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The stupid part is that for all intents and purposes, the EU draft for star wars sequels in the Zahn trilogy is very much "more of the OT" (not least because that's how Lucas told Zahn to write it). Unlike the chaos they got with total improvisation, the structure would have guaranteed some story coherence. And when I reread the books recently I was struck at how naturally they flow with the OT and how well they maintain the characterization. Luke doesn't feel like a completely different person, which is apparently not something to be taken for granted.
And as much as you can tax the EU of being bad or at least not good enough to fit on the silver screen (a debatable proposition given what we got instead), the Zahn trilogy is pretty universally beloved. I haven't met a prequel hater that doesn't at least recognize Thrawn as a memorable character. And I've actually met many who prefer the more mystic, weird and scruffy continuity of the Zahn sequels to the cleaner, sanitized and mighty setting the prequels had to depict.
They could even have had their cake and eaten it too, by just cribbing the narrative structure and characters and done a free adaptation of the EU, which is what they ended up having to do as a crutch anyways. TLJ being a midwit version of Kotor 2 and ROS being bargain bin Dark Empire.
It's different in many ways. "More OT"' in the case of the Sequel Trilogy is literally "no, everything we can possibly roll back to then we will", in some sort of childlike desire to relive things exactly as they were, regardless of how it distorts the story. Republic? Gone despite what it does to the heroes' sacrifices. Han's character development? Gone. Leia's Jedi nature? Meh. The Jedi..come on.
This is silly because people want growth, but if it was rational I wouldn't call it PTSD.
I mean if you're going to just redo the same beats of the hero's journey you can't use the existing characters, no double dipping.
TFA might have been perfectly serviceable (if creatively bankrupt) if it happened a century in the past or in the future. Then Jedi get to be extinct legend and you can just do the OT with new characters and slight variations and be fine. You don't have to turn Mon Mothma into a pacifist idiot, and you don't have develop Luke and Han's character backwards off screen. But then you can't use the crutch of "passing the torch".
Although ironically, shitcanning the EU once again was boneheaded, because this is pretty much what the Legacy comics did, and yet they had Luke as a significant influence on the main character despite being a ghost, which I'm sure Hamill and the fans would have been okay with.
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Kotor was such an amazing game. I for one would love to see a Revan series.
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