Occasionally watching AI slop Star Wars videos on youtube (for no more than a few minutes...) has brought me to this point. Just seeing Luke in his emo clothes having a heart-to-heart with Han as he's fixing the Millennium Falcon brought out all kinds of feelings in me. It's pathetic nostalgia, the original trilogy was a safe space for me in my childhood I guess, this is where I would go to see amazing things and have a good time and see the communist-coded underdogs triumph over the evil imperialists. And seeing these terrible AI videos where nothing makes sense and everything looks like shit and yet they STILL manage to capture the essence of Star Wars for just a moment, an essence that basically doesn't exist in any Star Wars movie made after ROTJ, although of course Rogue One gets the closest to this and there are some moments in Revenge of the Sith where I found myself actually being interested in what was happening onscreen.

Like...is it so hard to have a movie where Luke starts the Jedi Academy on Yavin 4, Leia is preggers with the twins while trying to build a new government on Coruscant, Han is having goofy adventures with Chewie as they visit Lando's weird mining city that's on top of a bunch of moving AT-ATs, and meanwhile the imperialists are reconstituting themselves in the unknown regions or whatever with Admiral Thrawn (the only true version of which is the terrifying guy we meet in the TIE Fighter video game) who is working with some evil Sith lord with an apostrophe in his name (Joruuuuuus C'boath) and cloning the Emperor (THAT'S how Palpatine returned!!!) and they have ysilmiari beasts or whatever that make the force useless. And the special effects are limited to whatever they could do in the 1980s—only actual models for spaceships, aliens all have to be makeup and costumes, locations all have to be real places or physical sets. That's it! That's how you get a potentially good Star Wars movie! The only issue is that the original actors are either dead or too old. But they could have done this decades ago, and they didn't! Why didn't you give me my slop George Lucas????????????????????????

Also Thrawn uses space phrenology to win battles which is a little yikes but whatever.

Putting this in askchapo because I guess it's a question even though it's a rhetorical one.

And yes I know, blablabla money, blablabla capitalism, blabla george was tired, blabla harrison ford wanted to kill han but not indiana jones for some reason, blabla most of this millennial-coded shit comes from the ‘90s EU and couldn’t have been made in the ‘80s.