Social trends aren't created by fandom, though, always look for the marketer behind the curtain

[yvannairie]

Honestly, I might just end up blaming Marvel for this, too.

I was already a bit confused as to where the idea came from that Star Wars movies aren't self-contained narratives that introduce and then deal with primarily the elements in their own movies, because every one of them needs to be viewable without having seen any of the other ones, y'know? That was the way of The Franchise Movie. If you absolutely had to know something from another movie, the film would literally flash back into it.

But then Marvel came along, and now everything is shared continuity, every throwaway line might be explaining or referencing another movie, and so the expectation is that nothing is thrown away, anymore, and everything builds on itself.

And that wasn't ultimately even true for fucking Marvel itself. I enjoyed the way Infinity War brought everything together, pulled elements from every movie leading up to it, but then Endgame didn't actually do anything with those elements other than... kinda just. Do a victory lap around the fact that they were now the most dominant form of cultural product in the world. I found that so gauche I've yet to even watch Endgame.

This is one of the places where I really got the criticisms towards TLJ -- because it wasn't a self-contained narrative that could be understood without any external reference points. Like, I think it was intersex-ionality on Tumblr who pointed out that this is what makes TLJ feel so much like a transformative fandom story rather than a source material story, because it takes the stuff that was kind of just a given and goes "wait -- let's re-examine that". But that's not what made it good, the strong narrative and the interviewing themes was.

I just... feel like it's a problem that even while I try to understand what people think went wrong with TROS, I keep finding myself talking about movies that are not TROS. I shouldn't even need to make those fucking comparisons. I should be able to just discuss the movie itself, because Star Wars movies are self-contained stories and have always been. Frankly Sequel Trilogy not having substantial timeskips between movies felt off to me from the start, because it was bringing "language" over from different franchises that started to make Star Wars feel like every fucking other franchise movie rather than its own thing.

Comments

[queermermaids]

I wouldn't even say it started with marvel, because star wars started the whole connecting movies thing, just done well. There are multiple throwaway lines in the original trilogy were expanded into plot points in the prequels. In a new hope obi wan said one line about luke's dad fighting in the clone wars and they made a movie and a half about that. Star wars is the franchise that is known for not throwing anything away, every single line is expanded into some great thing, yoda saying luke was too old, extrapolated to mean jedi start training when they're toddlers. instead of flashbacks or references to connect films there was the opening crawl, a literal exposition dump which was fine because it was star war's gimick

one thing i think you're noticing that i really feel looking at the sequels, that star wars was trying to be a lot like marvel, and it was not very successful. regardless of the view of the prequels at least those films used the language of star wars, there were a lot of gimicks that are known to be "star wars" that were ignored in the sequel trilogy in the idea that "oh well this other property we own makes so much money, lets just copy it". its kind of sad how the only things that feel like star wars are when plot points are lifted from the previous movies, because they wont utilize time skips or in universe lore or other things that are thought of as "star wars" separate from the plot. the clone wars and the mandalorian feel like star wars to many people because those don't try and be something else and dont copy whats already been successful, those use the established language of the franchise. The sequel trilogy really did not do that.

[yvannairie]

Oh man. Actually yeah, that's very right, I also pointed out to my friend how TLJ (the overall best-received of the Sequel Trilogy) feels the least-like Star Wars because it's attitude towards continuity is more immediate and modern, and the lack of a timeskip and re-establishing of context, instead just. Using the context at the end of TFA, making that movie feel much less like its own movie and rather just Act 1 for TLJ.

I think the thing that really snarls my gears about it is the lack of having a whole plot that gets is premise from the previous stories, but isn't entirely entwined with the previous story to the point of requiring all the extra context to make you feel like you were getting the most out of it. The backlash against TLJ actually makes way more sense to me post-TROS, because now I have context to verbalise why that movie felt so different.

EDIT: Also I wanna point out that the same thing applies to TROS, actually? Like, yeah, the prequels blew one half of a sentence into the premise of one of its movies but there's a ton of stuff that sits comfortably outside of the "canon" of the films. TROS went too far the other way and wanted to have everything interconnected backwards through time, and... that also didn't feel too good. TFA already felt too backwards-looking, all-of-this-has-happened-before-esque. TROS is the same but More(tm) because TLJ really zooming in on the internal context of the trilogy caused such a fucking uproar.

You make a compelling point but it's also making me wonder if the Sequel Trilogy, stuck between a rock and a hard place, being produced in an increasingly capital-controlled and test group dominated studio system and arguably having longer roots of franchisement than everything else it was going to be compared to, had any hope of being anything but kind of. Pretty, but ultimately fanservice-y whole or like any other superhero movie But In Space.