Thread by @jere7my

Posting this again because people keep bringing it up: “that line” is older than Empire.

This has kicked off a little, and as a result I've gotten some responses along the line of "Okay great, but Rose's line was still stupid." I can tell you: not only was it not stupid, it's been a significant theme for all of Star Wars, and I've got the receipts. A THREAD.

The idea that your actions can be corrupted by your motivation isn't a new concept in Star Wars. Hate corrupts. Anger corrupts. That's Jedi 101. If you are acting from a place of anger and hate, you're being reckless, with your own life and with others'. It colors every decision.

The prequel Jedi were solid on that half of the equation. Where they fell down was the other half: SAVE WHAT YOU LOVE. They counseled cutting yourself off from attachment instead. That left Anakin vulnerable to manipulation: to save what he loved, he had to turn to Palpatine.

This remained true in the original trilogy. Luke insisted on rushing off to save his friends, he insisted he was going to save his father, but Yoda and Obi-Wan kept telling him to cut those attachments. Don't give in to hate, but hey dude don't save what you love either.

What Luke did, what no other Jedi was able to do, was insist that he could save what he loved without giving in to hate. He suffered temptation, but then he threw away his lightsaber to save his father — and, incidentally, the Rebellion. Everything he loved.

This prompted his father to make exactly the same choice: to save his son, whom he loved, instead of fighting what he hated. This was a 180° turn from what happened last time he fought someone he loved: he had to embrace hate to do it.

The idea of the hero rejecting anger to win is a little radical. It's the opposite of the usual trope: the bad guys are REALLY in trouble when the good guy finally gets mad. The gloves come off, boy howdy, and it's extremely satisfying for the audience. Star Wars inverts that.

That's why it's a bit frustrating for some people. They're denied that moment of catharsis, of righteous anger. I felt robbed when I was eleven, watching RotJ, and didn't get it 'til later. But that was long enough ago that people aren't primed for it in the new Star Wars movies.

The most radical thing @rianjohnson did was take the rules of Star Wars seriously. Instead of treating "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack" as ignorable Jedi flavor text, he took it as a given and built on it. That gave us Luke's triumph on Crait.

And he took that rule that really only applied in the rarefied Jedi realm and brought it into the messy military actions of the Resistance. He said "Hey, if the Jedi are the good guys, those rules they have should apply to ALL the good guys." Rose was the one who realized that.

Finn was acting out of anger and hatred, which made him reckless, unable to hear that it was too late. He wasn't thinking about saving the people he loved, he was thinking about hurting the people he hated. That never pays off in Star Wars. Rose saved him from wasting his life.

(It's maybe interesting that the audience also has trouble hearing that it was too late, despite all the cues in dialogue and visuals that Finn would have been a mosquito on the windshield. We also want to see the First Order given a black eye; we're in the cockpit with Finn.)

So Rose is summing up one of the deepest morals of Star Wars when she scolds Finn for giving in to hate instead of letting himself be guided by love. It's not about whether he would have succeeded; it was that he was letting anger drive him, which corrupts the result.

Two addenda:

One, character dialogue, even from protagonists, is never gospel truth. Rose might have been wrong. She's expressing a theme, but just because somebody says something it doesn't mean they're uttering a truth about the universe.

Two, none of this justification matters if you found the line goofy or cringey or cheesy. That's a valid reaction, and you're welcome to it. I would just ask you to remember that Star Wars is fundamentally earnest, and that can read as cheese in a cynical entertainment market.

Earnest is not bad. It has a place in romantic space pulp fantasy, even if it sometimes sounds tinny to our jaded ears. Star Wars consciously draws from an older, less cynical era of film, and that's one of the things I like about it.

That is all. May the Force be with you.

P.S. It's instructive to look at Holdo's sacrifice in this context, too. She didn't say "Grr, I hate Snoke, he's going down." Leia would've stopped her if that were her mindset. She sacrificed herself to save what she loved. (The actions of Poe and Paige are left as an exercise.)

P.P.S. And Obi-Wan, who, at the end, against all Jedi teaching, sacrificed himself to save what he loved. And Luke, who followed in his footsteps, and became more powerful than we can possibly imagine.

(Okay, NOW I'm done.)