How Legends Luke Skywalker Shared A Sith Trait

'Good...Let The Hate Flow Through You.'

By Culture SlatePublished 4 years ago • 3 min read

What if there was a red lightsaber that was crafted and wielded by a character you would never expect? Star Wars Legends explored a storyline that took many fans by surprise. The person who created the red lightsaber? Luke Skywalker.

The defunct Star Wars Legends continuity depicted how Luke built a red lightsaber less than a year after rejecting the dark side and redeeming his father Darth Vader. In the current Star Wars canon, red lightsabers are traditionally associated with the Sith. If a character in Star Wars ignites a lightsaber and you are unsure which side they are on, take a look at their lightsaber. If the lightsaber is red, then the answer is almost always going to mean a Sith Lord or a dark side user. This is seen time and time again in the stories.

In the Star Wars Legends comic, Marvel’s classic Star Wars #96, Luke was battling the Dark Lady of the Sith Lumiya. She was probably the only Sith able to succeed Emperor Palpatine with how powerful she was with the dark side of the Force. In this comic, we saw Luke using a red lightsaber to fight her.

Fans all know that a vital rite of passage for all Jedi is the construction of their own lightsaber. We know that Luke built his own lightsaber after he lost his hand and Anakin’s lightsaber in Bespin at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Anakin’s lightsaber was blue. Luke’s new lightsaber that we first saw in Return of the Jedi was green in color like Master Yoda’s. Its hilt, however, was more similar to Obi-Wan’s. Less than a year later, after the events of Return of the Jedi, Luke was soundly defeated by Lumiya in their duel on Kinooine. Off-panel, in order to counter her, Luke then creates a shoto (short-bladed lightsaber) that has a red blade. At the time of the comic’s release in 1985, the lore regarding the color of the lightsabers had not yet been entirely established. The canon at the time had not indicated that red lightsabers were solely for the Sith or a dark side user.

According to Legends, Jedi used naturally occurring crystals, usually the kyber crystals of Ilum, which are generally blue or green. The Sith, however, used a combination of the dark side and conventional technologies to synthesize their crystals, which give off a red color. In later lore, we would learn that dark side users pour all their hate, fear, and rage into the kyber crystals, warping them and making the blade turn red instead of the usual green, blue, purple, or yellow colors.

Basically, Luke having a red lightsaber at this point in the era does not mean anything nefarious since the rule concerning lightsaber color had not been established. A later Legends work Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire would explore how lightsabers were made and offered a pretty good explanation for how Luke was able to make a red shoto.

Since the Jedi had been all but destroyed, and the Empire had also decimated the naturally occurring crystals that were used to make the lightsabers, Luke learned to craft the lightsaber with a synthetic crystal, using notes left by Obi-Wan. It took him over a month to carefully craft his green lightsaber using the Force. Once he was done, it gave off the green color and resembled the kyber crystals of old. On the other hand, Luke was forced to build the shoto in a day as he needed it to counter Lumiya's signature lightwhip, which made fighting her with only one lightsaber difficult. Because Luke didn’t have the time to carefully craft the shoto, it resulted in the red coloring of the blade.

The red lightsaber blade is rare among the Jedi even in the Star Wars Legends continuity. Now that we have the clear cut lines concerning who uses what color lightsaber and why, we no longer see many other Jedi use a red lightsaber.

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