Sequelitis: Part 2: Character Arcs

Belatedly coming back to this series. There may be more, maybe not. Depends on how angry people on the internet make me.

--

 

The original trilogy's protagonists aren't the most complex, well-rounded, deep heroes in all of media, but they're also not static or two-dimensional. They grow and change over the course of the movies. Let's see how their individual plots have changed them.

 

Luke: starts out as an impatient farmboy who wants to be a pilot like his father. Eager for the call to adventure.

 

Winds up: a Force-user who's willing and able to resist the urge to fight when need be. Attempts, and eventually succeeds, to reach Anakin by appealing to the goodness within him.

 

Leia: starts out a leader and experienced diplomat.

 

Winds up: valuing the personal as well as the big-scale, admitting to her love for Han. Uses the Force to save Luke in Bespin, and in RotJ, is poised to have Luke pass on what he has learned. ("In time you will use this power too.")

 

Han: starts out a scoundrel, shoots first, in it for the money.

 

Winds up: feeling allegiance to Luke, Leia, and their ideals to return and save the day in ANH. Accepts carbon freezing rather than fight and risk the others.

 

And another couple "main characters":

 

Vader: starts out Force-choking people and being good at flying spaceships.

 

Winds up: killing the Emperor and sacrificing himself for his child(ren).

 

The galaxy as a whole: starts out under the thumb of the Empire, getting planets blown up and stuff.

 

Winds up: not that.

 

We can also examine the PT to see if it has similar narrative arcs. Luke and Leia are newborns at the end of RotS, so they obviously have no character development. Anakin's is dramatic, being moved by a desire for freedom on an individual and societal level, to affection for Padme and his mother, to jealousy of the Jedi Council, to Vader. Padme and Obi-Wan's arcs, I would say, are similar in scope if not as dramatic.

 

The galaxy as a whole falls to the Empire pretty quickly, I know one criticism that's been made is "there was only 19 years between RotS and ANH? Obi-Wan talks like it's been generations." Which I think is valid, but bearing in mind that Anakin Skywalker (whoever he was) as a former Jedi had to live long enough to reach Luke and Leia's conception ~20 years before ANH, I think it's not a terrible plot hole.

 

Han isn't in the prequels either, but he is in Solo (which has issues of its own), and I think it's reasonable to say that that movie didn't help his characterization as an arc. The young Han we see there is somewhat softhearted--most importantly, giving the coaxium to Enfys and her gang. Yeah, he kills Beckett, and I guess we're supposed to infer that this starts him on the road to being tough guy Han from the beginning of ANH. But I don't feel like it convincingly portrays that side of him overall.

 

Now, the OT guys are not the main characters of the sequels, and it's fair to expect that they should play more static supporting roles while the younger generation (Rey, Finn, etc.) have more developed arcs. But the ST /should/ take into account the evolution the characters have already undergone, and try and imagine what they'd become 30 years out rather than resetting.

 

Luke: contemplated killing young Ben|Kylo because of Force premonitions, then disappeared, didn't tell his friends where he was, gave up on the Jedi entirely. Insisted he wanted to come to Ahch-To to die, succeeded in technically dying there despite projecting himself across the galaxy to be "with" Leia.

 

Leia: is a general. Uses the Force, but seemingly by instinct rather than training.

 

Han: has left Leia, is back to smuggling dangerous creatures and crashing in pirate cantinas.

 

Anakin: offscreen; Kylo hero-worships him as Vader but apparently doesn't know or care where he eventually wound up. Luke uses "a Jedi trained Darth Vader, therefore Jedi bad, QED" as his argument to give up on the Jedi.

 

The galaxy as a whole: oppressed by the First Order (?), planets getting blown up.

 

What was the point of the OT, in this context? What did it accomplish? Are the heroes or the galaxy actually better off for having been through any of it, or would another thirty years of Palpatine in charge been at least as good for everyone/the characters we've come to care about than what we get?