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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.