Franchise Original Sin / Star Wars

"If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will."

— Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

Various elements in later installments of Star Wars ruthlessly divided and fractured the series' fanbase and attracted complaints from fans and critics alike. But when taking into account how many warning signs were present in earlier installments that attracted far less complaint...well...Yoda's quote above says it all really.

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Original Trilogy

• Many viewers walked away from The Empire Strikes Back with a newfound hatred of C-3PO due to his constant worrying and panicking, with many at the time saying his character was ruined and turned into nothing but a whiner. However, he did his fair share of worrying and panicking in A New Hope as well. Unlike its sequel, however, this was seen as more tolerable because it was balanced out by the fact that his overall personality was more level-headed, he had some moments of cleverness and genuine helpfulness, and his dynamic with R2-D2 was downright hilarious. In Empire, however, not only is his cowardly and insecure side grossly exaggerated, he's given little productive to do and he and R2 spend most of the movie separated, meaning there's precious little to distract from his annoying personality changes. Return of the Jedi would address this by reverting him to his calmer and more well-rounded characterization from the first movie, while also making his actions crucial to the Rebels' victory, e.g. finally getting to use one of those six million languages he's fluent in to convince the Ewoks to help the Rebels.

Prequel Trilogy

• The Original Trilogy had all the elements that would come to be widely criticized in the Prequel Trilogy and the Sequel Trilogy. This includes wooden dialogue, Ship Sinking in The Empire Strikes Back, several-year time jumps between each film, underdeveloped characters, an out-of-nowhere Retcon (i.e. the big one), Wacky Wayside Tribe Kid Appeal Characters in Return of the Jedi, as well as shallow Worldbuilding. What made it work back then was that since it came first, the Willing Suspension of Disbelief wasn't stretched too far, and audiences accepted that Star Wars was intended as a Genre Throwback to serial films that were if anything far less immersive on this front. By the time the Prequel Trilogy and the Sequel Trilogy came along, the Star Wars franchise had become respectable and serious, and the expansion and rise of the internet meant that the criticisms people had once made about the Original Trilogy were forgotten, while the same criticisms given to the follow-ups now had a bigger audience to disseminate and spread, while being archived for future audiences to see.
• A common complaint about Anakin's characterization in the Prequel Trilogy was that he did too many horrible things to deserve being Easily Forgiven. To an extent, this was already true of his identity as Vader in the Original Trilogy; he was complicit in the destruction of an entire planet, and had no problems with wanton torture and murder, including that of Luke's best friend Biggs Darklighter, and his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi. However, Vader was a Fallen Hero and it was stated often that he had been a decent person at one point, and from the sorrow in his voice when he considers redemption in Return of the Jedi, we could only assume that the man inside the mask was worth saving. However, the Prequel Trilogy showed Anakin to be seriously flawed from the get-go, and largely bungled his fall — he essentially decides to wipe out an entire religious order, create a dictatorship, and kill all his friends because he had bad dreams about a woman whom he's Strangled by the Red String with. Far from showing the person worth saving in Vader, it cast doubt on the idea of there being one in Anakin. Further blunting the blow of his actions as Vader was that he managed to wrap his evil deeds in the absurd theatricality and impersonal scale of a supervillain, making them easier to accept. Anakin, on the other hand, murdered children twice and then strangled his pregnant wife when she asked him about it, which greatly strained the audience's forgiveness threshold, to say the least. While it can be argued that Anakin wasn't actually supposed to be considered sympathetic at this time, the aforementioned apparent implications from the Original Trilogy about him previously being a decent person prior to his fall had heavily colored most viewers' perception of him. This led to inflated expectations, and later criticism, regarding his portrayal in the Prequel Trilogy, regardless of whether or not the filmmakers intended for us to sympathize with him.
• Star Wars pushed effects-driven technology a lot further along than it had ever been before, and as far back as Empire, there were stories of actors finding those conditions difficult to work in. However, the limitations of the era by nature constrained just how much work the computers could do, meaning that most scenes still involved actual sets, costumes, and props. The prequels, on the other hand, became notorious for entire areas being nothing but bluescreens and countless characters being entirely CGI (even characters like the Clone Troopers, who absolutely could have been extras in costumes), a lot of which hasn't aged well. Though the films didn't stop using practical effects, and even by some metrics made use of more than the Original Trilogy, the focus very much shifted away from them, and it seems to have contributed to the notoriously wooden performances (i.e. it's hard to nail a good line read or convey proper body language when most of your sets and co-stars are covered in royal blue or lime green).
• When criticizing the Prequel Trilogy, many fans are likely to moan about the theatrical films' focus on politics at the expense of action, often citing long scenes in the Galactic Senate chamber. It's easy to forget that A New Hope incorporated a fair bit of politics into its story: Princess Leia uses a diplomatic mission as a cover for transporting the Death Star plans, several characters discuss growing support for the Rebellion in the Imperial Senate and the ramifications of abolishing that Senate, and there was barely concealed backbiting in the office politics aboard the Death Star between the Moffs, the Empire's military brass, and Vader. The Empire Strikes Back also has Lando Calrissian explaining Cloud City's neutral status and how his responsibilities as a leader conflict with his friendship with Han and his civic duty. Unlike the Prequel Trilogy, though, the politics in the Original Trilogy are a backdrop to the fight of good-versus-evil, at best being helpful in understanding the motivations of some secondary characters or plot devices, rather than central to the plot (it's telling that several of these scenes were deleted). It also didn't help that while the political elements in the original trilogy were fairly basic and understandable, Palpatine's byzantine schemes came across as either inscrutably complex or overly reliant on the good guys holding the Idiot Ball at crucial moments.
• The movies have suffered from inconsistent continuity from the very beginning, but it didn't start to get really noticeable until the franchise's later years. The first step was the iconic revelation about Darth Vader's identity in The Empire Strikes Back, which wasn't initially planned, and explicitly contradicted everything that we'd learned about Luke's father in the first movie—but that was easy to forgive, since it was a genuinely powerful twist that completely worked from a dramatic standpoint. It was a bit more glaring when Return of the Jedi similarly retconned Luke and Leia into being siblings, despite them kissing in two earlier scenes—but that was similarly forgivable, since it provided a cozy resolution for the main trio's love triangle. Then the prequel trilogy introduced multiple retcons to major plot points, none of which could really be called "improvements". Just to name a few: there was the revelation that Luke and Leia's mother died in childbirth when Return of the Jedi implied that she died when Leia was old enough to have a few memories of her; that Obi-Wan wasn't really Yoda's apprentice;^note Yoda does mentor every youngling in the Jedi Temple, however, so Obi-Wan at least had learned under him from a younger age before the prequels established his definitive mentor as Qui-Gon Jinn that Owen Lars was Anakin's stepbrother from Shmi Skywalker's marriage to Owen's father Cliegg and they barely even knew each other; and that Boba Fett was actually a clone of a different Mandalorian bounty hunter named Jango Fett (and was raised as his son). In some fans' opinions, the interquels Rogue One and Solo were even more guilty of this, since their stories were essentially built entirely around major changes to continuity (like establishing that the weakness in the Death Star was intentional, that Leia was personally present at the battle where the Death Star plans were stolen, that Han really did make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs...).
• One of the more frequently mocked parts of The Phantom Menace is the podrace plot that dominates the second act, which is steeped in Qui-Gon creating a plan that is, quite frankly, completely insane, with a hundred points of failure (even on its face, it hinges on a nine-year-old who has never finished a race winning it) and multiple alternate solutions that aren't so much as mentioned, all for the sake of a single big setpiece. But this wasn't the first time a Star Wars film had devoted a chunk of its story to a protagonist plan that made no sense: just ask Return of the Jedi, where the first act involves Luke's plan to rescue Han from Jabba. Said plan involves Lando going undercover for no apparent reason, the droids being sent in for a negotiation with Luke's main weapon hidden in one of them, Leia infiltrating as well, handing off Chewie as a prisoner, and then trying to rescue Han in a fashion that would almost certainly have gotten her caught, and finally Luke entering the palace unarmed, before starting a proper fight at the Sarlacc where the gang wipes out Jabba's whole operation, raising the question of why they didn't just do that to start with. However, the plan in Return of the Jedi was never actually explained to the audience, which kept the audience guessing as to what was going on, and left a lot of wiggle room for fans to speculate (maybe the plan was at least in part an Indy Ploy, maybe Luke, Leia, and/or Lando were acting independently, maybe the plan got thrown off-track at some point...). Meanwhile, the plan in The Phantom Menace is fully explained to the audience and we're fully able to see Qui-Gon's own options as he formulates it, which makes its issues far more obvious.
• The Phantom Menace was rebuked for several unpopular alien characters—Jar Jar Binks, Watto, and the Nemoidians—who were seen as offensive caricatures of Jamaicans, Jews, and Japanese people, respectively. But this criticism also applies to a sizable number of species in the Original Trilogy; the practice of modeling fantasy species on Real Life stereotypes was part and parcel of the Speculative Fiction that inspired Lucas. The Tuskens, a savage tribe of desert-dwellers who attack and abduct human settlers, were evocative of Native Americans from classic westerns or Arabic tribesmen as encountered by a Gentleman Adventurer. Then you have their fellow Tatooine natives, the Jawas, a race of disreputable nomads who live in caravans and make their living by stealing and reselling machinery, who seem to be basically Space Romani and/or Bedouin. Jabba the Hutt, the decadent, obese, hookah-smoking potentate who lives on a desert planet with a harem of half-naked slave girls, is a coded Orientalist portrayal of an Arab or Turkish Sultan. This is even true of many Rebel-aligned aliens, such as the Ewoks, who evoke the Viet Cong and the Noble Savage archetype in equal measure. Even Yoda (easily the most well-rounded of all the original trilogy's aliens along with Chewbacca), was intended to evoke wisdom from the east. Such coding didn't get wide scrutiny in the Original Trilogy, largely because it was eclipsed by the good-versus-evil plot, and the villains were "space fascists" mostly portrayed by white actors. The Prequel Trilogy put greater focus on Worldbuilding, which made it more obvious. And when the aliens had expanded roles (while remaining coded with dated stereotypes), particularly with how overrepresented they were in other media in the prequel-era (e.g. while the Ewoks had the decency to restrict themselves to direct adaptations of the Battle of Endor, plus a pair of TV movies and one cartoon, damn near every piece of Star Wars media set before or during the prequel trilogy shoehorned in a Toydarian who talked and/or acted exactly like Watto), it made it obvious how underwritten they really were. Nowadays, new alien species are not based on any particular stereotype, allowing them to be better written.
• The franchise was known for having underdeveloped villains all through the original trilogy, but it wouldn't become a glaring handicap until the prequels came along. The Imperials were cartoonishly-evil Space Fascists who acted very much like Nazi stand-ins with a simple and self-explanatory motivation: destroy the rebels so that they can retain their power. People were more willing to let the simplistic characterizations of the Imperials slide, however, because they were anchored by charismatic performances from screen legends like James Earl Jones and Peter Cushing, they evoked real-world dystopias enough that they actually seemed threatening, and they had enough Kick the Dog moments that it felt genuinely cathartic when the heroes won. But in the prequels? The Trade Federation just gets a throwaway line about protesting "taxation of trade routes" and a lot of Offscreen Villainy regarding the people of Naboo to establish them as the bad guys (forcing the Expanded Universe to show us some actual villainy from them, like massacres and slave trading),^note Attack of the Clones seemed to realize this and made steps to actually show some villainy from at least Nute Gunray, the Trade Federation's Viceroy - the film opens with an assassination attempt on Padmé that he orchestrated, then has bounty hunters hired by him make another attempt, and he chuckles in delight when she is slashed by the nexu in the arena on Geonosis, revealing that he developed a grudge against Padmé and became her Arch-Enemy and the Separatists just get some vague mumblings about "intentions to leave the Republic" and being led by the Sith, without any real mention of why the Separatists want to leave the Republic or what's so particularly evil in and of itself about that - even the Expanded Universe never helped here, with everything that had anything to do with the CIS skipping straight ahead to the dramatic battle at Geonosis. Hell, the most memorably "evil" act in the whole prequel trilogy is Order 66, which is technically carried out by the Republic. In contrast, the Imperials' clear motives, extensive rap sheets and aura of menace actually helped make their one-note villainy an arguable strength of the Original Trilogy. There's a reason why Rooting for the Empire is a time-honored tradition among Star Wars fans, but Rooting for the Separatists most definitely isn't.
• The franchise's habit of playing up Force powers started in Empire, which had characters showing off large-scale telekinesis, enhanced skills, and spiritual existence rather than the more subtle abilities like mental influencing and vague "sensing" of the first film. In Return of the Jedi, Palpatine added the ability to shoot lightning out of one's fingertips to the mix. Lightsabers also saw more and more use as the films went on - we went from A New Hope showing a little bit of Luke's early training with one and a single slow-paced duel that took two minutes, to Empire having Luke bust out the saber as a Utility Weapon once or twice and a more protracted duel against Darth Vader that served as the film's climax, to Luke in Jedi using the lightsaber almost exclusively every time he saw action and an even longer and more elaborate rematch against Vader at the end. Most people didn't really mind it, though, as those powers still only showed up in a few pivotal scenes, were mostly used by characters meant to come across as unbelievably powerful, and kept the mystical and ethereal feel largely intact (Coconut Superpowers also played a role, since the powers from the first film could be adequately demonstrated by simply having one actor repeat after another or pretend to have difficulty breathing), while the gradually increased prevalence of lightsabers primarily served to show Luke's growth as a Jedi. By the prequels and Expanded Universe, though, these powers were being used regularly and casually, New Powers as the Plot Demands became more frequent, and lightsaber fights became borderline constant. Many felt this demystified the whole concept and made the Jedi come across less as wise sages and more like superheroes, something that even the sequels (which earned their own controversies for adding new powers) called out.

Sequel Trilogy

• The Happy Ending Override that started with The Force Awakens is cited by many detractors as one of the biggest reasons why they don't like the Sequel Trilogy, but that wasn’t the first time that Star Wars undid or at least rolled back its happy endings. After A New Hope had the Rebels destroy the Death Star, The Empire Strikes Back showed that The Empire was still around and the Rebels get trounced in battle in the first act. But the first film never implied the Empire was gone along with the Death Star, but rather ended with the promise of further adventures with Vader escaping (see the early Expanded Universe materials). Furthermore, the primary accomplishment of Hope—the destruction of the Death Star—wasn't undone, and it made sense that the Galactic Empire didn't collapse in one day just because one space station was destroyed. A more direct example is Return of the Jedi bringing back the Death Star, but the fact that it was still being constructed showed that the destruction of the first one still meant something, and it is explicitly bait set by the Emperor to lure the Rebels in. Attack of the Clones slightly undid the previous film's ending due to Nute Gunray still being in a position of political power, but the main achievements of The Phantom Menace—getting rid of the blockade on Naboo, and Anakin beginning his Jedi training—weren't undone. In short, the happy endings were undone, but no one cared because the films continued the story in a logical manner, and they didn't retroactively make the previous films feel pointless.
• The Writing by the Seat of Your Pants nature of the Sequel Trilogy became one of its most notorious aspects, but in truth, the Original Trilogy was written the same way: even its status as a trilogy wasn't locked down until Return of the Jedi was in production, as Lucas had such an awful time making The Empire Strikes Back that he decided to wrap the story up with the next film. But the three-year gaps between Episodes IV to VI allowed more time for the main bodies of the scripts to be finalised — giving the writers time to try and fix previously inconsistent details (such as Obi-Wan stating that Darth Vader killed Anakin when the second film would reveal Vader was Anakin) without it feeling awkward — and the films themselves to be shot and edited, while the Sequel Trilogy only had two-year gaps between each movie, resulting in rushed and underdeveloped scripts that caused the quality to suffer.^note According to Daisy Ridley, J.J. Abrams was constantly flip-flopping over whether Rey should be Palpatine's granddaughter or not even while they were filming, to the point that she had no idea which version would end up in the final cut. Furthermore, the unplanned nature of the original films was fairly reasonable when many were expecting the first film to be the last, while the sequels were always built around the knowledge that they would be a trilogy, which makes the lack of forward planning rather hard to justify. Consequently, it became much easier to notice when the writers clearly didn't know how to handle certain plot points or characters, with many ideas being rolled back (The Force Awakens ends with Kylo killing Han with a Redemption Rejection, then The Last Jedi brings into question if he can be redeemed or not before ending with another Redemption Rejection on Kylo's part and a proclamation that he'll be the Dragon Ascendant, only for The Rise of Skywalker to walk back on both of these for a third time) or just ignored (the question of why Luke left a map to his location in The Force Awakens is never elaborated upon).
• The single most common criticism of The Force Awakens is that it recycles way too many ideas and plot points from the Original Trilogy, to the point that it sometimes feels like a remake of A New Hope with the characters' names changed. To wit: a young desert dweller from a backwater planet gets pulled into a war between the evil Empire and the noble Rebels after a chance encounter with a diminutive robot carrying secret information that could save the Rebellion, then goes on a quest across the galaxy to Bring News Back with the help of a dashing space pilot and a grizzled Mentor Archetype, climaxing with a scene where the mentor is killed, the Rebels destroy an armored battle station that destroys planets, and the heroes rescue the female lead from captivity in the Empire's fortress.
  
  One can nearly say the same about Return of the Jedi, where the writers decided to end the trilogy by having the Rebels blow up a second Death Star instead of coming up with a new action sequence—not to mention that the first act had the heroes returning to Tatooine for a rescue mission that easily could have taken place on a new planet. The call backs there worked with the mythical Hero's Journey concept (where a return to home is a classic theme), and the actual story (Luke attempting to redeem his father) was entirely new; the Death Star climax was rehashed precisely so that it didn't overshadow the super-dramatic confrontation in the throne room, which would have been harder to cross-cut with an action set-up that wasn't instantly familiar. People were less patient when The Force Awakens seemed to follow the Original Trilogy beat-for-beat, particularly since the writers had over thirty years to think of something different, didn't have the production hassles that Lucas had to deal with when he decided to condense everything for the finale of Return of the Jedi, and enforced a rather extreme Happy Ending Override that many felt basically undermined the struggles and Character Development of the Original Trilogy's heroes (let alone those of the Prequel Trilogy) to be All for Nothing, just for the sake of going through the same motions. This last sentiment gained more traction after The Last Jedi released, as many other fans adopted a wait-and-see attitude at the time only for TLJ to continue the trend by recycling The Empire Strikes Back.
• The power levels of the First Order and the Resistance:
  • The villains have always had as many resources as the plot wants them to have, but no one's Willing Suspension of Disbelief was broken over it until the First Order came along. In both of George's trilogies, the names of the Galactic Empire and Confederacy of Independent Systems alone told the audience that they had control over many planets off-screen (the opening scroll and a comment from Dooku treat ten thousand star systems joining the Confederacy as a casual aside), which gave them a plausible explanation for how they could afford all their weapons, armies, and fleets. On the other hand, the First Order is explicitly stated to be what remained of the Galactic Empire, making it far less believable that they could have ships, armies, and super-weapons even bigger and more powerful than their predecessors, and the Sith Eternal explicitly only ever had one planet whose location was only ever known by two people, and yet boasted the largest and most powerful fleet of all.
  • On the flipside, while the First Order seemed illogically massive to some fans, the Resistance seemed inexplicably puny considering they were supposedly backed by the New Republic and what they were up against. The Rebellion in the Original Trilogy, who the Resistance was obviously meant to be imitating, wasn't much better at the start; they had one base at a time, their fleet had fewer than three-dozen capital ships, and every film had the Empire coming close to wiping the rebellion out in a single strike. While one could argue the writers didn't think about the logistics of a successful rebellion in a galaxy of thousands of populated planets, it matched the tone by keeping the Rebels the underdogs and allowed for individual heroic moments to make a difference in battles. Plus, the Empire was the dominant power in the Galaxy, so the Rebellion having so few allies at first made sense, since they were the ones needing to win small victories over the more powerful Empire. Meanwhile, during the Prequel Trilogy, the Republic wasn't framed as the underdog but as the Separatist's equal^note While the Separatists are noted to have the bigger army, the Republic's army is of superior quality. Even in The Phantom Menace, which touched on the underdog theme by having the Trade Federation easily subdue the limited Naboo security forces, the invasion was a much smaller scale conflict only focusing on one planet without a strong military force and the Gungans joining the fray in the final battle helped even the odds. By contrast, the Resistance is a faction based around the New Republic, which is the largest faction on paper at the start of the new movies, and yet the Republic not only doesn't help, but the Resistance being so outnumbered makes no sense when they should in theory be able to quickly get help from a Galaxy on the same side. The original films had the underdog aspect from the start and the prequel trilogy drops it entirely, while the new trilogy forces the underdog angle (killing off the New Republic using Starkiller Base) despite it no longer making sense. It's also easier to notice because, while the Empire came close to wiping out their enemies multiple times, the First Order, from a realistic standpoint, succeeds in The Last Jedi by reducing the Resistance to roughly a dozen soldiers and a single freighter.
• Rey has garnered accusations of being overpowered due to learning Force techniques incredibly quickly, perhaps most notably resisting Kylo Ren's mind probe and turning it back on him very soon after she leaves Jakku. But this wasn't exactly without precedent: after all, Luke went from a farmhand on a backwater planet to the guy who made the one-in-a-million shot that destroyed the first Death Star in less than a week, even though he had only learned about the Force shortly before he left Tatooine. The difference was that Luke was already established to be a skilled pilot and a crack shot, so while he did use the Force without much more training than what Rey had, his most impressive Force-related feats in A New Hope took the form of enhancing skills he'd already developed before his training with Obi-Wan, which is more plausible than pulling new skills that require training to use out of nowhere. It also helped that Luke's feats didn't involve him single-handedly getting the better of more experienced Force users; Vader still clearly outmatches him in skill at the controls of a starfighter at the end of the film, Luke only surviving through Han's outside intervention, and after years of self-taught training and a period of Yoda by the time they meet again for a lightsaber duel in Empire Strikes Back, Luke still gets soundly beaten, loses a hand, and is forced to flee. On the other hand, Rey defeats Kylo in their first lightsaber duel, which both strained credulity regarding her abilities and undermined him as a threat, and then never loses a fight in Episodes 7 and 8^note Snoke tossing her around in the latter isn't a fight as she was disarmed of her lightsaber at that point., which take place over a much shorter timeframe than Episodes 4 and 5, so it's much harder to argue that she did training offscreen as Luke did in the gaps between movies.
• One of the most criticized parts of The Last Jedi is the Canto Bight sequence, an extended plot detour where Finn and Rose get into wacky misadventures in an alien casino while looking for a hacker; many viewers found the scene overly long and indulgent, and saw it as an unnecessary distraction from the battle against the First Order. As a few critics have pointed out, though, nearly every previous Star Wars movie has had at least one similar sequence, where the plot screeches to a halt while the heroes get into a scuffle that serves as a temporary distraction from important plot points. The original Star Wars had the trash compactor sequence (which distracts from Leia's rescue), The Empire Strikes Back had the "space worm" sequence (which distracts from the escape from the Empire), Return of the Jedi had the heroes getting captured by Ewoks (which distracts from the mission on Endor), The Phantom Menace had the pod race (which distracts from the journey to Coruscant) and Attack of the Clones had the fight in the droid factory (which distracts from Anakin and Padmé's mission to find and rescue Obi-Wan and ends with their capture). But not only is the Canto Bight sequence much longer and more elaborate than those previous sequences (especially when breaking out the fathiers is featured in the scene), it ultimately feels like a pointless "Shaggy Dog" Story — whereas every other such sequence at least accomplishes something related to what they're doing or the overall plot (the heroes still escape from the Death Star, Han is able to evade the Imperials for a while by hiding in the space worm, the Ewoks end up being recruited to help fight the Empire, Anakin wins his freedom by winning the pod race, and the droid factory fight/capture leaves the heroes in place to join the much bigger battle at the Geonosis battle arena when the clone army arrives), here Finn and Rose are arrested for violating the planet's parking laws before they reach the correct code breaker, and they're forced to settle for recruiting DJ, who betrays them. Not to mention that unlike every other side plot that the heroes get into, the Canto Bight sequence seems to end with a rather glaring anti-capitalist Author Filibuster that many audience members thought was out of place in a Star Wars movie.
• Another thing criticized about The Last Jedi is its decision to split up the Power Trio of Rey, Finn, and Poe. The thing is though, this isn't too dissimilar to what was done in Empire Strikes Back when Luke splits up from Han and Leia to continue his Jedi training with Yoda, or to some degree in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith where Anakin and Obi-Wan spend much of the movie separated. However, Empire, Clones and Revenge all had the benefit of having some time with all their respective main heroes on screen together before they split up, and they were able to draw upon the implied backstory of the characters (Luke, Han and Leia had implicitly spent the previous three years fighting the Empire, while Anakin and Obi-Wan had been student/teacher and friends for well over a decade) whereas in Last Jedi Rey, Finn, and Poe are split up almost right away and barely know each other, given that the film takes place immediately after The Force Awakens, in which they first met. On top of that, in Empire, Han and Leia still spend the rest of the movie together, so at least two thirds of the Power Trio stay together.
• One of the most common critiques of the later films in the trilogy is their treatment of Finn, who went from the arguable protagonist of much of The Force Awakens to having a subplot in The Last Jedi to being basically irrelevant in The Rise of Skywalker. Many went so far as to accuse the films of outright racism, and even John Boyega had nothing but unkind things to say about his usage in the latter two. But really, Finn's marginalization was already in swing in The Force Awakens; he's repeatedly shown up by Rey, doesn't demonstrate much in the way of special skills, is more often than not the butt of the joke, and his possible status as the next great Force-user is ultimately shown to be a Red Herring as he's quickly overpowered by Kylo Ren in their duel. Even when The Force Awakens came out, people often lamented how the film had placed relatively lesser focus on one of the few elements that wasn't derived from A New Hope, and Disney's relative disregard for his character was even, infamously, on display in foreign posters for the film◊. This was accepted then because Finn is at least along for the ride in almost every major scene, and this being the first film of a new trilogy, many people thought his relative lack of accomplishment was meant to make him a character who would develop into something more. In the later films, he tended to be sequestered off to his own plots which rarely did much to affect the overall story, with his status as the second-most-important character firmly taken by Kylo, while his actual level of ability more or less stayed the same. Rather than it being the start of Finn's heroic journey and development, as many had assumed, The Force Awakens ended up being his high-water mark.
• Captain Phasma was popular in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, and thus many fans were angered by her anticlimactic death during the climax of The Last Jedi. In this, she's merely following in the footsteps of Boba Fett, a hugely popular character who likewise appeared in two films only to be anticlimatically knocked into a sarlacc's maw by a temporarily blinded Han Solo with a stick. But it was a bit more understandable with Boba Fett, since ultimately he wasn't that important to the overarching conflict, being just one of several bounty hunters hired by Darth Vader to apprehend our heroes, and just so happening to be the one who actually succeeded in capturing them. Phasma, on the other hand, was a hugely important part of The Force Awakens, being Finn's commanding officer in the First Order before his defection. It doesn't exactly help that Fett was played by the mostly obscure British character actor Jeremy Bulloch, for whom Boba Fett was his best-known role, not to mention his lines were dubbed over and he got the part because he was the half-brother of associate producer Robert Watts and was cast because they needed someone to fit the suit. By contrast, Phasma was played by Gwendoline Christie, who already had a huge fan following in 2015 thanks to her role as Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones; with such a popular actor playing her, it was natural to expect Phasma to have a bigger role. Also, while it could easily be dismissed as naivete in a pre-Internet era that Lucas simply didn't realize Boba had a growing cult fanbase, it's a lot harder to justify in 2017, when a single Google search could unveil hundreds of people and articles grumbling about Phasma getting punked out.
• One of the main sources of Broken Base in The Last Jedi was Luke's characterization as a bitter and reclusive hermit following the destruction of his Jedi Temple. His characterization is similar to how Obi-Wan and Yoda are depicted in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back respectively. Obi-Wan and Yoda were wise, heroic masters who walked away from an ongoing war after becoming disillusioned due to a major personal failure, but agree to train Luke. Likewise, despite his anger and disillusionment, Luke does train and help Rey, albeit it was mostly to teach her why she shouldn't become a Jedi. The main differences are how far Johnson went with Luke's Achilles in His Tent behavior compared to his two masters, the Anachronic Order of the franchise, and Luke originally being portrayed and perceived as a Superior Successor to the other Jedi. In the original trilogy, it's Obi-Wan who encourages Luke to take up the fight, but also implies that he'll go without him, and Yoda is portrayed as wrong for not wanting to train Luke — both are too inflexible and staunchly dependent on the tenets of the old Order, and their idealistic younger selves in the prequels show how their obedience to those tenets failed Anakin and the Old Republic. Meanwhile, the young, heroic Luke of the original trilogy is portrayed as brash but unfettered, willing to risk anything to do the right thing and even see goodness in the corrupted Anakin. Him becoming a bitter hermit happens entirely off screen in a flashback, meaning that the audience is only given a small amount of time to justify him drastically changing his character. This makes the bitter Luke of The Last Jedi, who flat out gave up after making a single mistake, a lot harder to swallow. The idea that two of the most powerful Jedi abandoned the galaxy while the Empire consolidated its power is also largely an issue of Fridge Logic created by the prequels; viewing the OT alone, the timeline isn't clear enough to say what events Obi-Wan and Yoda were and weren't around for and how long they've been in exile, both are depicted as very old, and Yoda displays no real combat ability (Word of God was originally that he was only a spiritual teacher, and that Darth Vader would utterly demolish Yoda in a fight). The prequels would reveal that Yoda was the Jedi Grandmaster who once went toe-to-toe with Palpatine, that Obi-Wan is a few years younger in the OT than his actor was and that force-users can continue being effective into very advanced age, and that they went into exile right after the declaration of the Empire and each failing a single attempt to kill Palpatine and Vader. With Episode 7 and Episode 8's far tighter timeline meaning the First Order is rising while Rey tries to talk Luke out of retirement, Luke seems far more irresponsible and cowardly for refusing to use the abilities he should have by now to fight.
• Another major point of contention is that a heroic character - Luke Skywalker - is shown to be more morally complex than previously believed. Yet, only a year earlier, Rogue One also attempted to paint the heroic faction in a more morally gray light, and was more unanimously praised for doing so. However, Rogue One did so with a team of original characters, and told a story that was deliberately meant to fit right in to A New Hope, showing that the Grey-and-Gray Morality was only on a smaller scale and that the factions at large still fit into the series' classic mold of Black-and-White Morality. Meanwhile Luke is known for being one of the most idealistic and good-hearted heroes in the series, to the point that he was able to redeem Darth Vader by sticking to his values, which results in TLJ's transformation of Luke into a morally gray character coming across to some to be an insult to his characterization, even more so in that the movie revealed him to be partially responsible for the Resistance-First Order conflict because he considered killing his own pupil and nephew. While Luke nearly killed Vader in Episode 6 in a fit of rage - and only after much goading from the Emperor and Vader, with the final straw being the latter threatening to corrupt Leia and turn her to the Dark Side - he managed to stop himself and reaffirm his refusal to fall to the Dark Side. In TLJ, Luke's attempt at killing Ben happens in a flashback without more context to provide why he would do so other than word of mouth. One scene was meant to show Luke having a realistic reaction to a bad situation, then managing to defy making a terrible choice, while the other exists as in an already occurred moment in time where the audience is given very little to understand why it would happen.
• The Evil Overlord existing as a Generic Doomsday Villain and dying with little character development or backstory was first done in Return of the Jedi, where Emperor Palpatine was just as one-note as Snoke—he only got fleshed out when the prequels and side-material came. Rian Johnson even acknowledged this, saying that in both cases, who Snoke and Palpatine were wasn't important to the story. However, Snoke is heavily criticized for this status, with many fans arguing that just because it worked for Palpatine doesn't mean it can be repeated again due to various factors, such as the fact that Palpatine was the baseline status quo and the Final Boss introduced before the Star Wars universe was fully established, whereas Snoke shows up out of nowhere in an established SW universe with 40 years of stories behind its back. It also doesn't help that unlike Palpatine, Snoke was built up by the cast and crew as a major figure, where in the original trilogy, Palpatine was built up in the actual story. Thus, Luke standing up to Palpatine has a strong foundation since in story Luke knows Palpatine is the Big Bad, while Rey never learns about Snoke until right before her meeting, causing there to be no personal attachment whatsoever. Also, while the Empire's existence as a galactic power is self-evident (and hinted at emerging from a previous order with the disbanding of the Senate), the nature of Snoke's First Order is never quite spelled out on screen before his death.
• An oft-mocked scene in The Last Jedi was the bombing run in the opening sequence, with many being incredulous at the technology on display—that being, the bombers were so liberally based on the functions of World War II-era bombers as to be actively nonsensical. But really, Star Wars has always featured a lot of "World War II in space!" imagery; the Old-School Dogfight at the end of A New Hope was liberally inspired by The Dam Busters, and the franchise in general has never been big on realistic interstellar combat, playing Space Is an Ocean and similar tropes rather straight. The key issue was, in prior sequences, the World War II elements were mostly reserved to imagery and didn't tend to affect the plot, and the dogfights themselves were fast-paced and ended in victory. The Last Jedi stood out because the WWII-isms were not just happening to a greater degree than ever before, with bombs that appeared to be powered by gravity on a space vessel^note expanded universe materials would claim them to be powered by magnetism instead, but the bomber's odd functions were meant to provide the scene's main tension, drawing closer attention to them in a scene considerably slower-paced than any of the prior dogfights. Furthermore, it was also the first time that these WWII-isms actively resulted in negative consequences for the good guys and significant impact on the plot, since the destruction of the bombers is the main motivating factor behind Poe and Holdo's rivalry, which was already one of the film's most controversial elements.
• The Force seemingly being able to do whatever the plot needs it to do and increasing its potency has been a slowly growing sticking point for a long time coming, but it really hit the fan in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, wherein the former has Force Ghost Yoda calling down lightning to destroy a temple and Luke using an Astral Projection across light years to confront the First Order and the latter has Force Ghost Luke being able to interact with physical objects and use the Force, Palpatine in particular doing three of these things (being revealed to have spoken in Kylo Ren's head in the voices of Snoke and Vader to corrupt him, draining energy from Rey and Kylo to heal his deteriorating body when Rey refuses to participate in his body transferring ritual, and unleashing a thunderstorm of Force lightning capable of disabling entire fleets), items being able to be transferred through spacetime communication (Kylo Ren stealing Rey's necklace from the desert world she visits, a duel across spacetime causing the deteriorated helmet of Darth Vader to fall from Kylo's quarters to the planet below where he is, and Rey using this to hand the redeemed Kylo a lightsaber while she refuses to undergo the above ritual), and the usage of Force Healing. Such escalation was present even back in the Original Trilogy, with A New Hope originally making it out to be just some form of Combat Clairvoyance, Jedi Mind Trick, and limited Telepathy and premonition, The Empire Strikes Back adding on Telekinesis, increased physical ability, and even Force Ghosts (having bodies, as opposed to Obi-Wan's disembodied voice) while also increasing the scope of the first film's powers (Luke and Leia both are capable of sensing each other despite having respectively very little and no training, and Vader Force Chokes the captain of a ship from the bridge of an entirely different ship), and Return of the Jedi giving the signature Force Lightning of Sheev Palpatine. The thing was, such escalation felt more natural because the plot followed Luke coming into his own in mastering the Force, with the particularly noticeable displays of power coming from Old Masters well-versed in the arts and the feats weren't too outrageous. The Prequel Trilogy followed up on that and kept the potency of the Force to consistent levels (the one-time usage of Flash Stepping in The Phantom Menace notwithstanding), and while some found the displays a bit silly or being too similar to magic, the fact that the time period spanned the Jedi's peak at least meant it was understandable why such powers may have existed and were lost by the time Luke was being trained. The Sequel Trilogy's escalation, however, retroactively makes the feats and struggles of the Original and even Prequel Trilogy look redundant when viewed in hindsight.
• In The Rise of Skywalker, Emperor Palpatine's return was criticized as an Ass Pull since the film never explained how he could survive falling down a bottomless shaft and getting caught in the exploding Death Star II aside from vague references to Sith magic.^note For the definitive answer, it would later be clarified in the novelization that like in Dark Empire, he was a clone. One could say the same about Darth Maul's similarly contrived survival in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Despite getting bisected at the waist and falling into a bottomless shaft in The Phantom Menace, Maul managed to survive for over a decade before having his strength and sanity restored by Mother Talzin. The only explanation behind his revival was his rage against Kenobi and space magic. While Maul's resurrection was ludicrous even by Star Wars standards and could be seen as cynical fanservice at face value, fans excused it because the series actually put Maul to good use. Since Maul was seen as a flat villain with wasted potential in The Phantom Menace, bringing him back further fleshed out his personality and provided more cool action scenes. As Maul killed Qui-Gon Jinn and fought Obi-Wan previously, he fulfilled the role of a personal archenemy for Kenobi. In contrast, Palpatine already had plenty of screen-time and characterization throughout the first six movies, meaning that he doesn't have the excuse of being a wasted character to justify his return out-of-universe. Whereas Maul’s connection to Kenobi felt like a natural progression of their previous interactions in The Phantom Menace, Palpatine’s personal connection to one of the main protagonists, being Rey’s grandfather, had to be invented for the movie. While Maul's resurrection didn't really undo the outcome of The Phantom Menace, bringing Palpatine Back from the Dead undermines the ending of the story told through the first six movies, resulting in much less enthusiasm for his revival. On top of that, while Maul's return didn't overshadow the central Clone Wars conflict or undermine Palpatine's grand conspiracy, Palpatine's role as the Big Bad in the Rise of Skywalker ended up sidelining the entire rise of the First Order and Kylo Ren's role as the main villain of the Sequel trilogy, making it less acceptable to audiences.
• The Rise of Skywalker was criticized for retroactively making the Star Wars saga about Palpatine's bloodline instead of the Skywalkers due to Palpatine returning and Rey being revealed to be his granddaughter. In reality, the Prequel Trilogy was where Palpatine's increased spotlight began as he was running both the Separatists and the Republic while making everyone his pawns, and it even set up the potential for his resurrection by establishing him as someone versed in Dark Side knowledge centered around creating life and cheating death. The difference is that the Prequel Trilogy sacrificed nothing for his increased screen-time, but the Sequel Trilogy's increased spotlight of his bloodline came at the cost of characters getting sidelined, plots going nowhere, and the message of the the previous film about how a nobody can be a hero being undermined due to the reveal that Rey's abilities and relevance result from being Palpatine's granddaughter.
• The Rise of Skywalker was seen as too reliant on supplementary material for audiences to understand its plot and characters. In truth, as far back as the Original Trilogy, Star Wars has always relied on its Expanded Universe to help fill in narrative gaps with the novelizations elaborating on Palpatine's personality and background. Despite this, the Original Trilogy can be enjoyed as its own standalone saga with the tie-ins being extra bonuses that aren't necessary for understanding the goals and motivations of the main heroes. The Prequel Trilogy also used tie-ins, a bit more extensively than the Original Trilogy, most notably with Star Wars: Clone Wars depicting how Palpatine was kidnapped by Grievous, but the films could still be understood without having seen the other material. However, as pointed out by film critic Darren Mooney, the tie-ins are absolutely necessary for understanding the character motivations and relationships in The Rise of Skywalker. Most notably, Lando's backstory of his daughter being kidnapped by the First Order is completely absent in the main film. Without having read the Visual Dictionary, Lando's motivation and inter-generational friendship with ex-stormtrooper Jannah is rendered empty. Likewise, the message that Palaptine broadcast to the galaxy, announcing his return, was revealed not in the film itself but in a Fortnite live event.^note In addition to the actual reason he was able to come back at all being revealed in the novelization of The Rise of Skywalker, he was a clone body of Palpatine containing his soul. Without these details, The Rise of Skywalker becomes incoherent and confusing. Not to mention, the film simultaneously retcons huge parts of the previously established EU (Poe Dameron's backstory, Operation: Cinder, Snoke's identity), which sends the public mixed messages about the importance of the EU, and alienated the devoted fans most likely to consume the EU content the film was reliant on.
• Common complaints of The Rise of Skywalker include overusing fanservice, copying storylines from the Original Trilogy, having a villain that pops up out of nowhere with minimal explanation and failing to explain other things (particularly around the backstory and context-providing worldbuilding). These elements were all present in The Force Awakens, which was more highly praised by both critics and fans; the basic plot is very similar to A New Hope, the origins of the First Order and Snoke are vague, many mysteries are left unsolved and so on. Because The Force Awakens was the first film in a new trilogy and it had been ten years since a Star Wars film was released,^note discounting the Clone Wars pilot, and even that was still seven years before TFA people were more willing to accept this as a way to appeal to long-time fans following the divisive reaction to the Prequels and draw in new fans, believing that the sequels would address these mysteries and subsequently go in new directions. The Rise of Skywalker is the final film in the trilogy and the Skywalker Saga itself, and by this point viewers were not as forgiving of these elements; the lack of explanations is frustrating rather than intriguing, the fanservice comes off as cheap pandering, Palpatine's sudden return reeks of Ass Pull and the plot feels less like a homage and more like an unimaginative rehash.
• The sequel trilogy (and to a somewhat lesser extent, the prequels) caught criticism for falling back on Black-and-White Morality and other questionable tropes like Kylo Ren's Easy Evangelism and the First Order having no real political depth beyond allusions to Nazism. However, the Original Trilogy's Empire was just as, if not more generic an Evil Empire, only fleshed out politically in the prequels and EU. There also were nuances to character morality in the Original Trilogy, with Imperials being humanized in a few ways^note Stormtroopers are heard having casual conversations in ANH; Captain Needa practically sacrifices himself to Darth Vader to spare the lives of his underlings when they lose track of the heroes in ESB; Moff Jerjerrod displays concern for the troops on Endor in a few deleted scenes in ROTJ. and characters like Han and Lando are portrayed as morally ambiguous in their debut films, both of them having arcs in the back half of the respective films where they seemingly abandon or betray the heroes only to come around at the last moment and save the day. The rise of the alt-right and the greater attention paid to Islamic extremism decades later, though, would re-invigorate in-depth discussions of fascism, authoritarianism, and violent rebellion. And not only was Darth Vader apparently converted to the good side by saving his own child from a man he was established to have no loyalty to, but he appeared in a symbolic stand-in for Heaven at the end, indicating he was Easily Forgiven for his atrocities by both Luke and the Force. This was easier to overlook in the OT, though, because it was Vader's arc that largely popularized such redemption tropes, and lead to more complex and nuanced ones.

Anthology Movies

• Rogue One caught some mild flack for a few gratuitous references to Disney's animated Star Wars TV shows, which were completely lost on people who had only watched the live-action movies. Among other things, Chopper and the Ghost from Star Wars Rebels both made background cameos, the supplementary materials established that Cassian Andor was a former "Fulcrum" informant and Saw Gerrera from Star Wars: The Clone Wars played a major supporting role. Overall, though, those references were just bonuses for savvy fans and weren't too distracting or confusing for casual viewers who hadn't seen the shows. Most references were kept to the background for eagle-eyed fans, and even Saw Gerrera's role in this film (as Jyn Erso's mentor and surrogate father) was perfectly understandable to people who had never heard of the character. People weren't quite as forgiving when Solo took things a step further with The Reveal that Darth Maul was the leader of the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate. Rather than just being a small bonus, that reveal was a hugely important plot point clearly meant to lead to future adventures, and it was actively baffling to anybody who hadn't seen later seasons of The Clone Wars or read Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir—which revealed that Maul survived his apparent death back in The Phantom Menace and explained how he rose back to power as an independent villain. Furthermore, (Darth) Maul is an iconic character, being The Heavy of The Phantom Menace and heavily featured in that film’s marketing, making him stand out more compared to a minor figure like Gerrera.
• You could also credit Rogue One with giving backstories to self-explanatory things, like the Death Star's weak point or the Rogue Squadron callsign (and even a bit of Techno Babble to explain the superlaser). Audiences had accepted for decades that the Death Star was just a really big gun whose design flaw was easy to shrug off as the product of the same Awesome, but Impractical style that the Empire favors enough to have built a weapon like the Death Star in the first place,^note The Legends novel Death Star explained that it was an honest mistake that was never fixed because the request to do got so lost in bureaucracy until it was too late and the Rogue Squadron callsign sounding cool was all the explanation it needed. That said, the origins of a vast superweapon or the Rebel Alliance's elite squadron had some meat on their bones; these things were major in-universe, after all, and therefore developed into story beats naturally enough. Solo, however, decided to focus more on giving origins to trivial background items like Han Solo's blaster, Chewbacca's bandoleer, Han's last name, and the little notch on the nose of the Millennium Falcon, none of which have any bearing on larger plot developments, themes or characters. The backstory of these minor objects, if anything, turned out to be a rich well of Narm, because there really couldn't be, nor was there, a story to, say, Chewbacca's bandoleer besides "he put it on" — not only is it silly to draw attention to it, but if anything, it raises questions as to why Chewie apparently wore the same bandoleer for over 40 years.
• Solo wasn't the first time that an effort was made at giving Han Solo himself a definitive origin story. That distinction actually goes to several books in the Legends continuity that were devoted quite heavily to exploring Han Solo's background and past prior to A New Hope. But unlike Solo, the Legends novels depicting Han's background had several mitigating factors. For starters, the backstory details that are given particularly strong emphasis are ones that either heavily tied into stuff that would be important in the films (i.e. Han's friendship with Chewie, former friendship with Lando, his acquisition of the Millennium Falcon, etc.) or would at the very least contribute to his general worldview and personality by the time of his first appearance in A New Hope; whereas Solo would go so far as to focus on important matters while also drawing needless attention to more superficial elements as described above. Secondly, the Legends novels had many of the most important story beats for Han's backstory be spread out over the course of multiple books, whereas Solo had a sizable number of them confined to a single movie, which strained willing suspension of disbelief. Finally, even before the entirety of the Legends continuity was rendered non-canon after Disney's acquisition of Star Wars, the novels detailing Han Solo's backstory were designated as Expanded Universe material that one didn't absolutely have to read in order to understand and enjoy what happened in the films; whereas Solo was called practically from the rooftops to be treated as unambiguous official canon that needs to be consumed to understand his character, contributing to the feeling of shattered mystique that a lot of people ended up experiencing after watching this movie.
• Another minor element of criticism Solo received was how L3-37's 'droid rights' rebellion plotline was largely played for laughs and not treated with the proper weight that some critics argued it deserved. But the earliest seeds of droids being a case of What Measure Is a Non-Human? were already present from the very beginning of the franchise. While the earlier films of the franchise very swiftly established how droids had genuine personalities of their own instead of just being mindless machines, the earlier films also just as clearly established how droids were often used as servants who did various chores for the people who owned them while also playing a lot of the more unpleasant situations that the droids (particularly C-3PO) ended up undergoing for laughs. But this was easier to let slide and consider not that big of an issue in the earlier films because the implications that could be made from the existence of droids and their having personalities was never really a particularly strong element of focus in the franchise, and the fact that the droids had personalities was never explicitly labeled as comparable to them having human level intelligence or being entitled to their own equivalent of human rights. It certainly also helped that, as much as the situations of misfortune they tended to undergo were usually played for laughs, there was never any explicit proof that the work they engaged in outside said situations of misfortune were indicative of them being forced into doing anything they didn't want to do. L3-37's droid rebellion similarly being played for laughs, however, proved a lot harder to let slide since, unlike the earlier films of the franchise, Solo did draw attention to the plight of droids by explicitly showing the droids at the Spice Mines as being outright forced to do manual labor and other tasks against their will through use of restraining bolts and similarly drew deliberate parallels to slavery (and in a film where human and alien slavery was already a recurring plot point that was getting played for drama), which made the whole rebellion's treatment as something to be considered humorous instead of something to take seriously considerably more objectionable than the similar comedic treatment of droids getting into unpleasant situations that had been featured in the earlier entries of the franchise.

Animated Shows

• A common criticism of Star Wars Rebels was the lack of casualties among the heroes and their numerous victories make the Empire (save its highest ranking figures like Darth Vader, who is limited in his allotted screentime) look ineffective, despite them ostensibly being the tyrannical rulers of the galaxy. You could almost say the same about Star Wars: The Clone Wars. In The Clone Wars, the heroes commonly make it through battles unscathed, with the Separatists suffering numerous defeats. It is more forgivable in The Clone Wars, as canon dictates most of the main cast has to live until Revenge of the Sith, and there are still numerous casualties among the supporting cast. In contrast, the main cast of Rebels consisted entirely of characters who had never appeared in the films (aside from Chopper, who makes a cameo in Rogue One), making their continued survival stick out more (up until season 4 when a major cast member was finally killed off, due to Kanan's Heroic Sacrifice). In addition, while Revenge of the Sith establishes the Clone Wars were stuck in a stalemate before Count Dooku's death, the opening crawl of A New Hope establishes that the theft of the Death Star plans was the Rebellion's first major victory, something that Rebels blatantly and repeatedly contradicts (albeit in not wholly irreconcilable ways).
• Both Star Wars: Rebels and Star Wars: The Bad Batch have received criticism for their abundance of filler episodes. However, filler was also a common occurrence in The Clone Wars. It was less noticeable in The Clone Wars, as that show was closer in format to an anthology show with the series regularly switching the focus after every arc, and only a few characters getting multiple arcs dedicated to them. In comparison, Rebels and The Bad Batch each have a standard main cast, which neither show tends to deviate from. This not only makes the number of filler episodes more noticeable, but it also results in fans feeling the overarching plot points don't get the amount of time needed to reach their full potential. Furthermore, while one could potentially excuse filler being a necessary presence for The Clone Wars and Rebels to allow more opportunities for viewers to catch up on the show in reruns, that excuse can’t apply to The Bad Batch as it was made specifically for Disney+, which offers 24/7 access to every episode.

Live-Action Shows

• The Mod bike gang in The Book of Boba Fett was criticized for having incredibly garish vehicles that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of trying to appeal to 1950s nostalgia in the style of American Graffiti. In truth, many of the non-spaceship vehicles in Star Wars were made as a Zeerust homage to the cars and locations of previous decades, with Attack of the Clones in particular going out of its way to show off a diner on Coruscant that is just as deliberate a Shout-Out to American Graffiti as the bikes are here. The only problem is that the Mods' brightly colored and shiny rides contrast glaringly with the harsh, faded, and derelict environment of Mos Espa, making the deliberate '50s homage far more goofy-looking than they would on Coruscant or any other planet in the galaxy. The fact that they seem to move incredibly slowly doesn't help.
• One of the bigger complaints regarding Obi-Wan Kenobi is how the show's status as an Interquel between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope made the stakes feel nonexistent due to the inevitable Foregone Conclusion regarding the show's ending. With that said, several of Star Wars' most popular installments were an interquel between ROTS and ANH, with notable examples just from Disney's canon including Rebels and Rogue One. However, nobody was bothered by this at the time of their release due to their stories focusing on brand-new characters and their overall standing within the Star Wars universe, with familiar characters primarily taking a backseat so the show/movie could focus on the main protagonists' vastly different adventures. By contrast, Obi-Wan Kenobi focuses primarily on the titular main character who has already been fully developed over the course of several shows and movies, with little more to make him interesting, much less that can be done without interfering with what will inevitably happen in A New Hope. His climactic battles with Darth Vader also felt forced and unearned to some viewers, since neither Vader nor Obi-Wan can do any lasting damage to each other due to their Saved by Canon status.
• Many problems in The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi started with the first live-action Star Wars show The Mandalorian.
  • When brought into live-action for The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Cad Bane, the Grand Inquisitor and the Fifth Brother were criticized for not resembling their original animated incarnations. There was a similar backlash to Ahsoka Tano's redesigned appearance for her live-action debut in The Mandalorian. Whereas the animated show Star Wars Rebels depicted Ahsoka as a towering figure with long head tails, in live-action, she was played by the 5'6" (167.6 cm) Rosario Dawson and had much shorter head tails. Despite some initial criticism, fans came to accept Ahsoka's changed appearance as Dawson's performance compensated for her shorter stature, and they understood the shorter head tails were a necessary medium change for Dawson and her body double Caitlin Dechelle to perform dynamic stunts unprohibited. In contrast, Bane, the Grand Inquisitor and the Fifth Brother didn't have the same excuse to justify their new appearances as they weren't involved in dynamic action scenes that would necessitate less elaborate prosthetic make-up nor did they have any good performances to distract from their altered appearances. The Fifth Brother was especially singled out as he was given a Race Lift from Latino to Asian for no discernable reason. It also didn't help that whereas Ahsoka looked like a Togruta as seen in live-action movies, Bane and the Grand Inquisitor didn't even remotely resemble the Duros and Pau'an that their species were depicted as before in the live-action movies.
  • The Mandalorian received some criticism for having numerous references to the greater Star Wars expanded universe, which were confusing for audiences who had only watched the live-action movies. Most notably, Season 2 not only had a major subplot regarding ownership of the Darksaber, an important Mandalorian artifact in The Clone Wars and Rebels, but it also brought over major characters from the animated series including Bo-Katan and Ahsoka Tano. While these continuity nods were confusing, it was ameliorated somewhat by having protagonist Din Djarin as the Audience Surrogate. Given Din's unfamiliarity with the broader Star Wars galaxy, this makes him relatable to audiences who were introduced to the Disney-era expanded universe through The Mandalorian while also providing an in-universe justification for exposition that would explain the greater Star Wars setting. Furthermore, the characters and plotlines actually contributed to Din's story whether by challenging his Mandalorian beliefs or helping him find a home for Grogu. In contrast, Boba and Kenobi are more experienced characters who acted nonchalantly to expanded universe characters like Cad Bane and the Inquisitors, making it more difficult for audiences to relate to them. Also, the continuity references turned into major distractions with Boba's crime boss storyline taking a backseat to Din's Mandalorian adventures in two episodes of The Book of Boba Fett while the Inquisitors took screentime away from the Kenobi-Vader conflict in Obi-Wan Kenobi. Subsequently, rather than enhancing the narrative and world-building, the continuity references in Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi became distracting and confusing.
    • This same criticism would be thrown back at The Mandalorian for its third season, which placed a heavier focus on Bo-Katan at the expense of Din and Grogu's story while also shifting focus to other parts of the Star Wars galaxy (i.e. the corruption within the New Republic, cameos by Star Wars characters and big name celebrities). Again, Season 2 did this to a similar extent, but it was done via these characters and stories having merely intersected with Din's while still forwarding a challenge to his beliefs and showing his vulnerable side. Season 3 not only undid much of that development by reuniting Din and Grogu on The Book of Boba Fett and then quickly finishing Din's quest for redemption the aforementioned show set him on, but any further characterization between the two was limited to Din's parental frustrations at Grogu's cute antics or his efforts to support Bo-Katan. Thus, said shift of focus towards the eventual downfall of the New Republic and Carson Teva's efforts on the New Frontier weren't nearly as tolerated as ones that focused on Cobb Vanth, Ahsoka Tano, and Boba Fett.
  • The Mandalorian made extensive use of Volume soundstages where actors and sets are filmed while surrounded by curved LED screens projecting backgrounds. Although Volume offers the convenience of green screen backdrops but with better background lighting and visual references for actors, it confines filming to smaller sets that discourage massive crowds and wide shots. Nonetheless, the Volume worked for The Mandalorian because of its minimalistic design that consisted of mostly rural settings, small-scale action scenes and limited number of characters per scene. However, Volume proved unsuitable for the next two Star Wars shows given their larger scale and more ambitious aims. As those The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi involved more complex action scenes and larger crowds consisting of dozens, if not hundreds, of characters on-screen, the technology showed its limits as it forces actors and directors to work within a confined space with limited freedom for movement. This resulted in many scenes that were either lethargic (like the infamously slow speeder chase in The Book of Boba Fett) or incomprehensible (like the claustrophobic Battle of Jabiim in Obi-Wan Kenobi). It should be noted that both series were filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated increased use of Volume since it was the safest location to film on.
• One criticism of Obi-Wan Kenobi was that several Dark Side characters such as the Grand Inquisitor and Reva Sevander / Third Sister survived deaths that should in theory have killed them, whether or not due to The Power of Hate. This has its roots in previous installments, where Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader and Darth Maul made use of it to survive death. But their use of hatred wasn't the sole reason for their survival, as after losing three limbs and burning near lava, Anakin (while Saved by Canon due to Revenge of the Sith being a prequel) had injuries so severe that Sheev Palpatine had to put him in a life support suit to survive. Maul, meanwhile, spent decades bisected and delirious, but had the magic of the Nightsisters keeping him alive on his own, and Savage Opress had to find him and get Mother Talzin to restore his mind. While both characters were dispatched after a long, climactic battle, had outside help to save them, and still had lasting consequences (such as cybernetic parts), the Grand Inquisitor and Reva suffered anticlimatic stabs in the chest and returned no worse for wear than before, a criticism that worsened in Ahsoka with the first Light Side character to survive what would normally be fatal, when Sabine Wren, originally introduced as a non-Force Sensitive Mandalorian, is retconned as Force Sensitive and survives being stabbed, despite that exact wound being what killed Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace.
• A recurring criticism of the Disney+ shows (bar Andor) is that they're too short as TV shows with none of their seasons having the standard 10-12 episode length as seen in other Sci-Fi shows. However, the first Disney+ show, The Mandalorian, also had short season length yet didn't get as much flack because it was designed for shortform storytelling with its more accessible adventure-of-the-week format and relatively small cast size. However, the other shows have larger casts and more ambitious crossover storylines that weren't suited for the short seasonal length. The Book of Boba Fett had only 7 episodes and of those two, Boba was completely sidelined by Din Djarin. Ahsoka Season 1 had to introduce Rebels characters in live-action, set up an upcoming crossover movie with Mandalorian and Boba Fett shows, introduce new worlds and build upon the overarching series's arcs that started in Clone Wars, all within 8 episodes. Subsequently, Ahsoka Season 1 had to rush past some plot details and either omit or downplay key characters; most egregiously, Thrawn and Ezra only showed up in the last 3 episodes, and Zeb was completely absent despite being a major character in Rebels. Many viewers and critics felt that the shows would benefit greatly they had longer seasons if only so that characters and plotlines won't have to compete for screentime.
• Ahsoka received some criticism regarding the choreography of its lightsaber battles, with many people complaining that they felt stiff and slow when compared to the truly spectacular duels of previous live-action installments. Many people forget that Star Wars didn't always have such great fight choreography, with the Original Trilogy in particular being very restrained in how lightsaber wielders dueled one another. This doesn't get much flack because the few characters who did use lightsabers (Luke, Obi-Wan and Vader) were inexperienced, out-of-practice, and debilitated due to their robotic parts respectively. As such, people understood that it would make sense for the characters to not have intense, stunt-filled battles that constantly moved around grand setpieces. By contrast, Ahsoka gets more biting criticism due to the show focusing on a Prequel-era character who is shown to have fought in a similar flashy and acrobatic style in the past and is still relatively fit and well-trained in the present day, making her slower movements here all the more noticeable and unimpressive.

Comic Books

• Shattered Empire's Operation: Cinder - Palpatine's arrangement to have the Empire rain destruction upon several planets in the event of his death as an act of intimidation, regardless of how loyal or otherwise the planets in question were to the Empire beforehand - is derided by some as a pointlessly evil and impractical tactic, especially after later material indicated that Palpatine had contingency plans that would let him return to life and retake control of the galaxy at a later date. Such tactics have been a staple of the Empire's playbook as far back as A New Hope, where it put a massive amount of resources into constructing the Death Star - a single gigantic space station with little purpose besides giving the Empire a means to destroy planets and the subsequent intimidation factor - rather than investing in more capital ships or even the TIE Defender line, either of which would've been a far more efficient and practical means of combatting the Rebels and policing the galaxy. To say nothing of the same film having Grand Moff Tarkin use the Death Star to destroy Alderaan for little reason besides spiting Leia, with Legends material outright indicating that this act caused many Imperial supporters and neutrals to switch their loyalties to the Rebels instead. And then the Imperials decided to build another Death Star in the third film of the franchise. However, as impractical as these actions during the original trilogy were, they could at least be somewhat justified in that the Empire were the villainous overdogs in a position of power over the galaxy, and especially against the underdog rebels, which made it somewhat understandable that they'd feel confident enough in their ability to feel no fear in engaging in impractical and inefficient actions that could still be useful as intimidation that could reasonably make the more fearful and weak willed civilians who hadn't already committed to the rebels' side slower to make the jump to support the rebels. Operation: Cinder, on the other hand, occurs not too long after Palpatine's death, with the Empire now in a position of major weakness against the rebels. And as a result, what would have come across as at least partially reasonable as an act of intimidation from a seemingly superior force prior to Palpatine's death ended up coming across as a hilariously pointless act of petty violence and spite from a now headless and defanged force in a position where the resources used for such would arguably have been better served for more defensive actions, making the Empire look even more pathetic and harder to take seriously as a threat than it had while Palpatine was still alive.

Legends

• Fans still frequently cite Timothy Zahn's The Thrawn Trilogy as one of the best stories of the Legends franchise, if not the best. But in hindsight, it could also be blamed for starting most of the trends that would make Legends so divisive amongst fans in the long run. Notably, it was one of the first new Star Wars works that put major emphasis on realistic politics and military tactics while deemphasizing the spirituality and the mythic undertones of the Original Trilogy, and it introduced some surprising moral ambiguity to the conflict between the Galactic Empire and the New Republic, making the story feel more like a historical clash between rival nations than a sweeping epic about the battle between Good and Evil.
  
  At the time, though, most fans viewed this as a refreshing change of pace, showing that the Star Wars novels wouldn't just be a retread of the movies. It also helped that the story's more nuanced portrayal of warfare was directly linked to the introduction of Grand Admiral Thrawn himself—who became an instant fan-favorite and was explicitly designed to be as different from Vader and Palpatine as possible while still retaining his own kind of supervillain flair. Since the entire premise of the character was that he was a genius military tactician who relied on his intellect instead of on the Dark Side, it made sense that the story devoted considerable focus to his military strategy, and that he was written to have more redeeming qualities than the Sith. Not to mention that he had the secondary villains Joruus C'baoth and Mara Jade (both Force-wielders) to balance him out, making the story feel like an authentic Star Wars entry instead of just "Tom Clancy IN SPACE".
  
  The problems didn't really start until the later novels started copying the most superficial aspects of the Thrawn Trilogy without understanding why they worked so well in that story, and the whole Legends franchise started to seem stale when Timothy Zahn's bold reinterpretation of the Star Wars mythos just became its new status quo. It also didn't help that the series' "moral ambiguity" was gradually dialed up to the point that it started to seem excessively grim; while the Thrawn Trilogy was content with just humanizing the Imperials and acknowledging that the New Republic suffered from political corruption, later books featured story turns like Jacen Solo turning to the Dark Side and the Galactic Alliance becoming an authoritarian police state. And since later villains like the Yevethans, the Yuuzhan Vong, the Killiks, Darth Caedus, and Abeloth were nowhere near as interesting as Grand Admiral Thrawn, many readers found it hard to stay invested.
• One of the more mocked and overused plot elements of later Bantam stories was the "superweapon of the week" plot—i.e. stories fueled by the Empire stumbling onto some fantastical new technology that could be used to crush the Rebellion but mysteriously never got used to do that in the actual war. This is another idea that had its roots in the Thrawn Trilogy, which was partially fueled by all the strange and esoteric technology Thrawn pulled out of the mothballs to fight the New Republic: small-scale cloaking devices, gravity-well generators, cloning cylinders, and ysalamiri, just to name a few. But people broadly didn't mind it, because the focus was on how the technology was used, and the creative ways it was incorporated into Thrawn's tactical doctrine. There was also usually some level of explanation for why it wasn't widely used, and some of them were even building off things mentioned in the original films (clones and cloaking devices are both brought up). And while they were impressive, none of them really fit the label of a superweapon or hit anything resembling the Death Star's power, meaning that they didn't upstage the events of the films. What made superweapons-of-the-week so hated was that they often had little root in the films, were so absurdly overpowered that there was no need to use them creatively, and many of them were clearly meant to upstage the Death Star, making one wonder why the Empire wasn't using World Devastators or Galaxy Guns instead. The most notorious of these was the Sun Crusher, a piece of technology so patently stupid (a starfighter-sized ship that can blow up solar systems and survive direct hits from a superlaser) that it was difficult to not cry foul.
• Jedi Academy Trilogy:
  • One of the most common complaints about the trilogy is that Kyp Durron is Easily Forgiven by Luke Skywalker for blowing up Carida. The same thing could be said about Luke forgiving Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. However, Vader died after he was redeemed and forgiven by Luke, while Kyp Durron survived the whole story, making his Karma Houdini status more obvious.
  • The Sun Crusher is one of the most despised superweapons in the franchise, but even it was just taking existing trends to their natural conclusion, being the latest of many such weapons that was explicitly designed to be better than the Death Star. This goes back as far as Return of the Jedi, which implied the Death Star II was superior to the original (it was visibly bigger and its planet-killing superlaser could be fired more often at lower power to still take out capital ships in one hit), and further superweapons just got better and better (there was more than one World Devastator, and they could upgrade themselves with the materials they extracted while destroying a planet; the Galaxy Gun could fire through hyperspace before the target even knew it was in danger; etc). The difference was that later superweapons-of-the-week kept one of the most important aspects of the original Death Star besides its sheer destructive power: clearly-defined limitations and vulnerabilities that could be feasibly exploited; the Death Star II relied on an offsite shield generator for protection, and most future superweapons would have their own flaws to preserve a sense of narrative fair play (World Devastators were still vulnerable to starfighter weapons; the Galaxy Gun wasn't, but was vulnerable to a Star Destroyer crashing into it, which it was too slow to get out of the way of). In contrast, the Sun Crusher had no weaknesses - as mentioned, it was a starfighter-sized ship with missiles that could destroy entire solar systems, and so durable that that it could ram the bridge of a Star Destroyer with no damage to itself and even take a direct hit from a Death Star prototype's superlaser with only minor damage to its engines - meaning it completely destroyed any sense of balance merely by existing. Not helping matters was the fact that it was ultimately destroyed not by enemy action, but by its pilot Kyp Durron sending it into a black hole, robbing the story of any sense of catharsis that might've been had from actually defeating it.
• The Expanded Universe suffered from Depending on the Writer since the very beginning, but it didn't become a legitimate problem until the Del Rey novels. Back when Bantam published Star Wars books, all the writers were more concerned with writing their own stories than working with each other, and while this did result in inconsistent characterization across the franchise, this approach did allow each individual story to remain internally consistent. When Del Rey started publishing novels, multiple writers were forced to contribute their own books to multi-book story arcs like New Jedi Order, Legacy of the Force, and Fate of the Jedi, which suffered from contradictions and inconsistencies as a result.
  • The New Jedi Order books were a bold new direction for the Legends continuity, especially for readers who were at that point wanting to move away from the overused watered-down Zahn formula (see above). This mostly worked at the time — fans are heavily split on the series, but that's more to its content and plot than any technical flaws — but there were issues that, much like with the previously overused 'Timothy Zahn formula', only grew more apparent as more series of a similar pattern were published. More specifically, there was no clear story arc or "series Bible" that the authors were beholden to follow. And as a result, the overall story for New Jedi Order is rather inconsistent. The Yuuzhan Vong caste system was not well-established for several books, this same lack of clear set in stone rules for the caste system led to oddities like Nom Anor practicing Shaping as a path to advancement only for it to later be stated as heretical, exactly what "immune to the Force" meant changed with nearly every writer, and so on. A standout example is "Star By Star" introducing two obnoxiously overpowered units, the Yuuzhan Vong's voxyn and the New Republic's YVH droids, the former not only being able to sense and track Jedi but having toxins and diseases in every attack including their blood, the latter having regenerating armor that could tank a shot from a coralskipper and armed with blasters that could shoot one down. Later writers had to tone down the OPness to maintain dramatic tension. But despite all these issues, readers were still willing to at least tolerate the whole mess thanks to the books providing a then much needed breath of fresh air from the Zahn formula that had dominated so many Legends books that had been published prior. The series that followed the New Jedi Order, unfortunately, saw writers having even larger disagreements about story and character arcs, retconning or ignoring each others' works, and yanking the narrative in whatever direction they wanted it to go without paying any heed to what anyone else was doing. Most obviously, Karen Traviss yet again acted as a hypewoman for her Mandalorians for two books, only for all the other writers to pretty much ignore what she wrote. As a result, instead of ironing out the bumps in the road New Jedi Order suffered from, Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi allowed those bumps to become potholes that blew out the tires and caused the franchise to stall.
• Speaking of, Karen Traviss's focus on the brutal, principled Mandalorian warrior culture quickly made her books very popular, since Boba Fett's great design and intimidating aura had many fans from the beginning and a lot of readers had gotten tired of just how much focus the Force and its acolytes tended to get in the franchise. Traviss's revisionist take on the parts of the galaxy outside of the circle of mysticism associated with the force was welcomed with open arms... at first. As time went on, her Mandalorian stories increasingly came to idealize the Mandalorians, playing up their virtues, downplaying their flaws, and fawning over their skill and lethality, to the point that many fans came to resent that her work was just replacing one overexposed Creator's Pet with another. It didn't help that Traviss's characters (and arguably stories) escalated their denigration of Force-using characters and Jedi; it's one thing to feel the Jedi are overexposed and another thing to make the leap into hating them entirely. This arguably reached its nadir in her Clone Wars stories, which tried to depict Order 66 as a cathartic mass-execution of arrogant slave masters as much as a tragedy, when Depending on the Writer the Jedi might've been the beings who treated the clone army with the most humanity and compassion. To this day, Traviss's "fandalorians" are frequently seen as a bit of a Fandom Heresy, even as shifting canon and rewrites have somewhat mended the divide, even without the bad blood created by Traviss's tendency to contrast her "fandalorians" with what she called "talifans".
• The franchise has utilized Fallen Heroes as villains since the very first film, but no one had a problem with it until Legacy of the Force. Previous villains that fell under that category like Vader or Revan and Malak were introduced as Fallen Heroes, meaning that them being good people gone bad couldn't possibly alienate the audience. On the other hand, Jacen Solo was a popular character established in previous works as an intelligent and highly moral Jedi, meaning that he needed to take a level in dumbass for his fall to even happen, and everyone else had to become dumber and meaner so that they couldn't talk him out of falling to the Dark Side. And while all the other Fallen Heroes had at least one person offer them redemption, no one ever tried to redeem Jacen Solo, including his own family members that had successfully redeemed several Dark Side Force-users in the past. As a result, Legacy of the Force caused a major case of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring within the fanbase.
• The post-Endor era started out focusing on the adventures of Luke, Han, and Leia. This made sense because the franchise continued the story of the films, which included the stories of the Power Trio. Not focusing on them would have also angered the fans that wanted to see more stories about them. By the time of the Dark Nest Trilogy, the aversion of Comic-Book Time meant that Luke and Leia were in their fifties while Han was in his sixties, and they got even older in the trilogy's successors. Despite that, they were still going on galaxy-saving adventures like in the films. Their ages strained believability due to how old they were, especially Han who can't use the Force to circumvent old age. On top of that, works like I, Jedi, the Dark Forces Saga, the X-Wing Series, and Young Jedi Knights showed that post-Endor stories could be successful without Luke, Han, and Leia being the main characters, while the Old Republic games and both Clone Wars cartoons showed that Star Wars stories could be popular with them being completely absent. As a side-effect of their constant focus, other popular characters that were created as the franchise grew were either Demoted to Extra or killed off, including some of their children that could have succeeded them as the main characters and Luke's wife. All this caused fans to get sick of Luke, Han, and Leia during the later years of Legends, with some fans even wanting them to be killed off so the universe would be forced to tell stories without them. By the time of Fate of the Jedi, fans would joke about the trio still going on adventures forever and ever, even into their seventies, eighties, nineties, and beyond.
• As the amount of Legends works increased, the power of Dark Side masters increased with it, and it finally reached a breaking point with the Sith Emperor in Star Wars: The Old Republic. The Power Creep started in Dark Empire where a resurrected Palpatine was capable of generating Force wormholes, destroying fleets with the Force, ^note  according to Word of God decades later, he wasn't actually capable of these two, at least intentionally; Force Storms were the natural result of two powerful force-users clashing mentally, but this was lost on nearly every reader at the time. and resurrecting himself by transferring his spirit into clones. Later on in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Darth Nihilus was capable of draining the Force from an entire planet, eliminating all life on it; he could also use this power on a smaller scale to instantly kill anyone who approached him. What made this more tolerable was that both Palpatine and Nihilus clear limits and weaknesses despite their immense power, and in the case of Nihilus, his most impressive feat happened offscreen. Palpatine couldn't fully control the wormholes he generated, his clones died quicker than his original body due to being unable to contain his massive power, and he eventually couldn't generate anymore clones due to the source material being contaminated. Palpatine even demanded help from ancient Sith spirits when his final clone was on the verge of dying. While Darth Nihilus's Force Drain ability would be game-breaking to enemies who can't counter it, people who can counter it could easily defeat him, as shown by the game itself. Meanwhile, the Sith Emperor had nearly all the powers—including upgraded variations of them—of both Palpatine and Nihilus with none of their drawbacks, along with some other abilities. And unlike Palpatine and Nihilus, fans had no idea when or even if the Sith Emperor would ever be Killed Off for Real due to how often he's cheated death, and because of the MMO nature of The Old Republic making it doubtful the game's conflict will ever end, while every other Dark Side master would predictably be killed (or at least defeated) by the end of their stories. Because of this, the Sith Emperor was an infuriating Invincible Villain that ended up becoming The Scrappy.

Other

• George Lucas has always had a tendency to retcon elements in his own franchise via rereleases, and some fans have always found it annoying, but it didn't lead to too many distracting or controversial changes until the later installments. It started when he changed the title of Star Wars to Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope in 1981, and even removed home videos and workprints with the old title from circulation — but most fans shrugged this off, since he at least kept the movie's content unaltered. He attracted more complaints when he released the "Special Edition" versions of the original trilogy in theaters, featuring numerous unnecessary CGI alterations to major scenes. These changes were much more obtrusive, but they were outweighed by the many long-lost Deleted Scenes that were also reinserted, many of which (like Luke and Biggs' reunion) provided more meaningful context for key scenes. When further Special Editions ran out of redeeming qualities but continued introducing negative ones, most infamously the constant editing of the Han vs Greedo scene, fans finally got fed up with them. Eventually, it got to the point where by the time the Blu-ray Special Editions rolled along, even those who prefer the original versions started to miss the original Special Editions.

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