YMMV / Splinter of the Mind's Eye

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Leia is in the throes of PTSD and being a Jerkass because of it (or even moving to the realm of outright villain when she asks Luke, who is still insanely naïve, to murder her if they're captured), and Luke is the Iron Woobie who is too stupid to realize Leia's being borderline abusive.
  • Alternatively, Luke acts like a total creep for the majority of the book, slapping Leia for next to no reason, telling people she's his servant, and contemplating kissing her in her sleep. It might have been a case of Fair for Its Day, but today, some of his behavior comes across as borderline harassment.
  • Though at the end of the book a trapped Luke tells Leia to take his lightsaber and kill him, then herself, rather than face Darth Vader. It seems more like a request for a Mercy Kill than an act of villainy.
  • How does Vader know how to turn off C-3PO? He built C-3PO, and knows the commands that are built into him beyond anything a mind-wipe can get at. When Leia is tortured on the Death Star, why does she seem to have no reaction? Because she's still in shock, and the real reaction is horribly damaging.
  • Vader's artificial right hand in Return of the Jedi should have been because Luke cut the flesh one off on Mimban—or, alternately, the Emperor took it after the first Death Star was lost—but was Retconned by the prequels. Vader seems to go through Serial Prostheses.
  • What if the tension Luke and Leia felt was actually familial closeness that they couldn't recognize, possibly amplified by the Force (as we now know Leia is Force-susceptible as well)?
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Luke/Leia tension, after Return of the Jedi anyway. Suddenly it's either extra, extra squicky or extra, extra hilarious.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Go here.
• Iron Woobie: Leia and Halla can both survive just about anything, and have. Luke is just too sweet and dumb to realize Leia's being mean at all, just occasionally having hurt feelings and moving on. And Leia, at one point, is forced to take Luke's lightsaber and battle Vader to the death, but continues fighting until she literally dies. This can be taken as a metaphor for her even being on Mimban at all—while she really should be in a mind-healer's office dealing with her psychological problems, she just refuses to give up. Under. Any. Circumstances.
• Memetic Mutation: The comic panel where Luke slaps Leia just because she kept bugging him while he was trying to eat.
• Squick: See Harsher in Hindsight above for some modern readers' reactions to this book.

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