Heartwarming / Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor

• Fairly small, but the friendships between Lando, Leia, the Rogues, Han, and Luke are all-around sweet (even if there's plenty of Vitriolic Best Buds-style bickering going on).
  • Just one instance is when Leia tells Wedge that she needs to borrow him and Tycho. Wedge tells her that if it were up to him, he'd be happy to help, but Lando (his CO) would be very upset. Leia tells them that Luke is in danger. It takes all of two seconds for Wedge to go Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right! and send Tycho to round up the other Rogues while he fires up his ship.
• Matt Stover also wrote the Revenge of the Sith novelization, and it's hard not to compare Anakin and Luke... and Luke is so unlike his father. Kinder, less prideful, protective without being possessive. Anakin once thinks of saving people as what he's good at, what he's for - that never even crosses Luke's mind, but it's shown in almost his every action. He never puts his own pain before anyone else's, and he's in a lot of pain in this book. Luke's just a good person.
  Luke: My name is Luke Skywalker. I'm a Jedi Knight. And I want you to take my hand.
• The kindness and consideration that Luke shows to people, consistently, even when he's feeling desperate and broken. His All-Loving Hero tendencies even start to rub off on others. Nick Rostu, who was previously mind-controlled and begged Luke to kill him - but was instead saved - has the chance to blow away thirty-some innocent mind-controlled men and women to rescue Luke and return the favor, and he hesitates
  because he had an overpowering intuition: if Luke Skywalker thought he might save thirty innocent lives by sacrificing his own, he wouldn't hesitate. Ten innocent lives.
  One.
  "Or, hell, one not-so-innocent life," Nick muttered. "Like mine." He flipped the carbine's power setting to stun. "I hate Jedi."
• Nick and Geptun don't talk about it much, but they clearly still respect Mace Windu, and remember him with honour. In a galaxy where the Jedi had been vilified and/or forgotten about by most people, it's touching to know that what he did is not forgotten.
• Geptun tells Luke, going through a massive Heroic BSoD, that he's known only three heroes in his life — and Luke is one of them.
  • The Fridge Brilliance is also heartwarming here. Who are the other two? Almost certainly, Mace Windu and Nick "you'd have to be crazy to trust me" Rostu.
• When the twins are mind-raped by Cronal, Luke manages to break out thanks to the mental disciplines Obi-Wan and Yoda taught him, but Leia obviously has had little to no Jedi training yet. So how does she survive being broken? The Power of Love.
• Towards the end of the novel, Luke encounters Kar Vastor, who fought the Jedi during the Clone Wars. After Luke manages to free him from Cronal's mind control, Kar is not only grateful that his life has been spared, but also says this:
  Kar Vastor: You are greater than the Knights of old, Luke Skywalker. Unlike them, you are not afraid of the dark.
• R2-D2's complete Undying Loyalty to Princess Leia. Similarly, at the end of the book, he gets himself out of the safety of the Falcon and to the asteroid where Luke is, on the off-chance that he might be able to help his Master. He knows that the chances of him being able to help at all are about the same as him undergoing a quantum phase transition into a Lofquarian gooney bird, but the possibility is there anyway, so he does. There he waits, and spends what he believes to be his last moments accessing almost three decades' worth of adventures with C-3PO, the only droid he truly considers his friend. When he is unexpectedly saved, he cannot believe how everything has managed to turn out well in the end.
  R2-D2 spent the hyperspace transition reviewing his calculations, but they were impeccable. The designs of an evil but brilliant man had been thwarted. Luke would survive, Princess Leia and Han Solo had escaped, C-3PO was assuredly safe, and R2-D2 — to the best of his self-diagnostic subroutine's ability to determine — had not, in fact, undergone a quantum phase transition into a Lofquarian gooney bird. The odds against this outcome were literally incalculable. The universe, R2 decided, was an astonishing place.

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