Luke was aimless early on….where Leia was always driven. Instead of trying to gun down his family as Palpatine did…I would have set about spoiling Luke…sending him out of Vader’s reach to Naboo or better—Alderaan…where Tarkin could take care of him at arms length. Leia on Tatooine could be more easily corrupted by the Nightsisters…perhaps becoming Maul’s apprentice in the end. She sees her brother and homeworld killed, she will want revenge against the Empire. Make use of that drive to push her to the dark side at length.
I did have a whole response drafted out RE: Luke Organa as Red or even Gold Leader for the trench run, and I thought I saved it, but apparently not and it's now been a busy week later and I really can't remember what I wrote. Oh well, I'm sure bits of it will come back to me! OK, so where the hell was I again? Right; how Luke's story intersects with Leia's: - So as I mentioned up-thread; Luke's Lothal mission went about the same as Leia's. He shows up as the Prince of Alderaan with relief supplies and three hammerhead corvettes for the Phoenix Cell to half-inch. Shenanigans ensues, though since his cover is as a (junior) officer of the Guard, his "capture" would have to be staged a little more rough than Leia's. So he probably ended up getting stunned more than once. Otherwise, mostly the same character & story beats. Same for Rogue One, essentially; he'd be there with Bail and be sent aboard the Tantive IV with a mission to extract Ben, before getting swept up in the Battle of Scarif and fleeing with the plans in hand and Vader chasing them down. I thought about Luke putting up more of a fight in his capture; maybe giving the troopers more of a run-around . . . but that just seems like a needless embellishment. I also considered having him actually escape on his own and making it down to the surface, but that causes WAY too many problems, and starts to feel a little bit too similar to the first act of TFA. So he entrusts the plans and the message to R2, gets captured to buy him time, plays dumb with Vader, then gets carted off to a prison cell on the Death Star. So back to Leia: I imagine she witnessed part of the battle the same as Luke, but unlike him, didn't abandon her work and droid to go rushing off to Tosche Station to tell everyone . . . and as a result missed Bigg's return visit. Which honestly isn't needed since Leia isn't wistfully longing for a life of adventure, she's mostly concerned with her Aunt & Uncle, and making sure she gets those condensers on the south ridge repaired before sunsdown. So first thing in the morning the sandcrawler rolls up, and she & Owen fall into their usual routine of Owen taking the lead haggling/distracting with the clan chief, while Leia checks out the merchandise to spot what's actually worth buying, and what's just been made to look like it's worth buying. She of course notices R5's bad motivator and signals to pass him by, instead selecting R2 right off the bat, and getting a discount for how much older and beat up he looks (despite seeing full well he's been well maintained until recently and the Jawas don't know what they have with him yet.) I'll think more on it later, but I'm having a hard time figuring out if the iconic twin-sunset scene even happens in this version. Might need to think on it some more. I'd resist any attempt to have Luke's force sensitivity manifest, or otherwise outed early as it would imply that there's something fundamentally more exceptional about him than Leia, and that doesn't sit right. Leia was around Kanan and Ezra (and Vader!) without any of them getting so much as a hint of her potential. The same should be true of Luke if the circumstances were reversed. But she's the perfect size for a TIE pilot or a gunner/engineer. This is not a major hurdle. Or that. Indeed I think Leia has a much better chance of bluffing her way through the checkpoint than Luke & Han managed on their own. She might actually bother to think of an actual exit strategy too. Possibly one that doesn't involve the garbage chute.
I just saw something interesting about this. Apparently, it's a YouTube click-farming scam; find a fanfic, phrase the premise as "What if X," have a text-to-speech program read it, put it over a bunch of stolen images and fan-art of whatever property they're talking about, and rake in the views for only a few minutes of work per video. I just googled "what if Luke and Leia switched places," and the first hit was exactly as described in the post I saw. This person has decided to fight fire with fire, and built an automated tool to analyize these videos and fine the source fanfic they're ripping off, then informing the original author that it's happening and how they can file a protest with YouTube.
Yikes. I kind of see this as an outgrowth of the whole AI art craze that's sweeping the net. People with no artistic talent whatsoever can create fairly good simulations of the art styles of long established artists. I've even done it myself, playing around with Replicate AI, but I don't go posting the stuff all over the internet and claiming to be some great talent. Imagery is the first thing, now people are doing deepfake voices as well. Pretty sure it's not legal or ethical, but right now it's one of those things almost impossible to defend against. Deepfake technology is going to be the next great scourge of humanity when it comes to information warfare- it's already happening.
Right, so I've had a think, and I might have more of a sense how to navigate most of the rest of ANH's first act: - The 'Call to Adventure' pretty much has to happen the same way. Leia's in the garage cleaning R2 when she triggers the Prince's hologram message (or R2 triggers it as a ploy to get the restraining bolt off; I've always suspected that was a set-up but the movie makes it ambiguous.) I think the key difference here is her reaction; where Luke was thrilled by the idea of the rebellion and adventure, Leia is terrified because she knows what this means: the Empire will come looking for this droid and that will spell certain peril for her, and her Aunt & Uncle. So no, she doesn't remove the restraining bolt from R2, but the conversation with Owen and Beru on the matter goes about the same. Owen says to go to Anchorhead in the morning and have R2's memory erased and similarly stonewalls on the subject of her father. What's a little different is that Beru broaches the topic of Leia transmitting her application to the Academy, but Leia insists she stay for the harvest, promising she'll go next year. Despite all of this, her mind is still uneasy. Erasing the droid's memory won't solve anything if the Empire tracks it here, and despite what she'd like to admit to herself the mention of a Kenobi having some connection with her father stirs a long buried restlessness; a need to find out the truth. Oh and when she goes up to watch the suns set as she contemplates her next move, we don't get the force theme, but the more ominous, foreboding track originally composed for this scene. Her mind made up, Leia sets out with the two droids at first light. She tells Beru she's headed for Tosche Station to pick up the power converters Owen wanted, but instead cuts across the jundland wastes to try and catch up with the Jawas before the Imperials do, with the intent to give/sell the two droids back and keep her family off the Empire's radar (or scanners, whatever!) Everything is going fine until they're ambushed by a Tusken scouting party, while trying to squeeze the speeder though a narrow pass halfway up a canyon wall. Threepio panics and tumbles out of the speeder, down the side of the canyon, smashing into the boulder strewn gorge. Leia downs one raider with her rifle, but takes a glancing blow from a gaderffii to the back of the head and blacks out. When she comes to, the Tuskens have mysteriously fled and Ben is standing over her, hand on her forehead. Yadda-yadda-yadda. "Obi-Wan Kenobi." "Threepio!" "Quickly! They're on the move!" etc. etc. This last bit plays out a little differently as I switched the perspective away from R2 to Leia instead. That's because this time around he still has the restraining bolt, and thus didn't run off in the night. Also, keeping it from Leia's perspective allows me to cut the fight short when she's knocked out and we don't have to deal with that whole weird krayt dragon call bit. Indeed, not knowing how Ben scared off the Tuskens would add a little to his mystique, especially when combined with his unassuming demeanour. That's it for now; more later.