The entire arc of the Star Wars saga bends to being a story about the power of love, and it is in precisely that area that the sequel trilogy fails to deliver in the final movie, removing the coherence for the entire saga. An essay in tweets.

I’m not breaking new ground in stating that the first 6 movies deal with the fall and return of Anakin Skywalker. But it’s love that causes both of these actions. Part of the failure of the 9th movie is its break from the theme of love conquering all.

Looking individually at ANH, it’s the one that deals with love least. It is about adventure, identity. It’s the hero’s journey. The friendships formed are about it: companionship saves the day in the end. But later movies address/amend this.

Upon the introduction of Darth Vader as Luke’s father in ESB, the story shifts radically in the direction of familial love. In the background, you have the romantic love between Han and Leia. In ROTJ, both forms of love are spelled out plainly.

Only by the love he has for his son can Vader break from the Darkness and stop the emperor. The ultimate act of heroism, killing Sidious, is done by Vader, but love for his son was the impetus.

The arc of the Prequels reinforces this, and perhaps what I found most interesting was the degree to which love is the focus of these movies.

When Vader announces to Luke that he is his son, something that is reinforced by ROTJ, you learn, at the most, that Vader had an affair with a woman resulting in not just Luke, but a twin sister, who barely remembers her mother.

The revelation of the prequels is that it wasn’t a one-off affair Vader had forgotten about! It wasn’t just a distant girlfriend who he was separated from by the war so he never heard about her pregnancy. You meet Padme, a whole-ass QUEEN.

Anakin was in love. They snuck around and got MARRIED.
You can argue about the quality of the PT, but this is what stuck with me when I was younger; Vader had a family with his wife.

He had anticipated the birth of his child(ren) to such a degree that he would have done anything to protect his family. Seen as a whole, that is a beautiful, tragic love story made into a comedy by the power of love undoing the sins of the father.

The third trilogy would then unpack the generational trauma, right?

TFA deals with love more directly than ANH. Rey and Finn find a deep friendship. But the big love story is Han's sacrifice in an attempt to save his son. It's a painfully beautiful subversion of ESB.

In TFA, love is strained and broken (Han and Leia) but still a powerful force. TLJ hammered this point home by further subverting the original trilogy.

TLJ succeeded for me because it brought home the point that love is the motivation for the whole saga.

Rey and Kylo are a "taboo" love story, contentious because the hero should not empathize with the villain. But she does, and unlike Luke and Vader, she has no investment in this man; she merely sees her own pains in him.

Rey and Ben’s arc is about the power of love and understanding to change hearts. Ben turns against his master when Rey’s life is threatened because he believes she will join him, and she goes to him because she believes he will turn for her.

It’s an update of the Vader/Luke ESB scene, but Kylo is offering Rey to rule the galaxy with him as partners, something she has no interest in. They find themselves at an impasse. Even if you don’t ship it, the tension is fantastic.

"It's not destroying what we hate; it's saving what we love" is corny, but it's a powerful message that actually summarizes the PREVIOUS TWO TRILOGIES.

Luke does not defeat Sidious; Vader does. But he is able to do this because Luke would not give in to hatred and fear and kill Vader first.

The love arc from the original trilogy was really strong in the Last Jedi, which explains why a lot of fans are drawn to it. The emotional storytelling is an encapsulation of the rest of the saga.

This is the hard part of the essay because this is where I get super negative about the last movie, so I'm trying to not be sassy about it and stick to my thesis.

Episode IX lacks this emotional storytelling, however. I think you get some really powerful moments of love in Ben’s vision of Han, but given that Han is no longer active in the story, it’s a bit less impactful than the scene as it played out in TFA.

Rey’s relationships are much more scattered; she has secrets and she’s not confiding in anyone. She rarely talks with Finn. She fights with Poe. Rose is cut out. Leia is not an active player. Luke is
...blue, their conversation was only exposition.

The closest we are treated to a love arc is, again, Rey and Ben, but the emotional dialogue is replaced with terse exposition, and it’s not until she stabs him in one of their many narratively confusing fight scenes that she confides her feelings for him.

Rey’s relationship to Palpatine does not work as Luke’s and Vader’s did because Luke had time to process the reveal (remember, he starts in the denial stage of grief in ESB) and in ROTJ he approaches Vader bitterly calling him “father” in some of my favorite dialogue in ROTJ

Rey is just told she’s a Palpatine, and, like the reveal of Palpatine’s return, it comes out of nowhere with no real reactions to it.

She already accepted the family reveal in the last movie; the appendices to this reveal do so so so little for Rey’s character arc because she’s not allowed to react to it.

the narrative is focused on convoluted B-plots that Rey finding out her parents’ identities could have been a much more defining moment, but it’s skipped over.

Then flipping around and fighting Palpatine at the end, her strength comes not from love or willful pacifism, but from...an extra lightsaber? The spirits of the force?

They yeeted Ben Solo into oblivion for this fight because they needed bigger drama, I guess, but if they were using the narrative properly, it would be because the two of them, like Vader and Luke, united together to fight Palpatine, Ben having already turned to the light

And I mean they DID do that, but it was for a few seconds before he sucks their life force, because they are now punished for their heroism. Great heroic turn Ben! Now you must fly.

But the fight didn’t even need a plurality of sabers because, looking back at the Luke/Palpatine fight, he casts aside his weapon because he COULD NOT KILL his father. This fight takes strength from the fact Rey fights on him with TWO sabers now.

Earlier in the film, Leia uses the last of her strength to distract Ben, which leads to him getting stabbed by Rey, who then heals him. So he turns around and heals her from this weird death that makes no sense.
so the sacrifices for love are kind of eroded by this movie

And then Ben fades into the Force, with little build up and no time for the narrative to react. There’s no moment of mourning.
People assure me it’s a parallel to Vader, but it’s the worst I have ever seen because it’s actually just a more literal, sadder repeat of Vader

Ben, who Adam Driver admitted he always played younger than his own age, is a young man who dies by a strange machination of the plot, and rather than an emotional farewell and a visit from Anakin’s ghost, we literally never see Ben Solo again. Anakin's grandson disappears.

We do see ghosts! Leia and Luke! Who, (unpopular opinion time), did nothing to indicate they actually loved Rey. At no point would I describe their mentorship as the same parental love we’re expected to feel.
Also, they’re siblings? Why are they her acting parents here???

Star Wars is an epic saga of the power of love conquering evil, or so it is when the first 8 movies are seen together.

Episode IX had a lot of issues, but its neglect of this key element iof the transformative power of love is what really makes it feel so disconnected for a lot of fans, putting aside biases of character/ship preference

Nothing is resolved. The Skywalkers were doomed to repeat mistakes and get punished for it. Palpatine won. Rey is still an island, with none of her friends knowing how she cried because she found someone who understood her profound loneliness.

People tell me that Mandalorian is fixing things for them, but this deep dissonance in the narrative of SW is impossible to reconcile within the current franchise.

The rebels died for nothing, because the same power vacuum that exists after the empire fell is back. There was no resolution to that movie.

Mando is no substitute for the triumphant love story that crossed the first two trilogies and even arguably into TLJ. And the worst part is that I don't think Lucasfilm cares or even wants to fix it.

But the heart of the saga was what drew a lot of fans in. The love at the center of it all was stripped away for generic action and Marvel-calibre storytelling, and that's not a compliment.

I want this to get better. I want to love Star Wars again. But it's going to take a lot of work to return to the galaxy at the end of this series and restore that wonder, that hope, that love into the narrative. Because ghost twins isn't it.

Fin(n)