Quote Originally Posted by GloatingSwine View Post
But he only reached that point because the Dark Side gave him the strength to do so.
I'm not sure how you're drawing this conclusion. Luke went in there to redeem his father, not kill him. The Emperor lured him to fight but Luke once again turned his lightsaber off and refused to fight. This was without the dark side. This was Luke, attempting again to do what he set out to do, redeem his father. Then Vader taunts him and gets him to fight, but Luke once again turns off his lightsaber. Nothing suggests that if he couldn't defeat Vader in combat that he wouldn't still insist on redeeming him. It happened to work out that way, but no, I woulnd't give credit of Luke's redemption of Vader to the dark side. By any stretch of the imagination.
He got away with it, he didn't make a mistake he couldn't undo, that time, but there's absolutely no evidence that Luke Skywalker learned not to give in to fear in future because until this movie we knew nothing about that future.
This is the crux of it. You equate "give in to fear" with "might preemptively murder a child in his sleep". That's the equivocation. Luke could have done all sorts of things in "giving in to his fear" that don't require him to consider murdering his nephew in cold blood.

Luke could have, in his desperation, go face an enemy he didn't know or understand, Snoke, and been soundly defeated and captured. And through Luke, Snoke is able to attack Leia in the Force, and has no crippled the strongest light side user that could challenge him, and the leader of the Resistance. This requires new blood to save the galaxy. Cool, no problem. Luke could admit later that he gave in to fear and made a colossal mistake if people need to be spoon fed that he's just a human and not a god.

The point is that his mistake doesn't need to be that he's a child killer.
You don't get to make up a version of the future of the character where he's better than the movies demonstrate him being, because only what's in the movies counts.
The irony. Look, if we go by what's in the movies only, nothing in The Return of the Jedi indicates that Luke would kill his nephew in cold blood for future crimes. So if you're going to go with that storyline, you need to explain it and justify it, like I said in my original posts about this movie. If we go by only what's in the movies, we don't get anything. Luke saw darkness in Ben's mind, and thought the best course of action would be to kill him. That's not justified by the movies. And for those that care, it's not in line with the expectations of the character after Return of the Jedi.

Also, everything Mecalich said, as usual lol.

Remember, at the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke says this when he overcomes the dark side and makes the sacrifice to redeem his father, "I'm a jedi, like my father before me." We go from this to "I may have to kill Ben in his sleep. Damn, that was a bad thought to have. I made a mistake. **** it, I can't fix this. I give up. The Jedi are terrible and need to be destroyed."