crosspost: Luke's whining [July 2016]
Dec. 12th, 2018 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineThis was a response to another post, which I won't reproduce in its entirety—it was about the debates over Luke whining.
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I do agree that it’s important to show how far he comes, and that Mark absolutely played him as whiny here [when he complains about going to Tosche Station].
The reason the incessant refrain of “he’s so whiny” is so frustrating for a lot of us is that it’s almost invariably used to reduce his entire character down to that, even though it’s a tiny amount of his overall screentime. And that’s aggravating even if they were just reducing his entire character at this point to whining. And his short temper gets folded into “whininess” rather than allowed to be a legitimate aspect of his personality that is, to a large degree, his main struggle throughout all three movies.
And it ignores that, while his manner is petulant, he isn’t just a suburban teenager whining about chores. He lives in a desolate, desperate place controlled by crime lords. His home is in the middle of nowhere, leaving Luke isolated from his peers. Going into a small town to pick up power converters and briefly associate with people his own age (who mostly don’t seem to like him) is what goes for fun in his life. The farm is vulnerable to raids: his grandmother was tortured to death in one of them. He comes from a family of slaves; he’s the first Skywalker born free. He’s an ostensible orphan, fascinated and wistful about his parents, yet doesn’t know his mother’s name and can barely extract information about his father (which turns out to be lies, anyway). There is a lot that is genuinely terrible about his life, and his frustration at being constrained to that life and desire to escape are perfectly legitimate.
(I read somewhere that, in the version of the story that Mark was working off of, Owen was pretty damn shady—withholding Luke’s savings to keep him stuck working for free on the farm. That’s definitely not what the official story seems to be now, but at the time Luke was meant to be in an even worse situation.)
We occasionally go overboard in rejecting the Whiny Everykid Teen Always and Forever thing, but … that’s what it’s usually about.
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I do agree that it’s important to show how far he comes, and that Mark absolutely played him as whiny here [when he complains about going to Tosche Station].
The reason the incessant refrain of “he’s so whiny” is so frustrating for a lot of us is that it’s almost invariably used to reduce his entire character down to that, even though it’s a tiny amount of his overall screentime. And that’s aggravating even if they were just reducing his entire character at this point to whining. And his short temper gets folded into “whininess” rather than allowed to be a legitimate aspect of his personality that is, to a large degree, his main struggle throughout all three movies.
And it ignores that, while his manner is petulant, he isn’t just a suburban teenager whining about chores. He lives in a desolate, desperate place controlled by crime lords. His home is in the middle of nowhere, leaving Luke isolated from his peers. Going into a small town to pick up power converters and briefly associate with people his own age (who mostly don’t seem to like him) is what goes for fun in his life. The farm is vulnerable to raids: his grandmother was tortured to death in one of them. He comes from a family of slaves; he’s the first Skywalker born free. He’s an ostensible orphan, fascinated and wistful about his parents, yet doesn’t know his mother’s name and can barely extract information about his father (which turns out to be lies, anyway). There is a lot that is genuinely terrible about his life, and his frustration at being constrained to that life and desire to escape are perfectly legitimate.
(I read somewhere that, in the version of the story that Mark was working off of, Owen was pretty damn shady—withholding Luke’s savings to keep him stuck working for free on the farm. That’s definitely not what the official story seems to be now, but at the time Luke was meant to be in an even worse situation.)
We occasionally go overboard in rejecting the Whiny Everykid Teen Always and Forever thing, but … that’s what it’s usually about.