Bane would've been pretty cool, because you can have the Mando, an old Bane and even more senile Durge meet and conflict be in a small arc in a love letter/rip-off of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. That shit would be great.
Yeah, gonna disagree on this one wholeheartedly. They have much of the same opinion I have and had a similar trajectory to me in terms of the media. They and I both saw Force Awakens and gave it slack at the time, because a retread of ANH was a decent enough starting ground and a "return to form" if you will. Akin to Last Crusade in this respect where it played the movie safe, which isn't a bad idea after the not so good Clone War cg movie being the last time SW was in film.
In retrospect it was shit (pacing and writing was poor), but this is JarJar Abram's entire modus operandi: make up mysteries and leave off plot for later and let the stupids fill it in for you. They and I did not think it would turn to shit precisely because they were able to mostly consistently make good popcorn films out of Marvel, which also had a lot of backstory. We fell for the lazy shit's procrastination approach and expected Lucasfilms to not despise and loathe their fans and content.
Then came Rogue One. I thought the movie didn't let you care for the characters since you didn't get time to know them, and thought it jumped around too much (same complaints I had for Force Awakens btw, they don't let you breathe at all). They thought it was mostly mindless action, this was the first signs of something was going wrong to most people who did not look at the shitty books or comics they made and currently molder in Ollies.
TLJ was the kiss of death for both of us, and you know the rest.
They didn't do this about face to save reputation. They thought like me that Disney should at least be able to make something competent, if not inspired, and then realized the hideous mistake around where the normies did. I was thinking they would use some of the EU plot points, but goddamn did I not expect the worst parts of Jedi Prince and Dark Empire.
I will however agree on one thing: Rich Evans, I love the guy, but he's retarded for thinking the setting is too small to make good content with. He only is in the ballpark of right if you interpret his beliefs as "You can do some new and interesting things, but not with any current Hollywood producer".
I don't think Durge is part of the new canon. If he is, I've never seen it.
I respectfully disagree. I never saw The Force Awakens as anything but RLM and feminist bait. It wasn't even that safe since it fucked the Jedi progression system into the dirt. In the previous films, even wunderkinds like Anakin and Luke took time to train. They were barely powerful in their first two movies, then in their third movie, they came into form. Rey was holding off attempted mind-rape and was winning fights with Dark Jedi in her first film. And it was so sloppy that they had to explain it as Rey subconsciously downloading Kylo's training when the latter failed at mind-raping her. "Safe" would have been Luke and a female Jedi apprentice kicking ass and taking names, like my playthrough of Jedi Academy where I play as a female Jedi and fight alongside Luke against some new Sith threat-that would bring in the female demographic while playing it safe with the older fans. "Safe" would not undo everything the OT characters accomplished, but rather build on top of the foundation that it laid. See again, Jedi Academy, and how Luke's revived Jedi Order became a well-established force that the New Republic calls in for support. You'd have done a better job with a "safe" film if you brought in Michael Bay and all he did was have the Jedi kick ass and have human and alien chicks show off T&A all the time. Maybe Rey as a character would have worked better if she was Jaina Solo and she was already trained off-screen so as to explain where her Jedi powers and experience with machines and lightsabers came from.
TFA meanwhile, was meant as a callback to the OT, down to the point where they REVERSED things so that the Empire is once again strong, the Rebels are once again weak, the Jedi are once again nearing extinction, Han Solo is a smuggler once more, just to get in those Red Letter Media fans who kept whining about how bad the Prequels were and how good it was back in the Original Trilogy days. And yet TFA utterly shits on the lessons of the OT, the most prominent of which was the lesson of Empire Strikes Back, the lesson which states that experience and wisdom matters. Luke had more power than Darth Vader, and Vader even says that Luke is strong enough to kill the Emperor, but thanks to his lack of training, he can't even make it past the Emperor's mechanical manservant. For that reason, Yoda tried to keep Luke from engaging the enemy until his training was complete. Meanwhile, TFA shows us that so long as you have the power of feminism at your side, you can instantly learn how to ward off mind-rape and be an expert lightsaber duelist even though prior to you meeting the enemy, you didn't even know the Force exists.
At the same time, everything accomplished by the good guys in the Original Trilogy is gone. The new democracy they created is ineffective and worthless, the good guys have even less forces than they did when they were a rebellion against a galaxy-wide empire, the Jedi are eradicated once more, the new Empire is just as evil as the old, except it has weapons that make the old empire look like a backwater post by comparison, which made the OT worthless as the actions of its heroes accomplished absolutely nothing.
And of course, the Prequel-bashers ate that shit up, calling Kylo Ren a "better Anakin" (even though he's everything bad about Anakin with none of the good) and saying that EPVII is the direction the Prequels should have gone but didn't. Meanwhile, I was sitting there, fuming at the fact that A) they made the Original Trilogy about as pointless as Naruto anime filler by making the OT heroes' accomplishments WORTHLESS, and B) they don't understand the main lessons the OT tried to teach. For each praise they threw at Disney's way, they added in more Lucas-bashing to go with it. And then now the tables have turned: now the fans want Lucas back, and now the prequel-bashers are about as popular among SW fans as dengue fever is in Manila.
The fact that RLM can talk on for hours praising the Original Trilogy's values while giving TFA a pass goes to show they didn't know SHIT about the Original Trilogy, since TFA basically made the accomplishments of the OT's heroes null and void while missing the point of the OT's lessons entirely. All it did was rob the OT of its aesthetics, add in Instant Jedi Just Add Feminism, and JJ Abrams called it a day. No fan of the Original Trilogy would support a film that stole its aesthetics, disregarded its lessons on the need for wisdom and training, and made the accomplishments of its heroes worthless, to the point where the title of Episode VI couldn't even count as true anymore because the ending implied that Luke would rebuild the Jedi Order, which in TFA has been reduced to a failure. "Return of the Jedi" my ass, they never came back in the films!
Not to attack any of you personally, but to me, RLM is two-faced in that they criticized the Prequels to hell and back for not being as good as the Original Trilogy which they elevated as a positive example, yet they also praised a film that shat all over the OT's lessons and the accomplishments of its heroes. The people who kept praising the Original Trilogy over the prequels didn't protest at the fact that EPVII made it about as meaningful as anime filler. It was then where I saw that RLM are fake fans of the Original Trilogy, since no real OT fan would accept a film that thoroughly destroys everything the OT heroes accomplished in place of shallowly recreating the scenario of the OT, except they took the good lessons and worldbuilding out and replaced it with SJW feminist pandering.
I mean, at least Legends waited until 130 years after the movies before having the Jedi get hunted down to extinction again, and even then, they didn't go all the way, since they had a Jedi Emperor who has his own Jedi Knights fighting the new Sith Emperor and his Sith minions, and both emperors had legions of Stormtroopers and Star Destroyers that they threw into battle against each other, which made the story different. TFA couldn't even wait for 50 years before killing the Jedi off again. I was hoping for a scenario where it turns out in EPVIII, the Jedi weren't extinct, Luke was just hiding them until the enemy revealed themselves so he can send in the boys and girls with laser swords and strike, and that Han lied about the Jedi being nearly extinct to protect his friend's plans. But that didn't happen. Why? Because TFA made it clear that the Jedi were extinct again. And people wonder why the next film after it was titled "The Last Jedi." We went from "Return of the Jedi" for Episode 6, and two movies later, it's "The Last Jedi", which makes the sixth movie completely pointless. But let's not fool ourselves. It all started with TFA. Rian Johnson only chose to double down EPVII's flaws while fixing none of them.
And I will never stop blaming RLM and the Prequel-basher crowd for this. They're the reason Lucas sold to Disney, their endless insults wore him down and convinced him to sell, and now that Disney ran the franchise to the dirt, to the point where even the bloody toy franchise is tanking, the destruction of Star Wars as a sci-fi IP and a media giant is complete. All thanks to these clowns.
