Why is backstory so important?

That's a good analogy. But if SW were to be like the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, TPTB should never have labelled TFA and TLJ as episodes 7 and 8 respectively. They should have made it clearer that they were a separate thing in the same way they did The Hobbit/LotR. But no, they went the HP route and made them episodes 7 and 8. So why should we try to stop treating it as one continuous storyline when the creators of the new content are labelling it one continuous storyline?

EDIT: I think we've drifted off the subject matter of the thread...

 

Look at it this way. Hobbit-LotR trilogies have different main characters, mostly different supporting characters, mostly different locations and are set decades apart. Harry Potter movies have the same main characters, mostly the same supporting characters and locations and are set 3 months apart at most. Star Wars movies might be labeled like HP, but in reality are like H-LotR.

No, this is important in relation to the subject matter.

 

If the characters motivations and personalities stayed mostly the same, then of course there is no need for backstory, it's easy for anyone to just pick up where they left off. New characters usually get a back story to understand their motivations if they are central to the story. Bad guys often get back story to understand the threat they represent. If the bad guy is linked to the good guy, even more backstory is required.

If there's a time skip and the drives and ideas of the person changes radically, I would think a functional, coherent backstory for that would be important to the story. The more that their interactions created the change or drove motivation, the more back story should be shared since this directly relates the story being told.

So for me if Kylo had just met Snoke after his fight with Luke, what we got would probably have sufficed. The problem is that it's said that Snoke was involved before. That creates a tangle between the OT3, Snoke and Kylo that is confounding and a driving force of the story, but that is murky and seems to not be fully thought out, or perhaps intentionally left out for IX (if I'm being generous) or that RJ and JJ failed to relate adequately to some of the viewers.

 

I see what you're saying and I understand where you're coming from, but I do not agree.

1 thru 6 flow like one big narrative - to me. Which is the HP analogy.
Solo, RO (and the TV shows) are the side stories that connect in an overarching canon - to me. Which would be the Hobbit/LotR analogy.

Where do 7 and 8 fit into this? Are you saying I should view 7 and 8 more like spin offs? And if that is so, why call them 7 and 8 in the first place? Do you get me, you don't have to agree, but do you get me?

A bit of backstory for Snoke, The First Order, Luke's failure with Ben and such would have provided the reasons for me to view them as a true continuation of the previous six episodes. At the moment I do not see them this way and I think you're saying that I shouldn't see them that way anyway. Is that correct?

EDIT: @FN-3263827 - Is this kinda what we started discussing elsewhere?

 

Another thought on this just came to mind - my apologies fer interruptin' conversation - ... now, this's just to my ownself, anything 'back story related was never much a concern to me. Don't mean that I didn't wonder, 'coz ... Sure, I did. Some time later on, meybe another Story (in a novel or comic) come along an' tells more about a thing. Other times there ain't more Stories about things.
Still Nuthin' been told about Yoda, an' that's just fine.
Same's just fine if I don't know about lots of other things to.
Just ta me.

Puttin' me to wonder just how much expectation plays into all this, not 'my' expectation (I've none), I mean just in general ...

 

It's the prequel thing. Why Anakin turned? Not a big deal for 25 years. He was seduced by power. That's it. Nothing complicated, like Sauron. Not complicated. Why Palpatine wants power? Self-explanatory. Bad people want power. I don't know why that's so complicated. It was never complicated. Fascism isn't complicated. Power for power's sake. There's always another person waiting to exploit that gap. Myth (and Star Wars) is about that cycle. Evil exists. Every generation has to fight it.

Harry Potter is a lengthy saga dealing only with one generation. The Hobbit is funny because what was annoying about those films was the lengthy allusions to the next generation's fight against Sauron when it really should have been 2 films of just Bilbo & Friends and the dragon. The mere attempt to make it into a full-on prequel story made it less about the heroes, like the 30 minutes of political minutiae in TPM takes away from Anakin & the Jedi. Those are just story editing problems. TLJ and TFA has to do the same thing that's accomplished in 8 Harry Potter books. Follow one generation through it's big conflict while also hinting at why that conflict still exists. 2 movies are never going to cut it.

 

A couple lines of expository dialogue, to go along with a couple lines in the opening crawl would work wonders.

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 6, 2018, Original Post Date: Jul 6, 2018 ---

The movies don't even remotely explain how we got from the state of affairs at the end of E6 to the state of affairs at the start of E7.

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 6, 2018 ---

Nobody is asking for a backstory for "everybody and everything." I don't need to know where Phasma came from because she is just a glorified stormtrooper. But gee, a little backstory for the most powerful dark side user since Palpatine and the leader of the First Order would have been nice.

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 6, 2018 ---

Sorry, but you don't get to call your movies Episode 1... Episode 2... all the way up to Episode 9... and then say "hey, don't treat these as one continuous story!!"

I can actually buy the above with regards to the Star Wars Story side movies.... but you don't get to do it for the main set of films.

 

The Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy. It was published in three different books due to the cost of publishing it as one novel at the time. However, it is NOT a trilogy. It is one book. The three books do not have different main characters and it is not set decades apart. Sure, there is about 20 years between Bilbo's going away party and when Frodo begins the quest. But the quest takes part from about October through the early spring.

The Hobbit is definitely set decades before LOTR but it's a prequel. Here there are different main characters (Bilbo vs. Frodo), but the reason for the apparent lack of connectedness in the Hobbit and the LOTR is the fact that Tolkien wrote the Hobbit for his kids and kids in general. When the publisher asked him to do another book on Hobbits, THEN he set it, LOTR firmly within the mythology he'd been working on since he was injured in a gas attack in WWI. He later went back and changed the first work so that it would tie in better to the newer work.

The idea that we should stop treating Star Wars as if it's a continuous story is ludicrous. Why call it episode VII? VIII? IX? The problem isn't the fans. It's the fact that LFL, under the leadership of KK, made some HUGE errors, the most glaring of which was to NOT have any sort of freakin plan for the ST. Thus you get JJ rebooting the franchise and asking questions followed up by RJ saying I'm going to reboot the reboot.

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 6, 2018, Original Post Date: Jul 6, 2018 ---

Exactly. A little bit of information about why Luke is at this place in his life, and hopefully something better than "he tried to kill his sleeping nephew." Heck, Mark himself said he had to make up a backstory so he could understand why Luke was in this dark place. What does that tell you? I'd have thought the writer/director genius would have had that information for him. I guess not.

 

Unless the audience is going to be confused as to the motivations of the characters, backstory is superfluous. It is needed sometimes, but in the case of snoke not so much. Luke telling Rey what happened between him and Ben was justifiable, because the audience needs to understand why we are here. The same backstory creates problems with TFA- Luke went into isolation, but if he didn't want to be found, why did he leave a Maclunkey MAP!!!

 

All this comparison talk between Star Wars and LOTR has got me really excited for more Sequels. I can't wait for the next chapter, "The Lord of the Rings: The Re-Fellowship of the Ring":

"Frodo has vanished. In his absence, a sinister DARK LORD has risen from the ashes of Sauron. With the support of GONDOR, Aragon leads a brave FELLOWSHIP. He is desperate to find Frodo and gain his help in restoring peace and justice to Middle-earth once again."

*Queue opening battle sequence from Mordor where Lord Snoken has forged a much bigger ring, a much bigger evil eye and a much bigger Orc army...

 

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, what we really need is the Star Wars version of the Silmarillion to tie everything together and give an exhaustive explanation on every detail of every major player in the Galaxy.

Mostly kidding, but I would read and re-read book ad infinitum if they went with it.

 

And to subvert your expectations, there will be no ring to find. They will all fail and come back with nothing.

 

Star Wars was the first introduction to Star Wars. It was a simple movie with no idea how big of a success it would be.

Now, we had seen 6 movies prior TFA, and those 6 movies had explained every important event in that timeline (at least, for the audience to understand how X ended being Y).

TFA, which has the title of Episode 7, its not really Episode 7, because there's such a jump that everything is f*cked up again and we don't know how.

A new Republic? Ressistance? What? How can the good guys be the ressistance and on the run if the Republic is the one which rules the Galaxy? A new Empire? But at the end of the previous Episode, there was no Empire anymore! New Emperor? Who is he? Why didn't mention him in the other movies?

Now, A New Hope and the original trilogy didn't give any explanation about Palpatine, the named Senate, Clone Wars etc. but, appart from all of these being explained on the prequels, it was the first contact we have with Star Wars.

How can anyone possibly compare this like it's the same situation?

Even if Lucas started with Episode 1, there was no backstory of the Jedi and so on.

Lucas give as a starting point. Then, he explained how we got there. Now, the ones that continue this point, they continue it with no explanation on how we get there.

"But, they did this conciously! They had a plan to expand it on comics and such!"

Yeah, no, they hadn't a plan. Yes, they will expand, but what happened was this:

They needed a movie and FAST. So they didn't plan anything, they copied ANH with minor changes, they left mistery boxes with no idea on how to resolve them and now is when problems happen.

Even if Lucas had this (let's face it, he didn't plan the entire thing in 1977), he was just getting started and had no idea on how this would evolve.

Even if they wanted to explain Snoke and how thing got to where we are, they can't. It's Episode 7 and 8. And last time I checked, 7 and 8 come after 6. So those 30 years will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

If they at least called them Episode X and XI, we could have "prequels" VII and VIII sometime in the future that continue after where we ended in Jedi.

This guys are repeating the same mistakes for one reason: LAZINESS.

 

It's simple. The OT was born in a vaccum, the ST however was not. The OT didn't have to consider any rules that had been established earlier because there were no such rules. This isn't the case for the ST however and simply ignoring a character's backstory doesn't seem to fit in a franchise with such a rich and detailed history. What's truly bizarre is that nobody wanted to know about Han's past and we got an entire movie about him but when people wanted to know about the bad guy who managed to steal Kylo away from Luke we got nothing. It just doesn't make sense to explain the story of every minor character in comics and spinoffs while ignoring many major plot elements of the saga movie.

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 7, 2018, Original Post Date: Jul 7, 2018 ---

There would have been more than enough time for character backstories if they had removed the useless Canto Bight scene. Any good filmmaker could do this in 150 minutes of screentime.

 

A line without the character expressing how it affects their present is bothersome for me. Especially when they are meant to be a part of the plot.

We already knew Han Solo is a smuggler with a spaceship. He was later expanded up on each movie and got to express himself; his character was made independent of others around him. We don't get that with Rey or Finn nor do we get their purpose for this trilogy. When you have the 'general audience' finding no relatability or reasoning with these supposedly lead characters then that is a problem in story telling.

 

the general audience likes these characters just fine.
judging by a brief google search for cosplayers, fans like them too.
they may not work for you, but that doesn't mean they don't work for other fans all over.

 

Exactly! Ignoring a characters backstory is just insane. We don't need a whole bloody film series detailing the last 3 decades of Luke's life. But how about enough to make it not feel like the character went from point d to z???

I wish I could like your post more than once. The thing with Snoke is spot on. NO ONE wanted a film on Solo. EVERYONE I know whats to know what is up (or what was up) with Snoke. Where'd he come from, who is he, how'd he turn Kylo to the dark side? And what do we get? ABSOLTELY FREAKIN NOTHING. Not a book on this, not a comic series on this, not a cartoon on this. Straight up NOTHING. Makes total sense.

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 14, 2018 ---

Yeah, I love the new characters. I just wish they were better written. Otherwise no problem at all. Heck, if I did cosplay I'd do Chirrut Imwe myself.

 

to the degree that you know me, i didn't want backstory on Snoke.
nor do i think it's the least bit relevant to the forward narrative in the ST.

so not "everyone". ; D

honestly, compared to most of the OT characters, the new ones are pretty stellar.
what did we know about Leia in the OT? nothing.
she worked the Rebel Alliance, she came from Alderaan, she was a princess.

that's pretty much it. and in RoTJ she's suddenly Luke's sister.
honestly if someone tried to pull that in a film series today, it'd be laughable.

we know even less about Han, Chewie, Lando, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan, Yoda, Palpatine, etc.

the ST characters have mysterious or unknown pasts at least clearly by design rather than mere omission.
they are all "orphans" in some fashion with past trauma that's made them who they are today. they share that thematically.

i don't fault the OT for omitting all this backstory stuff.
it's simply not important to the forward narrative.

i like Solo because it's fun and i love spending time with the characters and in this gffa.
but we never needed any backstory on Han Solo. it adds nothing to what we already know about his journey.
same with Anakin. same with Luke. same with Ben Solo. same with Snoke.

 

How do we actually gauge fan participation in this regard? I don't think google algorithms can tell you much, as it's intended goal is to give you what you search for. I also don't think merely pointing out the existence of people who enjoy the characters tells us much either, since the world is a diverse place. There will always be somebody that enjoys something.

 

that's exactly my point.
people keep making generalizations like: nobody likes these new characters. or these characters don't resonate.
obviously they do to someone. many someones, in fact.

it's okay if someone personally doesn't like something or doesn't feel like it resonates. or likes it and thinks it resonates just fine.
it becomes problematic when anyone frames anything as if it's a universal truth.