The Jedi were supposed to rise with Luke and look how Disney decided that should turn out. Why should anyone assume that Rey will fair any better in this grim-dark world? It's just one big vicious circle that will never be complete. Happily ever afters don't exist anymore. There's simply no profit in it.
Also, when the Empire rises up Yoda confronts Palpatine, fails and runs off into hiding. Obi Wan also runs off into hiding. Neither joined up with the rebels after that and fought the Empire. So the Jedi seem to have a track record of running off into hermitage when things go wrong. Luke is just following in the foot steps of his masters as far as I am concerned.
Coruscant is taken over and The New Republic government is forced into exile. I think it's the first and only time that happens It's a good series...very long, like 20 books. I haven't read them all, but some of them are very good.
Yeah, as a whole the old EU novels painted a much grimmer future for Star Wars: over three decades of near constant repeating cycles of war, political corruption and next to no progress on Luke's whole "passing on what he has learned" thing. Then, just when everyone seemed to *start* to get their shit together a massive galaxy wide invasion by endless legions of alien vampire S&M religious fanatics wipe out whole swaths of the galaxy, and the fledgling Jedi are back to essentially being Generals and lightsaber wielding commandos....which is exactly what they're *not* supposed to be (see: The Clone Wars!) But once that's sorted, the whole galaxy seems to magically revert to what it was before, sans some hand-wavey mentions of "rebuilding", which last exactly five seconds before it all goes to shit again. Several bouts of resurgent Sith, a former Imperial war criminal randomly elected president of the galaxy (or whatever they call it!), Jedi resorting to assassination, the Republic basically reverting back into the Empire and some nonsense about an all powerful being randomly making Jedi go coo-coo for cocoa puffs. After all that, I'd call ending the EU a mercy killing. I can't help find it amusing that a lot of the fans currently whinging about TLJ are the same ones who whinged about the "loss" of the EU (as if it was every meant to be canon to begin with!) Also pretty bizarre that the very same ones complaining that TLJ changed too much were the ones crying about TFA being a direct ripp-off of ANH.
I always hoped that the Jedi Order would be rebuild and then protect and assist the Republic, and not with everything being destroyed and being reset
Revisionist history. When you specifically label one subset of the material the "Non-canon" category, what does that tell us about the rest of it?
Has nobody here actually *seen* George Lucas's other works? THX 1138 anyone? If that's not very avant-garde post-modernist cynicism with robots and don't know what is! Here's the thing: a Star War is a lot like and Ogre. There are many layers involved. "Fun, not so serious adventure" is just the outermost layers. Under that is a fluency and love of classic cinema. Then under that you have deep history human mythological storytelling. And under that you have deeply cynical social commentary with a heavy slant towards both anti-facist and anti-capitlaist symbolism and associated imagery. Also robots. TLJ is continuing and extrapolating the trend, not circumventing it.
How about the general lack of awareness of literature and history. Has no one read Aseop's fables, Iliad, Grimms Fairy Tales, etc? Because, I'm here to inform you that "happily ever after" is far more "modern" in a literature sense that cynicism. Actually, why not read what cynicism actually was a philosophy about, rather than just the conventional parlance of today. This isn't new, not by a long shot.
Evil always rises and falls. Art imitating life imitating art's imitating life after imitating art by imitating life with a pitcher of pitch black coffee. "Happily ever after" only takes place when there's no room left for a sequel... or if Mr Floppy and Nikki Cox are involved... Or if you're Kerr Avon and going nuts on the privateer cargo ship Scorpio... I hadn't thought of that, even though it was in plain sight - lol. Still thought and hoped Luke would hermit himself into a hole forevermore as opposed to being a shiny happy fairy tale ending (which ROTJ already was, this is a new chapter and they had to do something other than keeping it shiny happy)... either way, they did it well enough and kudos to Mark Hamill for doing it as great as he had despite disagreeing with the direction the writer went for.
Luke has nothing in common with Yoda and Obi-Wan. They went into exile to preserve the Jedi Oorder, and bring about it's victory and rebirth when the time was right. They were also being hunted to extinction. They would have hurt the rebels cause if they tried to help them all along. Besides, wasn't the rebellion only 4 years old at the time of A New Hope? Anyways, Luke did the opposite. He went into exile to destroy the Jedi once and for all, and he wasn't fleeing for his life. He did this while the Republic reigned, and the Jedi were free.