Help, after a discussion with @shadowssuitme I’m now trying to think of theoretical situations in which both Luke and Leia turn to the dark side together, that don’t involve them having basically been raised as Sith/by Vader.
Here are what I’ve thought about so far. I’d love to hear some ideas from you guys.
1.) Leia is on her deathbed and Luke basically goes berserk and kills a bunch of people to give her their life force. He can’t come back from that sort of dark side use, and after a lot of internal angst I could see a situation where Leia would join him. I don’t see them ruling the galaxy together with an iron fist, but I could see them developing really unhealthy tenancies, especially if Luke has to continually kill to keep Leia alive or something. (Though, as with the one I’m going to detail below, I feel like saving her would also potentially bring him back...)
2.) Another potential is that Luke thinks Leia has been killed and goes on a revenge rampage and turns to the dark side because of his despair/no one to stop him, only to later discover that she’s still alive and has been hidden/Force-blocked or whatever to make him think she was dead. But I feel like finding her alive again would bring him back to the light side, so I’m not sure it’d work.
3.) Leia loses Ben and that turns her to the dark side. Probably this wouldn’t work as a Kylo Ren thing. It’d have to be a good, probably young Ben, and it’d have to be in a completely horrible way. I think this is a hard sell because she’s already been through so much and never even shown any cracks of turning, but I think I could see losing Ben in the perfect storm of things being enough to push her over. I personally think in this situation that Luke would be able to bring her back, but if that’s not possible I suppose I could potentially see him turning to the dark side to protect her/support her.
All three of these scenarios, and similar ones I’ve devised, all tend to feel a bit cheap though, or require a situation where one of them couldn’t bring the other back to the light. I think it could very interesting to explore an alternate universe where they both fall to the dark side together (or separately so long as the end result is them both there), and also exploring how Han would behave/react to that situation. Han, by his very nature of not being Force-sensitive, can never turn to the dark side. He can be evil, of course, but he cannot lose himself in the way that people who turn to the dark side seem to lose themselves. So it would be interesting to see if he alone could bring them back, and if not, if he could still survive with them as dark side users.
I’m mostly approaching this with a Luke/Leia/Han perspective, but even without that angle it’d be an interesting thought.
I know it’s a horrible thought, but can any of you come up situations where both Luke and Leia could fall to the dark side and not be in a position to redeem each other? I kind of love the idea of a Luke/Leia story where they say, “Fuck societal norms” and are dark side, are openly in love with each other regardless of people who oppose incest or the idea of Vader’s children having children together, and whose dark side actions tend to be more along the lines up, “Fuck the Republic, fuck your rules, fuck your conventions and trade contracts and rules of engagement, there are slaves being tortured on these planets and we’re going to kill anyone who opposes us from saving them no matter what side you’re on.” But I’m just not sure how you’d get them there.