Spartacus01 said:
Sremrofsnart said:
The answer is very clear in my eyes… It’s not HIS Star Wars anymore, not his vision, not the franchise he wanted it to be… To put it somewhat bluntly here: In my view, with Andor, Star Wars has now officially lost everything that once made it so great and DIFFERENT from other franchises. Star Wars was never intended to be that gritty, dark, and realistic – in fact, Star Wars was always meant to be a space opera fairy tale that EVERYONE could enjoy. And that’s absolutely nowhere to be seen anymore in anything Disney Star Wars produces.
Why do I address Andor so fiercely here? The point is that the other stuff on Disney+ consists of Star Wars shows that were mainly in my eyes bad fan service and all used the same nostalgia-bait tactics instead of giving us something truly new (like the Prequels back in the day – they weren’t perfect, but they were something completely NEW to the franchise). But through all the instrumentalization of the shows and the deliberate merchandising product placement (Baby Yoda/Grogu… now we have everything with Grogu), all these shows NEVER crossed a certain line – and those lines were absolutely broken with Andor. In my opinion, Andor is NOT Star Wars… not in the slightest way George Lucas wanted it to be (yes, I know that some early concepts of The Star Wars were also darker, but there was a REASON why George changed it into the movie that started it all).
I respectfully disagree. Maybe it’s because I’ve always loved the old Expanded Universe, which could get pretty gritty, realistic, and dark when it wanted to. But honestly, I’ve never bought into the idea that Star Wars needs to stick to one specific tone or genre, or that every new project has to imitate George Lucas in style or mood. To me, that completely misses the point.
Star Wars is huge. We’re talking about a galaxy with billions of worlds, millions of species, and basically infinite scenarios. The whole appeal is that it can go in a thousand different directions. If every story felt exactly the same, the franchise would be incredibly boring. That’s why the old EU was so great. You had stories that tried to echo Lucas’s writing style and tone, stories that leaned hard into realism and grit, stories that lived somewhere in the middle, and even stories that barely felt like they belonged to Star Wars at all. That variety made the universe feel alive.
The problem with Disney Star Wars isn’t that the authors aren’t able to match Lucas’s writing style, it’s that they often don’t know how to craft solid stories in the first place. When they want to, they can. We saw it with Rogue One, with Andor, and with some of the books and comics. There are releases that are genuinely well written, but they’re the exception instead of the rule. And to me, that’s the real problem.
I can understand many of your points very well, and yes, I also admit that I might be a bit too critical of Andor in some aspects. But for me personally, it unfortunately crossed a few lines that simply weren’t crossed before (keyword: attempted rape of Bix). I absolutely don’t deny that such themes exist in Star Wars and have always been there (Leia and Jabba, for example), but for me it was simply too much in terms of tone and especially the explicitness of the scene, which was extremely brutal by Star Wars standards. Unfortunately, you could really tell that this was deliberately incorporated into Bix’s story because apparently she hadn’t suffered enough yet, and with Season 2 they clearly wanted to consciously test all the boundaries they had – and that’s exactly what didn’t sit well with me, at least.
I want to mention that I deliberately chose the Bix example from Andor because the problem can be most clearly identified there. Yes, the series also had other dark references and scenes, but the Bix scene simply went way too far for me personally. This type of violence portrayed in such an explicit form is simply not compatible with official Star Wars products for me – because where does it start and where does it end with having to show realism like this? If we say “the galaxy is huge, everything fits,” then where do we draw the line? Could we also show explicit torture scenes, graphic executions, or even worse in the name of “realism”? For me, there must be certain boundaries that define what Star Wars is and what it isn’t, regardless of how well written or how “realistic” something might be.
I want to clarify something here: I’m not saying that Star Wars must always imitate Lucas or stick to one specific tone. The EU absolutely proved that variety can work wonderfully. But I think there’s a fundamental difference between “variety in tone” and “crossing certain genre boundaries that define what Star Wars is”. Yes, the galaxy is huge and can tell countless different stories – but that doesn’t mean that literally everything fits into Star Wars. Even the darkest EU books didn’t show explicit sexual violence, especially not in a visual medium that reaches all audiences. It’s not about everything having to be the same or too similar – it’s about what fundamentally defines Star Wars as a genre and as a franchise. And for me, a well-written rape scene is still not Star Wars, no matter how “gritty” or “realistic” we want the universe to be. There are simply certain lines that, when crossed, make it feel like we’re no longer in Star Wars but in a completely different genre.
Another thing that needs to be mentioned here is that I think it’s also a problem that a dark series like Andor appeared right in the middle of many non-dark Disney products and series, and I think that’s why it feels so out of place, at least for me. It feels like a 180-degree turn – first you have shows like Skeleton Crew which was simply made for a younger audience, and then BAM, you have Andor which is clearly intended for an older audience. They’ve clearly lost their course regarding tonality. If Star Wars had been taken more seriously by Disney from the beginning, and if Disney hadn’t maneuvered the franchise too much into the younger target demographic with all their merch and series – then Andor would have landed much better tonally. And that’s actually the tragic thing about it, because Andor is actually a very good series, and yes, I can absolutely understand why the series is so popular – because it finally shows Star Wars seriously again, away from all the fanservice etc. But you simply have to note that Andor unfortunately appeared a bit too late, because now we have a completely confusing mess of Star Wars products, and even though there were already clear differences in the old EU – there’s still a big difference between whether you do this in book or comic form or in live-action series form.
I absolutely agree with you that the EU also had many very dark books and storylines, and this also contributed positively to Star Wars’ development because not everything felt the same – and yes, you’re also right that if we always stayed 1:1 true to the original, it would quickly become boring. Of course, it’s part of Star Wars that it grows with time and also had many new things and expansions in the EU, and yes, it’s completely normal that the tone changes and evolves with that. My actual main criticism of Andor is simply that this total tone shift just feels like a 180-degree reversal, and the problem was that Star Wars didn’t have the time to approach this darker tone of the series – yes, there were books and novels that were marked as adult, but still, books are simply not a series – they simply have a different audience than Andor does.
I think that’s exactly why the series, despite its good and really excellent craftsmanship, is still so controversial, because some themes were simply (still) too explicit and above all too sudden. In my eyes, Star Wars and generally such a large franchise simply needs time to orient itself to such things, for example with an Adult label for Star Wars. Otherwise, it simply feels too much like a complete genre change – after countless fanservice shows and films that were basically intended for every audience, a new show suddenly comes out of nowhere that is then explicitly aimed at adults – certain problems are simply preprogrammed there, and I think Disney should have solved this differently and above all more slowly.
That Star Wars should and must develop somewhere is completely clear and also desired… you just have to be careful not to make the mistake of changing the franchise into something so drastically that it’s almost no longer recognizable. And I think that’s exactly the risk we’re currently facing – that in the attempt to make Star Wars “more mature” or “more realistic,” we lose sight of what actually made Star Wars so special and different from other franchises in the first place.
But thank you for posting your opinion, it’s always interesting how differently such things are perceived, and through some opinions you also come to your own rethinking 😊
