#we also had two characters who were two different brands of sheltered and unsocialized

[mearchy]

Nobody's gonna see this addition but I was thinking about it and if I remember it correctly I think early in Rey's ""character arc"" they had something kind of approximating this going on. With a really ebullient and kind person who is actually also a fucking weirdo due to social isolation, and is intensely powerful. She could've been so cool and abnormal. She looked normaler next to whatever the fuck was happening with old Luke. Which by the way, the level of crazy hermit he was at is so true and correct imo, it was just the sort of evil-leaning pessimism that sunk the character. Luke is supposed to be on his weirdo shit out in the ass-end-of-nowhere. In a dank cavern or a hut.... perhaps a shed. That's his natural habitat to me.

The best fics are the ones that recognize that although Luke Skywalker may APPEAR on the outside to be a normal friendly twink who happens to have cool powers, especially when contrasted with such ship partners as Boba or Din or even Han, he is arguably the scariest person alive in the galaxy around the prequel era. AND, crucially, he is also a fundamentally weird guy. This man was homeschooled on a rural farm his entire life and then apprenticed to a swamp gremlin who showed him how to tap into the cosmic power of the universe. He blew up the death star age 19, killing approx 2 million-ish Imperials. He is a vortex of Force power that can communicate with the ghosts of dead Jedi. He’s staring into the distance and mumbling to himself and doing Yoda aphorisms and casually pulling out the “yeah I could crush that guy into a paste with my mind (:” and nobody around him knows what to do with that. I think he is a character who has very little frame of reference for how a Jedi or a person in general is supposed to act and there is some thing about him that is by necessity really fucking weird and a little scary but he’s so nice that it can throw you off the scent a little bit. Thanks for coming to my TED talk