When Star Wars Died · 11:03pm Jan 2nd, 2021
For a solid 15 years of my life Star Wars was the biggest thing in the world to me. From when I was about 4 years old and would've seen the movies for the first time on the old VHS's my parents owned to when I naturally started to lose interest in the franchise around 2010 due to a variety of reasons. But for those 15 years Star Wars was above anything else to me, Pokemon, DBZ, Halo, Starcraft, anything. Star Wars was the world to me. That's why it's so sad to see the current state of it and what's happened to the franchise. It's just one of many franchises out there that have been murdered.
Although truthfully it died much earlier than most people think. Most people would probably point to George Lucas selling it to Disney or the release of The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker as where Star Wars died. Or whenever EA got the license to Star Wars games and proceeded to do nothing with it after a decade of legendary releases. But nope. Star Wars didn't die when Disney bought it, it didn't die when the sequel trilogy opened with The Force Awakens and reverted everything the heroes had fought for in the original trilogy, it didn't die because of Rian Johnson or Kathleen Kennedy, it didn't die with TOR, the prequel trilogy and Jar Jar didn't kill it.
Star Wars died in 2008. Legacy of the Force, the last true novel series of the old EU, ended that year. And then later two dark marks hit the Star Wars franchise, one just a minor misstep, annoying but not a big deal. The other however would prove far worse than anything anyone could've expected until it eventually became the cancer that killed Star Wars.
In September of 2008 The Force Unleashed came out. A game I bought but never finished purely because of how much I hated the gameplay and how much of a massive step backwards it was at that point in time. Button prompts, button prompts, button prompts, and boss fights filled with QTE's. Such a horrible downgrade compared to the perfect combat gameplay and use of force powers back in Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, with a dumb story and awful main character to boot that can't come anywhere near to how great Kotor I and II were.
But that was just a game and not really a big issue, there were some annoying things about it but The Force Unleashed wasn't hugely problematic the same way The Crystal Star may have been an awful book but wasn't a big deal either.
It was what came out in October 2008 that killed Star Wars.
The Clone Wars. The awful, disgusting, travesty that destroyed and spat on the old EU while trying to replace it and giving rise to an era of Star Wars dominated by Dave Filoni. Dave Filoni, a man I have just as much derision and distaste for as Abrams and Kennedy. The cancer on Star Wars that has polluted the franchise for more than a decade with his disrespectful, thieving, and mediocre ways. If it was just that single "movie" there wouldn't have been a problem, but the tv series almost immediately showed that it could not exist with the EU up till that point. So much was changed, retconned, or ignored. Dave Filoni showed absolutely zero respect to any other creators and simply used whatever he wanted, changing it to his own desires and views, and tried forcing us to accept it as the true canon version. Asajj Ventress, Grievous, Dathomir and Zabraks, Korriban, Malachor, Mandalorians, etc. etc. all "reimagined". The clones' carrying out of Order 66 even changed from the simple conditioning and genetic manipulation to them being brainwashed by computer chips in their brains.
What's worse is simply how incongruent it was and how much The Clone Wars just doesn't fit in with the rest of the Star Wars universe and Revenge of the Sith. It is unironically less fitting than the deliberately over the top (and far superior) Genndy clone wars cartoon. You can not reconcile TCW's existence with Revenge of the Sith, it does not work.
Ahsoka does not work. Ahsoka is just as bad and just as much of a blight as Rey is. She is a fanfiction character. An author's OC given far too much importance and stealing the spotlight from others. Dave Filoni does not even try to hide his bias for her, he cares about nothing other than his own direct creations and he will ruin and destroy everything just to make them look good and be the center of attention. Ahsoka's existence can not be reconciled with Revenge of the Sith or the rest of Star Wars, TCW's last season doesn't even lead up to Revenge of the Sith half as well as Genndy Wars did.
The Clone Wars is simply an inferior product made to replace the old EU clone wars media. So many novels, comics, games, the Genndy cartoon, all thrown out with the trash and ignored for a show with a disgustingly ugly cgi artstyle and bad animation. In every way Filoni Wars is inferior to what came before it and yet we now have to treat it as "canon". As what truly happened. Wookiepedia already had its Canon/Legends split that made things annoying enough but there's also the fact that so many Legends pages had to be edited and changed to conform to things done or retconned in TCW, like Dathomir and Asajj Ventress no longer being Rattatakan. Now the only things you can trust are the old Essential Guide books. The New Essential Chronology should be treated as the Star Wars EU bible and I am happily in possession of it.
The sad thing is things just declined so hard and so fast after 2008. Legacy of the Force was the last novel series not tainted by the Filoni era. Even Fate of the Jedi unfortunately tied into it with Mortis. Then you had some stand alone books and TOR but it was never the same as how it was around the prequel years.
I've heard a lot of people say it was George Lucas even more than Filoni responsible for what I've complained about but George would've never gotten involved if it wasn't for TCW existing in the first place. He never cared about the EU and honestly that was a good thing. George is a movie person, he doesn't understand the EU and he doesn't care about it and things were at their best when he just let it go on on its own while he did his thing. Only every now and then would he contribute or nix something specifically in the old EU. But then along comes Filoni Wars and you have two people, one who doesn't know the EU and one who doesn't respect it, just doing whatever they wanted. It's a shame because I always respected George Lucas and loved the prequels from the beginning (which makes it annoying to see people now praising the prequels after the garbage fire of the Disney trilogy when I always liked them to begin with) but it's clear that he shouldn't have really bothered with the EU. In the end I still chiefly blame Dave Filoni and even more so despise him after the Disney takeover and he threw in with them to save Ahsoka, so TCW is basically the only "old" thing kept by Disney in the franchise besides the stuff they pilfer to try and win back fans. He even got his final season after showing he has no soul. And then he attached himself to The Mandalorian like the parasite he is and immediately started throwing in his characters because he's a hack who can't care about anything he didn't directly create.
It doesn't help that Filoni Wars and Rebels are simply bad either.
What may be the worst though is how the fandom was split. I simply can't relate to or connect with Star Wars fans who like TCW and maybe even prefer it to what came before. It's like we're two totally different generations of fans, or we're looking at different franchises. It's like the old EU, the most creative and lush part of Star Wars that had so much passion and so many authors involved, has been completely murdered and supplanted by Dave Filoni's creations. Long before Disney this had been happening and what I really hate right now is seeing people say that TCW makes the prequel trilogy "good" or that it fills in the gaps. No it doesn't. You are creating a fake answer to a fake problem when you say that. The prequels were good to begin with and didn't need anything like that and furthermore we already had plenty of things doing that like Genndy Wars and the novel Labyrinth of Evil among others.
So yeah this whole blog has nothing to do with anything, I just wanted to get all this down.
You’re very passionate about this.
5427609
Well Star Wars was really big for me. It's been years since I would really even call myself a Star Wars fan now though. It's pretty clear the franchise has passed me by, I've still got my old games and books and that will have to be good enough.
Coming in as someone who hasn't been more than a casual fan of lore-heavy franchises like Star Wars, take my word with a big grain of salt, but from my impression of Star Wars over the past few years especially with the Disney trilogy, actively nixing official expanded universes is a bad practice on my end of things. While one can still resort to making Star Wars fan fiction taking place in the old EU, fan fics do have the limit of not having the official backing and funding of the company bearing the Star Wars franchise, so not even the bast fan fic stories can compete with the old EU novels because 1) EU novels still have some sense of canon even if it's only within the EU and 2) people would rather cling on to EU novels for lore than what some fan declares in a fan fic, and this is especially true because Star Wars seems very lore heavy.
My opinion on Filoni—coming from someone who's never seriously watched any Star Wars material, not even the first six movies—based on general impressions around the Internet is that he's a good writer if you take away all the Star Wars cover around his works, but since he's in Star Wars and has had some extensive work in it, he may be prone to just fanservice (and that if he was otherwise an independent novelist or worked in an all-original miniseries, he'd be universally praised as a great modern-day writer). Not that fanservice is in itself a bad thing, but at the very least, as someone who's much for tradition in real-life cultures, I want to see Filoni or some other person at least bring back in EU trends/storylines/what-have-you along with new and original stuff, even the stuff that he may not like at first because this stuff isn't supposed to be an excuse to just write about his pet characters but to also provide the original Star Wars experience the first six movies and the EU provided. Moving forward, I am not sure what would be more viable: shows and movies completely based in the EU or otherwise original stuff like The Mandalorian but with heavier tie-ins into the EU stuff.
Finally, the recent announcement of so many shows/movies coming in for the franchise is a mixed blessing/curse. On one hand, it's new Star Wars stuff and it's proof that there's no such thing as Star Wars fatigue—only bad-movie fatigue. On the other hand, there's something off with not really outsourcing many of these things to different people/authors/groups/what-have-you—it's all under the same Disney umbrella. It may feel rather conformist watching those things compared to the Wild West atmosphere of the old EU in which people went wild with the Star Wars stories they wrote. Sure, there's much more room for hot garbage, but there's also much more room for really great stuff. Perhaps, on the bright side, one can see the slew of shows/movies here as the start of a renaissance of EU-esque novels and other media: with so many starting points to get stories and lore from, there'll be tons of material to make a new EU with stuff that's hopefully as daring and creative as the old EU.
It's sad to hear from a former fan of a franchise that, in his eyes, has fallen from grace. I do hope that Star Wars gets better, though; it used to be a serious bastion in the minds of many. It can be such a bastion again.
Oof...can't say I agree with your take on The Clone Wars and Dave Filoni, but at least you're passionate about what you do like, and are not afraid of putting out a very hot take. Gotta respect you for that, at least.
But regardless of what anyone enjoys about Star Wars, whether it be the Originals, the Prequels, the Sequels, the EU, the Clone Wars, or any of the other materials, the fact is that we all still ultimately love the same thing and can find common ground.
(Sorry if this is a late reply, btw.)
Agree, considerably regarding The Clone Wars the animation series, the orange anchor(Ashoka Tano) is pretty much that random shoe horned in annoying sidekick to a main character that is supposed to "broaden" appeal or whatever. She only retards the beginning seasons, inserts herself way too much, is unkillable, unmaimable, and does not posess much in the way of nuance. She is supposed to be a regularly trained jedi, yet acts so rebellious and edgy like Anakin as if the two grew up together.
It poorly rewrites Star Wars, as you've mentioned Asajj, as well as Obi-wan's love interest, the force, Dooku's character assassination, clones(oh no... microchips...), the prequels in general, mandalorians, and more than likely other things as well.
Literally the only thing that could have somewhat have given it some value or redeeming quality, would have been if the clone Rex had shot and killed Ashoka and that this had driven Anakin closer to the dark side.
The series successfully humanised the clones, but failed to humanise the confederacy and machinise the clones.