Oh. You’re a r/moviescirclejerk user. That explains a lot.
Oh. You’re a /r/saltierthancrait user. That explains a lot.
I browse a lot of subreddits, especially Star Wars ones. STC is one of them, yes. (I do apologize for the r/moviescirclejerk comment. That came off as needlessly mean.)
Look, you’re forgetting the main problem of all this. Palpatine came back. He was back for 30 years. The Empire came back in full force, so much so that they were even more advanced and deadly than before, as you admitted. Our heroes didn’t prevent anything. They failed offscreen, and so the new heroes were forced to come in and clean up the old heroes’ mess. The OT heroes, despite having succeeded onscreen during the OT, left behind a legacy of failure and abandonment. It’s not comparable to the PT, since the PT actually ended in tragedy, so it made sense for Obi-Wan and Yoda to look to the new generation to make right their mistakes and not repeat those failures. The OT then shows us the heroes succeeding, but the New Canon has everything get shot to hell just for the sake of setting up the ST. Now, the OT heroes have been retroactively demoted to being just the stepping stones for the “real” heroes of the ST.
All victory is temporary, this is true. The problem is allowing that victory to be completely scrubbed away through in-universe negligence and incompetence. By TRoS, there was nothing left of the OT heroes’ victory to be preserved. Therefore, the ST is not a story of preserving and preventing. It’s a story of the “real” heroes cleaning up after the previous ones, who were made foolish and incompetent to serve this newfangled story.
Why did the Republic fund the Resistance in secret? Why were the two factions seemingly estranged from one another? If there’s a resurgent Empire, clearly with malicious intent, that’s encroaching on Republic territory, kidnapping children to be soldiers, and building a massive, very conspicuous planet killer, then I think at least a small self defense military is justified. In fact, as long as the Empire still existed as a faction, even when they fled into deep space to regroup as the First Order, the Republic still should obviously had held onto some basic military force. You don’t lay down your weapons while the Empire is still out there gathering strength. That’s idiotic. Not to mention the Resistance is tiny, even measlier than the Rebel Alliance, despite being initially funded and supported by the dominant government of the galaxy. Why is that?
Except the movie DOES explain his return. He simply transferred his consciousness into a clone. It’s implied by “I have died before”, and the fact alone that he survived IMPLIES he’s discovered the secret to cheating death >that only one has achieved.
That’s not an explanation. “I have died before” and him being alive explain nothing. And besides, the immortality sought by Plagueis wasn’t possessing clones. It was maintaining life in a single body.
Jakku is a desert planet to visualize the hell Rey’s going through.
No, it’s not. It’s a desert planet because, in JJ’s mind, Star Wars protagonists are supposed to always come from desert planets, because reasons.