To tell any other story in the Star Wars universe, you must first retcon the Original Trilogy.
See, the Original Trilogy established that the “dark side” was a temptation for every Jedi. Like cocaine or meth for modern humans: addictive poison that gives a temporary rush of power.
That’s great for the whole spiritual, mystic, two-wolves-within-you conflict Luke went through. His victory was overcoming his shortcomings in the form of fear and anger.
But it’s actually terrible for any story made afterwards.
On the one hand, you can’t now make a story where, “maybe the Jedi were excessively stoic.” without also inadvertently making the argument that Luke was maybe… wrong?.. to conquer his emotions? It undermines Luke’s conflict.
On the other hand, you also can’t make the Dark Side totally evil without flattening Vader’s character. When Luke loses himself to fear in Episode 5 and to anger in Episode 6, he proves that the Dark Side doesn’t sink its teeth into you and control you permanently after a single moment of weakness. Even after losing yourself to the Dark Side, you can still observe how it is hurting your loved ones and then choose to pull yourself out of it, conquering your fear and anger in order to protect them. Exactly as Luke does for Vader, and exactly as Vader does immediately after for Luke.
Which means Anakin was just… one-dimensional up until that point. Weak. Too simple to be a protagonist. He wakes up to find he’s killed Padme, and yet still doesn’t turn his life around and learn to fight the temptation of the Dark Side? He hunts down and kills Jedi who had nothing to do with his fall, and yet never looks into their eyes to realize he’s fallen?
No matter how you look at it, it just… doesn’t work.
That’s why the prequels retconned the Jedi into something morally ambiguous. And why the sequels retconned them into a past that needed killing. It’s why the Clone Wars animated series turned the Jedi into a bureaucratically anti-emotion order. And why a lot of video games added lore where the Jedi actually committed genocide against the Sith. It’s also why pretty much none of these other media talk about the Dark Side in the same tone as the OT.
The second the OT ended, the Dark Side could no be longer a “temptation”. It had to became a faction. An unjustly vilified piece of humanity. An ethnic group.
Because you can’t have a “dark side” and have complicated, nuanced characters and extensive world-building: either A) the world will fall apart, B) the characters will be woefully inconsistent, or C) all of the above.
So every, single time you want to make new Star Wars media, you have to retcon the “Dark Side” essentially out of existence.
The main issue with the Force is that no one ever defined how it and the Dark Side work.
Not that midichlorian bullshit, but an explanation of why the Dark Side is powerful.
There are sort of fan theories as to how it works, but as you pointed out, those are undercut by the lack of consistency.
The original trilogy sort of hints at a workable mechanism.
First is the Light Side. You are borrowing power from the universe to do things. It’s not fast, but it is powerful.
Then the Dark Side, you are not asking. You’re demanding. You’re pulling more power faster than the universe can support. This is why hatred and fear lead to the Dark, because if your emotions are heightened you’re less likely to ask.
The Dark Side should also be corrosive to your own body.
Vader’s line that he was more machine than man. It should not have been a single injury on a lava planet, but a slow decay as he literally pulled the life out of his own body to fuel his power.
Palpatine should have been slowly decaying. Not one fight with reflected lightning.
But that’s the prequel problem. People can’t leave shit alone and have to explain every little detail, even if years are meant to go by between the prequel and the original.
The franchise should say to hell with canon and redo the prequels.
Anakin’s fall into the dark side should have mirrored Luke’s journey. Instead of a maudlin love story causing his fall, he is slowly corrupted by greed and power. Do it well, and it becomes an allegory for modern class struggle and the greed of the few as they gain power. The clone wars are between ordinary people about the legality of cloning as a technology. The Jedi are not generals and there are like 20, not 1,000s. Part way through Anakin’s training, Obi-Wan and him leave to enlist as pilots - Obi-Wan offering to continue his teaching in the space Navy against the Jedi’s wishes. Every time Anakin wins a battle, he’s ashamed of how good it feels to kill. Every time Anakin gets promoted on the space Navy for winning, he is ashamed of the feel of power. Obi-Wan isn’t blind to Anakin’s slide to darkness, but has too much pride himself to ask for help - failing as a teacher because he can’t tattle on his friend.
Ep 2 should be about Anakin coming to grips with his non-jedi like desires and accepting his fate as something not-jedi. Escaping from the Jedi order and running away ashamed and afraid like a fugitive. The Jedi hunting him down across the galaxy. A whole movie about this acceptance, instead of a 1 minute scene in Palp’s office. It would be an allegory for the tyranny of the majority, and accepting ones flaws. Ep 2 ends with Anakin finding Sideous stuck in hiding and starting his dark training (a la Yoda in Ep5)
Ep 3 opens to a reluctant Anakin and Palps nearly killing each other while doing dark side training (embracing death and power). They are interrupted by a Jedi on a mission to kill Anakin. The Jedi is killed off by Anakin at great physical cost to Anakin (starting his Darth Vader injuries). Anakin gets mad that the Jedi won’t leave him alone and finally commits to being a sith. This starts Anakin’s long quest to hunt down each Jedi individually. Each battle with the Jedi injures him further, requiring cybernetic replacements from each painful injury. The hunt consumes him and he is finally Darth Vader.
Expand the clone wars into an actual thing. Not that they were fighting with Clone armies. That’s sort of stupid.
No, the clones were of actual people, and the Jedi were the main way to tell if someone was a clone or not. I’m talking full on pod people situation here.
So, Episode 1 can be the initial discovery of the clones, and Jedi starting to hunt them. Introduce Obiwan who is a newly minted Jedi master. He finds Anakin who is a slave, but not a child. A young adult.
Obiwan then starts training Anakin.
Episode 2 would find that Anakin had been cloned. Obiwan or Padame or someone convinces people to accept the clone, and Obiwan ends up training them both. The original and the clone. Maybe the surviving clones are somewhat accepted into society, after the factory and controllers are destroyed.
Episode 3 is Anakin’s fall. He grows resentful that of his clone. The Jedi masters sense this and pass him over for some honor or advancement and Anakin starts to think that it’s because he was a slave which fuels the resentment. Padame and the clone grow close, which makes Anakin even more resentful.
At the height of the movie, the surviving clones are ordered to kill anyone near them in a mass suicide attack. Anakin’s clone, who has connected with the Force, does not kill.
Anakin murders his clone, thinking that Padame is dead, and then goes on to kill the jedi, thinking they’re to blame. Obiwan finds Anakin’s lightsaber, (he and the clone switched mid fight) and assumes the clone was activated and that Anakin is dead.
And then stuff wraps up so that Luke is born and placed on Tatoine.
I like it. You got the birth of Luke and Leia in a way I didn’t. I think in my head retcon, Padme doesn’t exist and Anakin sleeps around while killing and conquering (how he doesn’t know about Luke/Leia). That’s not great.
Wanna combine them and pitch Star Wars What If? to Disney?
Star Wars has been constantly retconning itself, from the beginning.
The first film was not really produced as “Episode IV”, it was “Star Wars”, a standalone film. It was a movie about a farmer orphan who goes on a swashbuckling space adventure with laser swords and space wizards. The good guys are unambiguously good, the bad guys are just bad guys. Everything is pretty much just as it seems, no secretly alive people, no secretly related people. Lucas may have had nebulous plans/hopes for follow ons, but they weren’t baked and the overall concept is standalone.
Then ESB came along and retconned the Skywalker family, and produced cliffhangers knowing there’d be a third film. However, I’m pretty certain that “there is another Skywalker” didn’t specifically have Leia in mind at the time, mainly because of how it’s handled in the follow up.
Then ROTJ came along, and that little tease about ‘there is another Skywalker?’ just a kind of casual “oh yeah, that’s Leia, and she’s your sister, and we are going to do absolutely nothing serious with that, just consider the matter closed even though they were clearly setting up for… something with that”.
A lot of things in the franchise have this feel. Like “Rei’s provenance is mysterious and significant” swinging in the next film to “the parents are nobody, parents don’t matter” and then swinging again in the last of that set of three to “just kidding, her provenance is very significant”.
To tell any other story in the Star Wars universe, you must first retcon the Original Trilogy.
See, the Original Trilogy established that the “dark side” was a temptation for every Jedi. Like cocaine or meth for modern humans: addictive poison that gives a temporary rush of power.
That’s great for the whole spiritual, mystic, two-wolves-within-you conflict Luke went through. His victory was overcoming his shortcomings in the form of fear and anger.
But it’s actually terrible for any story made afterwards.
On the one hand, you can’t now make a story where, “maybe the Jedi were excessively stoic.” without also inadvertently making the argument that Luke was maybe… wrong?.. to conquer his emotions? It undermines Luke’s conflict.
On the other hand, you also can’t make the Dark Side totally evil without flattening Vader’s character. When Luke loses himself to fear in Episode 5 and to anger in Episode 6, he proves that the Dark Side doesn’t sink its teeth into you and control you permanently after a single moment of weakness. Even after losing yourself to the Dark Side, you can still observe how it is hurting your loved ones and then choose to pull yourself out of it, conquering your fear and anger in order to protect them. Exactly as Luke does for Vader, and exactly as Vader does immediately after for Luke.
Which means Anakin was just… one-dimensional up until that point. Weak. Too simple to be a protagonist. He wakes up to find he’s killed Padme, and yet still doesn’t turn his life around and learn to fight the temptation of the Dark Side? He hunts down and kills Jedi who had nothing to do with his fall, and yet never looks into their eyes to realize he’s fallen?
No matter how you look at it, it just… doesn’t work.
That’s why the prequels retconned the Jedi into something morally ambiguous. And why the sequels retconned them into a past that needed killing. It’s why the Clone Wars animated series turned the Jedi into a bureaucratically anti-emotion order. And why a lot of video games added lore where the Jedi actually committed genocide against the Sith. It’s also why pretty much none of these other media talk about the Dark Side in the same tone as the OT.
The second the OT ended, the Dark Side could no be longer a “temptation”. It had to became a faction. An unjustly vilified piece of humanity. An ethnic group.
Because you can’t have a “dark side” and have complicated, nuanced characters and extensive world-building: either A) the world will fall apart, B) the characters will be woefully inconsistent, or C) all of the above.
So every, single time you want to make new Star Wars media, you have to retcon the “Dark Side” essentially out of existence.
The main issue with the Force is that no one ever defined how it and the Dark Side work.
Not that midichlorian bullshit, but an explanation of why the Dark Side is powerful.
There are sort of fan theories as to how it works, but as you pointed out, those are undercut by the lack of consistency.
The original trilogy sort of hints at a workable mechanism.
First is the Light Side. You are borrowing power from the universe to do things. It’s not fast, but it is powerful.
Then the Dark Side, you are not asking. You’re demanding. You’re pulling more power faster than the universe can support. This is why hatred and fear lead to the Dark, because if your emotions are heightened you’re less likely to ask.
The Dark Side should also be corrosive to your own body.
Vader’s line that he was more machine than man. It should not have been a single injury on a lava planet, but a slow decay as he literally pulled the life out of his own body to fuel his power.
Palpatine should have been slowly decaying. Not one fight with reflected lightning.
But that’s the prequel problem. People can’t leave shit alone and have to explain every little detail, even if years are meant to go by between the prequel and the original.
My hot take is based on this idea.
The franchise should say to hell with canon and redo the prequels.
Anakin’s fall into the dark side should have mirrored Luke’s journey. Instead of a maudlin love story causing his fall, he is slowly corrupted by greed and power. Do it well, and it becomes an allegory for modern class struggle and the greed of the few as they gain power. The clone wars are between ordinary people about the legality of cloning as a technology. The Jedi are not generals and there are like 20, not 1,000s. Part way through Anakin’s training, Obi-Wan and him leave to enlist as pilots - Obi-Wan offering to continue his teaching in the space Navy against the Jedi’s wishes. Every time Anakin wins a battle, he’s ashamed of how good it feels to kill. Every time Anakin gets promoted on the space Navy for winning, he is ashamed of the feel of power. Obi-Wan isn’t blind to Anakin’s slide to darkness, but has too much pride himself to ask for help - failing as a teacher because he can’t tattle on his friend.
Ep 2 should be about Anakin coming to grips with his non-jedi like desires and accepting his fate as something not-jedi. Escaping from the Jedi order and running away ashamed and afraid like a fugitive. The Jedi hunting him down across the galaxy. A whole movie about this acceptance, instead of a 1 minute scene in Palp’s office. It would be an allegory for the tyranny of the majority, and accepting ones flaws. Ep 2 ends with Anakin finding Sideous stuck in hiding and starting his dark training (a la Yoda in Ep5)
Ep 3 opens to a reluctant Anakin and Palps nearly killing each other while doing dark side training (embracing death and power). They are interrupted by a Jedi on a mission to kill Anakin. The Jedi is killed off by Anakin at great physical cost to Anakin (starting his Darth Vader injuries). Anakin gets mad that the Jedi won’t leave him alone and finally commits to being a sith. This starts Anakin’s long quest to hunt down each Jedi individually. Each battle with the Jedi injures him further, requiring cybernetic replacements from each painful injury. The hunt consumes him and he is finally Darth Vader.
I’ve had this bouncing in my head for 25 years.
My idea for the prequels is this.
Expand the clone wars into an actual thing. Not that they were fighting with Clone armies. That’s sort of stupid.
No, the clones were of actual people, and the Jedi were the main way to tell if someone was a clone or not. I’m talking full on pod people situation here.
So, Episode 1 can be the initial discovery of the clones, and Jedi starting to hunt them. Introduce Obiwan who is a newly minted Jedi master. He finds Anakin who is a slave, but not a child. A young adult.
Obiwan then starts training Anakin.
Episode 2 would find that Anakin had been cloned. Obiwan or Padame or someone convinces people to accept the clone, and Obiwan ends up training them both. The original and the clone. Maybe the surviving clones are somewhat accepted into society, after the factory and controllers are destroyed.
Episode 3 is Anakin’s fall. He grows resentful that of his clone. The Jedi masters sense this and pass him over for some honor or advancement and Anakin starts to think that it’s because he was a slave which fuels the resentment. Padame and the clone grow close, which makes Anakin even more resentful.
At the height of the movie, the surviving clones are ordered to kill anyone near them in a mass suicide attack. Anakin’s clone, who has connected with the Force, does not kill.
Anakin murders his clone, thinking that Padame is dead, and then goes on to kill the jedi, thinking they’re to blame. Obiwan finds Anakin’s lightsaber, (he and the clone switched mid fight) and assumes the clone was activated and that Anakin is dead.
And then stuff wraps up so that Luke is born and placed on Tatoine.
I like it. You got the birth of Luke and Leia in a way I didn’t. I think in my head retcon, Padme doesn’t exist and Anakin sleeps around while killing and conquering (how he doesn’t know about Luke/Leia). That’s not great.
Wanna combine them and pitch Star Wars What If? to Disney?
Star Wars has been constantly retconning itself, from the beginning.
The first film was not really produced as “Episode IV”, it was “Star Wars”, a standalone film. It was a movie about a farmer orphan who goes on a swashbuckling space adventure with laser swords and space wizards. The good guys are unambiguously good, the bad guys are just bad guys. Everything is pretty much just as it seems, no secretly alive people, no secretly related people. Lucas may have had nebulous plans/hopes for follow ons, but they weren’t baked and the overall concept is standalone.
Then ESB came along and retconned the Skywalker family, and produced cliffhangers knowing there’d be a third film. However, I’m pretty certain that “there is another Skywalker” didn’t specifically have Leia in mind at the time, mainly because of how it’s handled in the follow up.
Then ROTJ came along, and that little tease about ‘there is another Skywalker?’ just a kind of casual “oh yeah, that’s Leia, and she’s your sister, and we are going to do absolutely nothing serious with that, just consider the matter closed even though they were clearly setting up for… something with that”.
A lot of things in the franchise have this feel. Like “Rei’s provenance is mysterious and significant” swinging in the next film to “the parents are nobody, parents don’t matter” and then swinging again in the last of that set of three to “just kidding, her provenance is very significant”.
There’s a massive amount of content created between the OT and the prequels. Most of it was pretty consistent.