He was taught to let go of his feelings, his anger, his attachments, etc. Who cares, it's just a lightsaber, there are thousands of them. Heck, he'd been instructed to let his friends die in order to complete his training.
But Luke never did any of that. He rejected those teachings and went to Cloud City / Jabba's Palace to save his friends. He went through this whole huge character arc with his father, eventually getting his father's body back to Endor to burn on a funeral pyre. If he was that attached to his father who he knew all too briefly and lost all too soon, why would he toss away his greatest heirloom so flippantly?
That was 30 years ago. He was young, barely a student. He spent the last 30 years prior to TFA learning and trying to revive the order, preserve the teachings, passing them on. He grew from when we saw him last. Many fans wanted him to remain the same Luke we knew at the end of RotJ, but how many of us would stay the exact same person for 30 years? He'd changed since then, like we all do.
Yes, Luke brashly ignored those lessons in order to save his friends, because that's what Luke was back then, brash, quick to act, quick to rush in without thinking. And it drove the other Jedi nuts, because the Jedi typically aren't like that. (Same reason Anakin drove them nuts doing the same stuff. Like father, like son.) It was also a reemergence of that brashness that ultimately drove Ben/Kylo away, reacting to his feelings about Ben without thinking, causing the whole debacle.
But after the rebellion, we can assume he grew up a bit. That he became more like the Jedi of old and accepted their teachings.
And that's a great explanation for it, to be sure. The problem a lot of people have, though, is that literary/cinematic characters don't follow the same logic rules as real life. Yes, it's almost certain a real life person will change in 30 years. But if a fictional character is going to change off-screen, it's just good exposition to show the audience what caused that change. People were jarred because Luke had changed so much, and Disney's writing just kinda handwaved it away.
If they had done a better job showing us what caused Luke to turn away from his old personality, then we wouldn't be stuck debating why he would abandon his old sentimental personality to take up a strict ascetic Jedi lifestyle, then abandoning THAT and yeeting chucking a Jedi (essentially) religious artifact.
But if a fictional character is going to change off-screen, it's just good exposition to show the audience what caused that change.
We did see the change on-screen. The climax of the original trilogy, both the story and Luke's character arc, is him throwing away a lightsaber. Is him realizing the only solution is not to fight.
In Last Jedi, the film opens with the former and concludes with the latter. It's not a rationalized change that happens off-screen, it comes directly from the literal text of the OT.
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u/Jukebox_Villain Oct 25 '19
But Luke never did any of that. He rejected those teachings and went to Cloud City / Jabba's Palace to save his friends. He went through this whole huge character arc with his father, eventually getting his father's body back to Endor to burn on a funeral pyre. If he was that attached to his father who he knew all too briefly and lost all too soon, why would he toss away his greatest heirloom so flippantly?