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Tumblr crosspost (1 December 2020)
Mar. 9th, 2024 10:29 pmI was pretty meh about TROS and Not Happy about the treatment of the Skywalkers as a family generally, buuuut I’m also really ‘meh’ wrt the posts about how Leia’s true calling is politics and giving her Jedi training and a lightsaber reduces her agency and collapses her path into Luke’s because JJ/whomever didn’t respect her independently of Luke/the Jedi stuff generally/whatever.
IMO there is very little evidence in the films that Leia’s true calling is politics. ANH doesn’t tell us why she became a senator, but I think it’s pretty clearly implied that the main function was shielding her activities as a Rebel agent. She’s a major figure in the Rebellion, but in ESB what we see is her giving orders to troops (making it reasonable enough that she would end up as General Organa).
By ROTJ, she’s taking orders as part of a strike team (and seems much happier for it tbh). Yoda’s dying words to Luke are about training Leia. Luke tells Leia that she’s his twin and will learn to use her abilities, too, and she is at some level unsurprised. Near the end of the film, she begins to use her Force abilities consciously. It is entirely possible that all this would ultimately lead to actual Jedi training.
Sure, there’s a tradition of politician!Leia in the expanded universe, but directors/writers/producers/Lucasfilm powers have always been free to use or overwrite the SWEU as they see fit. And they’ve all done it, many times! George certainly torpedoed SWEU material whenever he felt like it, including SWEU material that had come from him in the first place.
That is, LF has set up this system where fans are supposed to accept the labyrinthine layers of SWEU canon, but the directors/writers et al. can do just about whatever they want with it. I’m not saying this is unproblematic, bc it’s actually at the base of a lot of my reservations about SW and canonicity. But in terms of precedent, JJ & Co were entirely within their rights to go, “huh, there’s a whole thing about Leia being trained as a Jedi in ROTJ and we can see it. Let’s do that instead.”
It’s fine if you like the pre-TROS expanded universe version better (I don’t know what acrobatics they’ve done to make it work currently) or think it really does make more sense for OT Leia’s character. But JJ & Co were no more beholden to it than the other writers and directors were to the SWEU material that they threw into the blender. It’s nothing new. And it’s not really fair to assume that Jedi trainee Leia is something that they made up out of the ether because they couldn’t see beyond Luke’s storyline, when it is explicitly and repeatedly brought up in ROTJ.
Tagged: #tros positivity #i guess lol #but seriously it is /entirely/ possible to see leia's jedi training as the natural follow-up to rotj #and they've all discarded eu stuff whenever they wanted so whatever
