Lit How did the prequels affect the post-RoTJ timeline?

Well, this answer is probably much more on-the-nose than what you're looking for, but The Dark Nest Trilogy made a pretty obvious effort to dovetail with the post-RotS Star Wars milieu. There was that plot point where Luke and Leia finally find out about their mother, and Luke later recovers a holovid, from deep inside R2's memory, of Padme actually giving birth to them (it's been about ten years since I read The Swarm War, I might be remembering it wrong). I can't speak much to one-off references to Naboo or the Trade Federation in the NJO, but Dark Nest seems to bear the most direct effect of "prequelification" or whatever we're calling it now, and of course this was at a time after RotS when the movie "Saga" was "officially" "complete," so I'm sure Denning felt the need to tie it all together. But I did think it was shoehorned. But, anywhere, this is a pretty clear influence, more than anything we see before or after IMO.

Going into LoF it was obvious that the EU had become pretty prequel-esque. Lots and lots of time was spent on Coruscant, not to mention the Jedi moved into the Temple there. I wasn't a huge fan of how close the post-NJO Jedi Order mirrored the Old Jedi Order (Council, Grand Master, Code, etc.) but to be fair, I recall somewhere in LoF when Luke, in a moment of reflection, thinks about how glad he is that his Jedi aren't like the old (prequel) Jedi in that they can marry or dabble sparingly in the Dark Side or something like that; that they're less "dogmatic" (to use Palpatine's descriptor from the prequels). But I think that might have been a last-ditch effort on the author's part to make sure the reader thought the New Jedi Order was not too similar to the old, but they were still pretty similar.

 

Are you implying George Lucas is autistic? I've never heard of that before.


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You know the emulated the prequels in setting and style somewhat but really dropped the ball when it came to integrating prequel era species, events, and so on in the NJO and post NJO era. Where are the Neimodians? The Muuns? Are there any hidden factories of battle droids waiting to be cranked up? Are there debates in the GA military over the merits of clone soldiers. A lot of prequel stuff could have been carried over organically into the post NJO era but they didn't do that.

 

He's something.

I mean, his dialogue suggests a lack of... connection to the reality of human interaction, and he always comes across as a bit... distant when you hear anecdotes from people on set.

 

The reality of human interaction? What precisely is that supposed to mean? High brow French? Dockworker slang?

You forget the characters(well the Jedi) are a bunch of stoic quasi Buddhist Taoist philosopher monks and wouldn't talk in a manner common for most people.

The dialogue can be cringey I'll admit yes. I'd say as well the OT dialogue was the similar in that regard. Heck the OT's dialogue was at a lower reading level.

As an aside I've always wondered why a lot of sci fi/fantasy movies have cringey or stilted dialogue I think it probably has to do with actors prejudice against the genre. There like "Oh God I have to dress up in these stupid costumes, go to these conventions with nerdy losers and pretend I like it, deal with annoying script writers and and other nerdy nonsense." Because of that prejudice their either consciously or unconsciously unenthusiastic about their lines and roles and behave in a manner subtly expressing their frustrations.

They wouldn't admit such sentiments of course at least not openly or while their on contract but I suspect a lot of actors in such roles do harbor such sentiments.

 

I don't just mean the PT. There's that anecdote of Harrison Ford telling him "you can write ****, but you can't say it." Or his instinctive pushback on the "I love you" "I know" exchange that Kersh and Ford wanted.

 

The biggest impact, as has been said by others, was the decision that because the prequels did X therefore this is how X should be always.

Thus mono-form Jedi and government when the whole point of both in the post-ROTJ EU was that they were not to be their predecessors! But no, we cannot have different iterations of the Jedi Order nor can there be a distinctly different New Republic and it certainly cannot be successful.

It was under no requirement to be this way, but to be other would have required more imagination and creativity than LFL possessed at the time.

 

Taking aside questions of canon and lore; Star Wars was insanely profitable again, so LFL and Del Rey went conservative. Authors who would churn out predictable material were added to the stable, on the assumption if you gave them Luke + Prequel Superficial Flip Out Jedi Moves it would satisfy all the fan's needs at once. The priority became product turnover, and so the creative freedom the early Bantam stuff had was a sorry thing of the past.

 

Someone really should - and probably has in the realms of fanfic - do a parody of the PT sword fights. Say Luke finds a PT Jedi Manual and starts looking through it:

Lesson 12: Disarming attackers - jump high, with a somersault twist and spin 1080 degrees to remove hand at the wrist at an angle of 67 degrees upwards.

Luke: I don't just slice their arm off?

 

I thought prequel duels were an old fashioned affair, where the test is endurance, stamina and form. The object is not at all to harm your opponent, but rather, to strike at their blades until one of you tires of it?

 

The prequel duels seemed to change over time - I really liked the Qui-Gon / Obi-Wan versus Maul fight, it had more flash than the OT, but it also had Qui-Gon nutting Maul. Jump forward to AotC and the ObiWan /Anakin vs Dooku fight is fairly grounded, then it moves on to Dooku vs Ninja Rabbit.

This notorious but very funny gif is from RotS:



Which tends to eclipse everything else in the PT where the lightsaber duels are concerned.

The flashy PT-style fights do work well in Clone Wars, perhaps because animation is the better medium for that.

 

They should have gone old school and had the jedi use Force kick during their fighting

 

Interestingly enough many say that the newest duel in the saga, Rey vs Kylo, had Rey channeling Palpatine's fighting style, sparking speculation on her heritage.

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To be fair, Luke hit people with the saber. He didn't just wave it about in energetic circles waiting for them to concede defeat on artistic grounds.

 

A bit late, but to chime in on Coruscant in TFA, I can definitely believe that originally Abrams & Co were considering it, but the one thing that does give me pause in feeling 100% about it is that, at least as far as I recall, all the concept art for it in The Art of TFA is simply called "Republic City" or "Republic Planet" or "Republic System". No Coruscant used, even though they specifically refer to Felucia, Dantooine and Endor in concept art plans for those reused worlds from earlier movies. Of course I also don't think the word "Hosnian" shows up in any case, but that's also true of most if not all of the worlds in the concept art that later got names in spinoff stuff.

I actually think it's surprising how few place names there were in TFA itself... outside of Jakku which gets mentioned a ton, we get: Outer Rim, Hosnian system, Ileenium system, Starkiller Base (which I actually missed the first time I saw the movie), Kessel, and Ponemah each getting a single mention, and that's it.

 

Yes, Jello. With the outcome of making him a more sympathetic character with respect of the backlash for the prequels.

I mean we are discussing ways in which many of us, though not all, feel the OT stuff was made materially worse by having elements shoehorned onto it, ostensibly because it was exciting we had more information and offered opportunities to explore; but also probably because it was a better branding strategy. The NJO evolved more over time to incorporate prequel elements and that had the effect of setting up a repeat fall of the New Republic - whether to try and make the fall of the Republic a bit better or not, I can't say. But understanding what made the prequels the way they were seems to fall onto Lucas and his weird detachment. If that's due to an underlying condition or just he was the protonerd, I can't say. I'm just looking for explanations.

 

To be honest as a fan of the prequels and EU I kinda wished it was Coruscant that got destroyed so that we at least felt some attachment to that. As it was I didn't really care about the Hosnian system and neither did the characters I feel.

 

As a not-a-fan of most of the old EU, it really goes to show that the authors couldnt really reach beyond the basic plotting and ideas of the movies they were inspired by. I really liked the NJO books for at least taking the EU in an interesting direction and offering up different philosophies on the nature of the Force.

But even during the Bantam era it seemed like a lot of the books followed the formula of the OT films, and the few times they deviated the result still wasn't anything to celebrate on most occasions. With this new canon I have been pretty okay with the stories that are being told. They are familiar without feeling like they are emulating the movies closely, unlike the Thrawn trilogy where Heir to the Empire is almost literally ROTJ, Dark Force Rising is A New Hope, and The Last Command is The Empire Strikes Back.

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Let's not forget the Western Reaches, one of the biggest call-outs to EU material in the movie.

Same. To quote myself from an entirely different thread,

You may need to elaborate on this one, because I'm sure not seeing it. A few brief similarities, maybe - the trek through the forest in HttE, the reverse-trash-compactor scene in DFR, the duel with the dark lord in TLC. But those are pretty superficial similarities, certainly not major plot beats, let alone being "almost literally" the same story.

 

Yeah I'm not following the Thrawn Trilogy comparison at all.

 

The prequels influenced post RotJ to be pretty cynical towards politics in general. Instead of a mythological perfect kingdom, the Republic is just one institution in a long line of dysfunctional institutions.

The message continually becomes...even into the TFA...is don't trust politics.

"Palpatine is a politician and politicians are not to be trusted."

"I love democracy."

 

It feels to me like it was not just the PT that did that since eve the first books in the NJO series was cynical towards politics and they hade to be planed and (at least the first) written before TPM was released.