One of the pillars of fandom is that Star Wars has this incredibly rich, detailed setting, with tons of background. the thought, then, is that we want to see more stuff that explores that setting. Except, it turns out, we mostly don't. After the original trilogy, fandom has been pretty divided about most of the offerings, with a handful of expectations (the Thrawn trilogy, Rogue One, KOTOR, Rebels, and Mandalorian) and some of the stuff is just straight up hated (prequels and sequels). You also hear stories of the various SW tabletop RPGs struggling, and it makes you wonder why.

I think I know why. Star Wars isn't interesting because of the setting, at least not in the way that, say, Middle Earth or Star Trek is. Star Wars was originally a three act space opera recreating the hero's journey, and as such, dealt less in vividly new settings and more in archtypes. You literally have a desert planet, an Ice World, and a forest moon (that's called "the forest moon!") You spend almost no time with the cultures at play, instead sticking mostly to wilderness as befits a rebel force on the move. To it's credit, the world does appear lived in and real in a way that most sci fi doesn't, but that also is because the scenes were meant to look familiar. the Yavin/Death star sequence in a New Hope is basically a Battle of Britain/Dam Busters mashup with different fighters. The characters are somewhat interestingly both archtypes but also three dimensional. The old mystic has a sense of humor, the bossy princess isn't afraid to get her hands dirty, and the smart alek rogue has moments of sincerity.

So, what Star Wars does have is an amazing concept in the force, and some amazing visual design in it's star Ships. The force, in part by being so vaguely defined, really gets the imagination going. the design aspect is really easy to overlook. I think that if we held a "most iconic fictional starship" contest Star Wars would put at least four ships in the top ten: Falcon, X-wing, Tie, Star destroyer. I think this explains why video games that rely on either the star ships or force users are always so fun and popular.

To sum up, I think that more Star Wars content is great, but I'm more interested in the stuff that leverages the themes and concepts and designs of star wars, rather than the setting.

I think characters carry nearly any story, so I generally want to see them along with their backstory. Albeit, I-III were a bit of a mess learning about Obi and Darth, but it kept us talking and learning.

IMHO overall, I think Disney certainly got their money's worth buying the IP and all. It will be milked for quite some time with plenty of fodder to keep us along for the journey.

Star Wars was Fantasy in Space, with alle the cool fantasy themes but in a more realistic way so it fits the present science focused world

as "the force" is easier to accept than just pure magic

it is not about details, things are just there and don't need to be explained

and it focus on the individual hero saving the day against the enemy armies


as soon as things went a different way of classic fantasy story telling, started to explain the universe and moved away from the singe hero thing, the universe lost a lot of its magic

A setting is only as good as the writing. Star Wars writing has been atrocious for some time, a notable exception being some of the novels, etc.

Don't underestimate the ability of any "setting" to suck ass when you have committees trying to write something with a shopping list of agendas.

 kodos wrote:
as soon as things went a different way of classic fantasy story telling, started to explain the universe and moved away from the singe hero thing, the universe lost a lot of its magic

Yeah, one of the jarring things going from the OT to the Prequels was how complex the plotting was. A New Hope's plot could work in almost any setting: take the macguffin to find the wise man, resuce the princess for the fortress, then help the good guys destroy the fortress. Empire Strikes back is also simple: a group of friends are scattered by an attack, the Hero is trained by the sensei while the others stay on the run, then are captured and used by bait to lure the Hero into a fight. Lookint at attack of the clonese... it's: Two Heros are tasked to protect a princess from an assassin. One is her bodyguard, and falls into love with her. The other investigates the assassin and discovers a plot to build a secret army. He continues to trail the assassin to a second group, also building an army. The second hero comes to help, both are captured, but then the secret army arrives to fight the second army, but both sides are actually controlled by an evil wizard who is also the prime minister.

Political dealings do require a lot more layering of detail. having simple good guys and bad guys only makes sense in a simple world, but conversely, complex, shades of grey villains don't work in a simple world.


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 Elbows wrote:
A setting is only as good as the writing. Star Wars writing has been atrocious for some time, a notable exception being some of the novels, etc.

Don't underestimate the ability of any "setting" to suck ass when you have committees trying to write something with a shopping list of agendas.

I think that accusing Disney of having all these agendas is an overly simplistic critique. Movies can be made by committee and be quite good (Hey, MCU) or they can be terrible (Hey, DCEU). Star wars was at it's best when it was mostly the vision of George Lucas, but it was also at it's worst when it was almost fully the vision of George Lucas.

There's nothing wrong with the setting. It is what it is. The problems that crop up have nothing to do with the setting.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a dry, mostly desert world, a mostly frozen world, a mostly forested world, or even a mostly urban world (although the latter might need quite a bit of imports of basic necessities such as oxygen and water if it's urbanized so heavily the ecosystem collapses). Earth itself went through phases of mostly desert despite our high water volume; a dryer planet could easily be almost entirely desert as well. Earth went through a mostly frozen phase too, nothing says a planet a little farther out wouldn't as well.

The problems arise when the setting us used POORLY via bad writing. At which point the problem is NOT the setting, it's the BAD WRITING.

Yes, RPGs and such can have issues. After all, how many RPG groups are really good writers? But the issues are common across many RPGs, not just Star Wars. I've heard similar complaints leveled at Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and even Middle Earth. Again, it's not the setting's fault if the stories you're attempting to tell in game wind up poorly written. Indeed, RPG campaigns are rarely remembered for the overall story, but for epic moments within them where the PCs succeeded when everyone was expecting failure.

The Star Wars setting is very interesting and makes a good backdrop for a well-written story. But even the best backdrop - much like having the best special effects - does not save a poorly written story from itself.

Let's consider Canto Bight - the casino 'world' in TLJ. Only we can see it's just a casino city on a coast; we know very little about the rest of the planet aside from it has large lakes or oceans, and grasslands. It could just as easily have been filmed in Monaco or Las Vegas, and told you just as much about the wider culture and society of Earth.

Now, let's imagine a story where the bit about New Republic, First Order, and Resistance arms dealers all buying from the same crowd, and a New Republic agent is investigating what's going on. Now... well, we're pretty much at the plot of Casino Royale, aren't we? This is generally considered a good James Bond movie, is it not? Effectively the same setting; way different outcomes based on the quality of the story written in that setting.

For me, the Star Wars setting is full of possibilities. Unfortunately, very few Star Wars products really delve into it.

The old WEG RPG was amazing because it expanded the universe enough to fire the imagination. The new FFG RPG does a decent job of this, but it's weighed down by too much baggage; a lit of the EU and post-Prequels background expansion has been cringe-worthy Planet of Hats nonsense. Every member of this species has the same job as the one guy we saw in screen. Every member of that species has the same personality as the one we saw on screen, etc. Still, the RPG books do a good job of getting across the idea that there's a lot more out there to explore.

The Sequels shrank the setting dramatically. It feels like there's nowhere to go in Star Wars, and all the best ideas will have to strangle young to avoid running into the sticky gak trap of the official timeline.

The best ideas to come out of Disney Wars were the Whills religion from Rogue One (that treats the Force as a spiritual element rather than an X-gene), the criminal underground from Solo, and the post-Empire collapse in The Mandalorian. Those all have tremendous potential for exploration. The only problem is that Disney is too incompetent to do anything other than spin gold into gak. (Other than Dave Filoni...but the setting might be too damaged for him to save it.)

I guess what I mean by setting is that the setting, meaning the location and culture, on it's own, isn't enough to excite me.

For example, if CBS announced a show set entirely on occupied Bajor, that would excite. Bajor is a complex, well defined world with it's own culture, religion, politics, etc.

On the flip side, a show set on, say, Tattoine, wouldn't be interesting without knowing more.

Just have to add that the one thing the prequels did well is make the Galaxy feel big. The setting is expanded in the prequels even though the story is garbage.

Also, the comparison to LoTR is pretty accurate. LOTR has a setting with one defining conflict; the Valar/Elves/good vs Morgoth/Sauron/bad. Every aspect of Middle Earth's history is informed by this conflict. Every expansion of the setting will have to tie back to Morgoth some way or another. Attempts to add anything truly different to the setting tend to feel tacked on or confusing rather than organic (Bombadil, Ungoliant).

Star Wars had the same problem with regards to the Empire/Palpatine/Dark Side. Bringing in the Vong felt unnatural. But simply returning to the Palpatine well again and again is tiresome and stupid. The best expansion stories deal with fall out from the empire and its fall. The Force could also be used to expand to new conflicts or story paradigms, but that would require something more nuanced than Dark Side Again.


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 Polonius wrote:
I guess what I mean by setting is that the setting, meaning the location and culture, on it's own, isn't enough to excite me.

For example, if CBS announced a show set entirely on occupied Bajor, that would excite. Bajor is a complex, well defined world with it's own culture, religion, politics, etc.

On the flip side, a show set on, say, Tattoine, wouldn't be interesting without knowing more.

It requires a slower, smaller stakes story to expand on a single planet or handful in the Star Wars setting. The Mandalorian may develop Carl Weathers World into something more interesting over the next season...Or it may abandon the place for good. Star Wars makes small town out of its planets.

 Polonius wrote:
One of the pillars of fandom is that Star Wars has this incredibly rich, detailed setting, with tons of background. the thought, then, is that we want to see more stuff that explores that setting. Except, it turns out, we mostly don't. After the original trilogy, fandom has been pretty divided about most of the offerings, with a handful of expectations (the Thrawn trilogy, Rogue One, KOTOR, Rebels, and Mandalorian) and some of the stuff is just straight up hated (prequels and sequels). You also hear stories of the various SW tabletop RPGs struggling, and it makes you wonder why.

I don't really agree about the pillars of the fandom is the rich setting. Sure, tons of nerds have made up tons of setting, but every Star Wars RPG I've seen has gotten one piece of advice right: Keep the pace moving along. Keep the action relevant. Star Wars is basically pulp fiction and the setting is there to evoke the imagination, not get bogged down in details. This is the biggest flaw of a lot of SW writers, they feel the need to backstory EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. Nobody gives a rat's ass about the dude who gets his arm chopped off by Obi-Wan in A New Hope! But you can be sure somebody gave him a back story.

The sad thing is that JJ Abrams understands this, but is willing to sacrifice all logic and reason just to provide one spectacle after another, leaving the audience confused half the time. Yes, we want to turn our brain off at a Star Wars movie, but we don't want to be confused or have our expectations shattered either. This is why the John Wick movies were popular - there's a rich setting in there of underworld families and codes of conduct, but we learn them organically while we watch Keanu Reaves take ungodly amounts of punishment and murdering umpteen (other) bad guys. It's style over substance, but there's substance there to support the style.

In my opinion, the setting is fine. Things like the Clone Wars and Mandalorian are a testament to that.

The problem is that a bad story is simply a bad story.

The original Star Wars setting was vague and just enough to provide a backdrop to a simple story. Nothing special but not too bad.

The prequals eroded most of what had been built by telling you things you did not care about or no need or were just stupid - Midi-chlorians.....

The first sequal was a fairly lazy remake of the first successful film and added nothing really - just changed names fo the bad guys.

the second sequal was impressive only in its unrelenting awfulness - to add to its massive shortcomings in plot, character, pacing and writing - it also messed with what little setting was left in order to provide a few shody moments of effects.

No bothered with the third film.

There is nothing massively great about the SW setting but its not a bad starting point.

Writters can do wonders with a poor setting - they can also make it worse, or in the case of whoever excreted TLJ they just produce pure gak.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
In my opinion, the setting is fine. Things like the Clone Wars and Mandalorian are a testament to that.

The problem is that a bad story is simply a bad story.

Yep, yep.

Or cancelling interesting dives into setting exploration in favor of Moar Battlefrotns! Thanks for that, EA.

There are lots of places the setting could go, if they bother. It was one of the more interesting aspects of Rogue One that they just didn't bother doing in the 'new trilogy.' TFA could have been mostly on Tattooine and Endor with Hoth as the Superweapon and it wouldn't be any different. They just never bothered to look at the worlds around them, let alone allow them into the story.

 John Prins wrote:

I don't really agree about the pillars of the fandom is the rich setting. Sure, tons of nerds have made up tons of setting, but every Star Wars RPG I've seen has gotten one piece of advice right: Keep the pace moving along. Keep the action relevant. Star Wars is basically pulp fiction and the setting is there to evoke the imagination, not get bogged down in details. This is the biggest flaw of a lot of SW writers, they feel the need to backstory EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. Nobody gives a rat's ass about the dude who gets his arm chopped off by Obi-Wan in A New Hope! But you can be sure somebody gave him a back story.

The sad thing is that JJ Abrams understands this, but is willing to sacrifice all logic and reason just to provide one spectacle after another, leaving the audience confused half the time. Yes, we want to turn our brain off at a Star Wars movie, but we don't want to be confused or have our expectations shattered either. This is why the John Wick movies were popular - there's a rich setting in there of underworld families and codes of conduct, but we learn them organically while we watch Keanu Reaves take ungodly amounts of punishment and murdering umpteen (other) bad guys. It's style over substance, but there's substance there to support the style.

Yeah, I think we're kind of on the same page. I guess I'm using setting very specifically, to mean the places and cultures, which were kept intentionally archtypical to allow for the action and the story. Compare SW to, say, Dune. Arrakis (and the Empire in general) is almost obsessively detailed. I feel like you can run a World of Darkness level RPG among the Fremen. But the setting is criticial to the story.

I guess maybe I'd rephrase my observation to be, not that SW doesn't have an interesting setting, but that SW does best with a very minimally sketched out setting.

It's a great setting. You can do literally anything with it. The main problem it has is just that its too most recognizable features; Jedi and Stormtroopers don't really ever coexist at the same time.

I had my gripes with TLJ, but one of the things it left me with was excitement for the setting. For the first time it felt like it could live up to its full potential. The rule of 2 and the Sith gone, the Knights of Ren and Stormtroopers conquering the galaxy while the resistance rises to oppose them with a new generation of Jedi. It was probably the best potential to see a conflict on par with the Clone Wars but without the iconic heroes and villains on the same side.

I've never viewed them as anything other than a series of really, really, really long toy commercials, personally.

It's never interested me. I've never managed to sit through an entire Star Wars movie, except Rogue One and only then because I literally could not leave.

I don't think I've ever made it all the way through any Lucas movie.

EDIT - Yep, I have. Howard the Duck. Now that's a great movie in an immersive universe.

I would say that currently star wars isint that interesting of a setting. Thats because its been sanatised completely to be customer (child) friendly. This means that you cannot get neuance and everything boils down to black and white / good vs evil. But the evil is white washed and there is no room for grey areas and creativity.

I actually find KOTOR feels more like star wars than any of the newer movies. Same with a lot of the older star wars games. The thing is Disney is making Disneys, and I can feel it. Maybe the issue is I tend to like stuff that takes itself very seriously, and these newer films (mandalorian included) do not.

 Thargrim wrote:
I actually find KOTOR feels more like star wars than any of the newer movies. Same with a lot of the older star wars games. The thing is Disney is making Disneys, and I can feel it. Maybe the issue is I tend to like stuff that takes itself very seriously, and these newer films (mandalorian included) do not.

Pretty much agree the old republic is a much better setting than the rise and fall of of the empire. The old republic takes the best parts of.the setting and runs with them it has a decadent fall.of.rome feel to it given there main enemy is hubris,corruption and stagnation that then allows.the sith to be a viable enemy and hamstrings the jedi without neutering them.

It feels a bigger setting as it is much less humancentric due to never being a Live Action setting, the stories told.have a huge width from epics like.the first encounters with the sith to small stories.of.lone jedi righting wrongs on the frontier a couple.of.which have a firefly/western vibe.

I really hope they leave the Kotor period alone as.I just see them hiring another one note hack like JJ or Johnson to write and direct.it.

It boils down to the definition of fantasy vs science fiction.
Fantasy is based on some "big-bad" some obstacle to overcome.
Science Fiction is largely how something affects the people, how people adapt to a technology or capability.

Star Wars happily straddles that line between both.
You have the big bad "Empire" lead by some "Sith Lord" with varying levels of bosses between the protagonist and them.
Notice the stories revolve around some Jedi and learning their powers.
What is really clever is the more traditional fantasy element magic=force has more a science fiction part to it.
The traditional science fiction elements of space ships and tech is all used by the big-bad .
The blend of stories about the characters and the tech around them all seem to go hand in hand.

Star Trek however is very much pure Science Fiction.
Look at some of the best episodes and they always contained some new twist in technology.
If ever low on ideas, you could writing something about the transporter...

Honestly, you cold re imagine Star Wars as a pure classic fantasy story with traditional magic and probably not miss much other then it would not have a tie-in with the original

I like both for what they each offer.
I expect science fiction to ask the more painful questions, so Star Trek not being part of Disney is a blessing.
Star Wars loses some of it's grit but hey, I am finding the Mandalorian fun all the same despite the baby Yoda craze,
So long as we can maintain the "Han shot first" there may be hope.

I think the greatest strength of the Star Wars universe (and the 40K Universe) is that it is a huge sand box. In thi ssand box, you can literally find a way to tell almost any sort of story you want to tell from an RPG perspective.

You can have the fate of worlds (or star systems) hang int he balance. It could be much smaller too, like two pilots from the Rebels and the Imperials stranded on a remote planet together (Yes, Enemy Mine in SW). Both would work equally well in the setting. Therefore, as RPG/writing it is great because you can do anything you and your players want.

The original Trilogy was sketched in just enough to provide the basic archetypes and themes to build on. Since then, the Universe has only narrowed. For example, the Force is just an X-gene.... it isn't even that spiritual.... it is biology. Factions are reduced down to Rebels, Imperials, and criminals. Jedi's need a bloodline to have the force. Everything is because of Palpatine. Etc. Instead of expanding the Universe of possibility the new movies continue to narrow it and limit it.

Therefor,e the more we "see" of the Star Wars Universe, the smaller it has gotten. This limiting of the scope has turned me off to it more than anything else.

Argive wrote:I would say that currently star wars isint that interesting of a setting. Thats because its been sanatised completely to be customer (child) friendly. This means that you cannot get neuance and everything boils down to black and white / good vs evil. But the evil is white washed and there is no room for grey areas and creativity.

I'd actually suggest watching Clone Wars, if you haven't already.

Plenty of room for moral grey area (the entire Clone army is a grey area for the Jedi - they're breeding living sentient beings purely to get put in wars and die), and creativity is barely any more stifled than in something like 40k.

 Easy E wrote:
Therefor,e the more we "see" of the Star Wars Universe, the smaller it has gotten. This limiting of the scope has turned me off to it more than anything else.

You hit the nail on the head.
The best horror movies are based on what you do not see.
Some of the best universes made have little explained about them they just exist.
It gives opportunity to make things up as you go.

I liked how Hare Brained Schemes said they had freedom to write some big story in a relatively backwater location in the Battletech universe.
This is what each franchise needs to do on occasion: "dust off" new strangeness that is in another location removed from the "primary" story we were aware of.
Wouldn't it be funny if the empire we knew was like a fiefdom of a larger empire?

There are a lot of desert planets. And most planets seem to consist of a singular type of ecology.
I mean, it's a convenient story-telling device so the audience can recognize where the characters are, but it is kinda bland.

But to me, the pseudo-magic tech is what is more interesting. Lightsabers, IMO, are the coolest sci-fi weapon ever

-

 Argive wrote:
I would say that currently star wars isint that interesting of a setting. Thats because its been sanatised completely to be customer (child) friendly. This means that you cannot get neuance and everything boils down to black and white / good vs evil. But the evil is white washed and there is no room for grey areas and creativity.

I respectfully disagree. Not that star wars is very white/black, but that this is a new development. The original trilogy is built on a pretty simple plot: the rebels are good, the empire (and Jabba) are evil, and anything the rebels do is good, anything the bad guys do is bad.

My point was Its either darkside (bad) or jedi(good)….

Darkside is always evil and always will be pure evil in the setting...

This hasn't really changed since OG star wars.
So it was interesting when it was new. But the setting hasn't grown as far as I'm concerned. Sure deathstars have gotten a bit bigger and badder…

But quite a lot of SW media (KOTOR, Clone Wars, the prequels, even TLJ, in a roundabout way) sends pretty strong "hey, the Jedi weren't exactly the best guys and aren't really supposed to be 'good' guys.

The idea that it's just binary "good vs evil" isn't necessarily true, and there's plenty of opportunities within the setting to explore things aside from that - honestly, anything where you don't have Jedi and Sith featured so prominently is very good for exactly that.

 Polonius wrote:
I think that accusing Disney of having all these agendas is an overly simplistic critique. Movies can be made by committee and be quite good (Hey, MCU) or they can be terrible (Hey, DCEU). Star wars was at it's best when it was mostly the vision of George Lucas, but it was also at it's worst when it was almost fully the vision of George Lucas.

The problem is people I think.

We can drag Star Trek, the DCU and the MCU in on this perspective as well imo. Compare the massive success of the MCU to other major "corporate" IP projects. The ones that succeed the most, are the ones where the actual creators are given the most freedom. Guardians of the Galaxy, Shazam, Deadpool, Avengers. These films were all made by people who clearly loved what they were doing and had the freedom to create it. Compare to the recent spat of Star Trek media, which even when it's good feels like someone put it through a centrifuge of focus groups before making it, or has been chiefly handled by someone (not naming names, but he makes Discovery) who seems to wish he could be making anything but Star Trek. The recent Star Wars films I think feel very much like a board of executives was reviewing every creative decision in TFA and TRoS, while Johnson was allowed to run wild without any sense of control in TLJ. The DCU is just a mess of what I can only describe as "board approved" plot points, kicked off by a man who proclaimed Martian Manhunter was a boring character without any ounce of sarcasm. I.E. someone with no respect for the source material, who only seems to really like comics written by Frank Miller. Works great when you're producing 300. Less so when you're producing more mainstream comic book films. Do we even need to go into everything halfbaked about Fox's XMen films?

There's no such thing as a bad setting. Jim Butcher turned "pokemon and lost roman legions" into an best selling book series on a bet. There is however such a thing as ill conceived stories.

I think the difference we're seeing in terms of quality, fan reaction, and consistency really comes down to a combination of factors. The right people for the job, people who want to do what they're doing more than anything. Corporate figure heads keeping the overall project on track while not burying it under focus group testing. Creative directors who actually want to be working with the given source material, rather than people who like maybe some of it and find the rest worthless.

Disney is the only company that seems to have nailed the mix right, and they failed to properly replicate it in Star Wars after their decades of success with Marvel.


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 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
But quite a lot of SW media (KOTOR, Clone Wars, the prequels, even TLJ, in a roundabout way) sends pretty strong "hey, the Jedi weren't exactly the best guys and aren't really supposed to be 'good' guys.

The idea that it's just binary "good vs evil" isn't necessarily true, and there's plenty of opportunities within the setting to explore things aside from that - honestly, anything where you don't have Jedi and Sith featured so prominently is very good for exactly that.

I agree with you.

I also think Star Wars has struggled massive to really find it's foot on this front. It'll happily switch back and forth from white/black morality tales to more complex gray dramas without rhyme or reason, and with no unifying cohesion behind it. I can't count how many times the balance of the force is brought up in Star Wars material, and I still have no fething idea what that means cause the franchise has provided no consistency on what it is supposed to mean.

I think there are two problems at the heart of the recent issues with the post-Lucas Star Wars setting.

The first is that its become too "self-aware" and "self-referential" - The Force Awakens opens with the line "This will begin to make things right" as though its an apology for the prequel films, the rest of the film is a very intentionally and self consciously nostalgia trip trying to remind you of why you fell in love with Star Wars in the first place and begging you to give it a second chance by rekindling the magic of your first time with it. The next two movies in the trilogy come across more or less commentaries about both the previous film in the trilogy and the rest of the saga as a whole. It dwells on the past too much to allow the story to move forward in a satisfying manner which detracts from ones ability to view it as a true "other world" which you are catching a glimpse of. The new films in particular never seem to allow themselves to miss an opportunity to make an overt callback to another film in the series which they justify with the "its like poetry, it rhymes" quote from George Lucas but done in the ham-handed manner of an amateur fanfic-writer rather than with the care and subtlety of a true poet. The "rhymes" you find in the Prequel Trilogy and The Clone Wars are often subtle enough that you can miss them if you're not paying attention, but also clear enough to catch them if you know what to look for, and in many cases the rhymes are used to contrast as much as they are to parallel:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/137711830

The sequel trilogy instead very overtly calls attention to its own rhymes as though it aggressively *wants* you to recognize that they are there, and its not going to let that moment slip by unnoticed - and thats a big part of it, for the most part the prequel rhymes just sort of "happen", they are a scene just like any other that flow and transition from the previous to the next without effort. In the sequel trilogy the rhymes are "moments" - the camera lingers on the scene just a bit longer, the scoring picks up, and the overall intensity of it makes it more of a focal point so that it can be acknowledged. Whereas I missed most of the rhymes in the prequels until I watched that video, it was difficult for me *not* to notice the self-referentialism of the prequels.

Another issue, which is more "behind the scenes" is that the producers and creatives behind the content seem to be to "self-aware" (for lack of a better term) of the content they are creating. I get a strong sense that behind the scenes the writers, directors, "don't worry about it making sense or explaining any details, we'll release a book or a comic or a game to explain it later, the fans love that sort of thing, just like George used to do" - but in many cases the details they feel they can just skip over feel like they are major (or at least substantial enough to seem somewhat important) plot points that really *should* be explained in at least some way so that what we are witnessing makes enough logical sense for us to not really question it. Both The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker in particular seem like they both suffer from this in particular. As much as I love the Visual Dictionaries, for example, they seem that they have or the content found therein have become almost mandatory in many cases for filling in some major details about what is going on, whereas in the Lucas era they were mainly just served to provide neat points of trivia and fun factoids rather than elaboration on plot exposition.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
But quite a lot of SW media (KOTOR, Clone Wars, the prequels, even TLJ, in a roundabout way) sends pretty strong "hey, the Jedi weren't exactly the best guys and aren't really supposed to be 'good' guys.

The idea that it's just binary "good vs evil" isn't necessarily true, and there's plenty of opportunities within the setting to explore things aside from that - honestly, anything where you don't have Jedi and Sith featured so prominently is very good for exactly that.

Yeah and the CURRENT star wars has literally just taken KOTOR setting out behind the barn and put two slugs into it and buried it below 6ft of moist earth.
Current star wars setting isint interesting. And I wholeheartedly agree that the star wars itself could be much more interesting.

What would make the setting interesting for me ?

I would love to see a fledgling galaxy star wars. Like primordial fledgling galactic society where worlds and nations mattered and technology was a big thing.
The Force truly coming into its genesys at the same time would be hella exciting as the paradigm of black and white would not have been established yet IMO. I think its almost like what force wakens tried to do, but failed biblically. They didn't do it for creative reasons but for public appeal reason to try and make the franchise "more accessible" and other such bcorporate buzzwords.

I know that star wars without established "force" isint really star wars.

 Polonius wrote:
One of the pillars of fandom is that Star Wars has this incredibly rich, detailed setting, with tons of background. the thought, then, is that we want to see more stuff that explores that setting. Except, it turns out, we mostly don't. After the original trilogy, fandom has been pretty divided about most of the offerings, with a handful of expectations (the Thrawn trilogy, Rogue One, KOTOR, Rebels, and Mandalorian) and some of the stuff is just straight up hated (prequels and sequels). You also hear stories of the various SW tabletop RPGs struggling, and it makes you wonder why.

I think I know why. Star Wars isn't interesting because of the setting, at least not in the way that, say, Middle Earth or Star Trek is. Star Wars was originally a three act space opera recreating the hero's journey, and as such, dealt less in vividly new settings and more in archtypes. You literally have a desert planet, an Ice World, and a forest moon (that's called "the forest moon!") You spend almost no time with the cultures at play, instead sticking mostly to wilderness as befits a rebel force on the move. To it's credit, the world does appear lived in and real in a way that most sci fi doesn't, but that also is because the scenes were meant to look familiar. the Yavin/Death star sequence in a New Hope is basically a Battle of Britain/Dam Busters mashup with different fighters. The characters are somewhat interestingly both archtypes but also three dimensional. The old mystic has a sense of humor, the bossy princess isn't afraid to get her hands dirty, and the smart alek rogue has moments of sincerity.

So, what Star Wars does have is an amazing concept in the force, and some amazing visual design in it's star Ships. The force, in part by being so vaguely defined, really gets the imagination going. the design aspect is really easy to overlook. I think that if we held a "most iconic fictional starship" contest Star Wars would put at least four ships in the top ten: Falcon, X-wing, Tie, Star destroyer. I think this explains why video games that rely on either the star ships or force users are always so fun and popular.

To sum up, I think that more Star Wars content is great, but I'm more interested in the stuff that leverages the themes and concepts and designs of star wars, rather than the setting.

I think this is one of the reasons the Mandalorian is solid. It's disconnected from the larger Movie storylines, and otherwise is just its own universe exploring all those visuals and designs in some interesting ways, and in doing so feels better than a lot of the more mainstream storyline stuff.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
But quite a lot of SW media (KOTOR, Clone Wars, the prequels, even TLJ, in a roundabout way) sends pretty strong "hey, the Jedi weren't exactly the best guys and aren't really supposed to be 'good' guys.

The idea that it's just binary "good vs evil" isn't necessarily true, and there's plenty of opportunities within the setting to explore things aside from that - honestly, anything where you don't have Jedi and Sith featured so prominently is very good for exactly that.

I'd argue the whole "let's grey it up" is part of what's done the most damage to star wars

I dunno, part of what makes the Clone Wars series so great is that it started out fairly black-and-white and as the characters, story and audience grew became more shades-of-grey as supposed good guys were revealed to pursue morally dubious ends to their goals or be not such good guys after all, and bad guys turned out to sometimes have good reasons for what they did or start to or partially redeem themselves.

For what was essentially a kid's cartoon, it weaved a surprisingly deep narrative. I'd go so far as to say it's everything the prequels should have been but weren't.

So yeah, I'm defenitely on the side of the writing is what makes a good story, not the setting.

Bran Dawri wrote:
I dunno, part of what makes the Clone Wars series so great is that it started out fairly black-and-white and as the characters, story and audience grew became more shades-of-grey as supposed good guys were revealed to pursue morally dubious ends to their goals or be not such good guys after all, and bad guys turned out to sometimes have good reasons for what they did or start to or partially redeem themselves.
For what was essentially a kid's cartoon, it weaved a surprisingly deep narrative. I'd go so far as to say it's everything the prequels should have been but weren't.
So yeah, I'm defenitely on the side of the writing is what makes a good story, not the setting.

You keep looking at a main character and then remember "Doesn't he become Darth Vader?? WTF!"
You watch mainly to see the many steps that lead to the change.

Some of the most interesting books I have read was where the "bad guy" was fun and interesting and the "good guy" was irritating.
I keep thinking of HK-47, he always approached his mayhem with a measure of glee and was forthright in his wants and actions.

This was all before "Megamind" that hammered that anti-hero aspect home (not so much "The Incredibles" but it pointed out the same thing).

SO to stay on topic, I really think not much interest is really in the setting.

 Galef wrote:
There are a lot of desert planets. And most planets seem to consist of a singular type of ecology.
I mean, it's a convenient story-telling device so the audience can recognize where the characters are, but it is kinda bland.

But to me, the pseudo-magic tech is what is more interesting. Lightsabers, IMO, are the coolest sci-fi weapon ever

-

True, to a point. But then, how many times to the featured characters move around on given planet enough to show more than one biome?

Some of the issues is the gamification of the Force. As fun as it is, breaking things down into actions that give you Dark Side Points or Light Side Points that you spend to unlock specific powers that are mostly things from other games removes a lot of what the Force was all about. It puts the focus on telekinesis and other superpowers instead of the guiding hand of destiny that makes for its most compelling moments in the films. As much as I enjoyed Fallen Order, it is probably the worst offender in recent memory.

Most of the Force in the original trilogy is new age mystic nonsense, but its also rarely about abilities as much as it is a current of destiny. There's a sense that a Jedi is literally a puppet for the Force and much of Luke's conflict comes from wanting something other than what destiny has in store for him. The Emperor is defeated because everyone involved gives into fate rather than any of the powers at play. On the flip side, the Dark Side comes across as the folly of letting emotion control us and the damage we cause to those around us as we try to bend the world to our will.

A lot of that has been lost over the years because its not the kind of empowering stuff that makes for a good boss fight. A lot of it has been swapped out for fights with Mega Smiths and Burly Brawls. Far too often the Dark Side gets treated as a choice of powerset and RPG alignment and never gets explored in a way as interesting as the confrontation at the end of RotJ implies. It's probably a big part of why I'm rather fond of TLJ. Snoke's scene is one of the few times we've really seen subjugation and oppression through the Force expressed that way, and its the first time I've felt like someone understood how to make it something both compelling and reprehensible since the prequels made it mean little more than an excuse to dress in black and carry a red saber.

 LunarSol wrote:


Most of the Force in the original trilogy is new age mystic nonsense, .

I always saw it as more old school Daoism..... which is pretty far away from being "New Age".

However, to synthesize your great post..... the more we learn about the Force (Through games, books, comics, RPGs, etc) the smaller and more limiting it gets. As you say, it is just a a choice of power sets as opposed to the battle between Good and Evil. Therefore, the setting itself has been continually getting smaller instead of more interesting or empowering.

I would be interested in a story where they run with the daoist aspects: what does a religious life look like in Star Wars? What kinds of theological or spiritual conflicts come up among the priests and their charges? What makes different Force religious different? Is there a Shaolin to the Whills' Wudang?

Honestly that's why I always found the idea that the Jedi have to "die off" to tell new stories about the Force to be complete nonsense. There's an entire galaxy out there no doubt full of just as much religious and spiritual diversity around the Force as there is around the idea of god IRL, just waiting to be detailed. You see hints of that in Rogue One, and there's a bit of EU material on the subject(eg, the Voss Mystics in the TOR MMO), but the reason they've not been developed isn't that the presence of the Jedi somehow makes it impossible, there just hasn't been any drive to do it.

I do think one thing is important to note though, and that's Disney and their level of culpability in all this mess. I have zero love for Disney as an entity, but other than perhaps a charge of naivete their hands are clean of pretty much everything save TRoS.

Disney have been buying up a lot of companies in the past couple of decades, but they're not corporate tyrants in the "you're MY wife now Dave" sense of taking immediate and complete control. Their MO is to let their acquisitions continue on broadly as they were before, doing the things that made them successful enough for Disney to find them an attractive buy in the first place, only stepping in more directly if things get screwed up.

From all the rumours and leaks I've read, beyond some very broad "hit them in the old Nostalgia Bone" direction for the overall tone of TFA, Lucasfilm pretty much did as they liked right up until TLJ and Solo. People reflexively defend her because they see the criticism as motivated by sexism, but the simple reality is the culprit behind the present state of Star Wars is clear: Kathleen Kennedy. She greenlit the projects. She hired the directors. She allowed the directors to go their own ways(at least initially), and arguably that was only actually a successful strategy for one(TFA) out of four movies. In two of the three cases it had questionable outcomes, she spent small fortunes correcting(I've seen some argue over-correcting, especially in the case of Solo, which has the word "safe" running through it like a stick of rock - though I personally enjoyed it - and Rogue One seems to have become a decent movie almost by sheer chance) the problems, and in the third she almost certainly knew in advance the film was likely to be, let's be charitable and say "controversial" among fans, thanks to test screenings, but pushed on regardless seemingly because she got on well personally with the director and/or she agreed with what he was trying to do and say with the story.

It's only after it became obvious to everyone that Solo was going to struggle that Iger steps in with his "buck stops here" media interviews and Disney begins actively meddling in Lucasfilm's internals operations, which has given us both bad(TRoS being even more of a hyperactive, confusing mess than is typical for JJ ostensibly because Disney ordered nearly 40 minutes of footage hacked out of his favoured final cut) and good(The Mandalorian, and what appears to be at least a partial sidelining of Kennedy and the Story Group she appointed in favour of people Disney feel they can trust like Favreau & Feige, and old Lucas loyalists like Filoni).

In short - I don't think we've actually seen "DisneyWars" yet per se, we've been getting "KennedyWars", and we'll have to wait & see if Disney stepping in in a more active way will be good or bad in the long term. I'm hoping that they'll be satisfied with shifting responsibility for what does & doesn't get made, and how it gets made, to people like Favreau who they see as a safe pair of hands, and once that's firmly in place they step back again, but the rumours about Project Luminous and its apparently utterly rote attempts to ape the Marvel Formula, right down to treating each main Jedi character like a supey-hero with their own "special" Force power, has me a bit worried they're going to play it safe for a long time yet.

The settings are fine, the characters are fine, but the writing does a terrible job selling those characters so the movies fall flat. The difference in character development in the prequel movies and the clone wars animation is astounding. Anakin isn't just some creepy weirdo who flirts with padme and somehow wins her over with his hatred of sand. Grievous is a ruthless general who sees power as both a means and an end instead of a coughing mustache twirling meme. Obi-Wan is an incredibly complex character and the show demonstrates everything he went through to change him into the wise master Luke finds. Even Jar Jar is better in the animation, he is massively underestimated due to his clumsy reputation and that evens the playing field instead of relying solely on dumb luck.

The world building is still interesting and good writing could easily salvage the new trilogies characters. Even Rose could transform from a cheesy idealist fangirl to an unbreakable force of willpower that transforms even the most sniveling of cowards (Finn) into courageous heroes. For example:

 Easy E wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:


Most of the Force in the original trilogy is new age mystic nonsense, .

I always saw it as more old school Daoism..... which is pretty far away from being "New Age".

What's in the films isn't, not even in the OT. Its new age in the sense that it blindly apes some broad strokes of eastern philosophies without bothering to understand it and just stamps 'good and evil' into a shallow misinterpretation

 DominayTrix wrote:
Even Rose could transform from a cheesy idealist fangirl to an unbreakable force of willpower that transforms even the most sniveling of cowards (Finn) into courageous heroes. For example:

Spoiler:

Just give a better reason than "That's how we're going to win, not fighting what we hate, but saving what we love" for stopping Finn. Something like "If everyone sacrifices themselves then we save nothing. Honor my sister's death by having the courage to fight, love, and live on" etc

That did inspire me to think of something else to add to Rose's character. Something more along the lines of:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

 DominayTrix wrote:
Even Rose could transform from a cheesy idealist fangirl to an unbreakable force of willpower that transforms even the most sniveling of cowards (Finn) into courageous heroes. For example:

Spoiler:

Just give a better reason than "That's how we're going to win, not fighting what we hate, but saving what we love" for stopping Finn. Something like "If everyone sacrifices themselves then we save nothing. Honor my sister's death by having the courage to fight, love, and live on" etc

That did inspire me to think of something else to add to Rose's character. Something more along the lines of:

Spoiler:

Rose actually resenting/being deeply hurt by by her sister's loss, and keeping that pain/fear of loss repressed through a lot of the film. When she makes a connection with Finn (platonic! If Finn needs to have a romantic arc, have it with Poe, not Rose or Rey or the other ex-Stormtrooper!), she finds a connection that reminds her of her sister. When Finn tries to do what her sister does and sacrifice himself, Rose intervenes, because while she appreciated the sacrifice her sister made for her and everyone else, she still lost her sister, and isn't prepared to lose someone else.

Good writing if only they had had a even vaguley competant director and writing team for TLJ the film could haev been salvaged from the gak it became.

In terms of background detail, for me 40k and Star Trek absolutely trump Star Wars, hands down. 100% of the time.

But that’s only because the Star Wars I love (and I do) is visual in nature. The films and the TV series.

And all of that is tied into relatively constrained story telling, the rise and fall and rise of Skywalker, The Empire and The Old Republic.

I know there’s far more out there, but I’m strictly limiting my comments to what I have personally viewed/read.

Star Trek gets a serious leg up from the frankly amazing Deep Space Nine. A static location, complete with fallout and implications for every action.

40k conversely is far, far more than a single story. Yes the Heresy era is now very well (some could, probably successfully argue overly) defined. But the backbone is more of a loosely cohesive sandbox which is very clear that no matter what tales we as participants might weave, the stage is so utterly vast we’ll never truly impact it, whether on the board, pen and paper, official novels and fan fiction.

What Star Wars needs (and I’ve not seen the Mando yet) isn’t just a DS9 of sorts, but also a ‘below decks’. Tales and adventures of absolute, 100% mooks that are less participants and more bystanders caught up in the flood.

There is room for that. But it’ll take balls and skill to pull it off i a canonical manner.

 DominayTrix wrote:
The settings are fine, the characters are fine, but the writing does a terrible job selling those characters so the movies fall flat. The difference in character development in the prequel movies and the clone wars animation is astounding. Anakin isn't just some creepy weirdo who flirts with padme and somehow wins her over with his hatred of sand. Grievous is a ruthless general who sees power as both a means and an end instead of a coughing mustache twirling meme. Obi-Wan is an incredibly complex character and the show demonstrates everything he went through to change him into the wise master Luke finds. Even Jar Jar is better in the animation, he is massively underestimated due to his clumsy reputation and that evens the playing field instead of relying solely on dumb luck.

This. Clone Wars TAS is everything the prequels should have been but weren't.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
In terms of background detail, for me 40k and Star Trek absolutely trump Star Wars, hands down. 100% of the time.

star trek? LOL

Star Trek makes SW seem consistant and well written. for every "in the pale moon light" there's 2 or 3 "Spock's Brain"s

It’s still a wider story telling base. Multiple protagonist and antagonist factions, bit of light politics etc.

Sure, it has stinkers. But there’s still more of a sandbox for creativity.

Star Wars, the original, was a great example of how simple concepts and good visuals make compelling entertainment.
The force was a magic, there was an evil empire, and there was a young man destined for greatness.

Ever since then, Lucas and others took that basic concept, and tried to expand on it, and the more they tried to explain stuff away, the worse for wear it looked. Now force isn't just some all-encompassing life energy that picks it's champions, it's a goddamn space STD. Now the evil empire isn't a nebulous, undefined force, it's got fleshed out organization and plans, and anyone can see how dumb it is and how it has no right to work.

The more was revealed of Star Wars galaxy, the more the man behind the courtain was sticking out. Now he's out in the open, and he's naked as heck.

This thread inspired me to go look for the 2003 clone wars cartoon. You can find it on Youtube in it's entirety. It is a bit breakneck, a consequence of it being written as a series of shorts, but it is a great series and a decent enough prequel for the OT without all the rigmarole of the prequels. I had forgotten how good it was.

I also rewatched Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back. They still hold up. Though Han is a right creepy git on the Falcon with Leia in that one sequence.

Are the modern (CGI) series any good? I have heard mixed things about them.

 Da Boss wrote:
Though Han is a right creepy git on the Falcon with Leia in that one sequence. .

yeah the TESB Han/Leia romance would NEVER work in a movie today

 Da Boss wrote:
This thread inspired me to go look for the 2003 clone wars cartoon. You can find it on Youtube in it's entirety. It is a bit breakneck, a consequence of it being written as a series of shorts, but it is a great series and a decent enough prequel for the OT without all the rigmarole of the prequels. I had forgotten how good it was.

This series was superb. Seeing Grevious revealed in it as a very dangerous, very intelligent enemy and then watching him become a pathetic cartoon villain in subsequent materials was a gut punch.

Are the modern (CGI) series any good? I have heard mixed things about them.

The animated Clone Wars movie is pretty bad, but the series that comes after it is good to great. Only a few bad arc/episodes in the mix. Rebels was great. We're all pretended Resistance never happened.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Though Han is a right creepy git on the Falcon with Leia in that one sequence. .

yeah the TESB Han/Leia romance would NEVER work in a movie today

That's pretty crazy, reminds me of the time I talked to people who thought the kind of rapey scene in Blade Runner should be cut out of the film. But it's scenes like that which are important to show the moral ambiguity of the characters.

Showing that Han is a scumbag is alright, it is more that Leia reacts by falling for him after he has been such a weirdo creeper.

I am not arguing for it to be cut though. Did not say that anywhere in my post and would not either. We can't edit out everything we do not like from media made decades ago.

 Da Boss wrote:
We can't edit out everything we do not like from media made decades ago.

Clearly you're not George Lucas!

 Riquende wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
We can't edit out everything we do not like from media made decades ago.

Clearly you're not George Lucas!

Disney had to post guards in the room holding master copies of the original trilogy to prevent him from sneaking in at night to edit more scenes.

 Da Boss wrote:
This thread inspired me to go look for the 2003 clone wars cartoon. You can find it on Youtube in it's entirety. It is a bit breakneck, a consequence of it being written as a series of shorts, but it is a great series and a decent enough prequel for the OT without all the rigmarole of the prequels. I had forgotten how good it was.

The scene where Anakin gets pinned by the yeti creature and has his robot hand torn off, only to panic and defend himself by choking the creature (without a hand to choke it with) was better character progression into Vader than the entire prequel trilogy combined.

 Da Boss wrote:
Showing that Han is a scumbag is alright, it is more that Leia reacts by falling for him after he has been such a weirdo creeper.

I always interpreted it as sort of a long running game they'd been playing for awhile.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Showing that Han is a scumbag is alright, it is more that Leia reacts by falling for him after he has been such a weirdo creeper.

I always interpreted it as sort of a long running game they'd been playing for awhile.

Much like "It's Cold Outside"; it has a lot to do with an era in which women were expected to play the mouse.

 LunarSol wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Showing that Han is a scumbag is alright, it is more that Leia reacts by falling for him after he has been such a weirdo creeper.

I always interpreted it as sort of a long running game they'd been playing for awhile.

Much like "It's Cold Outside"; it has a lot to do with an era in which women were expected to play the mouse.

Bit of column A, bit of column B. That was likely George's intention, but Lucas was also a certified creeper. Ignoring the fact that slave leia was mostly an excuse to get Carrie Fisher in a golden bikini, he also swore "there's no underwear in space because flesh expands but underwear doesn't so a bra would strangle you" so she wouldn't wear a bra under a dress. Anakin and Padme are just another example of the same creepy flirting Lucas writes.

Bras aren't needed in space. No gravity, no sagging :-p ...

 Polonius wrote:

I think I know why. Star Wars isn't interesting because of the setting, at least not in the way that, say, Middle Earth or Star Trek is. Star Wars was originally a three act space opera recreating the hero's journey, and as such, dealt less in vividly new settings and more in archtypes. You literally have a desert planet, an Ice World, and a forest moon (that's called "the forest moon!") You spend almost no time with the cultures at play, instead sticking mostly to wilderness as befits a rebel force on the move. To it's credit, the world does appear lived in and real in a way that most sci fi doesn't, but that also is because the scenes were meant to look familiar. the Yavin/Death star sequence in a New Hope is basically a Battle of Britain/Dam Busters mashup with different fighters. The characters are somewhat interestingly both archtypes but also three dimensional. The old mystic has a sense of humor, the bossy princess isn't afraid to get her hands dirty, and the smart alek rogue has moments of sincerity.

I think you are on the right track: Star Wars is a setting developed around a story. Story came first and setting was built along as needed for the story. This means that once the story is complete, setting is also 'complete' and it is hard to come up with new, interesting stories. Star Trek, by contrast, is much more about the setting which can be used as a playground for different stories. It's even more obvious with Warhammer 40k setting.

Talking about Middle Earth, it is in many ways a 'setting first', but Hobbit & LotR were very much stories where setting was written around them. This is why Third Age Middle Earth is nothing like Tolkien's original, Silmarillion era Middle Earth. And once LotR was finished, Tolkien found out that his setting was also finished. He actually tried to come up with a sequel for LotR but very early came to conclusion that it was going to be crap and gave up.

Backfire wrote:

 Polonius wrote:

I think I know why. Star Wars isn't interesting because of the setting, at least not in the way that, say, Middle Earth or Star Trek is. Star Wars was originally a three act space opera recreating the hero's journey, and as such, dealt less in vividly new settings and more in archtypes. You literally have a desert planet, an Ice World, and a forest moon (that's called "the forest moon!") You spend almost no time with the cultures at play, instead sticking mostly to wilderness as befits a rebel force on the move. To it's credit, the world does appear lived in and real in a way that most sci fi doesn't, but that also is because the scenes were meant to look familiar. the Yavin/Death star sequence in a New Hope is basically a Battle of Britain/Dam Busters mashup with different fighters. The characters are somewhat interestingly both archtypes but also three dimensional. The old mystic has a sense of humor, the bossy princess isn't afraid to get her hands dirty, and the smart alek rogue has moments of sincerity.

I think you are on the right track: Star Wars is a setting developed around a story. Story came first and setting was built along as needed for the story. This means that once the story is complete, setting is also 'complete' and it is hard to come up with new, interesting stories. Star Trek, by contrast, is much more about the setting which can be used as a playground for different stories. It's even more obvious with Warhammer 40k setting.

Talking about Middle Earth, it is in many ways a 'setting first', but Hobbit & LotR were very much stories where setting was written around them. This is why Third Age Middle Earth is nothing like Tolkien's original, Silmarillion era Middle Earth. And once LotR was finished, Tolkien found out that his setting was also finished. He actually tried to come up with a sequel for LotR but very early came to conclusion that it was going to be crap and gave up.

with all due respect the idea that star trek was a story designed around a setting is complete and utter bull. the starship enterprise was given warp engines specificly so they could visit a new planet each week. and each week a new planet was invented, some of them rediculas, specificly to tell a story. TNG wasn't much differant. nor for that matter was voyager. the only trek that could be argued to be a "story based around a setting" is DS9. and frankly, spin offs by their nature have to play within the setting, but even DS9 did lots of stuff specificly to tell a story. like invent whole empires with a magic warp gate, specificly to cause trouble for the heros.

 kodos wrote:
Star Wars was Fantasy in Space, with alle the cool fantasy themes but in a more realistic way so it fits the present science focused world

as "the force" is easier to accept than just pure magic

it is not about details, things are just there and don't need to be explained

and it focus on the individual hero saving the day against the enemy armies


as soon as things went a different way of classic fantasy story telling, started to explain the universe and moved away from the singe hero thing, the universe lost a lot of its magic

Nope. It's actually martial arts in space. Both dojos train it's members in sword fighting and hate each other with a passion.

Don't let space ships and blasters fool you. The centre of each SW movie is the lightsaber fight which goes along with the mystical mumbo-jumbo to channel your ki aka force.

But none of the main plotlines is resolved with a swordfight...

Cronch wrote:
But none of the main plotlines is resolved with a swordfight...

I don't know if I'd call Vader's massacre of Rebel crewmembers in Rogue One a swordfight...

Star Wars is a very interesting setting, but the writers' insistence on making every story about the same group of protagonists (old EU)/trying to copy-paste the original trilogy over and over again (sequel trilogy) really limits how much space there is to explore, and the desire to make the economic and political underpinnings of the setting a pile of half-baked gibberish intended to be skimmed past by twelve-year-olds in search of the next explosion instead of making any effort to make sense (prequel trilogy) does limit the quality of any spin-offs.

I don't think the setting is the problem. The aforementioned handful of exceptions (Rogue One, KotOR, etc.) indicate that there's room to do interesting things if you don't demand the writers keep doing the same thing over and over again and then castigate them any time they try and innovate, but that isn't how the Internet of today works.

I would add to that the writers using the Force as a crutch for laziness and making it the centrepiece of every single storyline.

There are elements of Star Wars (now that I think of it) that are rather archaic, especially in terms of technology. It's rarely bothered me, but it is something that's come to mind frequently.

No internet for example. The Holonet exists but it's more like cable TV than the internet. No one has anything like a cell phone or lap top connecting them to any broader networks and computer systems in the Star Wars universe are abnormally analog.

The lack of modern security systems is another. Like, how is it possible that the Empire didn't cover things in security cameras with droids watching for suspicious behavior? This bugged me in the one episode of Mandalorian with the prison ship. It seemed really bizarre that the security droids and systems on that ship were not well connected or coordinated, until Mando was using them to advance the plot, anyway.

Star Wars is more fantasy than sci-fi but it's still a show with sci-fi trappings and it's sci-fi right out of 50 years ago. It's never ruined anything for me aside from random thoughts, but I wonder to what extent the anachronisms of the setting might hinder bringing new people into the franchise.

 LordofHats wrote:
There are elements of Star Wars (now that I think of it) that are rather archaic, especially in terms of technology. It's rarely bothered me, but it is something that's come to mind frequently.

No internet for example. The Holonet exists but it's more like cable TV than the internet. No one has anything like a cell phone or lap top connecting them to any broader networks and computer systems in the Star Wars universe are abnormally analog.

The lack of modern security systems is another. Like, how is it possible that the Empire didn't cover things in security cameras with droids watching for suspicious behavior? This bugged me in the one episode of Mandalorian with the prison ship. It seemed really bizarre that the security droids and systems on that ship were not well connected or coordinated, until Mando was using them to advance the plot, anyway.

Star Wars is more fantasy than sci-fi but it's still a show with sci-fi trappings and it's sci-fi right out of 50 years ago. It's never ruined anything for me aside from random thoughts, but I wonder to what extent the anachronisms of the setting might hinder bringing new people into the franchise.

Yeah. Things like... obviously they can mass produce cameras because droids are everywhere and they can see. If droids have sophisticated AI that can be tasked with and execute on jobs then why do they have to have humanoid like bodies (or bodies at all). Why don't ships have droid AIs? Why don't houses? Why didn't the deathstar have several running and organizing different functions on the station?

SW is crazy analog. Thats why it's just fantasy with Sci Fi trappings and not actually sci fi at all.

I think you can make analogue make sense in a setting where there are malicious AIs, or a past AI revolution against the organics. Then having taboos against it might bake sense, or at least, manual overides all over the place.

But Star Wars as you say has Droids, which are obviously AIs, and yet...

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Star Wars is a very interesting setting, but the writers' insistence on making every story about the same group of protagonists (old EU)/trying to copy-paste the original trilogy over and over again (sequel trilogy) really limits how much space there is to explore, and the desire to make the economic and political underpinnings of the setting a pile of half-baked gibberish intended to be skimmed past by twelve-year-olds in search of the next explosion instead of making any effort to make sense (prequel trilogy) does limit the quality of any spin-offs.

I don't think the setting is the problem. The aforementioned handful of exceptions (Rogue One, KotOR, etc.) indicate that there's room to do interesting things if you don't demand the writers keep doing the same thing over and over again and then castigate them any time they try and innovate, but that isn't how the Internet of today works.

Except of course, they do innovate and a lot of the innovations are largely acclaimed by the Internet of today. They just aren't the stuff on the big screen, because that's been gak more often than not. 3 good, 2 average, 6 bad, by my count.

 Da Boss wrote:
I think you can make analogue make sense in a setting where there are malicious AIs, or a past AI revolution against the organics. Then having taboos against it might bake sense, or at least, manual overides all over the place.

But Star Wars as you say has Droids, which are obviously AIs, and yet...

Yeah, also a "Droid Smith" found data on a Droids harddrive and could tell what that data was and that it was encrypted, not by plugging in a wire and interacting with it's code, but by going at the back of it's head with an ark welder. fething what?

 Argive wrote:
I would say that currently star wars isint that interesting of a setting. Thats because its been sanatised completely to be customer (child) friendly. This means that you cannot get neuance and everything boils down to black and white / good vs evil. But the evil is white washed and there is no room for grey areas and creativity.

I don't think any major Star Wars production was anything else than a child friendly franchise of movies with a manchean morality. They took some very mild steps toward a less manichean style in Episode VIII, but quickly retreated back to known territory for Episode IX. KOTOR II also attempted to delve further on the theme of the Force and good and evil, but the game storyline needed some work and was rushed out. I don't know anything about the EU which was apparently an awfull mess.

 Da Boss wrote:
I think you can make analogue make sense in a setting where there are malicious AIs, or a past AI revolution against the organics. Then having taboos against it might bake sense, or at least, manual overides all over the place.

But Star Wars as you say has Droids, which are obviously AIs, and yet...

Well, in the old EU, Droids received regular mind wipes to keep a lid on things.

A thinking Droid is of great use, especially on things such as Astromechs, who for the inexperienced pilot are an absolute boon.

There’s also the question of what sentience is. C-3PO can do some things against his programming (impersonating a deity), but not others (revealing the Sith translation). One is clearly simply some sort of taboo. The other is an absolute inability to comply.

During The Clone Wars, there’s a plot device where R2-D2 is captured by the Separatists. And Anakin being Anakin, hasn’t had his memory wipes for quite some time, meaning the Separatists might find all sorts - plans, base locations, troop dispositions etc. So he has to be rescued.

Yet strip away any kind of decision making, rendering all Droids essentially mono-tasked automata? You remove a great deal of their uses. Sure, a Gonk, Mouse or Treadwell Droid would still get it’s job done. But Protocol, Navigation and Astromech? Nah. Not gonna work.

Why they are ais and how useful them being ais is is not the question. The question is if that tech exists they why is it not implemented in other better ways.

Droids, even if they are not actual ais but are just really advanced conversational interfaces for complex computers, should mean that all kinds of other things should be voice activated. If you can have a conversation with your astromech about plotting coordinates for hyperspace jumps then why are you not just talking to your ship?

Why is there a droid language at all? Shouldnt r2 and water condensers or whatever the feth lars needed c3p0 for just have a language setting and speak whatever language their owners do?

Why does every door on every ship and every planetary base have a locking mechanism for a astromech to use its spinny plug key on which means people cannot interact with it but litterally anyone with a droid can?

In the EU it was also explained that most SW peoples greatly feared AI uprisings, which was a main reason why ships don't have wide droid control. The Katana fleet from Heir to the Empire was literally a big fleet of Dreadnoughts that had the Droid AI all linked to enable skeleton crews to f!y them, and then it went crazy and they jumped blind into lightspeed and disappeared for decades.

The most important question is why don't Astromechs just speak common? It would make it easier than evidently every main character taking a college course in Astromech so they can understand them.

Yeah but you dont need to give the droid ai full unimpeded control. You can still require a manual pull of a handle to activate warp speed jumps. The ais in the ships deciding to do a blind jump is the exact same level of threat as r2 deciding to do the same thing when imputting coordinates and plotting a course.

Small "snubfghters" were referred to as being too small to mount the full sized navicomputers in them as well as a hyperdrive (a bit a%%-backwards, if you ask me. I'd want the nav hardware with or without the go-faster drive).

The later Jedi fighters had an astromech socket, but still needed a hyperspace drive ring for example.

The droids were their plug-in navicomputer, as well as other ship repair device things.

Presumably if a droid does all the things a droid does + be a nav computer then plugging in the bit of hardware that is the droids brain would take less space than the droid and do its job.

 Lance845 wrote:
Why they are ais and how useful them being ais is is not the question. The question is if that tech exists they why is it not implemented in other better ways.

Droids, even if they are not actual ais but are just really advanced conversational interfaces for complex computers, should mean that all kinds of other things should be voice activated. If you can have a conversation with your astromech about plotting coordinates for hyperspace jumps then why are you not just talking to your ship?

The weird thing about that is the Falcon is established as having a voice interface. C3PO complains about its dialect of all things.

Why is there a droid language at all? Shouldnt r2 and water condensers or whatever the feth lars needed c3p0 for just have a language setting and speak whatever language their owners do?

Its worse when you consider that the droids can clearly understand languages, and make sounds. R2 even communicates in writing (on the X-wing HUD) with Luke when they're going to Dagobah, presumably because his beeping can't be heard in space.
Now this may be a setting prejudice against droids rearing its head (I know I hate having devices talk to me and give instructions), but droids are so ubiquitous its seems crazily passive aggressive and inconvenient just for spite's sake.

Why does every door on every ship and every planetary base have a locking mechanism for a astromech to use its spinny plug key on which means people cannot interact with it but litterally anyone with a droid can?

I've been binging Rebels this week, and that really got to me after a while [it doesn't help that their droid just grabs the port with a pair of pliers and spins it, rather than inserting an actual interface unit]. Often the ports are just inside the exterior doors, even in facilities/ships that don't seem to use astromechs at all.
And they seem to be designed for astromechs (as they're set way too low for humanoid models), which by definition shouldn't be working ground facilities anyway.

Well Solo established that the Falcons computer was Landos sassy rebelious droid that got its body destroyed. If anything it just proves how easy it is to put a droids brain in a ship that a professional gambler can just do it without some kind of advanced engineer/programer. Which returns to the first question. Why the hell are they not in more things?

 Lance845 wrote:
Well Solo established that the Falcons computer was Landos sassy rebelious droid that got its body destroyed. If anything it just proves how easy it is to put a droids brain in a ship that a professional gambler can just do it without some kind of advanced engineer/programer. Which returns to the first question. Why the hell are they not in more things?

Until Solo we didn't know the falcon's brain was a droid brain. So the answer could be "maybe they are in a lot of things?"

as for how analogue SW seems keep in mind ANH was released in 1977, and they could eaither keep to the look and feel of that or randomly for no reason modernize and risk losing elements of aestetics people loved.

BrianDavion wrote:
as for how analogue SW seems keep in mind ANH was released in 1977, and they could eaither keep to the look and feel of that or randomly for no reason modernize and risk losing elements of aestetics people loved.

I think the grunge retro-tech look of Star Wars is great. I'm only questioning if trapping the sci-fi trappings of the franchise in 1977 hurts it more than helps it. You can be grunge retro tech in aesthetic, and still supply characters something like a cell phone. Just give those little communicators people use a holoprojector or something, and expand on the Holonet to make it more of an internet analog and less something that just pops up randomly. Maybe keep it analog and give a reason for it. Maybe slicing and hacking abilities are so good in the Star Wars universe that networking computers just makes them more insecure?

 AegisGrimm wrote:

The most important question is why don't Astromechs just speak common? It would make it easier than evidently every main character taking a college course in Astromech so they can understand them.

In a way, Binary is the Common Tongue. Every droid, regardless of who owns it, runs on Binary. So you have to learn one language and you're basically good to go with every droid you ever meet. You could probably get rudimentary translator widgets that translate your speech into binary, and any binary into your speech. As long as an alien has a similar device (for his language), you can communicate without a protocol droid knowing six million forms of communication. There are presumably millions of aliens that can't speak Common, but that's not a barrier to understanding Binary. Presumably few non-droids can actually vocalize Binary (too fast?) but ones that could manage it would be effectively set for life communicating with the galaxy at large.

So your Astromech speaks Binary because it guarantees that the droid owner will be able to understand it. I mean, if they can't be bothered to learn Binary in the first place, they're idiots, given how staggering useful learning it is.

And yes, the Star Wars setting worries about droid uprisings. That's why the Battle Droids were controlled from a central computer, despite that being an enormous weak point to exploit. But you could stop a droid uprising with the flip of a switch. Another good reason to know Binary, so that you know if your droids are plotting behind your back. Such is the cost of having a slave race.

 John Prins wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:

The most important question is why don't Astromechs just speak common? It would make it easier than evidently every main character taking a college course in Astromech so they can understand them.

In a way, Binary is the Common Tongue. Every droid, regardless of who owns it, runs on Binary. So you have to learn one language and you're basically good to go with every droid you ever meet. You could probably get rudimentary translator widgets that translate your speech into binary, and any binary into your speech. As long as an alien has a similar device (for his language), you can communicate without a protocol droid knowing six million forms of communication. There are presumably millions of aliens that can't speak Common, but that's not a barrier to understanding Binary. Presumably few non-droids can actually vocalize Binary (too fast?) but ones that could manage it would be effectively set for life communicating with the galaxy at large.

You're assuming that every species (or even planetary culture) would program droids in a universal way and give them (somehow) a universal language. That doesn't make any real sense at all. Reducing numbers to 0s & 1s doesn't create a functional language, regardless of Lucas calling the 'droid language' Binary. [And assuming it isn't a parsec situation, where he was just using a word he didn't understand in a stupid way]

It still just begs the question of why people wouldn't learn or get a 'translator widget' for Basic, rather than bothering to give the Droids a universal private language that they can use with fewer people understanding them, something people wouldn't even do if they fear a droid uprising. If Binary is a real language (rather than machine code that lacks complex concepts and grammar, which doesn't seem to be the case from what we're shown), there isn't any reason to thing Binary is any less complex than Basic, or any random alien language like Huttese (which gets used a lot)

Voss wrote:


You're assuming that every species (or even planetary culture) would program droids in a universal way and give them (somehow) a universal language.

in fairness the vast majority of the galaxy was united under the republic for a looong time. long eneugh for things like droid languages to be standardized.

BrianDavion wrote:

Voss wrote:


You're assuming that every species (or even planetary culture) would program droids in a universal way and give them (somehow) a universal language.

in fairness the vast majority of the galaxy was united under the republic for a looong time. long eneugh for things like droid languages to be standardized.

The same is true for the language for people. It goes back to the very point that Lance raised in the first place. The droid language is a barrier, and there isn't any functional reason for all the droids and machines to not speak Basic, since droids understanding it is nigh-universal already. Its only a barrier to the operators.

Consider if the Amazon Echo and Siri (and etc) could only communicate back in machine code. How in the world would that be useful?

If your astromech can be told to check the ship's shields, finds they're not great but could be better if only it could get to such and such a panel it can't reach, why is it useful for it not to be able to tell you that? The bloody thing can understand your orders, make sounds, and even replay visual/audio recordings, but it _can't_ tell you that a lever needs to be pulled to reactivate the hyperdrive. That's a thing that literally happens on screen, and its utterly stupid.

It's also worth noting that whatever 'droid language' R2 is speaking, it's not binary. Binary would be... well, if you had a computer with a modem in the '90s, you probably remember that buzz when you connected to the internet. THAT'S binary.

R2 uses a wide variety of sounds - whistles, chirps, beeps, and etc. He's communicating far more than 0's and 1's.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
Well Solo established that the Falcons computer was Landos sassy rebelious droid that got its body destroyed. If anything it just proves how easy it is to put a droids brain in a ship that a professional gambler can just do it without some kind of advanced engineer/programer. Which returns to the first question. Why the hell are they not in more things?

Until Solo we didn't know the falcon's brain was a droid brain. So the answer could be "maybe they are in a lot of things?"

We do know it's smart enough to talk to (and presumably offend) 3P0 in Empire, which also has a later scene where he chastises R2 for 'trusting a strange conputer' because Cloud City's central computer apparently volunteered information to him as well...

The Holonet is a different beast entirely... Before the prequels it was generally depicted in the EU as a stand-in for cable TV. But by the time the prequels rolled around it was essentially late 90s internet in all but name.

In our RPG I've rationalized it as being severely limited in bandwidth the further rimward you go, with the Empire not believing in net neutrality. So the core world's can have their 90s internet while the outer rum can check their e-mails and hang around analog BBS boards if they've got top-end circa 1970s nerd tech.

Does anyone remember that "Star Wars doesn't have paper" meme from before the sequel trilogy? We never see any sStar Wars characters take in any sort of culture outside of musical performances. Unless you count the Holiday Special.

I think we see examples of both outside the movies:

The paper meme came from the first edition of the RPG, changed to 'rarely used' in the second edition. I think the EU had an example of someone using paper and someone else commenting that that was strange but the details are fuzzy. We see paper books in Rebels as well but I think the implication is that they (and obviously, the sacred jedi texts) are extremely old and predate digital storage becoming the norm.

As for other culture... Flight simulators seem to be described as roughly analogous to video games in universe (IIRC your family members in x-wing alliance are critical of you for spending too much time in the simulator as a kind of in-joke) and you also have the holo-chess... Then there are the skeevy guys watching a tei-lek dancer hologram at Saw's hideout, presumably there's some kind of holographic entertainment industry, since they're ubiquitous enough in Jeddah city alone for the imperials to hijack them with missing cargo pilot wanted posters...

Then there's Chass na Chadic in Alphabet Squadron - she maintains a collection of banned holos, poetry, and other media which she barters for banned music: she likes to rock out in her b-wing. In her case she selects her playlist by picking individual chits with individual songs on them, which may be a limit of the storage medium or else an artifact of their illegal underground distribution.

Or she’s the Star Wars equivalent of a vinyl nerd.