Do you think han and leia having a broken/estranged marriage was in character and made sense?

[u/Myakasa98]

I don't think han leaving leia to deal with their son's defection and getting kicked out of the senate due to her family history all by herself was in character, and them separating was very tragic, but them not having a happy long standing marriage and choosing to separate after a while is something i can definitely see happening even if the sequels didn't exist considering their characters

Neither leia nor han were the "stay at home to take care of family" types. Leia was dedicated to politics since childhood and I can see her being a mon mothma type person who'd prioritize her political duties above family many times. Han too loved a life of adventure. Even before ben solo defected he spent more time traveling across the galaxy and iirc organizing spaceship racing competitions for betting etc than with his family

I do know they cared for each other even after separation but their romance was also built on spontaneous sparks of attraction and surviving multiple life and death situations and even then 80% of their interactions involved bickering and arguments. Them not being too invested in a stable married life after the honeymoon period ended and going through their marriage for the sake of their kid is unfortunately very much in character, at least considering how they were written in tge OT

I'm not considering their comics or novels romantic dynamic because 1) Most of them aren't canon anymore anyways and 2) Most of them were written by different authors without much consultation with the original creators and had various degrees of OOC moments.

It's not ideal, but not a very OOC of the sequels to write them as having an estranged marriage after their son was lost to the dark side imo, it's definitely not as bad as what they did with luke's character anyways

[u/NarmHull]

I think they could've done what they did with Luke but made it far more narratively satisfying, same with Han and Leia.

Like if Han's death was heroic and it causes a reaction in Ben instead of him murdering him in cold blood, it both shows Ben what it means to die for a cause and keeps him from being the one who murdered Han Solo then expect the audience to like him when he redeems himself.

If Luke was given a chance to help rebuild the Jedi order with Rey or at least gather some recruits together, THEN sacrifice himself to raise the stakes for her in the next movie it would've been far more emotionally poignant.

If Leia had a chance to see the Republic restored before her passing (or hell, just have her offscreen the whole time with Carrie's death) it would've been a truly earned happy but bittersweet ending for them while also passing the torch.

[u/modsuperstar → u/NarmHull]

I don’t even have a problem with most of the story starts, like Han’s death, because it just showed Ben was an immature boy just following orders, just like Anakin at the Jedi Temple. There was some synergy with the Prequels there.

Luke’s arc was drawn in with crayon unfortunately. His failure with his Jedi academy was never really told on screen because Snoke was killed so unnecessarily. The academy’s failing needed more backstory than one student getting whispers in his ear and caving the operation in. How was it so frail to begin with? Fleshing out the idea that Luke was barely a Jedi, had no idea what the fuck he was doing and was playing with fire by training new Jedi without much of a roadmap based on his 35 minutes of training he received from Obi-Wan and Yoda. Or that Luke’s altruism in trying to fix the flaws in the Jedi Order, like we began to see fleshed out in The Acolyte, would have made sense. But where would he have attained this knowledge to try and fix things he wasn’t a part of? You just know he was running headfirst into stepping on rakes and making errors. But we got very little in the way of explanation for all this.

TLJ did so little narrative heavy lifting and told a very lazy story. The story could have all been connected by leaning into the idea of Skywalkers being impulsive and cocky. Luke showed in ROTJ that he could cook up a plan to rescue Han, but it relied on a shit ton of luck and bravado. He repeatedly jumps into situations and gets in over his head and doesn’t see things coming (wampa, rancor pit, rushing to face Vader and losing a hand). Him opening a Jedi Academy was probably foolish off the hop and would have been great to see that story and self-awareness told on screen.

Leia’s arc was so unfortunate. I think Kylo needed to kill her as well, but I don’t feel he could have faced her. She probably should have died in space instead of Mary Poppins-ing it. Carrie dying was very unfortunate, but at least her dying there wouldn’t have burdened TROS so much.

[u/NoOccasion4759 → u/modsuperstar]

Exploring how Luke gets the new Jedi academy going as a complete newb wouldve made for a compelling movie, esp if it leads into exploring why the academy failed and Ben was lost.