Ben Skywalker

Can you imagine being the one and only son of the savior of the galaxy? The man who faced down the entire Empire with a laser sword?! (Well, kind of. . .) The son of the last of the Jedi and the Grand Master of the New Jedi Order. His mother? The Emperor’s right-hand-woman-turned-scoundrel-turned-Jedi Council member. Born in the midst of a galaxy-spanning war, Ben Skywalker came from a Legendary lineage and had tremendous shoes to fill. And fill them he did.

On top of all that, once the evil, horrible, no-good, very bad Yuuzhan Vong were eventually vanquished, or, er, relocated, Ben was ready to settle into some regular, old-school, boring Master-Padawan Jedi tutelage under his heroic uncle Jacen Solo. What could go wrong, right? As it turns out, everything. Long story short, Ben found himself being slowly and secretly led down the path to becoming a Sith apprentice. . . until Mom intervened. Thank the Force for Moms, right?! 

Ben was a character whose journey developed beautifully throughout the Legends timeline. We saw the blossoming romance between his larger-than-life parents in the earliest days of the Expanded Universe in Heir to the Empire. From there, his birth took place in Edge of Victory: Rebirth. 

Throughout the New Jedi Order, Ben was basically a young child inconsequential to the grand scheme of galactic events. He didn’t stay that way, however. For someone whose story began with such disastrous trauma, he became heartwarmingly heroic in his own right. His Jedi training under his dark and broody uncle, Jacen Solo, began in Legacy of the Force: Betrayal. Jacen was able to take Ben under his wing when Ben cut himself off from the Force due to feeling the weight of the war through the Force. 

It’s in Legacy of the Force where Ben moved into the limelight as a central character whose decisions had the power to change the fate of the galaxy. The subsequent series, Fate of the Jedi, jettisoned an angsty, teenage Ben and his cringy, out-of-touch father on a father-son Odyssey-esque road trip into the far reaches of space in order to investigate the mysterious psychosis threatening the Jedi Order. 

Ben, though the heir to the most legendary lineage in the history of Star Wars, was a teenager through-and-through—bickering with his dad and falling head-over-heels with renegade Sith Vestara Kai. It’s a whole thing. 

Ben’s relationship with Vestara is symbolic of his tendency to extend forgiveness to those the Jedi establishment was unwilling to work with. With both Vestara and Tahiri Veila, Ben served as the extended hand ready and willing to welcome them back into the light. In this way, he demonstrated that he inherited more than the Skywalker name from his father.

Ben is one of the Legends characters who is worth investing in without reservation. There’s no character quite like him in the modern Canon. The trajectory of Luke’s story arc when such a wildly different direction in Legends. 

Because of this, we have Ben Skywalker in all of his complicated whirlwind of feelings and family drama. Plus, there’s a delightful comic story in Tales: 19 in which Ben duels a Dark Jedi for Anakin’s/Luke’s legacy lightsaber, which has taken on a whole new level of significance in the Sequel Trilogy. 

While we’ll never know just where his Jedi journey would end due to the Legends universe’s abrupt end, you’ll certainly find a wealth of wonderful storytelling here.