We’re all familiar with the scene at the beginning of ROTJ where Luke beats the mighty beast that looks like something out of space Jurassic park. It has a face that one might say only a mother could love.
Everything about this creature emphasizes how monstrous it is. There’s obviously the design, but there’s also the fact that it is Jabba’s method of destroying those who displease him. The horror is mild, but there are undertones of monster movie-esque themes in the scene. Luke waiting for the rancor to emerge from the shadows, etc etc. For all that, it’s typical action movie stuff, and it ends in a moment that the audience might find a little humorous. After Luke defeats the rancor in a Jedi hero moment, the movie turns to the rancor keeper – who cries over the monster’s death.
It’s a ludicrous contrast, and although perhaps a bit touching, more funny than anything else. Monsters are meant to be beaten – what else would you do with one? Even this monster had someone who loved him is the underlying message, but there is a little bit of “pet owner of savage dog” type thing going on. I would say it’s primarily meant to be humorous in the moment. After all, who would mourn the death of a brutal monster?
Fast forward to the last part of the movie, though, and all of a sudden…
Much like the rancor keeper, Luke is alone in his grief. A major theme of ROTJ is how solitary his journey is. He’s set apart from the others. Although I would argue the potentially scorching hot take that Leia would also feel grief over Vader (just an entirely different grief), Luke stands alone.
If we turn back to the rancor keeper and his grief for an attack monster now (notably, a monster kept at the beck and call of a corrupt ruler), it suddenly has a new light, and the question implicit in the moment – monsters are meant to be beaten; after all, what else would you do with one? – suddenly has a new answer.
«I used to bring Qui-Gon here as a boy. He was fascinated with this tree, having been born here on Coruscant, a planet of steel and stone. He knew nothing like it».
master and padawan antics between qui-gon jinn and his dutiful pupil obi-wan kenobi. raising a padawan hand selected by the cosmos to suffer inordinately aint much but it’s honest work
this is a (kind of) redraw of something I did years ago. a collage of qui-gon showing how much he cares for obi-wan for my own catharsis. Im not linking or showing the old one because I genuinely need people to stop perceiving it <3
“When I was your age, all I cared about was not starving. I was living in a hole in the ground, and a Jedi found me. She may have been desperate and ragged like me, but she told me I had potential. And that was…Well, she only taught me a little before they hunted her down. And they made me watch whilst they killed her.”
Just thinking about how, even in this Jedi’s darkest hour, even when she was as run thin and desperate as a starving kid on the streets, even when she was being hunted down just for existing, this Jedi still saw a starving kid and took him under her wing, still told him he was worth something, still taught him about not hurting innocent people.
This Jedi would have had so little left to her, but still saw someone she could help and took the chance. That this is who the Jedi are–even when they’re ragged to the bone, they still look to help others, they still look to care for a kid they find on the street that they can teach things to, they still care so much about a kid that probably had no one who ever cared about him before, that her effect on Jod’s life STILL shapes who he is. He tries so hard to be a murderous pirate who doesn’t care about anyone, but you can see that he never actually wants to hurt anyone innocent and even lets his plans go down in flames rather than truly attack any of the parents or the kids.
This Jedi may not have been with Jod for long, but even decades later, you can still see the echoes of how much she meant to him, how her loss shaped him, but also how her philosophy still rings in his ears.
