Luke Skywalker Character Derailment

On the Film page for Character Derailment we're explicitly forbidden from adding Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi despite the fact that he's the most prominent example of the trope in existence, with the flimsy excuse that the drastic change to his characterization was "explained" and all rebuttals to this point on the main discussion page have gone ignored for four years. As others have said, "If, for example, the reason given for his change in character was he dropped his sandwich and was overcome by grief about it, that would be an explanation, but it would be absurd to the point of farce. Would that still qualify?" The film still failed to explain why the man who was willing to risk his life to redeem his father would attempt to murder his struggling nephew in his sleep with no Author's Saving Throw.

Edited by stankykong on May 30th 2022 at 5:43:06 AM

You're not "forbidden from adding Luke Skywalker", the note specifically says to discuss it and get consensus first. If the consensus is in favor of adding Luke you'd have no problem.

Anyway, this is about a specific example, and should be at ATT or a discussion thread.

The list of resources on ATT said to use Trope Talk for specific examples.

This is rather weird. There is a note on CharacterDerailment.Film saying not to add Luke without discussing it on the discussion page for the main Character Derailment page (not the film page). Going there, I find "The following have been deemed non-examples of Character Derailment due to the changes being explained in-story" but with no link to where this decision took place, so there is no confirmation that it ever did.

So if there's no confirmation that it ever did, then there's no proof it was deemed invalid and I'm free to add it.

I'm trying to understand why I have such an urge to defend this as a valid interpolation on Luke's character as portrayed in the original trilogy. Guess that's why CD is FlameBait.

IIUC, Flamebait is even more YMMV than YMMV entries? I know that curating YMMV can be tricky. How does the wiki even approach keeping something like Character Derailment under control?

Yeah, hang on. If Character Derailment is categorized as Flame Bait, that means it gets no examples. So why are there examples?

Plenty of Flame Bait tropes have examples, Fighteer, they're just only allowed on the pages themselves. Like What An Idiot, for instance. DMOS and SBIH are also Flame Bait, and they obviously allow examples.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 2nd 2022 at 8:54:20 AM

Oh, I see, we're arguing over the CharacterDerailment.Film subpage. It's mercifully short, which is good. Given that brevity, it seems like there should be overwhelming consensus on an entry, and I don't know that The Last Jedi meets that threshold.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2022 at 8:57:34 AM

Of course it does, Mark Hamill himself disliked what they did to his character alongside everyone who's ever read a Legends book or played one of the video games. They threw 40 years of character development out the window to make him do a complete 180 and make his character turn his back on everything he believed in, making every film and show before it ultimately meaningless. Hell, just look at the film's audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Edited by stankykong on Jun 2nd 2022 at 11:49:31 AM

I see problems with the way Character Derailment is currently described, so I'm not going to form an opinion on it myself yet, but "People don't like a character change" isn't an argument in support of derail-ment. There are situations where audiences dislike Character Development because it takes away from something that they like. I don't think that is the concept that derailment is intended to describe.

To be fair, it's meant to be seen as Luke changing in his old age, right? We're not meant to think that the Luke that attacked Kylo is the same Luke that defeated the empire, are we?. He had off-screen character development, and several years to grow bitter and desperate as the result of things like PTSD and the inability to keep the Dark Side from returning.

Exactly. This is why I think that applying Character Derailment here is ignoring all of the context that the film sets up. The trope is not "fans don't like a character's development".

Offscreen character development isn't character development unless there's an Author's Saving Throw to fill the gaps. The definition of development is change in characterization that happens "over the course of a narrative". This is a blatant case of Not as You Know Them, we literally have a page dedicated to this exact scenario that's explicitly described as a Character Derailment subtrope.

Edited by stankykong on Jun 2nd 2022 at 2:34:00 PM

That's not... no. Just no.

First off, that's not even what an Author's Saving Throw is?

Second, off-screen development still counts as development. I'm not gonna pretend that I agree with the direction the sequels took Luke in, but it's not like he tried to kill Kylo a week after defeating Palpatine. Several years had passed. Obviously he won't be the exact same person as before.

Interquels are often considered an example, Clone Wars had an entire page dedicated to it. AuthorsSavingThrow.Star Wars The Clone Wars

Interquels are different. They take place during the original story. Obviously it'd be weird if someone acts totally different between the works when the whole point is that these events happened in the same timeframe.

The logic doesn't apply to sequels.

No, I'm saying that if they made works showing what led Luke to do a complete 180 on his personality over the years then it could be seen as organic growth. But the way things are now it's an obvious example of Not as You Know Them, which again, is a Character Derailment subtrope. And even then if we wanted to be generous and include supplementary material then for every one comic there'd be ten+ Legends works approved by his original creator showing the opposite. Earlier you said "We're not meant to think that the Luke that attacked Kylo is the same Luke that defeated the empire, are we?" That's the exact problem; we didn't see him grow/regress into the other Luke, for all intents and purposes he's not the same character as there was no visible development. This is the exact definition of the trope, the description even says "In works with multiple authors, a new author may have a wildly different interpretation of a character, causing him to write his version of the character instead of the one established".

Edited by stankykong on Jun 2nd 2022 at 3:09:09 PM

But the "Legends" material is now officially non-canonical, correct? That means that TLJ is in an Alternate Continuity, and therefore "Legends" does not count toward the established character portrayal.

Legends is the continuation of the original source material with the original creator's vision intact, the movies are a Continuity Reboot which still uses the original source material as a base. If they started from scratch and made a completely polar opposite Luke, that'd be fine. But you can't in good faith argue that the Luke in the original series organically grew into the Luke in Last Jedi when there was no material displaying such growth into the opposite of everything he stood for previously. Character development is defined as change over the course of a narrative, you can't write characters doing a sudden complete 180, tell the audience to fill in the blanks, and call it organic growth. Luke Skywalker has been listed on Not as You Know Them since 2018 with no controversy, and if he's valid there then by definition he's valid here.

Edited by stankykong on Jun 2nd 2022 at 3:17:30 PM

Legends is irrelevant to this conversation. The film writers are under no obligation to honor anything in the SWEU. TLJ explains Luke's disillusionment entirely within its own story: he trained Ben Solo, Ben turned against him, he lost faith, etc. The progression of his characterization is consistent with the story. Not liking it and not agreeing with it are not sufficient to qualify for this trope.

Fine, Legends is irrelevant. If we're excluding Legends (& by extension the new EU) and keeping the focus directly on the films then we loop back to the same problem; saying development happened and actually having it are two different things. It didn't explain Luke's disillusionment, everything went to hell as a result of it. There's no logical progression shown explaining why Luke would go from doing everything in his power to save his friends and redeem his father to attempting to kill his nephew before he actually fell and turning his back on his loved ones, leaving them to fight and die in his place. By definition of all the tropes I mentioned on their own pages he fits in perfectly, but you insist on complicating matters. He lost faith because of his own actions, we don't see why he took those actions. As I have said multiple times before, "offscreen" character development is not character development; this is a clear case of Not as You Know Them, which by definition makes it Character Derailment.

Edited by stankykong on Jun 2nd 2022 at 4:38:33 AM

The "specific types" are potential explanations, not "subtropes".

Then why does Not as You Know Them describe itself as a "Character Derailment trope" at the bottom of the description?

Because someone added that before our recorded histories, and nobody's bothered to remove it.

But yeah, an objective trope can't be a subtrope of Flame Bait.

Edited by WarJay77 on Jun 2nd 2022 at 5:45:15 AM