Luke Skywalker Character Derailment

Wow, somebody fucked up. If Not as You Know Them is a subtrope of Character Derailment, then it should be on the Flame Bait index and dewicked. It's older than our current edit history, so it wasn't launched recently as a non-subjective version of CD, and therefore it must have been overlooked.

It is generally nonsensical for subtropes of subjective tropes to be objective.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2022 at 5:47:19 AM

Double post: In private discussion among the moderator team, it was suggested that Not as You Know Them could be removed from being a subtrope of Character Derailment and could instead be listed as a cause of it.

In fact, the "Specific types" section is highly misleading because it says that all examples of those tropes are implicitly also examples of Character Derailment, which is completely wrong. The relationships here are being misused. Those are not subtropes, but are instead potential triggers for a character to fall into this trope.

If we define Not as You Know Them as, "The previous story ended with Sue acting in a certain way, but when Toby goes to see them in this story, Sue is suddenly behaving differently," which certainly sounds like a trope, then it could give rise to complaints of Character Derailment, but does not have to.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2022 at 8:19:18 AM

My thoughts on the subject is that I was okay with the idea of Like feeling despair and going into exile over his mistakes, whatever they might have been. The thing to recognize is the movie was crafted around him having to confront a colossal failure, learning to trust the next generation and chose his own destiny as a hero. That is a clear, textual character arc in the film, it doesn't end on his worst moment being the sum of who he is. That said, I took issue with a large list of presentation problems and can understand the backlash ^note He does everything he can to ignore Rey's existence even when right in front of him and never really comes around to her personally, Yoda is the one to make him rethink his conclusions, which harms his ending affirmation of her taking on the Jedi mantle. He has committed himself to death in exile, which makes for a dramatic reveal but his reasoning sounds less like a discovery he has made through personal study/insight and more like a critical analysis of Star Wars as movies, and Rey responds by recapping events he was a part of. And a few more if we really want to go down this path.

So I guess that is part of the question when it comes to Character Derailment, if they have a clearly designed character arc that is intended to bring them full circle it's more of a bump in the road or showing cracks in a facade rather than derailment. Obviously, there are limitations to that reasoning (you can't be an All-Loving Hero, kill children as part of a story arc, say oops and maintain your moral standing), but the core idea remains.

Oh, I have lots of thoughts about how it was presented in the film, but I am concerned right now about the technical aspects of troping this. Since it is already listed under Not as You Know Them and that is listed as a subtrope of Character Derailment, it is already correct according to our subtrope-supertrope handling rules. Whenever there is a more applicable subtrope, an example goes there, not on the parent.

We are looking at whether Not as You Know Them should actually be a subtrope of Character Derailment over in the Description Improvement thread.

So it all depends on whether we decide to keep Not as You Know Them as a subtrope or not? I suppose that's fair.