I don’t think fans really wanted another Luke, Leia, and Han trilogy per say. I know for me I just wanted something that respected them as characters and felt like a natural progression to where we last saw them. Instead it feels like a regression.
Luke - He ended Return of the Jedi as the last Jedi. In the Sequel Trilogy he ends his story arc no different from where he was during the end of the previous trilogy. The only difference is he’s now broken and depressed as he failed. I didn’t need Luke to be Superman but I do feel seeing him pass on what he knew to the next generation as foreshadowed by his talk with Yoda was an essential part of his character development that felt promised to be told. He could fail at first to convey a Fisher King like narrative but instead he fails and everything is given to Rey because the plot says so and not because she earned it. Luke could definitely fail at first after following the teachings of the Jedi that came before but it’s poorly written and conveyed.
Leia - She’s in the same position she was at the start of A New Hope. She’s leading the Rebel Alliance then and now she’s leading the Resistance. Her growth to becoming a senator and even Supreme Chancellor is squandered. She fails at being a mother.
Han - He’s back to smuggling and where he was at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. He doesn’t continue to grow and become a respected figure in the Republic as his arc in Return of the Jedi implied when he became a general in the Rebel Alliance. Instead he’s back to smuggling, failed as a father, and loss the Millennium Falcon for reasons. Everything he overcame is thrown out the window.
All of these issues stem from The Force Awakens decision to be a soft reboot. The characters are mostly delightful and fun but the problem is the story they’re going through has no sense of consequence or baring on what comes afterwards. Hardly anything in the film has an emotional payoff or point in viewing things retrospectively. It’s there just to look like Star Wars but it doesn’t actually feel like Star Wars as it serves no purpose in the grand scheme of things.
I was ready to explore a new generation of characters with the trio serving as mentors. I wanted to see the children of Han and Leia and if in the cards Luke. I knew though George wasn’t so keen on the Expanded Universe in part because he didn’t see Luke as having children. So Luke having a kid may not have been likely but he could have served as a surrogate type parent. Instead we’re following characters they’ve never met or don’t have a connection to them directly or indirectly. The Skywalker saga is about generations of the same family and suddenly not following them in favour of a “Nobody” then Palpatine just feels very anticlimactic.
You don’t need your heroes to become regressed failures to convey a good story to prop up a new generation.
This makes the white-hot outrage over Luke’s characterisation in TLJ even more laughable.
At the end of RotJ, Han and Leia are respected leaders and heroes to the New Republic. Fast forward to TFA and Han is back to being the scoundrel smuggler we were introduced to in the first movie, and Leia is back to being a Rebel leader, and thus we have two characters who made a 360° turn.
It’s strange how Abrams hasn’t received any backlash for this deliberate regression, but Rian Johnson gets all the blame for ruining Luke Skywalker.
Well, it wasn’t even Abrams who did that setup, it was George.
And I disagree that Leia is in the same place. Before she was trying to bring down the Empire and now she is trying to save the New Republic from the First Order. She is fighting the entire time to preserve what she had achieved. While some argue the wording of the opening crawls implies that the First Order had won, the fleet we see in the end of TROS shows that they had not yet won, just intimidated the various system governments.
Han was going to die in George’s version anyway (so was Luke for that matter). Abrams at least gave us a glorious scene for him to exit on. And it is far from pointless. Johnson has that event derail Kylo and it ultimately leads to his return to the light in TROS. So it is a pivotal scene for the characters. And face it, most of us wanted to see the Rogue Han Solo over a respectable Han Solo. It was a good character choice in many ways.
And ultimately when you come down to the myths and legends that Star Wars is built on, everything about the former heroes not still being on top of things falls perfectly in line. Han went back to what was comfortable, Leia is protecting the Republic like she fought the Empire, the fall of Kylo Ren and the destruction of his school has ripped off the veneer of mastery that Luke had put on to reveal the flaws in his character. Luke more than the others has become a different mythic figure. Not the wise old man waiting for the hero, but the disillusioned hero not ready to help the hero.
It was J.J. though. In Return of the Jedi it’s naturally implied as part of the story and the films before it that the part of destroying the Galactic Empire is over and that re-establishing will be the next step as there’s a power vacuum created by the Empire being defeated but also the Hutts as well. That will be a tricky situation to get under control if someone tries to exploit it. There’s no set up for the Empire to rise again except possibly the fleet we see at the Battle of Endor that seems to have escaped but even then that doesn’t explain how they’d become the First Order and have the funds to build a bigger Death Star and have a huge fleet. It might be in a novel but you shouldn’t have to need supplement material for what should be in the movie to explain essential story.
It’s too late. As Holdo says, "We are the spark that that’ll light the fire, that will restore the Republic. The spark is that the Resistance must survive. This is our mission.”. The New Republic is gone. It was destroyed by Starkiller Base as the people who show up at the end of The Rise of Skywalker are ordinary people who’ve had enough of the First Order and possibly Final Order. It’s never said they’re part of system governments but people.
They were both going to die in George’s Sequel Trilogy but we only know how with Luke. It was going to be in Episode IX after he restored the Jedi Order. It’s difficult to say how Han would have died but Harrison Ford said it would’ve happened in Episode VII like we got during the lead up to The Force Awakens. I’d say it’s still pointless with Kylo/Ben in the end as you have to take in account Leia too. She sensed the death of him if she continued her Jedi training. He still died. His parents both died for nothing. He was redeemed and saved Rey but that’s it. No Skywalker lived on to continue the legacy. Instead Rey is the last one standing but she’s a Palpatine and the Republic must be established again as it was destroyed. It’s more or less the same story position as Return of the Jedi. How is everyone going to react when they find out Rey is related to Palpatine? Will it be like in the books when Leia nearly loss everything when it was revealed she was Darth Vader’s daughter? It creates so many unnecessary problems and complications. It may have been fun to see Han rogue at first but it’s regressing his character and not letting him grow up as he did across the entire Original Trilogy. He went from selfish and self centred to one of the Rebel Alliance’s most loyal members and very selfless towards Leia and his friends. It’s only natural to expect him to continue to grow. They could’ve still played with Han’s smuggler backstory under the power vacuum scenario since it’s all about crime syndicates in George’s story for example trying to overtake the Republic but not at the expense of his personal growth.
It’s all about the execution of said ideas. Why does Han need to go back to the only thing he’s good at? Is he not allowed to rise above what he worked very hard to overcome with the help of others? The Republic is gone. They’re trying to restore it just as the Rebel Alliance was trying to do. Leia is doing the same thing she was thirty years ago. She’s still fighting an Empire in so many words. With Luke though George also had him as broken but he overcame it and in the end restored the Jedi Order. It’s all about execution and respecting character growth. Instead we got a failure who passed on the mantle to Rey because the plot says she must be the last Jedi now. It doesn’t ever show us why she’s earned the right to it. It’s just given to her as the plot says she’s the protagonist like with the lightsaber, the Millennium Falcon, Luke’s X-Wing, and even Leia’s training. Leia will train a Palpatine but not her own son? Star Wars was an ecological value system before and the collective whole. It was not not just one individual collecting everything and being the only hero. Even with Anakin being the Chosen One he still needed help from Luke. Just as Han needed help with overcoming his smuggling past. Just as Leia needed help to get off the Death Star. Just as Luke needed help destroying the Death Star. It was a value system of the collective whole of people helping people.
These things just don’t sit right with me. It needs to be clear within the narrative what is going on. You shouldn’t need to read or look up supplement material to understand the story the films are trying to convey. There’s only one rare instance I find in George’s story where you may need supplement material to understand something and that’s the mystery of Sifo-Dyas. However it’s something he planned to explain in his Sequels as he was the secret apprentice of Palpatine. So it would’ve been addressed eventually and supplement material wouldn’t be needed for it.
Ulimately on my part I’m glad you enjoy the the Sequels. I genuinely wish I could see the things you see. They are pretty fun on their own merits in some ways and have some Star Wars like qualities but ulimately I find they’re lacking in consistency that makes sense within the context of the first six films.
On the state of the Republic I have to disagree with you. The Hosnian system was destroyed. The capital is gone, but the member worlds remain and have not been conquered. They are never seen to be conquered. There has been no passage of time form TFA to TLJ for them to be conquered. Some may have surrendered, but even that is not mentioned. You have the First Order Fleet trying to control things AND trying to chase down the resistance. There is no indication in the films that the First Order is actually running anything except a fear campaign, which is working and which is why none of Leia’s contacts provide any help. Looking at their actions logically, the resistance is too small to be effective or be worth saving and they everything they to protect themselves. The First Order splintered the Republic, but has not taken over. The trilogy is about saving the New Republic. It is not about starting over, but about saving what was already created. So Leia’s legacy has not been destroyed, just taken a severe hit.
And that is also why Han falls back to his old ways. Their son has fallen to the Dark Side and his wife is running the resistance in the outer rim. And if her name is tainted by the revelation of her father, where does that leave him? His return to smuggling is logical and makes sense.
Luke suffered the most when Ben turned to Kylo. His entire school was destroyed (not just the building, but the students). By his nephew no less. So his jaded attitude stems from guilt over a member of his family falling to the dark side just like his father had. And by this point he has studied the records of the TPM era Jedi and come to the same conclusion that I have that the Jedi were responsible for Anakin’s fall because they gave him no tools to wrestle with the temptations of the dark side. In the PT Anakin is just told to avoid any temptation. But he is never told what to do if there is temptation. He has fear in TPM. What is he supposed to do with that. And Luke meets the same fate as Obi-wan - losing a trusted student to the Dark Side. Anakin destroyed the temple on Coruscant and Ben destroyed the new temple. Obi-wan and Yoda went into hiding and Luke goes into hiding. He wallows in self-pity as Luke tends to do. Too much is made of his rise to the occasion in ROTJ without recognizing that he is the same person he always was with the same flaws. Just because he overcomes them at that point does not mean they can’t come back later. So we are presented with the cause of why he reverted. It is a human and believable story and very true to character. In TLJ Luke is probably the most realistic and human his character has ever been.
So all of these characters were handled very well in my opinion. Very true to OT form and very logical from the fall of the only Skywalker of the new generation. Everything that has gone wrong prior to TFA stems from Ben Solo becoming Kylo Ren and does so in a way that rings true to their humanity and rings true to how old heroes are portrayed in myths and legends.