#sequels discourse

[gffa]

Rings of Power is to me what the Star Wars sequels were to me:  The conflict between not wanting to be an asshole to fans who enjoy them, but having major problems with the worldbuilding and characterization of established characters, that the gloss and shine of them is lovely but the structure of the story falls apart with the slightest touch, that they actively disrespect the established lore of the foundational material, that there are glimmering moments of something really worth exploring, but it gets buried under an avalanche of me wanting to vigorously shake the creators until a damned overarching theme falls out, the cast is lovely and deserves a better show than the one they’re in.  Also god forbid we have a Black actor in our fantasy series, how very dare, time to bring out the racist harassment because they totally deserve it for idk existing and being in the show.

[gffa]

I’ve been thinking about the sequels again and how I’m actually generally a fan, but there’s one criticism of them that I don’t think I’ll get over pretty much ever and it’s sort of summed up by this quote from George Lucas: "I’ve left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more features. There will definitely be no Episodes VII-IX. That’s because there isn’t any story. I mean, I never thought of anything! And now there have been novels about the events after Episode IV, which isn’t at all what I would have done with it. The Star Wars story is really the tragedy of Darth Vader. That is the story. Once Vader dies, he doesn’t come back to life, the Emperor doesn’t get cloned and Luke doesn’t get married …" --George Lucas [x] GL said a few times that Star Wars is the story of Anakin Skywalker and I love that, because, yes, ultimately Star Wars is the story of Anakin Skywalker. That doesn’t mean he’s always the main character, but instead that his decisions and actions have shaped the story that the characters move around in, that the other characters’ stories are contrasts against his, despite that Anakin wasn’t even originally meant to be Darth Vader.  And I think that was what felt like it was missing from the sequels, that there wasn’t a sense of how the galaxy was shaped by Anakin Skywalker’s legacy.  He was barely even mentioned as Darth Vader, much less the name Anakin Skywalker! The games and books do a fair amount to help fill in the gaps and I actually like a lot of what they did but I feel like the sequels needed more worldbuilding emphasis on how the Emperor and Darth Vader had set the stage for the galaxy even 30 years later, to make it really feel like it was part of the Skywalker Saga.  He doesn’t need to be the main character, but Anakin’s legacy, both good and bad, should have been felt more.

[gffa]

25, but for the sequel trilogy as a whole! I’m curious what you would’ve done or how you would change that.

How would you end XXX/Would you change the ending of XXX? I think some of the most immediate changes I would make would be to the timeline--Luke wouldn't have been on Ahch-To for years and years (or else he would have been searching for something, in addition to feeling like he had to take himself out of the fight), EP8 would have been at least a year out from EP7, and EP9 would have been a few more years as well. I would have put in more about the political state of the galaxy, would have shown what the New Republic was like, possibly with scenes of Leia being frustrated and still trying to help fix things even if she was no longer a Senator, I would have set up the First Order through her more, shown that she was saying, hey, the remnants of the Empire are still out there, this is a problem that will blow up in our faces if we don't do something. (So, basically, Bloodline, but IN THE ACTUAL MOVIES.) I would have set up character arcs for the characters better IN THE ACTUAL MOVIES. Rey's arc is mostly fine, it just needs tweaking. Her journey is the same as every Jedi's before her, one that's a classic for a reason--the galaxy needs the Jedi to rise up again, but it's not an easy journey and she has to face the darkness within herself, she has to confront the fear within herself and let it go, just as all those Jedi Younglings had to do, just as Anakin Skywalker had to do, just as Luke Skywalker had to do, just as Kanan Jarrus and Ezra Bridger had to do, just as Cal Kestis had to do. I personally would probably nix the Palpatine story (I was a big Rey Skywalker fan for a long time, but the more I settle into SW, the more I like that Luke never needed to have kids) but if that absolutely had to say, I would have hit the notes harder that it wasn't that she actually was dealing with the fear in her heart because she was his granddaughter, but because she herself decided that's why she was feeling fear. Also, Palpatine would not have survived via clones and I would have hit the notes harder that he's Forever Unsatisfied and that trying to achieve immortality through the dark side is not a great idea. I would have kept the Canto Bight storyline, but I would have added Poe to it, and Finn would have had a storyline about how he was a literal, living, breathing war asset that powerful people decided was just a tool for them to use, so, yeah, he knows what a shitshow capitalism is. I'm not sure what I would have done with Phasma, maybe given her more scenes with Finn to build up tension to the final climax. We would have gotten Kylo Ren's story IN THE ACTUAL MOVIES, why he turned to the dark side, what reasons he had that he felt that was the choice he wanted to make. I've read the comics and, honestly, even those don't really tell us WHY, other than, maybe? he felt lonely? and Snoke was whispering in his ear? but not why he never felt the need to tell anyone about Snoke? or even what actually happened that night at Luke's school. I would have made the whole "we need to stay vigilant against the dark side, it's always within us, it's our duty to take a cue from Jedi philosophy, and always confront the dark side that's part of us and work to let it go", like that's always been what GL's whole thing about how the Force works and how the Jedi work and tying that into that people everywhere need to get off their asses and actually pitch in, because you can't depend on one person out of a hundred billion (which is how many Jedi there were at their height) to come save you, you have to be willing to deal with the shit around you and work to overcome it. Parallel that with Rey's journey to let her fear go, to come to terms with her fear about who she is and who her bio-family is/isn't, that the dark side creeps up on her because Jedi training does make you vulnerable for awhile and have her come to the understanding--especially through finding Luke and Finn--that having other people who can bolster you in the Force, as well as you can bolster them, makes you stronger, so you don't need to cling to others (or the idea

of others) so tightly that you become attached to them. Learn to trust them and pass on what you've learned, so that there is always more and more light in the galaxy.

[gffa]

unpopular opinion

one of the sequels' mistake was focusing too much on kylo. all the other 6 films don't spend too much time with the villain and that's! great!

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree I don’t really object to spending time on the villain, per se, but I wish they had used the time better and not whittled his character focus down to very little other than Rey, despite not really having given them room to develop a relationship on-screen in more than a single weekend. Like, I love Anakin, I’m not opposed to focusing a lot of screentime on a Problematic Fave who is not exactly a great person, but has a lot of potentially sympathetic beats that you could write into the character’s arc.  But none of that came through in the movies! But also they had such a great cast of other characters that they criminally underused, like the wasting of Finn’s character’s potential was just frustrating as all get out, Rose deserved so much better, and so I’m neutral-to-agreement. I would have liked more focus on the other characters--do you know how much FUN we could have had with more Resistance characters interacting with each other? do you know how ADORABLE the Rey + Poe + Rose trio was in that one book? do you know how DELIGHTFUL Poe and Rose were in that one Adventures comic? do you know how great Poe and Finn’s chemistry was and you just wasted it? do you know how much I wanted a more coherent arc for Finn and Rey’s relationship? do you know how amazing Rey and Rose could have been together?? Or, if you’re going to devote that much time to the villain, AT LEAST MAKE GIVE ME SOME HILARITY.  Though, it’s still my favorite thing just about ever that the last spoken word any Skywalker said in the movies was, “Ow.”  Amazing, perfect, brilliant, wonderful, stupendous, nothing could have been funnier.

[gffa]

BEFORE I BEGIN:  I want to make it clear that this is not an argument against this video’s view of the Holdo vs Poe storyline, nor is it an attempt to say CinemaWins is wrong on the internet or whatever.  I mean, fair enough, he does kind of go at others’ arguments, so I don’t feel guilt using his comments as a jumping off point, but still.  Ultimately, this isn’t about CinemaWins’s video [x] at all, but about what this crystalized for me. But it was sort of a smack in the face moment of finally being able to articulate why this doesn’t work for me.  “Tell me why the leader needs to answer to one pilot.” BECAUSE THAT IS POE’S CHARACTER TRAJECTORY IN THIS MOVIE.  He is being set up as the next leader of the Resistance, that is made clear by the end of this movie, by the supplementary material, and, hell, even TROS follows through on that arc. Poe isn’t just some random pilot and maybe Holdo doesn’t know that (but then what kind of leader is she if she doesn’t know that Poe is being groomed for this role? she and Leia were in conversation, presumably?  Also, they have a conversation at the end about how they both like him) but the audience sure as hell does and having the character who is supposed to be learning to step up, as in that is his whole arc in this very movie, is undercut by Holdo treating him like he’s just another pilot. If the movie had made the argument that Poe should have trusted her because that’s what you do when you’re leadership material, you trust your fellow Resistance members, then that might have worked better for me.  But he’s treated as a hotshot pilot who was just demoted and nothing more. So, when Poe fucks up over the course of the movie, then is suddenly back in charge by the end of it, like nothing happened, like his mutiny didn’t just badly hurt them, but Leia is still like, “What are you looking at me for?  Follow him!” despite that he was just treated as just “one pilot” doesn’t work for me. Either Poe is being groomed for leadership, in which case you bring him in on these decisions or else tell him, “You have to trust me.  As the future of this movement, you need to learn to work with people.”, OR he’s “just a pilot” and then you have to cut out all the stuff about him being groomed to be the next leader of the Reistance. And if Holdo doesn’t have a plan at this point, if she’s still working on it, then you have to let him in on that, too, because I think it would be fair to make a case that she does owe the FUTURE OF THEIR MOVEMENT at least some answers.

[gffa]

i see all these deleted scenes from tlj and i just... feel so annoyed because if rj had kept them in it would have improved the film. greatly. it would have provided more consistency for character arcs and emotional satisfaction imo. if it was a matter of running time i can think of a few scenes that we could have lived without and whose absence would have allowed the story to flow just as smoothly

One of the things that’s always interesting to me, as someone who edits a lot of concept art and reads the comments/tags on those posts, is I hear a lot of, “This would have been so much better!” (even on things I think sounded like they were almost assured to be bullshit) or “This looks so cool, how did it go so wrong?”  And I get a similar feeling with deleted scenes–just seeing the snippets of those scenes, outside of the connective tissue, it’s easy to assume they’d be amazing.I do agree with you, that TLJ’s pacing was probably the primary issue I had with it (well, I wasn’t a fan of the Force lore stuff, either), secondly the lack of missed opportunities for better connections between the cast.  So it’s easy for us to think, if they had just added a few more scenes in, it would have made a huge difference!  And that might be entirely true.But I think it’s also easy to just look at concept art, the barest sketching out of a moment, to see an amazing illustration and all this potential pops into our heads.  Looking at the concept art for TROS scenes that happened looks amazing!  Looking at the concept art for TLJ scenes that happened looks amazing!  And yet we still argue about those scenes or many of us find them dissatisfactory.At the same time I’m onboard with you that I think what you’re getting at is that the movies felt disjointed and the character relationships weren’t what they could have been.  I wish TLJ had opened up the span of time more, so it wasn’t just this single day that was right after the previous single day, I wish we had a better sense of the state of the galaxy, I wish we’d gotten Ben having more than two minutes of screentime with anyone but Rey, if we’re supposed to care about him as the son of legacy characters.  (And, boy, do I wish they’d taken the chance to explore Finn’s story as a literally stolen child made into a soldier for a war that wasn’t meant to be his, when at Canto Bight.  Parallel it to Rose’s story, how the First Order fucked over both of their lives, fucked over entire worlds and entire groups of people, that both of them are still dealing with it, in different ways, but the same root problem!)I like TLJ and looking at the concept art pieces that were included in the TROS artbook, especially the pieces of Luke on Crait, I’m reminded that there were a lot of moments in that movie that I really loved.  I enjoyed pretty much everything about Crait!Look at these beautiful pieces:

Or this amazing one of the flashback scene:

Concept art so often looks STUNNING and SO COOL, so it’s easy to think the scenes that will actually be written/filmed will be amazing with them, too.Or look at the footage of Luke feeling Han’s death now that he’s open to the Force again:

It’s gut wrenching, it’s beautifully acted, but it’s an isolated moment that’s hard to put into full context (of how it would feel in the movie), so who knows how much it would have actually made a difference.I keep thinking of Leia sensing Han’s death and it was a lovely moment, but it’s so quick and you only see her face, that can only convey so much, and so ultimately there is a part of me that feels like, “Why wasn’t there more focus on that?  Why wasn’t she there, why couldn’t they write a story where she was there to see it?”  And maybe I would have felt the same way with all those TLJ deleted scenes–nice, but not enough.At the same time you’re absolutely right that one of TLJ’s biggest weaknesses imo was the lack of some better connective tissue and some of those deleted scenes–WHY THE FUCK WOULDN’T YOU GIVE LUKE TWO GODDAMNED MINUTES TO MOURN HAN’S DEATH ONCE HE OPENED HIMSELF BACK UP TO THE FORCE!?  YOU FILMED IT, WHY DIDN’T YOU KEEP IT?  IT WASN’T EVEN THAT LONG is one of the hills I’ll die on–and I think TROS suffered from the same thing, only a hundred times worse.That movie really needed to be two movies instead of one, even if I wonder if that would have actually helped, because maybe the reason I liked it(/didn’t hate it) was because it was a series of trailers strung together, rather than a slow, crawling pace.Overall, I think all the sequel movies suffered from a lack of things feeling connected aside from a handful of dynamics and supplementary material has done a nice job of filling some of those things in (Spark of the Resistance and Resistance Reborn and Alliegence and the TROS novelization have all been really good for this), but that the basic bones of what they had wasn’t terrible and the concept art and deleted scenes really reflect that.

[gffa]

Hello! Don't know if you've answered this and I'm not judging, just honestly curious, why do you think the Duel of the Fates script was a shitshow?

Hi! My biggest problems with it were:- The idea that the light and the dark were meant to be balanced together and Rey was onto something with that, which is explicitly against what George Lucas says about how the Force works- Coruscant being some sort of wasteland after the fall of the Empire, like, you expect me to believe a planet that important would fall into that deep of ruin in only a couple of decades?  No thanks- Everything with Mortis felt completely wrong to me and not understanding why it wasn’t just an awesome Force-related spectacle, but actually meant something, there was nothing to do with the Overlords of the Force, just that it was a Force-heavy planet to namedrop, nothing of meaning really happened in Duel of the Fates- Finn in chains, NO FUCKING THANKS- Hux secretly wanting to be Force-sensitive just felt like it came out of nowhere and had no impact or connection to anything elseIt just felt like it was trying to namedrop things that were big deals in previous Star Wars stories, without understanding what gave them meaning, and had a fundamental misunderstanding of the Force.  The concept art was really cool, but the concept art is always really cool for pretty much every single thing in Star Wars, but the script just felt terrible to me.It did, however, give us the most amazing line, when Hux realizes he’s been beaten:  “He lost the star war.”  L O L AMAZING THANK YOU.

[gffa]

I read your faves and least faves and realized you're a lot less sequel positive than I thought you were and also a big mood. The alien thing bugs me so much. Not only are there almost NO previously established races, but they're all either orange, grey, pink, or Caucasian flesh tone. And then they retcon Snoke from being chalk white to human white. Star Wars Resistance is FULL of aliens we've seen before but as soon as you step off the Colossus you get one-mouthed Ithorian knockoffs.

I never really know where to put myself re: the sequels, because there’s a lot I feel could have been so much better in easy to fix ways, but then I have to wonder how much of that is my own bias because one could say the same about the prequels, except could they, because I never really see a lot of, “if they had just tweaked this one thing here, then this one thing over here, the prequels could have been great!”, that a lot of the criticisms against the prequels are that they didn’t like what they did, but don’t really have ideas for what they would have liked, while the sequels I see a lot more, “I liked the basic set-up, but here’s what needed to be addressed”.Which is assuming it’s even fair to pit the prequels and the sequels (or the originals) against each other, because they each stand on their own, they can be taken on their own merits, BUT I keep navel gazing about why I’m so easy on the prequels when I’m harsher on the sequels.I think a lot of it, for all that TROS is actually my favorite of the sequel movies, that the prequel trilogy absolutely nailed its ending for me, that Revenge of the Sith is my all-time favorite Star Wars movie, and I thought that it really showed that George Lucas had a strong sense of who these characters were and where they were going and why they did what they did.The sequels have a ton of charm and I really do love the set-up, there’s been some really excellent worldbuilding (especially re: the political situation) in the supplementary material and they’ve worked to put more aliens back in the galaxy, and I’m softer on the sequels in that regard because I live in the supplementary materials much more than I do in just the movies (setting aside the whole aspect of how I do consider the movies to be the “foundation” of SW, at the very least for I through VI) and I’m willing to give them time to integrate TROS into things, just as I was willing to give them time to integrate TFA and then TLJ into the bigger tapestry of SW.It’s hard because I don’t want to be negative about the sequels so much, but I’ve been slipping into that mindset a lot because I see all these things that could have made the story stronger, could have used the pieces that were there better, could have widened up the scope of these movies so they don’t feel like they have such a narrow focus, how they could have better incorporated the worldbuilding (planets and aliens alike) to actually make this feel like the GFFA, but the more I focus on that, the more I get ensnared in that mindset.  The more I vent, the more frustration I feel.I think, too, part of the problem is that I’m not terribly enamored with the creators of these movies and it’s very hard to get enthused about interviews or insights when I’m so annoyed by both sides of the JJ/Terrio vs Rian Johnson thing and want both sides of this entire thing to just chill out already.  Not that it’s up to me, people do what they want on their own twitters, but sometimes I do feel like every tweet made about it saps a little more good will from me re: the sequels.  Also, you know, my fault for being on twitter to rubberneck the wank, fair enough! XDWhich means I keep trying to get back to a more positive place about the sequels, but it’s hard when it doesn’t feel like I’m finding the right corners of fandom who are just chilling out and enjoying the movies and characters and stories.  It feels like I’m constantly seeing everything pitted against each other and it wears my enthusiasm thin, especially when I have a lot of problems with the movies, but I want to be charitable towards them yet not ignore them.Nobody really seems to be having fun with the sequels and it’s hard for me to generate my own when it’s not the era of my heart, so I wind up being kind of more negative than usual, despite that I ACTUALLY REALLY LIKE THE SEQUELS ERA AND THE CHARACTERS.  *wistful*  I miss that time when the Phasma novel or Cobalt Squadron came out and I was just BURSTING WITH FEELINGS about the sequels and their amazing characters.Because I think another book like Spark of the Resistance would do a lot to jump start my positive feelings on the movies again.  Or a novel that better explains Ben Solo and his relationships with his family to me, to actually show us what’s going on in his head, to help me connect to the movie version better.I AM READY TO LOVE, STAR WARS, PLEASE GIVE ME MORE TO READ OR WATCH WITH THEM, I WILL YELL HAPPILY ABOUT IT IF YOU DO, I’M PRETTY SURE.