The launch of the book ‘The Star Wars Book’ has answered a question that surely many fans of the franchise asked themselves for years: what requirements must be fulfilled so that a character can be considered a Jedi Master? What some may not have expected is that both Anakin and Luke Skywalker do not meet essential criteria.
To put it quite clearly, there are several stages that must be fulfilled, starting with demonstrating your potential from a young age – which is why in ‘The Phantom Menace’ it was doubted that Anakin would adjust to what was necessary – until being already adolescent you become the Padawan (or apprentice) of a Jedi Knight or Jedi Master, and once he has completed his training he receives the possibility of keep climbing on the ladder.
The most common way to achieve this is to undergo a Jedi judgment in which Council Members determine whether or not you are ready to make the leap. However, this stage can be interchanged in exceptional situations when someone has demonstrated their adherence to the order in situations of incredible difficulty.
Anakin’s problem
Both Anakin and Luke made it through that phase, but then it’s time to demonstrate the ability to teach someone the way to become a Jedi. That was the big problem of the character played by Hayden Christensen in ‘Revenge of the Sith’, and the Council’s refusal to give him the title of Jedi Master is one of the main reasons why he goes to the Dark Side and ends up becoming Darth Vader.
To that should be added another detail that has become more relevant thanks to ‘The Mandalorian’, since his Padawan Ahsoka Tano he was the one who made the decision to leave the Jedi order. It is true that she was initially expelled for a crime that she had not committed, but when the truth was discovered thanks to Anakin, she preferred to leave him feeling disappointed after what happened.
The complicated case of Luke
In Luke’s case, things get a little more complicated, since in the expanded universe of Star Wars that Disney decided to eliminate from the canon it would have met that criterion, as shown by the large number of padawans it instructed, but things change if we look at the current canon.
To begin with, Luke decided to deviate from the Jedi code by building a Temple in which to educate different people in force control. In fact, the comic ‘The Rise of Kylo Ren’ revealed that Ben Solo was his first apprentice and that none of the rest of the students completed their training before the Temple was destroyed by an attack from the Knights of Ren, who wanted the blame to fall on Solo, as it happened.
It is true that Luke would also begin to train Rey in ‘The Last Jedi’, but also that the character immortalized by Mark Hamill died before completing the process, giving the peculiarity that her training is completed by Leia in ‘The Rise of Skywalker’, so she has a stronger argument than Luke to be considered a Jedi Master.
However, Leia would not be deserving of that honor either, as it is true that trained under Luke’s command, but she herself decided to abandon her training at the last moment when she realized that acting as a Jedi would end up causing the death of her son.
It goes without saying that neither of them came to be considered a Jedi Grand Master, a title reserved to the wisest of the Jedi Masters and which at the time belonged to Yoda.