New Star Wars fans don’t see Luke Skywalker as the story’s hero – here’s why

A father who wanted to share the Star Wars experience with his son instead had a surprising revelation about the franchise’s storied hero, Luke Skywalker.

A user named CitizenKeen shared to the Star Wars Reddit that he was excited to share his love of Star Wars with his eight-year-old. While his son is a little young for the grimmer shows like Andor or The Acolyte, he has seen most of Star Wars.

This means his son grew up with the breadth of modern Star Wars, which spans a number of Disney+ live-action and animated series, including Ahsoka, Rebels, and Young Jedi Adventures.

However, he soon realized this came with a bizarre side effect. Apparently, his son views Luke Skywalker, the traditional hero of the Star Wars saga, as a minor side character in the franchise.

“I realized that, since he’s never seen Star Wars in theaters, his concept of the Star Wars universe is entirely dominated by screen time,” CitizenKeen revealed. “And when you compare the Original Trilogy to the run time of Rebels or Mandalorian or even Resistance, Luke’s barely in the Star Wars universe.

“He’s just this guy who’s in the old movies – barely seven hours – and then he makes cameos in other stories. At least Leia was friends with Ezra.”

It’s odd, but a completely true point to the state of Star Wars. For almost 30 years, Luke was the face of Star Wars, a central figure across all media tied to the film. Even books, video games, toys, and more prominently featured Luke as the heroic lead of the Star Wars saga.

But the new era is a far cry from the Star Wars of twenty years ago, when Luke boldly led a thriving Jedi Academy and his reach was felt throughout the Expanded Universe. The focus shifted to Luke’s father, Anakin, and to sequels that set up a world living with the fallout of Luke’s victory against the empire and failure as a Jedi leader.

With the new status quo, Luke exists as the heroic lead of a previous era. His importance to the original trilogy means he’s often doing other stuff off-screen for stories set around the original Star Wars, while later sequels sequester him in exile.

As a result, newer fans will more closely recognize him as a side character, given his most prominent appearances in new stories are as an exiled leader in The Last Jedi and Grogu’s abandoned master in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

While it has been a divisive choice for the smaller, more vocal aspects of the fandom, the changes put Star Wars in an interesting position.

The franchise is no longer slavishly beholden to its original hero or the trilogy that defined him. Projects that spread their wings beyond those films have proven to be incredibly successful with that younger audience.

“There’s an entire generation out there who are watching Star Wars on small screens and aren’t reading comic books or old novels about redheads, for whom Star Wars is defined by Ezra and Nubs and Groku, and that really blows my mind.” CitizenKeen points out to close his post. “The grognards are going to have a rough decade or three as these kids start aging into their own purchasing power.”

The latest Star Wars series to hit the air is The Acolyte, with new episodes airing on Disney+ Tuesdays at 9 PM ET. If you’re already caught up, you can read all about what a yellow lightsaber means or why fans think Sol will die.