Luke Skywalker: Hero or Villain?
Upon watching Star Wars: A New Hope for what has to be the 30th time in my 21 years of existence, I came to a realization: Luke Skywalker is not a good hero. I can put aside how annoying he is, as he points out that the thing covering his eyes is covering his eyes, or how he refused to call Obi-wan by his real name. My problem is with his actions.
People far more invested in the series than I have estimated the population of the Death Star at over 31 million people. That’s roughly around the population of Canada. These are stormtroopers, technicians, deck crew etc. Imagine even the Death Star Daycare workers who attended to the throngs of children living on the space station. It’s safe to assume that there is everything you could possibly imagine on the Death Star. Luke Skywalker killed ALL OF THEM, and the Rebellion put a medal around his neck for it.
Now I imagine that you thinking to yourself, “But the stormtroopers were clones!” I’m not going to touch on the issue of cloning and whether or not their lives are less important than others. Yet I would like to counter that it is widely noted that the ranks of stormtroopers had been swollen to include birth born recruits as well as conscripts. This means that these people were not inherently bad people. They were in it for the mortgage. I find it hard to believe that stormtrooper TK-547 was actually a bad guy. He probably had a family to support. His mother had probably fallen ill back on his home planet of Dantooine.
At this point in the article I would like to bring up the Nuremburg defense. A soldier cannot be held responsible for obeying the orders of a superior. In the case of Alderaan, 1.97 billion people were killed on the orders of Darth Vader (but it’s O.K. because he gets redeemed in the end #worsethanluke #runsinthefamily).
The way I see it, there is only one thing that was worth removing from the universe: the lack of safety installations on the Death Star. Anyone else notice that there is not a railing in the giant chamber that the planet-destroying laser passes through?
Braden Jones
your insane. lyke skywalker is the hero our the universe. we should be taking him everyday we have a nice habitable planet.
if Darth vader had his way, well all be dead. Just sayin