Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - Teaser Trailer

[Reverend]

I admit that, on a personal level, I've never really liked the virgin Anakin birth or the chosen one prophecy. It's one of my least favorite additions to the prequel era and I honestly prefer to ignore it in my head canon, because I find it silly. YMMV of course.

I don't know, Star Wars has always tapped into both mythology and fairy tales. The trope of the prophesied saviour who will banish evil and restore order to the land is very common, as is the hero with a divine or semi-divine lineage.

The thing is, Lucas didn't just blindly lean into it, he actively subverted it.
Sure, Anakin starts off as the child pauper with a pure heart, found by a travelling wizard to be taken away to train as a magical knight who will one say save the world...but then it all goes wrong.
Anakin grows into an insecure, selfish, impatient and intemperate knight who has too much of a taste for battle and a skewed sense of justice. He repeatedly does things he knows are wrong, that even contradict the heroic self image he's built for himself, but can't or won't control his baser impulses. He's undone not by the duplicitous wiles of a seductress, or even poisonous words of a vile deceiver, but by his own ego, hubris and hypocrisy.
The magical order of knights it turns out aren't the exemplars of peace and justice they're made out to be, but a stagnant, failing order that has long since lost it's sense of purpose and he become so compromised, so complacent, and so arrogant that it can't see the rot that surrounds it.

Maybe Anakin was the Chosen One and he blew it. Maybe there's no such thing and the prophecy is all bunk, taken out of context or inaccurately transcribed. Maybe there's another explanation for Shmi's mysterious pregnancy that has nothing to do with the force and Anakin's unusually high midichlorian count was purely a coincidence. Maybe Gardulla habitually has all her female slaves of a certain age and utility sedated and artificially inseminated to increase her profits. It's not like she'd bother informing Shmi of this, because: "Who cares? She's property!"

The point of all this being: Anakin didn't turn out the way he did because of some prophecy, he turned out the way he did because this is what happens when you raise a person up based on faith alone and expect them to fix the world for you. Even worse, most of the council didn't even believe in him and acted like it was up to him to prove them wrong, which just left him in a weird limbo and drove a wedge between him and the Order that never really healed.

Personally, I think it was pretty ballsy of Lucas to explore that particular idea when he could have easily done a straight-up villainous backstory for Vader and made out that he just hid his true nature from Kenobi the whole time.

 

[Awesome Possum]

Here's the thing about interpreting prophecy: it all depends on context. If the criteria for "Chosen One" are 1) Born of no father and 2) brings balance to the force, then really speaking that could apply to either Anakin or Luke, or BOTH. Anakin literally had no father and Luke was (figuratively speaking) also born without a father and both of them together had a vital hand in bringing balance to the force.

As to whom the prophecy specifically refers to, well then you'd have to ask whomever had the vision and transcribed said prophecy....though given the way force visions work, I suspect even they couldn't say.

Personally, I still think it's Anakin. He may have lost his way but he got there in there in the end. Though part of me also kinda thinks the mantle of "Chosen One" is whomever the force needs it to be at any given time. When Anakin fell, it fell to the twins and when they got the galaxy to the point of swinging back the other way (Leia leading the rebellion and Luke reaching what was left of Anakin) then it moved back to Anakin who took it over the finish line.

Luke did have Uncle Owen as a father figure and Owen did seem to care for him, even if Luke was frustrated with him. Owen likely wanted to keep Luke away from the Imperial Academy because some kid from Tatooine with unnatural talents with the last name Skywalker is going to raise some red flags with the wrong people. He later sacrifices his life to keep the Sandtroopers from finding him. Obi-Wan and Yoda could argued as keeping Luke from knowing the truth about Vader as keeping him in the dark so it would be easier for him to kill Vader and fix their mistake. Owen tried to keep Luke safe.

 

[Reverend]

Luke did have Uncle Owen as a father figure and Owen did seem to care for him, even if Luke was frustrated with him. Owen likely wanted to keep Luke away from the Imperial Academy because some kid from Tatooine with unnatural talents with the last name Skywalker is going to raise some red flags with the wrong people. He later sacrifices his life to keep the Sandtroopers from finding him. Obi-Wan and Yoda could argued as keeping Luke from knowing the truth about Vader as keeping him in the dark so it would be easier for him to kill Vader and fix their mistake. Owen tried to keep Luke safe.

I'm not questioning Owen's motives, ability as a parent or validity as Luke's de facto father (personally, I'm in the Yondu school of thought on that) I'm just illustrating that, from a certain point of view, Luke was born fatherless.
Like I said, it depends on how one interprets the prophecy. I think it's a truthful (yet deeply misleading) statement to say: "Luke had no father." He had an uncle who raised him like he was his own. But an Uncle isn't a father, in the literal sense. There was a guy walking around in what was left of his father's meatsuit, but who was not actually his father in anyway that mattered. Plus if you want to get *really* pedantic about it; at the moment of his birth, he had no father. Either by dint of the fact that his father simply wasn't present, or slightly more esoterically: his father was to all intents and purposes "gone".

Again though, I'm not holding this up as evidence that Luke was the "real" chosen one, just illustrating how the prophecy could be highly subjective. But also that ultimately it doesn't really matter because the prophecy itself was part of the problem.

ETA: Here's a philosophical question: was balanced achieved because of the prophecy, or in spit of it? Was the prophecy the main reason why things went so far off the rails? Had Qui Gon and Obi Wan just left well enough alone and truly trusted in the will of the force, would this little kid from nowhere have grown up far out of the reach of evil, to be the saviour all on his own?

 

[CorporalCaptain]

It's also clear from SW77 that Luke was dissatisfied not knowing about his real father. Luke did not consider Owen to be his father, and when he decided to follow Ben, it was to follow in his father's footsteps.

 

[JD]

Luke did have Uncle Owen as a father figure and Owen did seem to care for him, even if Luke was frustrated with him. Owen likely wanted to keep Luke away from the Imperial Academy because some kid from Tatooine with unnatural talents with the last name Skywalker is going to raise some red flags with the wrong people. He later sacrifices his life to keep the Sandtroopers from finding him. Obi-Wan and Yoda could argued as keeping Luke from knowing the truth about Vader as keeping him in the dark so it would be easier for him to kill Vader and fix their mistake. Owen tried to keep Luke safe.

I never really thought about it before, but they really did kind of a shitty job of hiding Luke from his father. They used his real last name, left him with Anakin's only living relative, on Anakin's home planet. You'd think it would have been smarter to do the same thing they did with Leia, and give him to a totally unrelated family, give him that family's last name, and send them off to a planet with no connection to Anakin. As the first arc of Marvel's first Darth Vader comic shows, all it took was one person saying the word "Skywalker" and the whole thing was blown.

 

[Awesome Possum]

I never really thought about it before, but they really did kind of a shitty job of hiding Luke from his father. They used his real last name, left him with Anakin's only living relative, on Anakin's home planet. You'd think it would have been smarter to do the same thing they did with Leia, and give him to a totally unrelated family, give him that family's last name, and send them off to a planet with no connection to Anakin. As the first arc of Marvel's first Darth Vader comic shows, all it took was one person saying the word "Skywalker" and the whole thing was blown.

I think Obi-Wan intended Luke to confront him one day and wanted Vader to know his son was the one doing it.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

Sure, Anakin starts off as the child pauper with a pure heart, found by a travelling wizard to be taken away to train as a magical knight who will one say save the world...but then it all goes wrong.

Anakin was basically suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder or the Star Wars Universe equivalent of it. It was a pretty genius way of subverting the chosen one trope. What happens if the chosen one had a traumatic childhood and extreme abandonment issues?

 

[Reverend]

I never really thought about it before, but they really did kind of a shitty job of hiding Luke from his father. They used his real last name, left him with Anakin's only living relative, on Anakin's home planet. You'd think it would have been smarter to do the same thing they did with Leia, and give him to a totally unrelated family, give him that family's last name, and send them off to a planet with no connection to Anakin. As the first arc of Marvel's first Darth Vader comic shows, all it took was one person saying the word "Skywalker" and the whole thing was blown.

Here's the thing though: nobody says the word "Skywalker" until Luke breaks Leia out of her cell (rather ironic in hindsight.) So it's possible that all these years he's been going by "Luke Lars" and only adopted the name "Skywalker" once he left Tatooine, no? I mean by the time they got to Mos Eisley, "Luke Lars" may have already had a price on his head on suspicion of handling stolen imperial property, so that name wouldn't be any safer anymore.

That aside, Tatooine isn't just a backwater, it's the arse end of a backwater's backwater. And Luke was on a moisture farm *way* the hell away from any space port and where nobody but other farmers would have even the slightest inclination of ever visiting. The odds of Vader ever wanting to come back there were nil. Indeed, when he did return, he didn't even set foot on the planet. just sent a detachment of troops down, left a few destroyers in orbit and took off with the princess to the Death Star.
Luke's cover wasn't blown until *after* he'd come out of the shadows, by which point it'd be inevitable that Vader would figure out who he was. Hell, it took Palpatine a good three years to get wind of it!

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Here's the thing though: nobody says the word "Skywalker" until Luke breaks Leia out of her cell (rather ironic in hindsight.)

In the original theatrical cut, that was the only time anybody said "Skywalker."

 

[Spot261]

Here's the thing though: nobody says the word "Skywalker" until Luke breaks Leia out of her cell (rather ironic in hindsight.) So it's possible that all these years he's been going by "Luke Lars" and only adopted the name "Skywalker" once he left Tatooine, no? I mean by the time they got to Mos Eisley, "Luke Lars" may have already had a price on his head on suspicion of handling stolen imperial property, so that name wouldn't be any safer anymore.

That aside, Tatooine isn't just a backwater, it's the arse end of a backwater's backwater. And Luke was on a moisture farm *way* the hell away from any space port and where nobody but other farmers would have even the slightest inclination of ever visiting. The odds of Vader ever wanting to come back there were nil. Indeed, when he did return, he didn't even set foot on the planet. just sent a detachment of troops down, left a few destroyers in orbit and took off with the princess to the Death Star.
Luke's cover wasn't blown until *after* he'd come out of the shadows, by which point it'd be inevitable that Vader would figure out who he was. Hell, it took Palpatine a good three years to get wind of it!

That's a hell of a catch, I'd never noticed that before.

 

[JD]

Here's the thing though: nobody says the word "Skywalker" until Luke breaks Leia out of her cell (rather ironic in hindsight.) So it's possible that all these years he's been going by "Luke Lars" and only adopted the name "Skywalker" once he left Tatooine, no? I mean by the time they got to Mos Eisley, "Luke Lars" may have already had a price on his head on suspicion of handling stolen imperial property, so that name wouldn't be any safer anymore.

That aside, Tatooine isn't just a backwater, it's the arse end of a backwater's backwater. And Luke was on a moisture farm *way* the hell away from any space port and where nobody but other farmers would have even the slightest inclination of ever visiting. The odds of Vader ever wanting to come back there were nil. Indeed, when he did return, he didn't even set foot on the planet. just sent a detachment of troops down, left a few destroyers in orbit and took off with the princess to the Death Star.
Luke's cover wasn't blown until *after* he'd come out of the shadows, by which point it'd be inevitable that Vader would figure out who he was. Hell, it took Palpatine a good three years to get wind of it!

You make some good points there. I have to admit, I tend to forget that Tattooine is that much a nothing place in universe. It's such a big part of the movies, I think of as being that big of a deal in universe too.

 

[Reverend]

You make some good points there. I have to admit, I tend to forget that Tattooine is that much a nothing place in universe. It's such a big part of the movies, I think of as being that big of a deal in universe too.

Think of it this way: why else would Jabba run his operation from there rather than on Hutta, or Nar Shaddaa, or Coruscant's lower levels or one of a hundred better connected worlds. Because it affords him privacy. Nobody goes there and if they do, you can see them coming from a parsec away. Smugglers, mercenaries and bounty hunters may use it as a layover, but they mostly stick to the space ports and have no interest in the locals. The Lars farm was just a dry spec of nothing between the dune sea and the jundland wastes.

Most of all though, it's where Shmi Skywalker is buried and that alone guarantees Vader would want to stay far away. He wouldn't even want to THINK about that place. Indeed, odds are if he ever did sense a disturbance in the force in that place, he'd go out of his way to ignore and bury that feeling.

 

[Unicron]

I don't know, Star Wars has always tapped into both mythology and fairy tales. The trope of the prophesied saviour who will banish evil and restore order to the land is very common, as is the hero with a divine or semi-divine lineage.

That's true. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I don't think the prequels used the trope particularly well, though of course that's simply opinion. The Jedi leaders and order, collectively, have some writing issues that I think could have been done differently. One issue I would have fixed is the big age gap between Padme and Anakin in between the first two prequels. It's an element that I've always found a bit odd and ill fitting (in part because the real life age of the actors doesn't fit with it very well - Natalie Portman only aged a few years between films, but Padme is supposed to be about 10 years older). As mentioned, YMMV.

 

[publiusr]

I'd rather see a Star Wars version of "House of Cards" with Andy Robinson

 

[Reverend]

That's true. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say I don't think the prequels used the trope particularly well, though of course that's simply opinion. The Jedi leaders and order, collectively, have some writing issues that I think could have been done differently. One issue I would have fixed is the big age gap between Padme and Anakin in between the first two prequels. It's an element that I've always found a bit odd and ill fitting (in part because the real life age of the actors doesn't fit with it very well - Natalie Portman only aged a few years between films, but Padme is supposed to be about 10 years older). As mentioned, YMMV.

I may be mis-remembering, but I think as written, Padme is only supposed to be like 14 or 15 years old to Anakin's 10. Son in theory at least, when you add on a decade, a 20 year old and a 24/25 year old isn't such an issue. It'd be even less of an issue if Anakin was the older of the pair, but that's just a bizarre double standard that our society has.

 

[Unicron]

You might be right... it's been a long time since I watched the films, so I don't recall the ages (and I don't think they're mentioned in dialogue, save that E2 is roughly about a decade after the events of E1). I keep thinking Padme would have been around 19 in E1, but I might be confusing that with the age of Natalie Portman at the time.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I think Padmé should have been a princess at the start of the TPM whose father or mother, the actual ruler of Naboo, dies in either the invasion or occupation. Padmé can assume leadership in exile through line of succession and return to lead the overthrow of the occupation forces. Being next in line to the throne of Naboo could have been the reason for her father/mother to send her away under the protection of the Jedi. E.g., the two Jedi intercept the transfer of the royal family to a prison camp, as occurred in the film, except the King/Queen refuses to leave the planet, having the Jedi protect the safety of the princess offworld and escape to notify the Republic about the invasion. At some point, maybe even on Coruscant, Padmé learns that she is leader now and decides to return to free her people with the aid of the Gungans. That would have eliminated the absurd idea that it was normal that a teenager could be elected to rule a freakin' planet, while still keeping Padmé in a leadership role.

 

[fireproof78]

I may be mis-remembering, but I think as written, Padme is only supposed to be like 14 or 15 years old to Anakin's 10. Son in theory at least, when you add on a decade, a 20 year old and a 24/25 year old isn't such an issue. It'd be even less of an issue if Anakin was the older of the pair, but that's just a bizarre double standard that our society has.

I believe it's 9 and 14, but I don't think that is in dialog.

 

[JD]

Yeah, it's never stated in the movie, but I'm pretty sure those are the ages given in the background material. It's always seemed kind of weird to me that they cast an actress that was so much older than the character was supposed. I know that kind of an age difference between actor and character isn't to much of a problem with adults, but when it comes to teenagers there's a big difference between 14 and 19.

 

[Tuskin38]

I believe it's 9 and 14

That's what the lyrics to Weird Al's song about the movie says.