It’s truly mind boggling to me that someone could have two problems with this movie, and one of them is that a specific kind of TIE fighter doesn’t have hyperdrive. Like, you realize how ridiculous that sounds right?
The Space Shuttle Atlantis uncouples from the ISS at the conclusion of another successful mission. On the other side of the space station, a VW Beetle from Russia fires its retro rockets on approach.
Not the same thing. Star Wars isn’t real life, and you don’t need to read an obscure EU book to know that a VW Beetle can’t fly in space. I’m not bothered by it at all, and I love the imagery of an X-Wing and a TIE fighter parked next to each other. It really helps illustrate Rey and Kylo coming together.
Obi-wan says that this TIE fighter is specifically short range in the original movie, no EU required.
But that implies there are also long range fighters. It was only the EU that established none of the Imperial fighters can jump to lightspeed, so I don’t see the problem. And like I said before, I think the idea of “plot holes” as an objective measure of quality is dumb in general.
Obi-wan was commenting on the size of the fighter as a measure of its range. The EU established that Vader’s larger TIE variant could go to Hyperspace, so it’s not a question of type but of size.
Regardless, your overall point is correct. Plot holes don’t make a movie bad. Sometimes they can even help obscure problems in a movie. It’s something I’ve realized on my fanedit of TFA, that the more I fix the logical problems, the more the underlying soul of the movie comes to the surface. In a good film this can be a good thing, like in Adywan’s edits of the OT. In TFA however, the more I fix things the more a viewer can only focus on the core of the story, and there really isn’t much there. Once the superficial problems are gone the true inner hideousness is allowed to shine through.
We could endlessly argue about whether or not a TIE fighter could make it across the galaxy, but this discussion is only a distraction from the fact that the entire Rey/Kylo dynamic of the film is utter trash.
Douglas Adams summed up this style of movie-making far better in SLATFATF:
“In other words - and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxywide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”