STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE -dir. George Lucas

Good night Luke…..

…

Good night uncle Owen….

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope 1977 | dir. George Lucas

Straight from Luke’s thoughts in NJO. Leia isn’t the only one that feels that way.

Star Wars (1977)

Happy Father’s Day to all the amazing dads in the galaxy far, far away

Star Wars Adventure in Beggar’s Canyon (Little Golden Books)

book by Jane Mason and illustrated by Gary Ciccarelli June 1998

(21-22 of 22)

STAR WARS: REBELS (2014—2018) OBI-WAN KENOBI (2022)

For 5 minutes each, write about 5 things a character loves

-don’t think too hard, just write and see what happens 

-when done, go back and expand on any interesting ideas

I must have been meant to do this tonight because I wrote 5 things for 25 minutes and it wound up being 500 words... for this guy of course.

Luke loves sand.  It cushions your fall when you take a tumble, it’s cool at night and warm in day.  It’s insulating and breathable at the same time.  It’s a part of everything.  Everywhere.  Sand makes up the walls of his home, the texture of his life, but it’s so much more than landscape and dwelling.

Aunt Beru coats the bowls of funnel flowers with sand to filter water into her cleaning basin—making the used liquid new again with just two trickling cycles.   It was her who showed Luke if you used the stuff to soak up spilled speeder oil in the garage, Uncle Owen would never be the wiser.  Aunt Beru also taught him sand could be as effective as water to get rid of stink.  A sand bath may not sound pleasant, but it removed grease and dirt, and most importantly—smell. No need to waste the sonic’s precious stores on a regular basis.

It has other purposes, more dangerous but just as practical.  Once, with Biggs on the outskirts of Anchorhead, they’d watched from a distance as desert bandits fought amongst themselves over ill-gotten credits. The one with enough brains to duck behind a wall of stacked sand emerged victorious, as his accomplices’ blaster beams scattered, unable to penetrate the natural barrier.  It was a frightening lesson.  Luke remembers.  Sometimes he checks for bags of it nearby when heading to a bad neighborhood.  Just in case.  Another time, he’d seen a guy throw hot sand in the midday sun in another man’s eyes, following accusations of being swindled at the market.  Wincing at the memory, Luke thinks he can still smell the scorched organs, hear the screams.

Luke doesn’t blame Tatooine for its environment—the ecological desolation was only skin-deep. Plenty of sentients thrived here, despite the challenges of life.  And sure, sand is monotonous, and boring, but it is also life-giving and powerful, that grainy, not-quite-powder, not-quite-rock stuff that decorates his homeworld and demands so much of its inhabitants.  Luke understands its beauty, appreciates it.  Sand is joy-giving as well as parching, able to be shaped, heated, etched, scraped, painted into so many amazing things.  

It isn’t enough to keep him here, of course.  Someday he’ll leave.  If not this season, the next, or the next.  There is a saying on Tatooine—“Time freezes in the desert.”  But Luke is sick of standing still.  Real life is waiting to begin, somewhere else, far far away.

Still... he’ll be back.  Luke knows that with the same certainty that he knows the northeastern #48 vaporator will malfunction at least twice a week.  It isn’t a bad thought, though.  Timeless is reliable.  Timeless is comforting.  And it is nice to imagine the day—Luke Skywalker’s long-awaited return to Great Chott, speeding over the Jundland Wastes in a new skyhopper to visit his friends.  Everything around him will be frozen in its desert biome, exactly the same as when he left.  

But Luke—he’ll be different.

Better, he hopes.

 In case it wasn’t clear, Luke’s five things he loves:

1.  Sand (so unlike his daddy! muwahaha)

2.  Aunt Beru

3.  Uncle Owen

4.  Biggs

5.  Tatooine

Day 19: Deadline

No! No, no, no, no, no! Luke’s fingers raced over the keyboard, aching already from the thousands upon thousands of words he’d written in the past few hours, but—no!

He stared at the chrono. Five minutes til midnight, standard Anchorhead time. Five minutes until he had to submit this assignment, but every other kid in the class seemed to be in the same boat and the website was bugging.

“No,” he muttered. And then the lights went out.

“Kriff!”

Power cut!? Again!? At least he’d have a valid reason, but the teacher would be really tired of hearing about little Luke Skywalker, the backward farmer, and how his homestead couldn’t get reliable power or connection—

“Luke?” Uncle Owen poked his head in the door. “You’re submitting your assignment, right?”

He wanted to cry. “Yes, but the power’s gone out—”

“Here.” And Uncle Owen handed him tools, and a key. It led to the room where the generator was kept. “I’ll help you. You think we can fix it in the five minutes before you have to submit it?”

Luke, despite the tension of the situation, smiled. “Yeah. Thanks, Uncle Owen.”

Owen ruffled his hair. “We don’t have time to waste on sentiment. Get to it!”

STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE (1977) dir. George Lucas

So one of the things I love about watching Star Wars: A New Hope after having watched all the other Star Wars movies is how… well… how normal Luke’s upbringing appears to have been.

It’s not just that he was loved. It’s clear that Breha and Bail Organa loved Leia immensely. But she was a princess functionally from birth, and then became a senator at–what? eighteen, nineteen, twenty? Something like that. She was much loved and much trusted, obviously, but her upbringing must have been… “unusual” would be putting it mildly. As a teenager she was learning statecraft and politics–and deception.

And their mother must have been the same way, queen from such a young age, raised and trained to rule. And their father–loved, yes, deeply, and I have no doubt that his mother did her best to protect Anakin from the worst parts of slavery–but he was still a slave, as was she, and there was only so much they could do.

But Luke! Luke got the gift of a perfectly normal childhood. All the jokes about Luke, the whining about wanting to go to TOSCHE station to pick up some POWER CONVERTERS–the snippy teenagery conversation he has with his uncle about waiting “a whole nother year????”–the shooting womp rats in his T-16 back home–the fact that left to his own devices, at the same age that Leia is deciding THE FATE OF HER PLANET, he’s still playing with model spaceships…..

…they’re all signs that he had a normal childhood. That he’s a normal eighteen, nineteen, twenty, whatever year old. 

I mean, he grew up in a situation where it was completely safe for him to whine to his parent figures. He knew that Lars and Beru wouldn’t make him pay for his “but I wanted to go to TOSCHE STATION” or for his “I want to go to the academy THIS year” or whatever. Unlike basically every other Skywalker ever he grew up without a ton of extra pressure, without a “oh by the way you’re going to be king of [planet]” stuff, without “also you’re the Destined Future of the Jedi.” They didn’t raise a legacy, or a scion–they just raised a child. (In point of fact, that’s why Yoda almost rejects him: he’s too old, and he was raised too normal.)  And since Owen and Beru obviously knew perfectly well who and what he was, that’s actually an astonishing accomplishment. They were delivered an infant who they knew had the approximate destructive power of a nuclear device, and they still raised him as… a kid, a child, a boy who they loved with the same mixture of exasperation and devotion as any parent-figures.

He grew up as a kid, with a gruff but loving uncle and a sweet-tempered aunt, he grew up skeet-shooting womp rats and hanging out with his friends in Anchorhead when he had an excuse to go into town–and it’s clear how safe he feels with them because he does whine and moan and have fits without any apparent worry that he’s going to pay for it later. He whines and moans in the way I did at that age: in perfect confidence that while my parents might temporarily snap at me, they would never hurt me, and they would always love me. And that all they really wanted for me was to grow up safe and happy.

tl;dr: Luke Skywalker: the last of the Jedi(?) but also maybe the first of the Jedi to grow up in a normally functional childhood.

(I also really, really want to see the story in which he grieves his aunt and uncle for more than ten seconds. Perhaps I will write it.)

Star Wars: A New Hope #1 (1997)

Luke back home where Owen isn’t dead // by Rudy Parfaite

I couldn’t let this one go without a drabble

He’d left without even saying goodbye.

Luke had sent a message home as soon as he was able, but by that point, there was no way for his Aunt and Uncle to respond back. After Yavin base was evacuated, the Rebellion had been constantly on the move. 

Even now he was supposed to be on his way to the Anoat Sector after the Rogues had completed their reconnaissance in the Savareen Sector. But Savareen was too close to Tatooine for him jump halfway across the galaxy and not stop. Try and explain.

Even as he flew over the Great Chott Salt Flats on the southern edges of Anchorhead, Luke tried to find the words.

Aunt Beru would forgive him. He knew that without a shadow of a doubt. She had always been the one to stand between Uncle Owen and himself. To push him to better himself and to understand that he wasn’t meant to be a moisture farmer. How he’d missed her quiet wisdom and calming touch in his chaotic life.

But what would Luke’s Uncle say? Who had tried to keep him grounded both spiritually and literally. Owen Lars was a man of few words who thought a man’s actions said more about a person than anything they ever said. What would he think of Luke’s actions? To leave and not return for years?

He hadn’t had much of a choice. Ben had said they needed to leave immediately and to return home might mean the Princess’ life. Everything the man he’d known as ‘that crazy old wizard’ had said was crazy, and insane, and unbelievable… and felt so right. Aunt Beru always told him to trust his gut. So he had.

By trusting his feelings, what Ben called the Force, he  saved the Princess, joined the Rebellion, and became a hero. But in doing so had the alienated someone he loved?

The flat, white, salt flats where giving way to the rougher terrain near the homestead as he reduced the X-wings speed. A few moisture vaporators passed by the cockpit but Luke didn’t noticed. His eyes were fixed firmly on the horizon, waiting for that first glimpse of what he hoped was still his home.

The dome of the homestead was just resolving itself through the heat mirages on horizon as Luke killed his thrust and brought the fighter closer via the thrusters. Setting down in a cloud of sand and dust, Luke sat in his cockpit and waited. He didn’t know just what he was waiting for, nevertheless, he was reluctant to pop the canopy and approach his old home without some kind of sign.

He still sat in silent indecision when a figure emerged from the stairs leading to the homesteads cooler, subterranean rooms. After squinting to confirm the person’s identity Luke quickly popped the canopy and was just as quickly blasted with heat, even from the setting Sun’s. Trying to ignore the heat, Luke told R2 to stay put and slid to the ground.

By this time Owen Lars was rounding the nose of the ship and stopped at the sight of him. 

Luke quickly removed his helmet and said, “Uncle Owen, I’m so sor…” He never got a chance to finish as his Uncle rushed to him and gathered him into a deep hug.

“You’re alive and safe, my boy,” Uncle Owen’s voice was think with emotion and Luke put his own arm around him. “That’s all that matters”