This is a false equivalency though because when Yoda and Obi-Wan went into hiding they had no choice in the matter. Their order was eradicated and the Empire was in control of the galaxy. Add in the events of Episode 3 and they were fugitives on the run for their lives when Palpatine declared them outlaws. No allies other than Bail Organa, no Rebel Alliance in existence yet, nowhere to go. Then they had to hide the space twins. Even more reason to stay hidden to keep those two safe.
Luke by contrast in TLJ left the fight after he failed his nephew but when the Republic was in power and the galaxy was at peace. Too much of a coward to face his sister and own his mistake he selfishly ran off to sulk on that island. Luke had plenty of allies who could have helped him to rescue Ben or at least make an attempt, especially when the First Order was a growing threat and Ben had turned to their leader Snoke. He just chose not to do anything about it until Rey showed up because, reasons......
Ah, but hold on. Again, remember that Luke is
already on "Sadness Space Island" at the end of TFA. JJ put him there and didn't bother to explain how or why he ended up there. Just "Luke went into hiding and we have to find him!" TLJ tries to take that situation and explain it, and I think the explanation works. It's just...not an explanation that people necessarily
like. It's not out of character, either. It's just a version of the character that many don't want to entertain or explore. Like, suppose if in TFA, the version of Han that we encounter is a guy who ****ed off to the far corners of the galaxy, found the dingiest, darkest cantina he could, and crawled inside a bottle. He didn't chase Chewie away, but he's hostile towards everyone else and just wants to be alone to drink himself to death. Now, would that be "out of character"? No, not at all. Han was a loner, and that aspect of his personality isn't something totally alien to who he is and who we've seen him to be. And the turning of his son to evil? I mean, I think it's totally understandable that that'd make you want to drown your sorrows and shame. But...that's really
not a version of Han that I especially want to watch. It'd be interesting in a sense, and probably could pull an amazing and compelling performance out of Ford, but...I don't wanna watch it. I think that's the same situation with Luke. His actions, as set up by JJ in TFA and contextualized by RJ in TLJ, make sense. They fit his character or at least a very sad version thereof.
Again, this is much more a failing of TFA and the entire structure of the ST more broadly, but we don't
see any of this stuff except for the flashback snippets in TLJ. But it's not hard to imagine that in the immediate aftermath of Ben's turn and the destruction of the Jedi Academy, that Han is gutted and takes off with Chewie, Leia turns ice cold and is broken with grief so she throws herself into her work, and Luke decides that he's a failure, the Jedi are failures, and so he's off to Sadness Space Island. That entire series of events makes perfect sense in the abstract...but we never see it, so it never
feels real. We see only the aftermath, and then only in the one film that bothered to try to explain and really grapple with the emotional consequences of any of this.
Again, TFA set all this up. Han's gone, Leia's busy being a general, Luke has disappeared to Ach-To, and none of them are out trying to redeem Ben. That's our
starting point. To the extent that the bullet points weren't already established, all TLJ does is try to take that situation and say "Ok, so, if this were to actually happen, with people whom we're going to treat like real characters, real people with real human emotions and not just caricatures or walking tropes, what would the backstory on all of this be?"
Again, touching back on the prequels, for a while I used to say that I thought TPM was a mistake of a film, and was utterly unnecessary. You could do pretty much everything TPM does in 3-5 minutes of exposition at the start of AOTC. And you could, but that wasn't the story George was trying to tell. For the story he wanted to tell, the story beats of TPM make sense to include. (Jar Jar is a different story altogether, but less said there the better.) More to the point, George actually bothered to
show at least some of what led Anakin to being the way he was. He
showed Anakin's attachment to his mother, his initial connection with Padme, his connection to Qui-Gon, his fear at stepping into the world of the Jedi. The audience is given a chance to see that and have it really register.
We never get that with the ST. We get a garbled Force vision by Rey in TFA, the Rashomon flashbacks of TLJ, and a little bit of exposition...and it just never sits right with people. But that was always the risk involved when you decided you
had to bring back the OT heroes, and when JJ set up the ST more broadly and TFA specifically by fracturing that family along with the Republic, that's what any future filmmakers (and audiences) had to deal with. That's not TLJ's fault. TLJ just takes that setup seriously instead of as something that can easily be brushed aside in favor of more rollercoaster antics and unearned emotional beats that are really based on referencing older media.
While it's not abundantly clear in the film. Luke wasn't supposed to have left any map. Artoo was supposed to have unknowingly downloaded his chunk when he was on the Death Star. And Lor San Tekka finds the piece he has, when Leia asks him for help finding Luke.
Uh...where is
that ever explained? Because if it's "in the novelization," well, again, that's really a flaw of the film. It works in the abstract because this is Rey's story and Rey doesn't know any of that stuff, so it's fine to not bother to have that revealed (because, again, it's all about Rey and not about "WTF why would Luke..."), but here on planet Earth where audiences come in not as a blank slate, TFA needed to do more heavy lifting to contextualize all this stuff.
I've said since it first came out that I was very, very unclear on the distinction between the Republic and the Resistance and why the latter even existed. The external explanations from the novelization make sense, but they feel like ex post facto justifications that JJ couldn't be arsed to deal with. This is nothing new, of course. He apparently did it with the NuTrek films as well, where the "red matter" or whatever was explained in comic books that JJ couldn't be arsed to deal with either.
And even then, the map stuff -- at least as you've explained it -- still doesn't make any sense. Artoo unwittingly downloaded the map to Ach-To from the original Death Star records?! Are you kidding me? And Lor San Tekka just happened to have the missing piece? Ok, so, then how did Luke get there in the first place? How'd he learn about it? And why the hell would a giant battlestation designed for terror and planetary destruction....also have Jedi maps-to-the-stars programmed into them that some droid could randomly and accidentally download? I mean, that has got to be one of the dumbest retcons I've ever heard.
So where did all the pieces originate from in the first place then? And a Droid " unknowingly " downloads a part of it? Obviously, recalling Leia putting the stolen plans in R2-D2 in ANH. How did it get on the Death Star? There are too many questions to check off to just assume that Luke didn't leave a map to his location or else why would even one exist to begin with? I can just hear Luke's reasoning..." I'm endangering the mission, even my father could read my thoughts...I'm going to go as far away as I can so Snoke can't link me to anyone I love...so I'll sink my Xwing in the ocean so they can't track me with this " map" that exists to my location, defeating the purpose that I just want to be left alone anyway to sulk then die and why not end the whole Jedi order as well because...I'm a failure anyway... my nephew is a bad boy and i can't change him...waaaaahhhh". I mean, none of it makes a lick of sense to me at all, mainly because TFA was just a parody of ANH and TLJ was a parody of itself with enough ego from the director to blind himself and the audience to what the very heart of Star Wars has always been about...
Yeah, the map stuff just doesn't make any sense. I think the rest mostly makes sense, but the map bit? I got nothing. The whole thing is just a macguffin to keep people running around, and nobody cared to explain "why" or "how" with it.
It's super contrived.... But the "canonical" answer is....
The Empire was supposed to have had a portion the map,(Kylo mentions this in the film) the Emperor trying to find all the old Jedi locations and secrets. When Artoo is interpreting the whole Imperial network, he's supposed to have just started downloading stuff to do with Jedi and all. Artoo doesn't know what he has until way later when BB-8 asks him.
The other chunk. Lor San Tekka find. Being a hunter of Jedi relics and all. He suspected where Luke had disappeared too, and believed his map would be able to lead Resistance to Luke. Of course that only turns to the remaining portion, that Empire didn't have.
Yeah, that's totally absurd. That's a straight-up retcon. And it still doesn't make sense, because then how would Luke know how to get there in the first place? If Lor San Tekka has a portion, and Artoo has the rest, then Luke doesn't have a complete map, and so he
should have no idea how to get there. Otherwise you have to start saying "Oh, well, actually Artoo downloaded the whole map, and Luke deleted it, but...uh...he left a part of it because...erm...he's....bad at deleting stuff from Artoo's memory? You know. Boomers and technology, man!"
Idk, if I have to read a book after the movie is over to understand everything then doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the movie itself? We never had to do that with the OT. In fact, look how long it took in between the OT and PT. By the time the PT got to us to " explain everything " it actually did nothing in my opinion to enhance any of the OT...it simply tried to fill in gaps and explain things that to me, didn't need explanation. The ST, TLJ especially, is a botched mess and , along with Indy 5, will be 2 nails in the Lucasfilm coffin. It neither explained, or enhanced anything, it simply robbed heart and meaning out of the OT. We will never convince each other...lol, and that's ok. I like you man!!
While I agree that needing a book to (poorly) explain this or that part that's never explained, I disagree a little with the comparison to the OT. The OT started us in a world where we had zero context and thus zero reason to question anything. Everything we get we can take at face value. Every explanation is treated as true, everything seen is treated as accurate. Luke serves as a quasi-audience surrogate because his experience of learning about the Jedi and the Force and such is our experience. The film doesn't need to show us how the Senate works because that doesn't matter because this is just Luke's story and what happens to him is what matters.
With the ST, they tried to do this again with Rey. Once again, she's just some kid on an outer-rim planet with no connection to the wider galaxy, who gets swept up in events larger than her and has to answer the call to action. So, once again, we're set to experience the explanations of the galaxy and such through her...except that our starting point as an audience is vastly different. We come in -- even the least fanatical most casual viewer -- with at least
some understanding of the story now. We know the Rebels defeated the Empire and presumably set up the Republic. We know Luke was probably gonna train some Jedi. So......why the hell is everything broken now? How'd it get like that? You simply can't "well there's a novelization..." your way out of providing important context like this when people are starting a
sequel rather than a first chapter. You can't rely entirely on "We'll tell the story as we go along."
At the same time, you had to diminish the OT heroes in order to create drama necessary for new heroes to rise. Otherwise, there's no stakes. The only other option is to fling the story waaaaaaay into the future to essentially be a vaguely familiar
setting, but with all new characters and specifics about how the universe works. That's what I would've done. OT heroes are long dead, Luke appears as a Force ghost or holocron projection (or both), new Jedi, new bad guy Force users, new galactic threat, new heroes, yadda yadda. You still get blasters and spaceships and such, but you leave the OT alone for the most part.
