#anti-tfw

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Did You Know: George Lucas Cemented Luke, Han, Leia and Lando’s Happy Endings in 1999?

When Del Rey books was preparing to publish Star Wars novels as of 1999, they began a plan to “shake up” the series of sequel tales that had been hitting shelves since the early 1990s.

Key to this plan: Killing off some of the old fan favorites in order to prove that the galaxy was still a dangerous place with high stakes.

They sent an e-mail to Lucasfilm in which they asked whether they could kill off any of the characters that the public knew from what was, at the time, the three-but-soon-to-be-four movies.

Lucasfilm reps responded that they’d have to have a list of who they were thinking about.

The list of possible “death” characters came from Del Rey… with Luke Skywalker at the top of their request list.

The letter that came back from Lucasfilm was dictated by George Lucas himself. Instead of approving which characters on the list could be killed, Lucas opted to list characters who could not be killed until they had lived full lives and reached a ripe old age: Luke Skywalker. Han Solo. Leia Organa. Lando Calrissian. The list, supposedly, went on for a bit.

As the story goes, Chewbacca was not on Lucas’ list of “do not deny anyone below a happy retirement” orders. Del Rey came back with a request to kill off Chewbacca in the first novel (Vector Prime) of their new series, “The New Jedi Order.”

Lucas eventually responded that he approved, “so long as he goes out like a hero.”

To this day, some fans still hate Vector Prime and the entire “New Jedi Order” series for killing off Chewbacca in a heroic sacrifice.

I wonder how those fans feel about these sequels? Because I can probably guess.

TL;DR - In 1999, George Lucas told the creators of the Star Wars EU/”Legends” continuity that Luke, Han, Leia and Lando could not be killed off because they’d earned the right to live full, satisfying lives.

***Information sourced from How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor and The Washington Post’s report on Chewbacca’s death in 1999, among others

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The above section is from the IGN article Star Wars: The Last Jedi Director Reveals Options He Considered for Rey’s Parents.

1) You failed miserably in your goal; Rey makes the Star Wars universe more about “chosen ones” than ever before. You see, until now, any life form could learn to wield the Force and be a Jedi. The EU/”Legends” books had characters who had deeply low midichlorian counts or who struggled to feel the will of the Force, but they just had to work harder to get to where others were. Sure, it was easier for Skywalkers to do it, but they still had to train and learn.

It took Luke more than three years before he finally made a physical object fly into his hand using the Force.

It also took him more than three years and loads of training before he had his first lightsaber duel... which he lost badly against someone who wasn’t even putting his full power into it, because Vader didn’t even want to kill him there.

Rey, on the other hand, is just born with the innate ability to wield the Force without ever learning or training at all. Shit, she can’t just use the Force inherently (like how Anakin could get flashes of events that were a few seconds in the future) — she’s fucking amazing at it, all of it, without ever training or learning anything. She makes things fly into her hands on the very first try. Her first lightsaber duel against someone with more than a decade of training? She wins without ever holding a fucking saber before.

“Anyone” can become a Jedi? I mean... MAYBE, but some people are born super-privileged and don’t even have to try, so they have a MASSIVE advantage over everybody else, and basically render the efforts of the “lessers” into jokes.

2) If you honestly think that the “hardest thing Rey could hear” is that her parents were already dead and were nobodies, you didn’t think about it very hard. Did you give the idea more than a couple of minutes? For example... I like the “your parents are already dead” angle, because that’s shocking and pretty mean. But if you really want to make this “the hardest thing she could hear,” maybe imagine Kylo Ren pulling out some of this shit:

What if we found out that Rey was created by Snoke (either as his daughter or by some kind of “conceived by midichlorians” experiment in an attempt to make a new Vader to serve him), and then, as she learns that he is the one who abandoned her there and he never intended to go back and get her, Kylo Ren still cuts him in half like in the final film? THAT would’ve really hurt her, explained some of her incredible powers, and opened up new questions about who her MOTHER was that the next film can deal with. Eh?

“Rey, I know you’ve never stopped thinking about your parents. The funny thing is, you’ve been close to their location more than once in the past few weeks. Your parents? They’re First Order. They’re stormtroopers. They sensed the power within you from birth, and they knew Snoke had a policy of killing any Force-sensitive newborns among the ranks, so they hid you away. They hoped they could escape one day. They trained in combat that was effective against lightsabers. They hoped they could help you learn some saber skills one day. They earned their way into Supreme Leader Snoke’s good graces, hoping to understand more about how someone with such skill manipulates the Force. They realized what hope that would bring to the Galaxy... if they could return to you, help you, and let the world see the First Order destroyed from within. And even after I read their minds, I let them sit beside the Supreme Leader every day, knowing full well that they hoped to betray him in the future. I wanted to use them. But I don’t have to do that now that I’m the new Supreme Leader. And your parents? *gestures to the bodies of the Imperial Guards on the floor* You just killed them.”

Those are just a couple of examples, but come on. I didn’t even have to TRY.

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Today is such a perfect day to hate Disney/Lucasfilm for rushing Star Wars films, having no story plan for any of the sequel trilogy, and pumping out more crap so fast that the next Star Wars movie is hitting just five months after the last one disappointed us all.

Today is a wonderful day to despise Disney/Lucasfilm for treating the Original Trilogy characters like shit by retconning their happy endings away, writing them utterly out of character, and then killing them off as quickly as possible.

Today is a great day to resent Disney/Lucasfilm for announcing another new Star Wars trilogy and multiple new Star Wars TV shows, proving that they’re learning absolutely nothing from the way the box office is dropping significantly after each of their SW films.

Today sure is the perfect day to mock Disney/Lucasfilm for how they threw out the old EU, promised a new EU that would be perfect in canon while deriding the old one for its hiccups, and then promptly fucked up their own canon with massive inconsistencies within just two years of their new EU.

Today is another phenomenal day to point and laugh at how Disney laid off all of LucasArts, gave the Star Wars property to Electronic Arts, and then allowed them to create games that were incomplete, sub-par, and full of gambling in a fashion that is just BARELY legally allowable.

That’s right. Today is the day to say “Fuck you” to Disney and Lucasfilm for ruining Star Wars in every conceivable way.

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The Force Awakens: Han Solo returns, but he’s regressed. His journey from the OT is undone in order to revert him back to being the Episode IV version: smuggler, swindler and scoundrel. This is seemingly done both to parallel Episode IV more precisely and also to make the new characters seem more selfless and heroic by forcing them to argue with him about how he should return to aid the Resistance and Leia (something that he is opposed to doing because he’s reverted to his 1977 self).

The Last Jedi: Luke Skywalker (?) returns... physically, anyway... but despite being played by someone who is clearly Mark Hamill, the character the film calls “Luke” is utterly unrecognizable, exhibiting all the traits that the original Luke abhorred or rejected. His new pessimistic, cowardly and weak portrayal exists mostly to make Rey seem more heroic when she is brave, optimistic, and strong enough to even defeat Luke in a minor scuffle.

Episode IX: We’ve been told Kathleen Kennedy that the plan was for this to be “Leia’s movie.” Based on how bad the other two members of the trio have been treated.... maybe we’re lucky that Carrie Fisher isn’t able to return for this.

I can only guess that Episode IX would’ve originally paralleled scenes of Rey and Finn’s gentle patience and tutelage of the force-sensitive slave children against new flashbacks that revealed Leia to be a cruel and abusive mother to Kylo Ren.