to his status as a legend he previously didn’t think he was worthy of, and inspires people in other parts of the galaxy in the most nonviolent Jedi way possible. That certainly seems to be the implication with the final scene with broom boy on the casino planet. But besides that broom boy epilogue scene, it’s never really made clear just how impactful Luke’s heroic act was on the larger galaxy.

Setting aside the logistics of how the story of Luke’s final confrontation with the first order would have spread, this isn’t something that’s ever really carried over into the next movie. There’s no throwaway lines about how other systems have been resisting harder than before ever since Luke did what he did on Crait. Nor is it mentioned that this motivated a bunch of people to join the resistance. The resistance itself doesn’t seem to be in that better of a position than they were at the beginning of the trilogy.

In fact, it seems like Lando was way more inspirational in this regard because he’s the one who somehow gets people from all over to fight back against Palpatine’s fleet.

I don’t know what to say other than that I’m speechless that anyone could watch these movies and come to that conclusion, and you just know that the only reason this argument is made is because it’s a desperate attempt to debunk the criticisms that Rey is a Mary Sue. There’s just simply no arguing that Rey did way more with the force in her first movies than either Luke or Anakin did in theirs.

All those two did with the force when they were first introduced in their respective trilogies was use it to assist their piloting exploits. Luke with the Death Star battle, and Anakin with the podrace and arguably the space battle over Naboo. That was it. At no point do either of them inexplicably pull mind tricks or force pulls out of their asses like Rey does. Nor do they beat one of the main dark side villains in a straight up fight.

And to circle back to the piloting thing, both Luke and Anakin are established to have prior experience in piloting fast moving vehicles in dangerous situations. Luke says that the Death Star trench room will be just like beggar’s canyon back home, and Anakin has podraced more than once. But Rey? What kind of experience does she have to justify her flying during the dog fight with the TIE-Fighters? All we get in terms of an explanation is that she’s flown some ships, but has never left the planet. She literally admits to Finn that she has no idea how she got them out of that jam. The obvious implication being the force was guiding her.