I think there's an additional fault line in the Star Wars Fandom that gets overlooked: between those who prize myth/metaphor and those who prize verisimilitude.
I would take issue with the idea that those things are incompatible or even necessarily different.
Yes, obviously if a viewer looks at ‘realism’ as an absolute good or a necessary quality in fiction, then that isn’t going to jive with a mythological story that’s meant to be a universal metaphor. But realism isn’t the same thing as verisimilitude and Star Wars is already patently not realistic and never has been. Nothing whatsoever about it works particularly well if you try to take it completely literally. Thence comes the people making jokes about Leia comforting Luke after Obi-wan’s death when her own planet just exploded, the ‘plot holes’ of when characters can sense each other in the Force, the nonsense that is the timeline if you try to actually figure it out, training and who should win in a fight, etc. Things that work emotionally and are not flaws become flaws if you refuse to address the story on its own terms.
Basically, someone trying to argue that sw needs to have punishment, death, and a pointless ending where the whole drama was meaningless suffering ‘because realism’ is interrogating the text from the wrong perspective and has, as a critic, no leg to stand on. It’s like complaining a rom com isn’t scary- it isn’t trying to be. It’s just not a valid position; you’re not criticising the thing which exists you’re saying you want a different thing.
The point of a story like this with heightened stakes and larger than life versions of ordinary ethical dilemmas and melodramatic exaggerated depictions of universal human relationships is to achieve, in an Aristotelian sense, exactly that mimesis which allows verisimilitude. By framing and aggrandising something that we recognise from our own lives, it becomes possible to infuse that experience with meaning. In the case of classical tragedy, catharsis requires both empathy and distance. The more you try to strive for total realism, the more false the construct of narrative will ring. Mythic storytelling is timeless and broadly appealing because the use of metaphor and allegory increases emotional verisimilitude. It conveys authentic truth we all recognise which is hard to communicate any other way.
When you break the story by throwing away the foundational themes which were the actual truth it was expressing and undermining its coherence by ignoring its conventions, you break suspension of disbelief. The audience goes ‘hey wait, that doesn’t make sense’ which reminds us this is all made up and we stop buying in to the world or its people. We stop caring. Suddenly interrupting the symphony with a bunch of traffic noise because that’s more representative of the sounds we hear every day than flutes and violins does not create a more immersive or moving performance. Cacophony without artificially imposed form cannot tell us anything, the communication (the substance and aim of all storytelling) between work and audience is severed.
People saying Ben has to die or be punished ‘because realism’ are not merely wrong in their conclusions, they’re wrong in every part of their premise. (To say nothing of how wrong anyone is to justify any part of tros as ‘realistic’ in the first place because, literacy aside, it is not. The human behaviour and alleged relationships depicted in it are less realistic than the physics.)
