@draggs
They did the same thing with the First Order, establishing them as powerful and showing how they've got the firepower and the naval power to match the Empire of old back in the OT. Poe gave Kylo shit, but if it wasn't for Finn going rogue and rescuing him, he'd be dead. Just as Leia gave Tarkin shit, and would've probably been disposed of if it wasn't for Han and the crew rescuing her. We even see Kylo stopping a blaster bolt in mid-air to show off how powerful he was. And again, yes, Kylo was shown to be a narrow-minded wimp when he gets hurt by a random mook and gets beaten by a noob, but in ANH, Vader was barely holding it together fighting an old man whose physical form meant so little to him that he lets Vader kill him.
Vader winning the duel on the Death Star isn't a symbol of his power; it's a show of how his ignorant ass was blind to the greater mysteries of the Force, and how little he mattered to the old fart whom he was fighting. Kenobi was so above him, to the point where the old man didn't even want to dignify him with a duel to the death. Kenobi letting Vader kill him was basically the old man telling Vader "you ain't shit. Come on, make me stronger!" It wasn't until ESB did they pump Vader up and make him a legit powerhouse where he gives Luke a run for his money. In ANH, Vader was sidelined left and right; some random princess gives him lip, people make fun of his religion, Tarkin has to hold his leash like he's some kind of wild dog, and the only place where he was undisputed was in his dogfighting, and that was because the Rebels were too busy trying to make bombing runs. Vader then gets blindsided by some punk who owes debts to the space mafia, and that causes him to lose the battle.
Dude, did you even watch ANH? The whole movie is one humiliation conga line for Vader. His plan of letting the rebels get to their base so that the Empire can destroy them failed horribly, his old master whom he wanted revenge on didn't even see him as a worthy opponent, people openly insulted him and his religion to his face and questioned his effectiveness, and to top it all off, some moron flying in a literal piece of junk robs him of the one solid victory he could've won in the entire film. It wasn't until ESB did he get time to shine, only for ROTJ to make him someone else's bottom bitch again.
Again, the same thing happened between the Empire and the First Order; they're shown as bad guys, not told, they massacre innocent people, they have big warships flying around, and they have a superweapon that wipes out entire worlds. It is a step-by-step recreation of ANH, to the point where Lucas complained how unoriginal it was. And again, TFA was made for the PT haters, and they loved it and supported Disney all the way. There's a reason why almost everything Disney did was one big fat ripoff of ANH; their first movie was ANH for millennials, their second movie was a direct prequel to ANH, and their first cartoon was a build-up to ANH, to the point where they shelved TCW instead of letting them finish, only coming back to finish it once their Sequels blew up in their face. It's because 90% of the talk around Star Wars is "PT IS TRASH, OT IS BETTER!" so no shit, the soulless corporate entity tried to appease the masses of filthy dimwits in the internet by making everything around ANH.
And speaking of Lucas, again, the PT is not trash. It's not some kind of Coppola-level masterpiece, but the first two PT movies were just decent films with some nice visuals, fights, and some interesting worldbuilding on the side, which kind of explains why the world in ANH is like that. But at worst, they were just fun boom-fiestas with some baby-mama drama that holds it back. The politics is easy enough to understand from a grade-school level, the fights were beautifully done, the CGI battles were nice for the time, and ROTS is actually as good as ESB and surpasses ROTJ in terms of quality.
Especially since ROTJ was the beginning of Lucas just falling asleep on the wheel, what with him dropping plot points like Vader's original plan to upstage the Emperor, as well as making his big bad evil force lose to teddy bears and a rag-tag fleet that the Imperial fleet outnumbered by a large margin. Even if you take the Death Star out of the picture, the Rebel fleet should've been curb-stomped by the Imperial fleet in an open fight. Zahn literally had to invent Battle Meditation to explain that plot hole as to why the Imps lost despite having every advantage on Endor handed to them on a silver platter.
And the funny thing is, Lucas actually tried to fix his mistakes in ROTJ when he made the PT; in TPM, the scrappy underdog native Gungan army loses to the more organized Trade Federation Droid army, because realistically, that's what should've happened to the Ewoks when they fought the Empire, and the Trade Federation fleet goes kaput when their flagship goes up in smoke because the flagship was their control ship; without that, all their ships and their armies go numb. Pretty much, people act like the PT was some massive drop in quality when the drop began with ROTJ and Lucas rushing things to the finish line that he forgets plot points that he planted in ESB.
Again, it's people like you who whine about how the Prequels were trash that led to Lucas selling the farm to Disney. And people like you deserve Disney Star Wars because you couldn't just leave well enough alone. You have to act like some mediocre movies were trash when they're just mediocre at best, not bad. Lucas was content to just let Filoni and the EU authors handle Star Wars while he went off doing other shit, but you people just could not shut the fuck up about how the Prequels were trash and how Lucas was bad, so of course, the man got pissy and sold the farm to Disney, which at the time, was making movies that people wanted, and this was before the SJW fad took off, so Disney movies were just basically Michael Bay with no swearing.
