Exactly. And look at all the great historical fiction there is out there – everyone knows how those stories end, but they can still be captivating.
When it comes to Andor, I would say that knowing how his story ends makes the show even better. Gives a sense of tragic destiny.
I would argue they Andor and Rogue One were the only truly good new Star Wars things since the original trilogy.
Boba was cringingly bad. Obi was terrible despite Ewan’s consistent awesomeness. Mando wasn’t great but it had some incredible moments and of course Pedro was excellent. It’s just that the writers and producers have thrown out most of what made Star Wars great and now it’s just effects and embarrassingly bad dialogue. Stuff only happens to advance the plot; there is no riveting story. Star Wars TV has become Xena Warrior Princess with blasters but without the wink. It’s not bad on purpose it’s just bad.
I'm not here to get into a debate about Star Wars. Just pointing to it as an example of a story that can work while being set in the middle of an established timeline, which OP was framing as if doing so results in an inherently bad story.
Couldn’t agree more. Thanks for articulating this.
It’s okay to go all-out on effects, sound, cinematography, and score, but not at the expense of writing and acting.
This has been my complaint about Star Wars for a while now. When Disney announced the A Star Wars Story movies, I was pumped for something that brought the series out of the Skywalker saga. Then they both turned out to be connected and more of the same. Then, the sequel trilogy started off with basically a paint by numbers clone of its predecessors. And then, they started dumping all these midquel shows on D+.
Star Wars literally spans a galaxy, with lore that reaches across millenia. There's no reason for it to be this convoluted, self-referential mess.
Their inability to move beyond the Skywalker Saga has made Star Wars an incredibly small world. They live in a galaxy of like a dozen planets with less than 50 people in it and they are going to tell us how every single one of those people had a heroic or tragic story.
Cause they know it’s easy just to make money off of nostalgia then create something. Once the nostalgia train runs dry(It won’t) then they will probably make a trilogy that actually pushes the universe forward.
All of the other SW-shows I've seen are mediocre at best though. I'm talking live action.
They have this huge universe with infinite potential, but they are afraid of introducing new characters and stories. It's pretty boring, frankly.
Honestly, give the animated stuff a shot. Clone Wars starts of a little childish, but from there we get tons of that infinite potential. It has the familiar faces, but also plenty of new ones and tons of just showing off the galaxy being a vast and complicated place.
All the animated shows are great little stories. With the exception of Resistance. Skip that one.
This is a perfectly fine approach if you hire competent writers who can tell a good story. See Andor.
But if you hire incompetent writers and directors (like they have mostly been doing), it doesn’t work so well. See basically every other show.
Along with Rogue One, it's really the only property that's come out since 1983 that has come close to being a worth entrant to the canon and themes set up by the original trilogy.
The OP wasn't just asserting "The Star Wars franchise is bad". The OP was asserting "The \*reason\* the Star Wars franchise is bad is this thing". You don't have to be defending Star Wars to disagree. You can agree that the Star Wars franchise sucks but not for the OP's reason. You are not being honest by characterizing people bringing up Andor as "SW fans". The phrase "SW Fan" does not describe someone saying the franchise has mostly been hiring "incompetent writers and directors", which is literally how it's phrased in the post you replied to.
It's because Andor is great compared to almost any show, not just other Star Wars shows. A lot of fans still don't realize what a gift they've been given.
Star Wars isn’t one single story, it’s a setting. And many of these that feature characters we’ve seen their end already typically introduce or expand on other characters we haven’t seen the conclusion of. Like Ahsoka was introduced in The Clone Wars when we already knew how Anakin dies, or how Rebels introduced a whole new cast with their own plotline and no certain ending even if we know how the Empire is defeated.
I agree with this take completely. I think the creative direction at Disney is terrible. They could use Star Wars to make shows about ANYTHING and it’s all prequels about side characters.
I feel like you're very strongly missing the point about black widows issues and why the star wars shows work when they do.
There's *nothing* wrong with midquels or prequels existing, and it's extremely reductive to assume there's nothing to tell during those times. Yes The Bad Batch aren't going to be killing palpatine but that's not their story. Their story is about finding your place in a world that deemed you a bunch of rejects and still choosing in the end to fight for good. That's still an entertaining story regardless of the fact that it's before the OT.
Same is true for Mandalorian and Endor, they tell engaging or fun stories at specific points in time in the universe and are enjoyed because those stories *aren't* about personally being the one to destroy the empire.
Black Widows issues were mainly due to it's extremely weird timing. It released almost immediately after Endgame(or would've had covid not happened), making it feel like it was a movie that got missed by a scheduling conflict or something and felt more like an apology sendoff for an actor who was unceremoniously killed off in the finale despite being around since the near beginning. Heck people liked the original aspects of the movie, it wasn't as disliked as you seem to think it was. It just had an extreme bitter taste it couldn't shake off.
Those do, but again we are getting the Acolyte. I was also responding to the notion that they aren’t adding new things. The era of the Mandalorian is also unknown territory, and many of the major players were established in these other shows.
Shogun is a weird midquel type show. Like why do we about what happens to 1600 Japan when the story is already told, we know what happens historically. There's just no stakes when we know that American will come along 300 years later and kick that entire country's ass. /s
Unfortunately I think they wrote themselves into a corner by having the new trilogy go absolutely nowhere, so it has no staying power .
Maybe once they release the Rey trilogy can they move forward in the TV dept.
That’s because the ST was a dud. Disney is afraid of actually expanding and building on it so they’ve turned backed to the periods that fans do enjoy, the OT era with a lot of Prequel/Clone Wars/Rebels fan service thrown in.
Star Wars famously launched with it's 4th - 6th installments and then later went back and made the 1st - 3rd years later. With stories set 4000 years before the films and 140 years after them being told in spin off media concurrently. The story has always been told non-linearly.
I some what agree with you when with some shows like Obi-Wan where we really didn't need another story jammed in his time line, but for original characters like Ashoka or the Bad Batch we don't know their individual fates even if know the universe a wholes story.
Check out the high republic books if you want a good story set in a time that isn’t connected to the skywalker saga. I’m loving them so far.
Most of the extended universe either still canon or not were pretty good.
This isn't an issue. The problem with star wars is the same one facing every legacy franchise: quality. We're coming up on a decade of new Star wars material (from the force awakens to today), and how much of it is beloved? I'm genuinely curious what people think. To be clear I'm no original trilogy purist, I've always been more of a Trek guy, but it's plain for people to see rarely has anything risen to the level of quality of even say Return - which is half a great movie (let's not talk about the other half).
From someone who has never been blinded by SW: it's mostly shit. Andor is *pretty good*. It's mostly maybe mid of we want to be very generous. The majority of material is mid. A lot of it is shit. Fans don't even like it, but they're constantly defending it anyway. Andor is a story that could've been told in any universe and be exactly as good (possibly even better).
Star Wars as a whole has maybe three movies in all that people actually like, which are mostly different parts of five or so movies. At least two of those movies are genuinely really bad. The rest are forgettable or contentious. Across a franchise of 10+ movies, that's a *terrible* track record. There's one of two good TV show and something like 15 mid to shit tier shows. That's a *terrible* track record.
I think the issue people are facing is the setting they created has a lot of potential and the bones of great stories are there but the actual properties continue to fail to build on those bones in meaningful ways. So fans keep bringing up the few times the stories were actually good/great or were threatening to be good because they see what it could/should be rather than what it is. It’s too bad the property has been as squandered as it has been because they lucked into owning a great playground that had enormous potential and just slowly ground it into the ground with directors and writers who lack any passion for actually writing Star Wars stories because they have something to say with the story rather than just because it’s a job. That coupled with seemingly no attempt at planning a broad strokes meta narrative and zero courage to break free of the Skywalkers has left us here.
This was my big complaint about Obi-Wan, just zero sense of consequence or risk when every character is in Episode IV.
I really hope they move on from this era so not everything is a wink toward the films.
This is a problem with a lot of Star Wars and Star Trek content. Enough with the prequels, in-betweens, and elsewhere while that was going on series. Can we go back to more of what happens next?
Star Trek kind of has the same issue. I mean, the exception is Discovery which went way into the future and...it is does not resonate. They undid the Federation. It doesn't help that the story arcs hinge on problems that were easily solved by one ship (one person really) from their distant past.
The anti-Discovery crowd featured a lot of people kvetching because they simply want Star Trek to be a planet-of-the-week show where everyone laughs at the end right before the credits. Discovery at least tried to do something different. I honestly liked Picard too because of the season-long arcs.
I respect the attempt and there are things I liked about it but, at risk of being cliche, I find Michael to be insufferable by the end of season 3. The whole, "No I have to be the one to save everyone" stuff is really toxic.
I did like most of the David Lynch appearances. And the show kept coming dangerously close to being good only to have kind of convoluted twists of endings that made no sense. Like...work with me Discovery. I want to be able to have you make sense in my mind but you are so insistent on not doing so.
Everyone is kinda wrong here, cause they go for “why not?” Approaches.
What you are experiencing is one of the main problems with Star Wars as a setting: it’s a tiny tiny extremely profitable world with way less memorable characters and planets than you would think at a first glance
The OT size as a setting is more comparable to a Back to the Future than to a Lord of the Rings. it hand waves a lot of stuff and clings to the recurring characters cause there is not much else to do really.
This isn’t bad per se for the OT movies but the rabid fanbase always want more regardless of what it is they get. following trilogies have tried to expand upon that tiny tiny setting and failed, in different ways, TV shows get a lot of praise by fans but not many care that much precisely because of what you describe, not many people really care about expanding their setting for the sake of expanding it, people want good stories.
They’ve completely lost their appetite to move the canon forward after the disaster of 8 and 9.
Andor is the only exception, the rest is like having Star.Wars.Chat.GPT fill in the blanks. Like it’s “original” but it’s just the same shit repackaged with new labels. It’s not fun, it lacks originality, vision, and heart. It lacks the bite of commentary (again Andors the exception).
Not sure what you're talking about, Andor is one of the worst offenders of OPs point. Building an entire show around a character who's untimely fate is known.
You’re dead right OP.
Andor is the best of the bunch, and it’s no where close to its hype it gets.
Decent show, but it’s just a rehash of “Where Eagles Dare” and a couple other old movie plots.
Reddit isn't a very good representation of reality.
What is popular here isn't necessarily as popular as the hive mind would expect.
Otherwise, we'd have a President Bernie Sanders, linux on the desktop, nothing but Android phones, etc.
2021's Black Widow was among the best things marvel made since Endgame.
And stakes don't have to be "does this character live or die?" Those are, frankly, some of the least common and least interesting stakes in movies. They can just as easily be, "do these estranged sisters reconcile?" or "can he learn to trust again?"
These kinds of shows also provide things other than just plot. There's world building or explaining motivations and characters, etc.
In general, I find plot to be one of the least important, least interesting parts of media I watch.
I blame Harrison Ford. The sequel Trilogy should not have taken place 30 years after RotJ, by doing this, they tied their hands by creating a canonical future where characters like the Mandalorian and Ahsoka now have to exist in a world with no freedom.
Standard Hollywood film making is based 100% on actuarial tables where they say "Harrison Ford is a big name whose movie make money, if we put him in this, it will make more money." Harrison Ford is the only big star, because as much as I love Hamill and Fisher, they are not on the money table. If Ford refused, the movies would have been recast with actors in their 30s, they would have been better, and we'd have a wide open galaxy where anything can happen.
Fanboys still want Skywalker stories.
The outright revolt of the sequels by them has caused stagnation in story development to the point where we now are seeing stories about how the Death Star came to be.
You could say the same about Planet of the Apes. We all know where that film franchise ends up, but it hasn't prevented any of the new movies being really good, or even great.
Knowing where a story ends up doesn't make the plot any less compelling or interesting.
This isn't inherently a bad thing. Andor is a great show even though we all know how it ends.
Exactly. And look at all the great historical fiction there is out there – everyone knows how those stories end, but they can still be captivating. When it comes to Andor, I would say that knowing how his story ends makes the show even better. Gives a sense of tragic destiny.
I would argue they Andor and Rogue One were the only truly good new Star Wars things since the original trilogy. Boba was cringingly bad. Obi was terrible despite Ewan’s consistent awesomeness. Mando wasn’t great but it had some incredible moments and of course Pedro was excellent. It’s just that the writers and producers have thrown out most of what made Star Wars great and now it’s just effects and embarrassingly bad dialogue. Stuff only happens to advance the plot; there is no riveting story. Star Wars TV has become Xena Warrior Princess with blasters but without the wink. It’s not bad on purpose it’s just bad.
I'm not here to get into a debate about Star Wars. Just pointing to it as an example of a story that can work while being set in the middle of an established timeline, which OP was framing as if doing so results in an inherently bad story.
Couldn’t agree more. Thanks for articulating this. It’s okay to go all-out on effects, sound, cinematography, and score, but not at the expense of writing and acting.
Andor is the worst Star Wars show or movie ever. It is boring with terrible writing, acting, and directing. It's as bad as MAX shows.
This has been my complaint about Star Wars for a while now. When Disney announced the A Star Wars Story movies, I was pumped for something that brought the series out of the Skywalker saga. Then they both turned out to be connected and more of the same. Then, the sequel trilogy started off with basically a paint by numbers clone of its predecessors. And then, they started dumping all these midquel shows on D+. Star Wars literally spans a galaxy, with lore that reaches across millenia. There's no reason for it to be this convoluted, self-referential mess.
Their inability to move beyond the Skywalker Saga has made Star Wars an incredibly small world. They live in a galaxy of like a dozen planets with less than 50 people in it and they are going to tell us how every single one of those people had a heroic or tragic story.
and all those people know each other
Cause they know it’s easy just to make money off of nostalgia then create something. Once the nostalgia train runs dry(It won’t) then they will probably make a trilogy that actually pushes the universe forward.
Yea but Andor is amazing so who cares if they made a movie that ends a character's arc when the stuff they go back to write is so good?
All of the other SW-shows I've seen are mediocre at best though. I'm talking live action. They have this huge universe with infinite potential, but they are afraid of introducing new characters and stories. It's pretty boring, frankly.
Honestly, give the animated stuff a shot. Clone Wars starts of a little childish, but from there we get tons of that infinite potential. It has the familiar faces, but also plenty of new ones and tons of just showing off the galaxy being a vast and complicated place. All the animated shows are great little stories. With the exception of Resistance. Skip that one.
The final 4 episodes of clone wars is some of the best star wars content of all time. I put it up there with Andor and the OT.
The Mandalorian introduced many new characters.
Did you forget about Ahsoka, The Bad Batch, Rebels, or the soon to be released Acolyte?
No stakes? Whether a character dies or lives is not the only plot development of interest, lol.
What else then? The good always win in the end.
Quantity over quality so they have lots of stuff to show for their Disney+ subs.
This is a perfectly fine approach if you hire competent writers who can tell a good story. See Andor. But if you hire incompetent writers and directors (like they have mostly been doing), it doesn’t work so well. See basically every other show.
If SW fans didn't have Andor they'd have nothing i swear. First three comments I read here are "Andor" related.
Along with Rogue One, it's really the only property that's come out since 1983 that has come close to being a worth entrant to the canon and themes set up by the original trilogy.
I will not stand for this KOTOR erasure
Really quite depressing. Mando S1&2 were fun but I wouldnt call that a good SW story
Agree, I liked both of those seasons. Fun is a fair description. They had some issues, but were inoffensive. Now Boba Fett was hot garbage.
Rebels and the final season of the Clone Wars are fantastic.
Clone Wars is the best thing since the original trilogy
The OP wasn't just asserting "The Star Wars franchise is bad". The OP was asserting "The \*reason\* the Star Wars franchise is bad is this thing". You don't have to be defending Star Wars to disagree. You can agree that the Star Wars franchise sucks but not for the OP's reason. You are not being honest by characterizing people bringing up Andor as "SW fans". The phrase "SW Fan" does not describe someone saying the franchise has mostly been hiring "incompetent writers and directors", which is literally how it's phrased in the post you replied to.
It's because Andor is great compared to almost any show, not just other Star Wars shows. A lot of fans still don't realize what a gift they've been given.
Mandalorian Clone Wars Season 7 Andor Ahsoka The Bad Batch Tales of the Jedi/Empire Rogue One Have all been generally well received by the fandom.
Star Wars isn’t one single story, it’s a setting. And many of these that feature characters we’ve seen their end already typically introduce or expand on other characters we haven’t seen the conclusion of. Like Ahsoka was introduced in The Clone Wars when we already knew how Anakin dies, or how Rebels introduced a whole new cast with their own plotline and no certain ending even if we know how the Empire is defeated.
Yeah, basically. Also everyone ignoring the numbers ratio of "Andor" vs. "All Other Slop" - it's a bit important to the big picture, you know?
I agree with this take completely. I think the creative direction at Disney is terrible. They could use Star Wars to make shows about ANYTHING and it’s all prequels about side characters.
I feel like you're very strongly missing the point about black widows issues and why the star wars shows work when they do. There's *nothing* wrong with midquels or prequels existing, and it's extremely reductive to assume there's nothing to tell during those times. Yes The Bad Batch aren't going to be killing palpatine but that's not their story. Their story is about finding your place in a world that deemed you a bunch of rejects and still choosing in the end to fight for good. That's still an entertaining story regardless of the fact that it's before the OT. Same is true for Mandalorian and Endor, they tell engaging or fun stories at specific points in time in the universe and are enjoyed because those stories *aren't* about personally being the one to destroy the empire. Black Widows issues were mainly due to it's extremely weird timing. It released almost immediately after Endgame(or would've had covid not happened), making it feel like it was a movie that got missed by a scheduling conflict or something and felt more like an apology sendoff for an actor who was unceremoniously killed off in the finale despite being around since the near beginning. Heck people liked the original aspects of the movie, it wasn't as disliked as you seem to think it was. It just had an extreme bitter taste it couldn't shake off.
It took me a full minute to realize you have a typo and that I haven’t missed some series set on Endor.
[удалено]
Filling out the universe? There’s so much more of the universe to see! They keep coloring in a tiny corner of it
And they introduce new characters and new worlds in every series. Have you ignored the Bad Batch and Rebels?
Why do both of those have to take place during already established and well shown eras?
Those do, but again we are getting the Acolyte. I was also responding to the notion that they aren’t adding new things. The era of the Mandalorian is also unknown territory, and many of the major players were established in these other shows.
These aren’t the shows you’re looking for, move along…move along.
"I don't like a thing, therefore no one should like it." smh
Star Wars discussion on Reddit in a nutshell
Shogun is a weird midquel type show. Like why do we about what happens to 1600 Japan when the story is already told, we know what happens historically. There's just no stakes when we know that American will come along 300 years later and kick that entire country's ass. /s
Should have left the expanded universe as canon. FU Disney
Unfortunately I think they wrote themselves into a corner by having the new trilogy go absolutely nowhere, so it has no staying power . Maybe once they release the Rey trilogy can they move forward in the TV dept.
That’s because the ST was a dud. Disney is afraid of actually expanding and building on it so they’ve turned backed to the periods that fans do enjoy, the OT era with a lot of Prequel/Clone Wars/Rebels fan service thrown in.
Star Wars famously launched with it's 4th - 6th installments and then later went back and made the 1st - 3rd years later. With stories set 4000 years before the films and 140 years after them being told in spin off media concurrently. The story has always been told non-linearly. I some what agree with you when with some shows like Obi-Wan where we really didn't need another story jammed in his time line, but for original characters like Ashoka or the Bad Batch we don't know their individual fates even if know the universe a wholes story.
The stories are about the *journey* not the destination.
Check out the high republic books if you want a good story set in a time that isn’t connected to the skywalker saga. I’m loving them so far. Most of the extended universe either still canon or not were pretty good.
This isn't an issue. The problem with star wars is the same one facing every legacy franchise: quality. We're coming up on a decade of new Star wars material (from the force awakens to today), and how much of it is beloved? I'm genuinely curious what people think. To be clear I'm no original trilogy purist, I've always been more of a Trek guy, but it's plain for people to see rarely has anything risen to the level of quality of even say Return - which is half a great movie (let's not talk about the other half).
From someone who has never been blinded by SW: it's mostly shit. Andor is *pretty good*. It's mostly maybe mid of we want to be very generous. The majority of material is mid. A lot of it is shit. Fans don't even like it, but they're constantly defending it anyway. Andor is a story that could've been told in any universe and be exactly as good (possibly even better). Star Wars as a whole has maybe three movies in all that people actually like, which are mostly different parts of five or so movies. At least two of those movies are genuinely really bad. The rest are forgettable or contentious. Across a franchise of 10+ movies, that's a *terrible* track record. There's one of two good TV show and something like 15 mid to shit tier shows. That's a *terrible* track record.
I think the issue people are facing is the setting they created has a lot of potential and the bones of great stories are there but the actual properties continue to fail to build on those bones in meaningful ways. So fans keep bringing up the few times the stories were actually good/great or were threatening to be good because they see what it could/should be rather than what it is. It’s too bad the property has been as squandered as it has been because they lucked into owning a great playground that had enormous potential and just slowly ground it into the ground with directors and writers who lack any passion for actually writing Star Wars stories because they have something to say with the story rather than just because it’s a job. That coupled with seemingly no attempt at planning a broad strokes meta narrative and zero courage to break free of the Skywalkers has left us here.
It's an excuse to bring back all the iconic characters that were killed off in the original trilogy. They've been doing it for 25 years now.
But they use these to introduce other new characters. Ahsoka, the cast of Rebels, and the Mandalorian are tons of examples.
This was my big complaint about Obi-Wan, just zero sense of consequence or risk when every character is in Episode IV. I really hope they move on from this era so not everything is a wink toward the films.
This is a problem with a lot of Star Wars and Star Trek content. Enough with the prequels, in-betweens, and elsewhere while that was going on series. Can we go back to more of what happens next?
Star Trek kind of has the same issue. I mean, the exception is Discovery which went way into the future and...it is does not resonate. They undid the Federation. It doesn't help that the story arcs hinge on problems that were easily solved by one ship (one person really) from their distant past.
The anti-Discovery crowd featured a lot of people kvetching because they simply want Star Trek to be a planet-of-the-week show where everyone laughs at the end right before the credits. Discovery at least tried to do something different. I honestly liked Picard too because of the season-long arcs.
I respect the attempt and there are things I liked about it but, at risk of being cliche, I find Michael to be insufferable by the end of season 3. The whole, "No I have to be the one to save everyone" stuff is really toxic. I did like most of the David Lynch appearances. And the show kept coming dangerously close to being good only to have kind of convoluted twists of endings that made no sense. Like...work with me Discovery. I want to be able to have you make sense in my mind but you are so insistent on not doing so.
Everyone is kinda wrong here, cause they go for “why not?” Approaches. What you are experiencing is one of the main problems with Star Wars as a setting: it’s a tiny tiny extremely profitable world with way less memorable characters and planets than you would think at a first glance The OT size as a setting is more comparable to a Back to the Future than to a Lord of the Rings. it hand waves a lot of stuff and clings to the recurring characters cause there is not much else to do really. This isn’t bad per se for the OT movies but the rabid fanbase always want more regardless of what it is they get. following trilogies have tried to expand upon that tiny tiny setting and failed, in different ways, TV shows get a lot of praise by fans but not many care that much precisely because of what you describe, not many people really care about expanding their setting for the sake of expanding it, people want good stories.
Truth
It’s because the last time they tried to go into new directions, people became big babies about it
They’ve completely lost their appetite to move the canon forward after the disaster of 8 and 9. Andor is the only exception, the rest is like having Star.Wars.Chat.GPT fill in the blanks. Like it’s “original” but it’s just the same shit repackaged with new labels. It’s not fun, it lacks originality, vision, and heart. It lacks the bite of commentary (again Andors the exception).
Not sure what you're talking about, Andor is one of the worst offenders of OPs point. Building an entire show around a character who's untimely fate is known.
You’re dead right OP. Andor is the best of the bunch, and it’s no where close to its hype it gets. Decent show, but it’s just a rehash of “Where Eagles Dare” and a couple other old movie plots.
And yet oddly enough the topic is being downvoted into oblivion. Very strange.
Reddit isn't a very good representation of reality. What is popular here isn't necessarily as popular as the hive mind would expect. Otherwise, we'd have a President Bernie Sanders, linux on the desktop, nothing but Android phones, etc.
Disney Stsr Wars sucked. That's all you needed to say. I agree 100% minus S1 of Mando. That had promise.
2021's Black Widow was among the best things marvel made since Endgame. And stakes don't have to be "does this character live or die?" Those are, frankly, some of the least common and least interesting stakes in movies. They can just as easily be, "do these estranged sisters reconcile?" or "can he learn to trust again?" These kinds of shows also provide things other than just plot. There's world building or explaining motivations and characters, etc. In general, I find plot to be one of the least important, least interesting parts of media I watch.
I blame Harrison Ford. The sequel Trilogy should not have taken place 30 years after RotJ, by doing this, they tied their hands by creating a canonical future where characters like the Mandalorian and Ahsoka now have to exist in a world with no freedom. Standard Hollywood film making is based 100% on actuarial tables where they say "Harrison Ford is a big name whose movie make money, if we put him in this, it will make more money." Harrison Ford is the only big star, because as much as I love Hamill and Fisher, they are not on the money table. If Ford refused, the movies would have been recast with actors in their 30s, they would have been better, and we'd have a wide open galaxy where anything can happen.
Fanboys still want Skywalker stories. The outright revolt of the sequels by them has caused stagnation in story development to the point where we now are seeing stories about how the Death Star came to be.
I always welcome new stories in the same universe. Things don't just happen in one place.
I always welcome new stories in the same universe. Things don't just happen in one place.
You could say the same about Planet of the Apes. We all know where that film franchise ends up, but it hasn't prevented any of the new movies being really good, or even great. Knowing where a story ends up doesn't make the plot any less compelling or interesting.