Spartacus01 said:
The problem is that, as Mark Hamill also said, the hatred for the Prequels at the time went far beyond the simple “I don’t like them”. There are actors who have received death threats, actors who have even tried to commit suicide, and George Lucas was covered by a mountain of poop for almost 10 years.

I mean… who cares? Among any passionate fanbase, there will always be some small percentage of irredeemable assholes. But this stuff is often brought up to deflect criticism of the Prequels, or to imply that all criticism of the Prequels is somehow invalid or dangerous simply because it’s vaguely congruent with more extreme, anti-social behavior coming from 0.000000000001% of the fanbase. Anyone that actually sends a death threat to an actor over something like this is clearly deranged.

I mean, I do feel sympathy for people like Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best, considering what they had to go through for the sake of their day job. But honestly that’s a sideshow, and it has nothing to do with how the Prequels were received in general. (Also Ahmed Best has a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu so I doubt any of these deranged morons would make fun of him to his face. He’s also clearly quite comfortable with making fun of the character he played, since he voiced Jar Jar in some Robot Chicken skits about Star Wars. As for Lucas, he’s actually covered with a mountain of cash, not poop.)

Anyway, the same thing happened again more recently with the Sequels. Some idiots on Twitter decide to harass one of the actors, and therefore all criticism of the Sequels is forever deflected. It’s like poetry, it rhymes.