First of all, thanks for including the excerpt from Aftermath, I've never read that before.
No worries, it's all new stuff made to tie in with the current trilogy, and its those things that are the crux of my argument that make it hard for Rey to be a Skywalker, because of everything being established right now.
The elements from the PT, especially the Jedi, are canon. Why are you saying they're irrelevant? The Jedi Order symbol, which (I believe) was first established in the prequels, is smack dab in the middle of the TLJ trailer. Of course it's relevant!
I'm saying its irrelevant because you're using what was established in the PT to justify or explain your opinions on the OT. And while that works
in theory, it doesn't work in reality. Because the fact of the matter is, when Lucas was creating the OT, these weren't things he was thinking about, they weren't established and thus are irrelevant to that material. They're retcons and since that material was made prior to the retcon, you can't used retconned material to explain pre retconned material, because that would be taking it out of context. Yes it is canon, but at the end of the day, that wasn't Lucas's intention at the time, it was added later. You can use retconned material to explain and understand things going forward, but you can't do it going backwards (in a real world timeline sense) because it doesn't make logical sense,
unless that retconned material was made specifically with that intention. Darth Vader being Anakin Skywalker was a retcon, Luke and Leia being twins was a retcon, which is why you can't use it as an argument to say Vader didn't sense Leia as her daughter. Because that wasn't the original intention, it was changed later, and thus there are going to be inconsistancies in what came before.
Just because it worked out for Luke doesn't mean he didn't break the Jedi code. Again, be blatantly defied his masters and went against their commands. They told him not to go because it's a trap, and because the empire is playing on his emotions. They were right. Luke was lucky enough to venture into that trap and not fuck everything up. Which is why I'm saying he's as far from the old Jedi as you can get; the vast majority of them would have obeyed their masters and followed the code and their teachings. Luke redefined what it means to be a Jedi and largely listened to his own instincts.
At the time, yes, but since then Luke has trained to become a Jedi, he's gone to their ancient temples, read their scriptures, he wouldn't bother with all this if he wasn't devout, and the fact that he is doing all this, going through all this effort and trying to create an order of Jedi, assumedly through the knowledge he's amassed from his research and travels that he's trying to be a true Jedi. There's also something that's implied in a leak that makes me support this idea, but I won't bring it up here.
I think that Luke's new order won't be a true Jedi order, but still an order for good, but in order to tell that story, his original order of Jedi has to be a more traditional one, for this to make sense. Again, or otherwise it wouldn't matter if he created a second order of non jedi or not, because he wasn't really following them anyway, and if that's the case why not just continue what you're doing.
As far as I know, only the Emperor (and Yoda) sensed someone specifically via the force who he was unaware of before. In ESB, he senses that the offspring of Skywalker cannot become a Jedi. And the only reason he was able to sense this was because of Luke's ability to destroy the Death Star, said in the dialogue.
Who else has done this?
In the Clone Wars, Obi Wan and Yoda sensed that Darth Maul had resurfaced after his "death". This could be a retcon yes, but it's okay in this instance because it's being used to explain material going forward, this was established prior to the sequel trilogy and was already canon by the time the sequel trilogy came around. The point is that Obi Wan and Darth Maul had some kind of connection through the force. As seen with those excerpts from the books, you naturally have a connection with the force with your family. The only instance that the skywalkers didn't have one was before the retcon that they were actually family. In the infamous edited interview people are passing around, Mark Hamil states that Leia, could have and would have contacted him mentally for help through the force. It's because they're both force sensitive and related, not just because they've met before.
Leia DID sense Han, she felt him die. She did this through the force.
I thought your point was that my quote was about Leia sensing Han, rather than Leia sensing Snokes influence through the force, which is the point I was making. Which goes back to my point that if Leia, a relatively weak force sensitive can do that, why wouldn't Kylo Ren or Luke, two far more powerful force users have some connection with a member of their family? It makes no sense.
Arguably, you could make it into the story, but the more they add details like this into the sequel trilogy, the less believeable it is to craft a story about it. I could make a story about Jar Jar binx pulling the strings the whole time, but it would be silly considering everything else that's established. Which is my point.
