I wonder if it would have made more sense to invert the pattern — the first movie is a defeat (leading to the start of the clone wars?), the second movie is a triumph, and the third movie is a tragedy, for obvious reasons.
Even before the Clone Wars, Padawans accompanied their Masters on fairly dangerous missions. I don’t exactly remember the youngest age to be eligible to be selected as a Padawan, but I believe 13 was the oldest (with special exceptions made during the Clone Wars because of the lack of available Masters, so Ahsoka is actually quite old to be, er, ‘selected’). Based on the books depicting Obi-Wan as a Padawan, he was thrown into some fairly dangerous situations when he was barely a teen.
As you pointed out, the Doylian rationale is that these works need audience surrogates, and those surrogates are going to be children. From a Watsonian perspective, however, I can’t help but conclude that it is not unexpected for young Jedi from around 13 onwards to encounter life-threatening situations or various other traumatic experiences, even when there isn’t a war going on.
(I personally get the impression that the Council doesn’t like sending so many young Jedi off to war, but just like with everything else they feel their hands are tied. I see it as part of the general theme of the structural corruption of good intentions.)
I can’t help but feel like the Battle of Coruscant isn’t nearly long enough to sustain a whole movie.
I actually haven’t seen the Tartakovsky mini-series 💀 I suppose I should do that!
It seems to be a commonly expressed opinion that the prequel series story is ‘missing’ a story between Episodes 2 and 3. Obviously TCW bridges this gap, which is why it’s so lauded, but I’m curious what an Episode 2.5 would actually look like if a coherent story were taken from TCW or any other source.
I’ve seen EddieDean’s Refocused edit of TCW, which is really great, but I’m hard-pressed to pick a single storyline that would work well if expanded into a full movie. The completely different style of story-telling between an episodic TV show and a feature-length movie make picking a single storyline a bit unwise, not to mention the oft-mentioned strength of TCW being the development of Anakin over time is completely removed.
Personally I would hope that a storyline in 2.5 would have more of Anakin and Obi-Wan working together. It’s a bit disheartening when you think about how few scenes of Anakin and Obi-Wan working together actually exist in both Episodes 2 and 3. By nature of being a main character, Padme would also need to be a part of the storyline.
Thoughts?