I agree with most of what you said. However, I also think you’re exaggerating a bit. The way you put it makes it sound as though there were virtually no Prequel fans between 2005 and 2018, and everyone who claimed to hate the movies genuinely felt that way. But that’s simply not true. Even between 2005 and 2018, there were plenty of people who enjoyed the Prequels to varying degrees, and not everyone who claimed to hate the movies genuinely hated them. The situation was much more nuanced.
You have to keep in mind that when trashing or making fun of something becomes popular, people tend to jump on the bandwagon, even if their public opinions don’t entirely reflect what they actually think. Teenagers and young adults are especially susceptible to following trends and conforming to the majority opinion. I’ve personally read plenty of comments online from people saying things like, “When I was a teen, I used to trash the movies and talk shit about them, but I didn’t actually dislike them all that much.” I’m not saying these people were the majority, but they certainly existed, and pretending otherwise is just as wrong as pretending the Prequels were universally loved.
Also, I think a lot of the extremism you see among some Prequel fans today is a reaction to the extremism displayed by certain hardcore OT fans back then. I wasn’t around at the time, but I’ve talked to plenty of people who lived through that era, and they’ve all told me that the atmosphere on many online forums and websites was unbearable. If you said anything positive about the Prequels, people would jump down your throat, insist that the movies were garbage and treat the Original Trilogy like it was the second coming of Christ, downplaying its genuine flaws in the process. Obviously, this doesn’t mean everyone who disliked the Prequels was being unreasonable, but there was definitely a toxic side to the discourse that made it difficult to have a balanced discussion about the movies.
So, again, I think the Prequel revisionism you mentioned is, to a significant extent, a reaction to the hostility that dominated much of the online Star Wars community for nearly a decade. Some fans have overcorrected and gone too far in the opposite direction, and I agree that pretending the Prequels were universally beloved from the beginning is inaccurate. But I also think it’s important to understand where this reaction came from. You can’t spend years treating an entire trilogy and its fans as a joke and then act surprised when some of those fans eventually push back against that narrative.
No there were definitely fans. I was certainly one. I saw Phantom Menace for my birthday and had a blast, I had a lot of toys including Jar Jar ones. I was so hyped for AotC I could barely focus at school that day. I watched episode 3 in theaters maybe 5 or 6 times. Together with the expanded universe stuff it was a significant part of my life. As I got older I started to notice more and more things that annoyed me. And I was never under the impression that they were better than the original trilogy in any way, other than some of the action sequences being more fast paced. I still think the original trilogy is nearly perfect.
And kind of what I was alluding to was that people were more ambivalent than anyone really lets on. Most people really liked certain aspects even though they hated others. Darth Maul being one example of a huge cultural icon, a very unique character design that you would see everywhere on T shirts, in cosplays, in art, etc. The Phantom Edit was basically the consensus, keep most of the movie but discard those little things that ruin it. The problem is that by AotC the entire whiny teen Anakin character (unfairly blamed on Hayden but still there) is baked into the plot so there’s very little you can ignore about it. By episode 3 he was still heavily criticized, but the spectacle and darkness of the movie was so great that people were more forgiving.
Like you said, an overcorrection. But I wouldn’t say that this is a backlash against those people in the early 2000s, because a lot of people weren’t even around for that. Like I mentioned, it’s taking on a weird flavor of generational warfare where young people assert that their Nostalgia is better than someone else’s Nostalgia. Somehow more pure, more earnest, less spiteful, less cynical. Teens and young adults now aren’t pissed off specifically at George W. Bush, or Obama, or the Iraq war, or hipsters, or any of that, even if they would be if they were aware of what was going on during that time. It’s just so far removed from their experience that they can only digest it through “people older than me screwed everything up, and the details don’t matter.”