Star Wars: Episode 7, 8... and BEYOND!

Obsidian Fire

Obsidian Fire

Ahk Morn!
AKA
The Engineer
The problem for the Prequel is that they wrote things too on the nose. Especially the Jedi Order's mistakes. It's really hard not to highlight them since the Prequels did such a good job of it. It also doesn't help that the Prequels are about the Jedi Order on a very broad level and interact mostly with their leadership as opposed to "normal" Jedi.

I feel like the Prequels would be well served with a series on what "normal Jedi missions" were like before things got crazy with the Clone Wars if just to show that at a "rubber meets the road" level, the Jedi Order was doing a lot of work that did help people and that needed to be done in the Republic. That might help balance out how much of a bad rap the Jedi Council gets.

For better or worse, the Jedi Order that we see in the Prequels isn't the Jedi Order as it was for much of the history of the Republic. The Rise of the Sith and the Clone Wars are exceptions to what normal Jedi life would be like and sometimes I think that gets forgotten a lot of the time.
 
X-SOLDIER

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
@The Twilight Mexican If I'm not mistaken, they've been using his original script as a sort of thematic outline for the sequels, and I know that he was involved with a lot of the early The Force Awakens concept art approvals and work, and also at least spoke with Rian Johnson about The Last Jedi, so I'm curious if there's any actual difference in his involvement for The Rise of Skywalker or if it's just more emphasized now since we've transitioned away from the anti-Prequel-anti-George-Lucas Era into the pro-TLJ-pro-George-Lucas era, and it's framed differently when it's being reported on.

@Clement Rage I think that it's reinforcing the idea that failure is only bad if you don't learn from it, but only if you pass those failings along silently to the next generation, just so that they trip over the exact same things. FAR too often, a character making genuine mistakes is detrimental to their character, but it's reflective of the way that real people are – not of the way we'd hope that they could be.

Yoda was hundreds of years old, and it's very likely that a lot of what the Jedi Order managed to be for such a long time was thanks to those exact practices, and it's why he's committed to upholding them. It's also likely he's seen the downsides of attempting those things end destructively more often than constructively.

This is one of those things that I like the most about the start of The Last Jedi, because if Poe hadn't gone off, and wrecked the Juggernaut – they'd ALL have been dead after that first jump into hyperspace, because that ship is designed to be a long-range fleet-killer. That doesn't make his actions there right, but they just happened to have worked. That's the issue about being someone who's in charge is that you have to be in a position where you're going to err on the side of caution a majority of the time. Eventually, you are bound to miss that 1/1000 opportunity that absolutely devastates things – but that shouldn't be the sole thing that defines you, even though you'll feel like it does.

Yoda HAD to be somewhat responsible for the things that happened, since he was amongst the most respected masters of the Council of the Jedi Order, and being almost a thousand years old – there's no way he wasn't in some way unable to stop what had been happening, and responsible either by his actions in the wrong direction or his inaction in the right direction. In his position it'd've been nigh impossible to've been ignorant to little issues and hints from time-to-time, and once you learn what was happening in the background – of COURSE things would have changed if he'd acted on them differently. His attitude and tone are clearly established in The Phantom Menace, and there's really no other way to play it with him.



I'm sure that some folks will paint it as "character assassination" or something, but really I think that they have to address these failures first it in order to be able to release him from their guilt, and have the following generations properly address those consequences later.





On a totally different note (while I still need to power through the Star Wars audiobooks, life's been too hectic lately), I think that this article about Episode IX is very much worth reading:

How Expectation and Reality Can Clash in the World of Star Wars Fandom
Especially this bit:
Ultimately, it all comes down to the execution and self-awareness. If I finish The Rise of Skywalker and think the idea I went into it with is better than what actually happens on screen, whose fault is that?

It’s mine. You can’t blame the filmmakers for not telling a story that exceeded my expectations when they had no part in crafting those expectations. You can blame the filmmakers for not making a film that satisfies on its own merits but that argument should not be made in reference to expectations.
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I think that spending SO MUCH time theorycrafting things for fun, I don't get really hyper-attached to them anymore, but it's still tough to distance those expectations and judge something on its own merits, especially when you're waiting on it with masses of people, and following the development in a way where you feel like you're connected to it.




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Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
Yoda was hundreds of years old, and it's very likely that a lot of what the Jedi Order managed to be for such a long time was thanks to those exact practices, and it's why he's committed to upholding them. It's also likely he's seen the downsides of attempting those things end destructively more often than constructively.
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Then you put some of those downsides in your story. Have a story like 'someone tried once, this is what happened.'

That doesn't mean that the 'other Jedi' has to stop trying, it just means that the pitfalls are aired.

I think that it's reinforcing the idea that failure is only bad if you don't learn from it, but only if you pass those failings along silently to the next generation, just so that they trip over the exact same things. FAR too often, a character making genuine mistakes is detrimental to their character, but it's reflective of the way that real people are – not of the way we'd hope that they could be.
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Alright, but his failure amounts to not having a good enough Palpatine detecting spell, which isn't an issue the subsequent generations face. We don't know if it's possible to detect him or not. Injecting an opportunity to detect him into the backstory twenty years later just makes everyone involved look bad, including the other Jedi who raised the issue and then did nothing.

Yoda's TPM characterisation is cautious, not inclined to dismiss threats. He foresees future issues with Anakin's training but is outvoted. They take Maul's appearance very seriously, they just don't instantly jump to the random conclusion that he must be a Sith, which would be a silly conclusion to leap to with the information they have. It would be like seeing someone fight with a sword and concluding that they are a long lost Viking or Roman. They don't even entirely dismiss the possibility, they just consider it unlikely.

I do feel there has been a relatively recent push to stress the failings of the Jedi, such as Luke's rant in TLJ, which highlights only failings, none of their qualities, and isn't contradicted, despite being very skewed.

What makes this so jarring is that they're genocide victims. In what other fandom is the response to genocide victims that they earned their fate through their actions, that it's their fault they were wiped out?

This is one of those things that I like the most about the start of The Last Jedi, because if Poe hadn't gone off, and wrecked the Juggernaut – they'd ALL have been dead after that first jump into hyperspace, because that ship is designed to be a long-range fleet-killer. That doesn't make his actions there right, but they just happened to have worked. That's the issue about being someone who's in charge is that you have to be in a position where you're going to err on the side of caution a majority of the time. Eventually, you are bound to miss that 1/1000 opportunity that absolutely devastates things – but that shouldn't be the sole thing that defines you, even though you'll feel like it does.
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There are ways to do that, but this isn't one of them. If you're going to do that, there should have been some kind of conversation like:

Poe: I saved the entire fleet.

Leia: You got lucky. What happens when you're not? (and then the ensuing story backs that up.)

As is, it's just the story contradicting the themes. Like at the end, when Poe calls off the attack, he doesn't know Luke and Rey are going to save them. With the knowledge they had, he just damned them all to die, so it's less growth than just getting lucky or not.

The themes are well intended, but as written they don't work out. Like DJ saying that both sides are fuelling a war machine when the New Republic are demilitarised to the point of mothballing 90% of their fleet. It's a great theme, but it doesn't fit with the story we've been given.

Suppose in some horrific alternate universe, someone hires me as script doctor for TLJ. Here is how I write that theme, keeping as much of the story intact as possible.

Poe goes after the Dreadnought for revenge, because it just destroyed his home. It's designed for ground bombardment, not ship to ship.

At Crait, Hux calls in another Dreadnought to destroy the base. They could have used the bombers to destroy it, but having spent them already, there is no choice but for Holdo to destroy the new Dreadnought by ramming, to save the resistance.

While I'm at it, re Holdo's plan: apparently, no one is rescued from the other ships when they're destroyed, the resistance thinks everyone in the other ships has been destroyed. After the mutiny fails, it is revealed that Holdo has already been sending out cloaked shuttles of crew in their
wake, disguising them as casualties. So she actually succeeds in saving a fair amount of the resistance, so the 'save v destroy' theme rings truer.

The 'allies in the outer rim' refuse to fight the FO, but they will pick up the cloaked shuttles after they pass -'saving what they love'.

It's always easy to rewrite after the fact, so this isn't jab at the writers, I'm just trying to illustrate why the themes don't quite click as given.

For what it's worth, TLJ, largely lined up with my expectations. I was expecting Luke to want the Jedi to end (it was in the trailer), I was expecting Holdo to have a plan, I was expecting Snoke to die because Kylo had to be rebuilt as a threat after his defeat in TFA. The last thing I wanted was for Rey to have a lineage, that would contradict PT lore. I didn't want Snoke Plagueis either.
 
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X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Genuinely sorry for not having the attentive focus to properly respond to things, but I got this idea in my head today and did a thing whose end results I'm rather proud of, and I figured the folks in this thread might appreciate. (My regular mini-tl;dr is in the description).





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X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
secrets-of-the-jedi-old-republic-clones-1.jpg


Star Wars Secrets of the Jedi is a book from the perspective of Luke telling the story of what he's learned about the history of the Jedi. Also, on this preview page, we have some stuff about the balance of the force and Anakin as the Chosen One, so it'll be interesting to see what things we get followed up on Vader's side of things.

Some interesting insights on Luke's character in general when he's an old hermit. Also, really liking that all of the flavour text character quotes are in Aurebesh.



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X-SOLDIER

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Crazy hopeful speculation based solely on that lightsaber's design and some lore created for the new trilogy.

In the Ahsoka novel (released in October of 2016), we learned that Kyber Crystals call out to Force wielders, and they're attuned with the light side of the Force. The book was also where the process of bleeding a kyber crystal was first detailed. That's taking a kyber crystal and bending it to your will and pouring your own pain anger into it. This changes the colour of the crystal to red. Additionally, if a red crystal is taken and you pour the rest of your emotions into it, they can be healed, which doesn't revert the colour of the blade – it turns it white. Ahsoka got her white Lightsaber blades in Rebels after healing one of the Inquisitor's crystals (and we know that she ventures out into an unknown area of the galaxy post-Return of the Jedi in her Gandalf-the-White style look).

Solo: A Star Wars Story brought post-Revenge of the Sith Maul into the films when he'd previously only been shown in Clone Wars and Rebels. While that was a surprise, it's also a good test to see how a cameo like that lands with a familiar and unfamiliar (with his survival) audience. One of my favourite parts about Maul's story is that when he eventually dies in Obi-Wan's arms – it becomes very clear that he hated Palpatine possibly more than anyone else. The fact that the upcoming-after-Rise-of-Skywalker-Disney-Plus-series of the final season of Clone Wars is all going to be focused in the Siege of Mandalore and Maul and Ahsoka's confrontation.

The other reason that I mention that is that Rey's red lightsaber style is distinctly like that of Darth Maul when it's folded out (especially assisted by seeing the shot of him in The Phantom Menace), but it's also one we've seen before in Rebels from the Jedi Temple Guard who became the Grand Inquisitor in a Force Vision that Kanan saw when he, Ezra, & Ahsoka were meditating together:


Rey learning about Bleeding Crystals and the Temple Guards / Maul's combat style makes me feel like there's a decent possibility that we're going to get Ahsoka in some capacity. She means everything to the Clone Wars generation of fans, and it feels like there are enough elements that they'd be able to include her in a smaller capacity like Yoda or Ben without them feeling out-of-place, especially since we're addressing the culmination of Anakin's legacy and the Balance of the Force – she's the de-facto person to find in Luke's absence.

At the very least, there are a LOT of concepts that they've explored with Ahsoka's character ever since they kicked off this trilogy that are VERY connected to the tiny little glimpses that we're getting here. On top of that – PURELY from a planned marketing release sequence standpoint, we're looking at The Mandalorian releasing in November 2019, followed by The Rise of Skywalker in December 2019 and then the final season of Clone Wars in February 2020 – which is all about Mandalore, Maul, & Ahsoka. Including her is how you hook people who never dove in to Clone Wars to binge-watch it and get excited for the upcoming season along with everyone else, and then also build up whatever you're doing next. It's a really damned good setup if that's what they're going for that also brings a lot of surrounding threads of Anakin's legacy to a close.

Chances of that happening? Who knows, but it makes thematic and logistical sense which makes me excited to see what they DO end up doing.




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Clement Rage

Pro Adventurer
Immediately disappointed they spent so little recap screentime on the PT. The major thing this movie has to do for me is to roll back hard on the prequel hate.

Those are old Imperial ships, I think, so...scrapyard?

If Palpatine possesses 3PO and stays there I'm in, no questions asked.

That...looks like a Starkiller beam...hmm.

If they do something real with Dark Rey I'm interested, but I'm also conscious that the teasers for TFA and TLJ also had lightsabre related misdirects (Finn holding Luke's blade and Rey holding Kylo's)
 
Carlie

Carlie

CltrAltDelicious
AKA
Chloe Frazer
I watched the trailer this morning and I felt nothing other than seeign Carrie Fisher. I even mostly forgot about it about an hour later. I just watched it again, see if anything could motivate me, wonder what's actually happening and I just don't care.

Oh yeah 'evil Rey' (sure that's a thing that's gonna happen) and that lightsaber, it looked cool so that's something.
 
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