Thread by @jere7my

This meme got (rightfully) dunked on on Star Wars Twitter a few days ago, but it taps into something that's been rolling around in my head for a while: the transition from pulp heroes to modern heroes.

The pulp heroes of the serials that inspired Star Wars start out heroic and don't change much over the course of their stories. We don't see Flash Gordon or the Lone Ranger learning to be heroes. George Reeves' Superman and pre-Craig James Bond start and end as paragons.

The pleasure in these stories comes from watching an ultracompetent hero go through their paces; we don't want to see them learn or stumble, we want to see them steadily overcome the odds with style and grace. It's satisfying, though sometimes dismissed as juvenile or simple.

George Lucas turned this on its head by welding the Hero's Journey to Flash Gordon. The Hero's Journey is all about changing, growing, starting out callow and naïve and ending up as a hero. It's a *journey*. Luke Skywalker isn't a hero when he starts out; he's barely competent.

Because the story is the journey, it ends just as the hero attains pulp hero status. Luke turns off his lightsaber and the story ends. We didn't get weekly serial episodes of Luke being a master Jedi, that base-level satisfaction of competence and success Flash Gordon gave us.

When we meet Luke again in TLJ, he's again in a position where he has to grow, to learn the lessons of an older man — which from my POV means he gets a better story, but in the modern sense. He's not filling that pulp competent-hero serial fantasy the ending of RotJ invited.

This isn't limited to Star Wars; it's a sea change in how pulp heroes are presented. Craig's Bond goes directly from getting 00 status before Quantum of Solace to dealing with aging & obsolescence in Skyfall. The ramps up and down are the story rather than the competence plateau.

My wife, a big LotR fan, had trouble enjoying the Jackson films because all of the romantic heroes were turned into modern heroes — they all had arcs, character issues to overcome. Book-Faramir is the perfectly noble knight; movie-Faramir is flawed, suspicious, harsh.

I'm probably going to show my comic history ignorance, but I think Spider-Man marked the same transition in comics — Stan Lee created a hero who was figuring things out, who in the beginning wanted to be part of the Fantastic Four but wasn't good enough. He wasn't an uberhero.

And in the MCU we mostly see stories of characters in transition, with arcs, becoming heroes or overcoming personal flaws, instead of riding that plateau of excellence. Zack Snyder's Superman is an extreme example, a paragon of truth and justice given a dark edge to overcome.

Most of the static competence we have in nominally adult heroes these days comes from the morally gray ones, the Batmen and the Johns Wick. If they don't have arcs, per se, it's because their modernity comes from their constant internal conflict. They're not shiny.

So modern fans of pulp heroes keep seeing them brought to the verge of what they want to see, then jumping past it to their decline. In Star Wars, the Expanded Universe satisfied that hunger, giving them endless stories of Master Luke being powerful and competent. In canon? TLJ.

Enter the Mandalorian. Din is a classic, pre-Star Wars pulp hero, a guy who starts out competent and stays that way. His evolution is below the surface, as he learns to be nurturing; if you just look at his actions, he's badass throughout. Not very Star Wars, but 100% pulp.

And Luke in the Mandalorian is the same. He's the "Luke in his prime" that RotJ teased and Rian Johnson jumped past. In the modern sense, he's not as interesting a character, because he doesn't move or grow, but for people who'd been waiting since 1983 for the drop it hit hard.

It's not a need I feel strongly, but there are times when I just want a simple story of someone awesome doing what they do well, and I get frustrated when stories skip past that part. The MCU Hulk bugs me — they gave Hulk a phobia in IW, then jumped to Professor Hulk. More smash!

Luke Skywalker has been important to me for forty-four years, and his portrayal in TLJ was deeply meaningful to me, as someone who's getting older and is still trying to overcome flaws he had as a kid. But I get why seeing Luke in the pulp hero mold in Mando meant a lot to some.