Every so often sometimes I’ll see posts pop up on my dash talking about the scene in ESB where Yoda and Obi Wan are trying to keep Luke from flying off to Bespin after Han and Leia and everyone’s always lauding Luke for being a “TRUE hero who sticks it to the meanie evil Jedi who just want him to blindly obey their evil oppressive orders and let his friends die >:(”
And it’s like. Okay. Okay, that sure is a funny way of saying “Luke blatantly ignoring his masters trying to tell him not to walk into the Obvious Fucking Trap Vader is purposefully using his friends’ pain to set for him, walks smack into it anyway, fails to rescue one friend and needs to have the other rescue herself and then HIM after he gets his arm amputated and loses his lightsaber and nearly dies” but OKAY.
o k a y . . .
Okay but like the two options aren’t “it was a great choice with no flaws” and “it was a horrific stupid choice that shouldn’t have been made and ultimately was useless.”
In the scene on Dagobah, Obi-Wan and Yoda are in part talking about the practical “you’re not strong enough” bit, but like, they’re also saying that Luke needs to give up his friends for the greater good, that he needs to sacrifice the attachment of his friendship. “If you believe in what they fight for” Yoda says, “you will let them die, and finish your training.” Obi-Wan literally says “I don’t want to lose you to the Emperor like I lost Vader” - he is literally talking about his fear that Luke’s love and fear for his friends will turn into spiritual corruption which will lend to the Dark side. That’s just, textual. They aren’t saying “come and become stronger, we understand you’re afraid, but it’s a trap, there are ways to do this which are clever, we’ll make a plan.” It’s a really blatant ultimatum - either your friends or your soul.
And Luke says no to that ultimatum existing in the first place! This is one of my favorite scenes in ESB specifically because you’re seeing so many facets of Luke’s character - his brashness of rushing off right away, his arrogance in thinking he can take on Vader, absolutely 100%! But also, we’re getting a really lovely showing of - his refusal to sacrifice real people and real relationships in favor of The Cause (TM). It’s actually really important that Luke DOES go, because what he’s demonstrating is his deep seated belief that people aren’t expendable or replaceable, that The Greater Good cannot come at the cost of, as he sees it, the lives of those he loves. There’s a really fascinating and affirmative humanization he’s performing, where Yoda and Obi-Wan are sort of clinically evaluating Han and Leia’s lives in terms of costs and benefits and - entirely correctly!! - decide that in this calculation, in this moment, it’s going to be more strategically advantageous to let them die. But Luke is saying, your algorithm is wrong, it’s fundamentally flawed, they aren’t replaceable, their lives are worth saving because they are people, and because I love them, and that isn’t meaningless, it isn’t a trifle. Which like, is literally the entire emotional impetus behind the final scenes of ROTJ!! There’s a REASON Luke was able to bring Vader back to the light when no one else was. It matters that Luke has this personality core of choosing relationship over risk, because him making this choice with Vader is what sways Vader away from the dark side and against Palpatine. It matters that he ignores Obi-Wan and Yoda’s strategic calculation which leads to their ultimatum - especially because, his rejection of that ultimatum is, again, what ultimately allows him to help Vader become Anakin and thus end the war for good.
Anyways, obviously at the end of the day personal interpretation of art will always come up to the individual but like, what’s happening here objectively has really serious thematic weight and it’s not just, Luke being pigheaded and ignoring his Correct and Unbiased teachers because he thinks he can take on the universe by himself lol
