You see it be used against the sequel trilogy, especially The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker. Even Palpatine’s return is criticized for “undoing the Chosen One accomplishment”… especially when these people are well-aware that Anakin only killed Palps specifically to save Luke.
What people don’t understand is that everything is temporary. What people think is that the victory of the OT only matters if it lasts forever.
The victory of the OT allowed for galactic peace for three decades. People were born and lived in peace because of the achievements of the OT. You need to come to terms with the temporarily of reality. Nothing ever lasts forever and thinking anything will… sets you up for sadness and anger.
Thoughts?
That may be how real life works, but Star Wars isn’t real life. It’s a fantasy setting. And Anakin killing the Emperor was meant by Lucas (at least retroactively) to be an act of cosmic significance. It was the destruction of the Sith and the restoration of balance to the Force.
Also, it wasn’t exactly 30 years of peace when the New Republic was embarrassingly corrupt and incompetent, and the new Jedi Order failed to get off the ground, and the main heroes of the OT all ended up failing at life and becoming estranged from on another.
That real-world cynicism has no place in Star Wars.
True, which is why the PT is an example of a perfect democracy where a suitable leader was elected and didn’t plunge the galaxy into a decades long civil war where every system was under the direct control of the leaders personal army and the main bad guy was a failed main character who killed both of the other two main characters.
Thank the maker that SW has never used real life cynicism prior to TFA.
The Old Republic only became corrupt and fell due to decades of Sith subversion. It didn’t fall apart for just mundane reasons like real-world governments often do. And the fall of Anakin is a melodramatic tragedy that, like Luke’s story in the OT, is based in mythical archetypes. That’s not George Lucas just going “Well, real life sucks, so I’ll make my world suck too, lol.” It’s meant to be loftier than that. The Prequels tell a tragic story, but that tragedy is deliberately softened because we know the OT exists and that the good guys will win in the end. You can have low points in a story, but that doesn’t equate to cynicism.
At no point in the PT or TCW is any indication given that Palps alone is responsible for the fall of the Republic. The Republic falls due to it being crippled by corruption and decay, exactly the reason real life governments fall, this has been well explained by Lucas along with all the other tropes based on real life in the OT and PT.
There is no difference whatsoever between Anakin’s fall and Luke’s withdrawal in the ST so if you are trying to claim there’s some magical difference between mythical cynicism and realistic cynicism then all your points against the ST are also invalidated as they’re identically mythical.
The PT is no more or less made less cynical by the existence of the death of Palps in the OT than the cynicism of the ST is made less or more cynical by the death of Palps in TRoS.