Fixing the dreadful worldbuilding of the ST

If you actually bother to read the books and comics set between RotJ and TFA chronologically, you would see that the setting is detailed enough to make sense and be interesting. Some details are being avoided until the relevant movies come out, to fill in the gaps later.

 

I have to agree with the OP as the Worldbuilding and Big Picture story are a letdown with the ST. I say this as person who enjoys TFA and TLJ as individual SW movies, but not as Saga movies because they really don’t capture anything new that makes the PT/OT better or even original. The only original stuff in the ST sort of makes the 1-6 parts irrelevant.

I say this cause I was a person who really delved into the PT EU cause there was so much going on in the movies, but I haven’t been interested in any ST EU novels and I haven’t had the desire to read TLJ novel. I’m not even hyped for Episode 9 the way I was for ROTJ and ROTS as the Rey vs Ren part 3 and Resistance vs First Order is essentially the ROTJ story.

 

If they had used this story, I'd find something redeemable in the ST just as I do with the PT.

In our world, in any time period, there's always something interesting going on. We don't live in a void (funny, because they live in space... but I digress lol). I have multiple issues with the ST, but I'd find it easier to get over if they had something I can latch on to. I easily have as many issues with the PT, the key difference being that at least there's something going on in the PT. In the ST, it's like the world is in a vacuum. It's not a lack of an interesting setting, it's no setting at all. Okay, fine, they have FO versus Resistance, but that's not a setting. It's an obvious revamp, but a much less imaginative one.

Really good post, and yeah, that story you lay out would have given something fun to be engaged in. Maybe JJ focuses on that in IX, and then maybe the ST climbs in my view, but I doubt JJ will (it's almost too late at this point). I'm sure there will be lots of books and other media to come out, but some of it needs to be in the movie(s).

 

Ah, the classic "everything will be explained if you read the books" excuse. The vast majority of Star Wars fans don't read the books, watch the TV shows, play the games etc. They just watch the films, and if you cannot explain the state of A to Z well in a film, then anything set within said confines become problematic. The most infuriating part of this whole debacle is Abrams and Kasdan actually wrote and filmed some of these scenes, but they were cut from the final product.

All information necessary should be provided in the film, the EU material such as books should be supplementary and provide additional unrequired material that further fleshes out the world. We're being sold an incomplete story, no two ways around it.

And to top it all off, the vast majority of the new EU at the moment focuses on the galaxy post-Civil War, not pre-Resistance/ FO.

 

The movies provide enough information to people who care about only watching them. OT didn't provide that many details either, it just seems that way since you've known them for a while.

 

i get your point here, i think many peoples issue with the don't worry its all explained in the books argument is that is fine for small details, but for huge thing like at the end of Return of the Jedi we see the empire and the emperor defeated and then the next episode starts and an emperor knock and an empire knock of are back and have helped turn Leia and Hans son, then that feels like a to big a detail to leave out of the films.
Not explaining it in the films also just ads to the feeling that Lucas film doesn't really know what its doing and just set all these things up to remind people of the original trilogy and even now don't really have a good enough explanation for them that they would feel comfortable putting on screen.

--- Double Post Merged, Apr 28, 2018, Original Post Date: Apr 28, 2018 ---

true but with the OT we didn't have 40 years worth of stories that films had to link into. So if their is and Emperor with and Evil empire then that feels fitting, if then you see them defeated, and then in the next episode their is basically and Empire and and evil Emperor again then you go huh? what happened there? and if their is no explanation coming then it all feels a bit cheap.

 

The OT was the first installment in the universe, it didn't need to explain anything other than set up the current state of its world. The ST is expected to build upon what has come before, just as the PT built upon the OT by providing a roadmap to and setup for it. We were also told plenty over the trilogy: we were told how the Emperor gained power (through politics) and remained absolute by dissolving the senate, we found out much about the Imperial hierarchy, it went into some detail about Vader and his relationship with his masters, and much more.

The world was built, we needed nothing more.

The ST has explained almost nothing. It never mentioned the end of the Galactic Civil War, it never explained how the Resistance was at odds with the Republic, it hasn't mentioned Operation Cinder, or anything important. Apparently finding an old Rebel base on a new planet called Crait is more useful information to convey to an audience. Imagine if the base the Resistance travelled to was linked to any of these past events; that would provided time for a line or two of info, which can be expanded upon in EU material.

There's no way to spin it, the ST's world was scrapped in order to push spectacle and character.

 

You’re kind of making my point that the ST is a retread of the OT and that is what’s so disappointing about it.

Yes, the OT didn’t have a huge macro story that really gave all the details of the politics and world building. But it worked because the story really focused on Luke, Leia and Han vs Vader as the metaphor of the Rebellion vs the Empire.

The PT took that story and then gave us this big picture of the universe (The Senate, The Jedi Council, The Rise of the Empire/Palpatine) so it actually made the OT better in that context.

Now with the ST, they needed to continue to show how the Republic evolved or devolved and we have gotten pretty much none of that. That would have made the PT/OT better again to show where the Republic is after 30 years, instead they have gone back to only focusing on the micro story like the OT.

That’s why I say TFA and TLJ are good/entertaining SW movies, but not really good Saga movies because there isn’t much there when you watch them in that context.

 

There's already a good thread for this discussion that's a little less hyperbolic.

Keep in mind these trilogies are designed to be watched independently. So this idea that "everything has to be explained" is an unrealistic expectation that some fans bring to the table.

 

That is essentially what they are thought of as by Disney; one style of eventuality of neo-fascistic, or pseudo-fascist-like, political tendencies from hard-right retaliations to a cold war/post-cold-war environment, and who are reliant on idolized views of a time perceived to be defined as better because of hard-line positions and nationalist pride; subsequently this outlier group is under-valued by more tolerant normative powers currently in the majority control who are subsequently thrown off-balance when the hard-line populous movement takes control and upsets decades of philosophically egalitarian growth in policy decisions globally.

That is both the past decade's Western Civilization populist condition, which still continues, and doesn't just equate to "Trump", but a whole host of Western nations going through the very same thing in their own ways (Switzerland, Sweden, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Greece famously, but it's pretty much everywhere), as well as the conditions which lead to the First Order in the SW universe.
Charismatic leaderships, hard-line positions, nationalist policy positions, tiered citizenship values (one class of citizen, or people, is/are more inherently of value than another), isolationist tendencies, verbosely demanded patriotism, and surprising support and accomplishments.

That is pretty much the nuts and bolts of the First Order.
They came about during a Cold War, off in a hardly monitored corner of the galaxy, the New Republic powers did not take them seriously, the First Order was therefore allowed to grow to powerful extents by simply repeatedly violating regulations and terms of the contract that ended the galactic civil war, which consequently created a fanatic out of Leia, who subsequently ran her own military cell to attempt to fight the First Order since the New Republic was not taking them seriously, and she did so fruitlessly as her endeavors were not capable of stopping the First Order from taking over the seat of power from the New Republic, which drove all sorts of problems with her home life which was already in turmoil due to a troubled child who ended up joining the very group his Mother was fighting against, which did drive Han away and cause him to go back to what he knew.
Now the First Order is swinging its weight around and we're seeing, in the SW universe, if recovery is possible from a populist hard-line right take-over.

If it seems like the OT, that's because it's meant to be.
If the current real world populist movements across Western socieity strike people as eerily similar to Hitler and the pre-Chancellor Hitler Nazi party, that's because in many ways they are, and in many ways the socio-economic conditions which existed then exist in a relative form again today.

If the thought is that the First Order doesn't really reflect current socio-economic dilemma, I suggest reading more world news.
Leia was basically the SW galaxy's Merkel.

A Merkel from whom no one at the council, in majority, took seriously her warnings.
A Merkel who, unlike our real Merkel, radicalized and became an outlier military force leader (once again) due to an impatience and frustration with the political process (here the real Merkel differs, as Merkel would likely look down on Leia's approach to solving problems, but this is a movie and people doing everything politically and no one shooting things gets boring for epics and adventures).

So if the idea is that the First Order should more closely resemble some current world zeitgeist, I would say that it definitely does. It represents a stark warning of what can occur out of our current environment, and to not be fooled into thinking that because it was defeated once before, that it will never rise again and take over.

If anyone thinks that the current populist zeitgeist can't develop into a Hitler's Nazi similarity part 2, they are severely mistaken. Will that happen? I'd like to think not, but if everyone keeps thinking that there's no possibility and that it's silly to make stories centered around reminding us of a rebirth of that reality, and if everyone keeps taking the populist movements as jokes, then I think it is increasingly likely.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

This is a bit confusing to me, honestly.

It seems to suppose that SW is directly relevant to the socioeconomic standings of the time in which it was released, and that the ST has failed to do so.
Aside from what I wrote earlier about there actually being a relevance between the ST and current socioeconomic conditions, I think it's worth noting that the OT was not relevant to its own time's socioeconomic conditions, nor was it nuanced in moral dilemmas related to its socioeconomic conditions within its story.

In the 1970's, the relevant socioeconomic conditions of the United States were a crumbling national economy, resource scarcity, radical physical infrastructural collapse, rapid rate increase in violent crimes and murder rates, evaporating working middle class, rising unemployment rates, a social rights movement which had erupted into everything just short of an all out civil war, drug culture death rates skyrocketing, the introduction and rapid rise of terrorism through a seemingly non-stop string of hostage taking and plane hijacking - to include the LIVE broadcast of the Munich incident, a fresh scarring from a string of political figures and leaders being assassinated, a deep cultural shock from the disillusionment caused from an ever growing list of government corruption, and a very fresh traumatic residue of the Vietnam War.

Now, Star Wars IV comes along. It doesn't have a Vietnam style war environment, and Lucas could have done that as his good friend was neck deep in Apocalypse Now around the same time range. Lucas himself was among those who strongly encouraged Coppola to make a strong Vietnam film, so if he had wanted to make it directly relevant to the war conditions of his time, he certainly could have.
However, he drew heavily in design from WWII Nazi Germany, and modeled only really the Emperor off of a figure from his current time - Richard Nixon. However, from the OT films, you hardly would grasp that idea. It's not really until the PT that it starts to come about a bit more as something to notice, and what a lot of people thought was the model was Bush. That's simply because what Lucas was constantly thinking about was showing how democracies don't get taken away - they are given away.
It happened before Lucas' time back in the late 1930's when Germany became swept up with Hitler, Lucas witnessed that happening in form during the Nixon years, a new generation saw that sort of happening again with Bush, and another may look at Trump as another incarnation yet again.

It's not isolated to one time in history. It repeatedly occurs.

But to continue on, look at the OT and then look at the 70's and early 80's.
There is no direct correlation taking place between Star Wars and its current times. It has relative motifs that cross time and culture to some extent, but it is not directly linked to the zeitgeist of its direct release time historically.
If Star Wars was, then the Star Wars we would have gotten in 1977 would have looked a LOT more like Rogue One than A New Hope.

Star Trek, on the other hand was, and for the most part still is.
It was actually written into the original writer's guide, and the Next Generation's writer's guide that the topics need to be relevant to current social issues.

No such directive exists within Star Wars, and the OT really didn't remind everyone of what was going on outside of the theater.
If anything, it reminded them of simpler times where moral right and wrong was easy to determine. These are the bad guys. These are the good guys. Root for the good guys. Boo the bad guys.

The only concept of economic struggles shown in OT, which would have been VERY relevant for the time, is the concept of haggling at sale, and Han wanting lots of money. That's not exactly tying a link between the current times and the story. Those are things which exist in many stories; especially epics and adventures.

Almost no one in the OT is forced to make radical moral choices. Luke's moral choice is personal about his Father; not about social obligations bound up in a murky socioeconomic climate that fuels his character growth through those tough moral choices.
Luke's moral choice is entirely revolved around fighting his Father or trying to save his Father; which ends up being both at once and neither, in the end, because Luke finds a loophole in self-sacrifice which empowers his Father.

I don't think it's bad to ambition for directly relevant socioeconomic science fiction, but Star Wars is just not that intellectual property.

Star Wars likes to borrow wafts of elements from our shared history and some bits of sampled items from our current times to sprinkle over everything, but at its heart, it is first and foremost a moral mythology about the personal struggles of ontological and existential issues regarding the value of the self, others, and our place in the universe.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

This post is brilliant.

Cheers.

 

These examples are not Star Wars.
I made a rather important caveat at the end of my post, which is currently occurring in your response.

I did not state that socioeconomic response writing isn't worth anything.
I highlighted that the OT really wasn't such a form of fiction, and never outlined itself to be such.

Also, and I'm not trying to be antagonistic here, but I think it's a bit hyperbolic to state that you disagree with every word of the post since a portion of that post is historical fact about what the 1970's was, and also rather factual summary of how the OT did not reflect those conditions of the 1970's in its story.

Cheers,
Jayson