LexX said:
The point is, I love the original trilogy and I remember the time before TPM like it was a full life even though I saw the OT in 1996 for the first time. It was great time all around. After the PT I had lost this feeling. There still were the same movies I loved but with them came this other thing that wasn’t anything like it.Small rant incoming.
The OT is like this beautiful, smart, funny woman who agreed to marry me. And after years of marriage her drug dealing, abusive son from a prior marriage now comes back and moves in with us. The son is the PT.
You can kick him out and pretend he doesn’t exist…but you know he is alive…somewhere. And even if he died, the memory remains. He is family.
That is the problem with the PT for me. And the ST for that matter. I try to do the whole “personal canon” thing, but I can’t. The OT is forever tainted for me. Can I still enjoy them to a certain degree? Sure. But can I ever look at Darth Vader again without part of me knowing how Anakin was portrayed in the PT? No! Can I look at Luke Skywalker again without occasionally remembering him sucking the milk from the boobs of some space cow or running away like a coward leaving an evil force to grow in the galaxy? No!
I have come to the point where I am more interested and fascinated by the train wreck nature of this franchise and by the toxic battles within its own fandom then the actual material.
Perhaps it is time to get out…again.
I know how you feel. I felt the same way for a long time, and it killed my interest in Star Wars for several years.
I’ve taken to compartmentalizing each trilogy and viewing each of them as its own three-part “saga,” like three different legends all taking place in the same setting. In a way, we’re lucky compared to fans of TV shows that went downhill in later seasons, like Game of Thrones. Those poor people don’t even have a clean cutting-off point where they can stop watching and just remember the good times. The whole show becomes tainted, because you can see big setups in the early seasons, and you’ll remember the disappointing payoffs those setups got in later seasons.
Compartmentalizing isn’t a perfect solution, but it definitely makes watching Star Wars easier, so I’m glad there are such clear dividing lines between each “era” of Star Wars movies. And it helps that I never really registered OT Luke and ST Luke as the same characters. Or OT Vader and PT Anakin, either.