Tyrphanax said:
I find it mind-boggling that some people, Anchorhead, for example, would limit their Star Wars universe so severely when I think that ESB was a masterpiece
I don't expect someone who came on after the trilogy was a completed entity to understand my level of fandom. I saw Star Wars in 1977. Loved it. Greatest film I'd ever seen. A few years later a sequel came out that I also liked, but not at the same level. It looked different, it felt different, the characters had changed, and the story had changed. Because of that, I wasn't all-in (as they say these days). A few years after that, a second sequel - which I hated.
That's not some sort of "Are you fucking serious?" situation. Plenty of films have sub-par sequels, or even terrible sequels. If someone doesn't continue to follow a franchise because of it, it shouldn't be mind-boggling.
The twenty-somethings who came into Star Wars after it was a finished entity are no different than the twenty-somethings who discovered Indiana Jones after the original three were a completed entity. The experience of (and the reaction to) a story that took some of us eight years to watch, is going to be inherently different than it is for someone seeing all of it in just six hours.
For us, there were several years between films. Those years were full of life experiences - new friends, new schools, driving, girls, jobs, first apartments, new films to discover, etc, etc. We went into each film as a different person than we were three or four years earlier.
To the twenty-somethings seeing it all at once and for the first time, ten years after it's completed, they bring a single view point into that initial experience. That view point is who they are that day, not who they were becoming over the course of a decade.
I don't expect you to understand that process beyond just imagining it. You can't truly understand a journey unless you were actually on that journey. It's that way for a great many things.
For the record; I want to make one thing very clear. My above explanation isn't a dig on newer fans. Far from it. I have absolutely nothing against any age group coming into the fandom at any time. You get here when you get here. All are welcome.
and that there's a ton of really great EU out there.
I've started to remedy my limited EU experience. It's going quite well, by the way.