Star Wars is going the wrong way

I was never a massive Star Wars fan.

As a teenager, like most, I watched the original trilogy (let’s call them the classics) and the ‘prequels’ (which I actually like) as they were released. I always enjoyed to films but I also found them a bit simplistic. Good vs Bad, space-faring species, cosmic super samurai. I was no where near as much into them as I am today.

The thing that initially piqued my interest was the Clone Wars animated series. All of a sudden, the Star Wars universe went from 6 films (in my eyes) to 6 seasons and 121 episodes of content set in between the second and third prequel. This sheer amount of content covering everything from escape, gigantic beast terrorising Coruscant to a third-episode epic about a power struggle between a father, brother and sister in an isolated relic from ancient times (randomly floating through space).

I’m the sort of guy who, once I’ve tasted something, I just want more. Like with Star Wars and the realisation that there was so much more out their, I was keen to learn more about the Star Wars universe and what it entailed. I quickly learned the difference between canon and non-canon information and content, the huge swathes of fan film, fiction, sub-cultures (most a bit too intense for my personal liking but it was good to dabble).

I then came across Star Wars The Old Republic (SWTOR). Now, I’m not a gamer and I must confess, I’ve never played the game. However, I did instantly fall in love with the cinematic trailers and some of the hidden content. For any who are beginning to get interested in the Expanded Universe, I’d definitely recommend SWTOR Galactic Timelines (Jedi Archives by Jedi Master Gnost-Dural) on Youtube. 47 minutes of ‘background’ context to where all this Jedi/Sith stuff comes from.

As you explore these concepts further, you begin to understand that this sub-culture (like Star Trek and some comic books) has become a self-sustaining, self-creating universe with over 30,000 years of history, millions of man hours, no doubt billions of words going towards creating a story that self-regulates and becomes more detailed by the day.

As sad as it sounds, I spent one weekend a few months ago trying to understand the difference between the Eternal Empire, the Infinite Empire and the Sith Empire and how they connected (for someone who’s never looked much deeper than what I’ve said above — you can imagine how this may be confusing. That whole Vitiate/Valkorion was confusing in itself.

But here’s my point, on top of the self-perpetuating, self-regulating, self-sustaining Expanded Universe of non-canon detail (I’ll say it again, 30,000 years of the stuff — everything from your first Jedi, through the creation of the Republic, the rise of the Sith Empire, the Great Hyperspace War, the period of peace and prosperity, the return of the Sith Empire, the Mandalorian Blockade etc. to the eventual defeat of the Sith Empire, the establishment of the Eternal Empire — on and on and on it goes) and then to the prequels, classics and now the sequels the question I have is this. Why did they have to progress the classic storyline (already exhausted and simplistic) when they had all the great, fan created content to build on?

The truth is, there’s just so much cooler stuff that happened before the prequels, classics and sequels happened. 30,000 years of the stuff. I know the content is less ‘hollywood-ified’ as there’s less romance, more developed concepts of good vs evil that just goodie and baddie. There’s established philosophies supporting both Jedi and Sith, huge galactic civilisations and empires, powerful weaponry (Star Forge!), badass mediation ‘spheres’, some classic tragedies (Exar Kun and Revan for example), tales of exploration, renovation, conquest — it’s all there, ripe for the picking.

There’s also a huge list of seriously bad-ass Sith Lords to pool from; Freedon Nadd, Marka Ragnos, Naga Sadow, Darth Bane and finally, my personal favourite, Darth Nihilus (a Sith with no physical form who could suck the life out of an entire planet…0_0)

The only reason I can think of is that they didn’t want to piss off all the die hard fans by creating a softer version of their self-created content so they just created a softened, over retread of A New Hope and hoped no-one would notice…

Now we’ve got Rogue One coming out and a further few sequel films exploring this whole Force Awakens; Kylo Ren, Rey and Fin thing.

Now, I’m not a die hard fan (a lot of this stuff is probably non-canon, factually inaccurate) but I felt it appropriate to say that as someone who has always been a Sci Fi fan and would love to see more great Star Wars stuff being produced, please, oh please, fund some more of this Old Republic stuff and build on that story line not the exhausted stuff that comes from the tiny snap shot of the Star Wars universe harvested by the original classics.

Nerd-gasm over…