And yet, people trashed The Last Jedi for leaning this direction 🤷🏽
People trashed Last Jedi for everything but that. That was the one highlight and people were upset it wasn’t followed up on in Rise of Skywalker.
…people were upset it wasn’t followed up on in Rise of Skywalker.
Fair warning, I am coming at this as a fan of TLJ who found it really worked for me after falling in love with Star Wars as a little kid in 1983, but one of the great sins of TROS is exactly that.
Every movie before that had its retcons, sometimes pretty significant, but no movie simply rolled back the previous one or refused to engage with it like TROS did. I’ve been forced to accept that there is pretty significant contingent who didn’t connect with TLJ like I did, but Disney and JJ took absolutely the wrong lesson from the backlash in how they responded. The fans who care that deeply view an installment they don’t care for as an annoying relative, but one one to be addressed, rehabilitated if possible, explained if not. Dave Filoni built his entire career on this.
I’m convinced that Count Dooku was a character quickly shoehorned in as a villain when the filmmakers got pushback from execs for having Jar Jar Binks as the actual Sith Lord (with Palpatine merely being the Apprentice).
What execs? The Prequels are basically the highest budget indie film project ever. Lucas had total financial and creative control.
Not execs, read the OP. The theory is GL got scared of fan reactions to jarjar so he didn’t want to make jarjar that central.
Don’t quote the old magic to me @hyperhopper, I was there when it was written.
It’s a fun fan theory, up there with Chewie/R2 being secret leaders of the rebellion and pre-prequel theories about “what actually are the clone wars”, but it relies on George Lucas being incredibly subtle in a trilogy where every other metaphor is written on giant billboards with spotlights on them. I mean the whole thing is a setup to “Jar Jar is Snoke”.
There were similar rumors that Lucas had the entire sequel/prequel trilogies planned out at the end of RotJ from the mid 80s until the prequels came out. Down to the EU books/comics (which he famously doesn’t care about) being Lucas’ plan all along. It was just “the man” keeping him from making the movies. That the man didn’t stop him making the original Star Wars before he was an extremely famous extremely wealthy movie maker was handwaved away.
It’s the fun logic hoop fan version of “No Trump/Musk is actually playing 7D chess! What he actually meant was…”
Sith are just The Satanic Temple with cool glowing sticks
I think not. I’ve never hear of the Satanic Temple rolling into a Sunday School and slaughtering all the children.
I thought the old lore said light/dark had to be in balance, or bad shit starts going down
Lucas had an uninituative meaning of “balance”. It wasn’t light and dark being equal, but dark side users being eliminated.
A better word would have been “tranquility”. If the force is naturally a calm lake, then dark side users are making waves I suppose is a clearer analogy.
Nono… There was no mistake there.
Before the Clone Wars, there were lots of Jedi everywhere in the Galaxy, and only a couple of Sith.
Anakin did bring balance.
Nope, Lucas meant the dark side being wiped out.
Lucas’ intention was that Anakin brought balance, eventually, by killing Palpatine and then himself rejecting the dark side. Thus wiping out the Sith.
Lucas doesn’t actually have any inclination as to what “balance” means and just leaves it to the fans to decide. It’s what made Star Wars resonate so well since fans can just project their own opinion onto the narrative. The Jedi/Republic had good intentions, but were corrupt beyond fixing, while the Sith/CIS/Empire were comically evil at times, they were also the only path that could actually root out the problems of the Republic.
“You know what would be really interesting to do? Don’t denounce me as a Stalinist but, for example – it’s my old temptation – to rewrote Star Wars… presenting Palpatine and Darth Vader as good progressive egalitarian centralist fighting reactionary feudalist, all the Jedi bullshit. It would tell a completely different story, from the others point. What do they [Jedi] stand for? All that, ‘Republic’, what strange of Republic is when you have a Princess Leila, knights, kings and so on? No, Palpatine the Emperor and Darth Vader, they are - my god - progressive Bonapartist revolutionaries trying to get rid of the old world.”
From: Žižek on Reshooting Star Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_DroaGggbc
But tbh I think that if we take the original trilogy, the Rebels are cleary fighting a reactionary imperialist power, ie. an analogy to the Vietnam war
Agreed but I did sometimes wonder what the ideal galaxy would look like to the rebels? Obviously it’s a fictional world, and they wouldn’t all hypothetically agree anyway, but would it be regressive or progressive?
Disclaimer: I don’t know a lot about Star wars
I think the pre-sequel shows have done a great job of showing the New Republic as a feckless liberal state too afraid to make any actual change. They are too distracted with trying to distance themselves from the Empire with incomprehensible amounts of bureaucracy and trying to reform Imperial Agents. The New Republic is so wrapped up with appearing to be the good guys that they neglect the citizens of the galaxy amd just let everything rot.
As ive grown older i find myself disagreeing more and more with the jedi whom as a child i idolised as paragons of good. But palpatine, vader, and the empire are so many things before being “poor good revolutionaries” trying to take down the status quo simply from the good of their golden hearts. Theres always more than 2 choices people :)
But tbh I think that if we take the original trilogy, the Rebels are cleary fighting a reactionary imperialist power, ie. an analogy to the Vietnam war
Lucas was very explicit that this was always the intent. It’s not reallt subtle honestly, asymmetric jungle freedom fighters fighting wealthy imperialist?
