re: What the hell happened with Rise of Skywalker?

Hux seemed pretty damn solid in TFW unfortunately he became a charcuterie in TLJ. Having Kylo defect from the First Order after killing Snoke and having Hux take over would have been far more interesting. Of course you don't have to have Kylo immediately run towards the rebels just no longer associate with the First Order. Have him alone and go through his own changes before he even considers allying Rey if he even does

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The obvious answer is Rey with Kylo either defeating her, joining her, or saving her from her dark side self.

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The best course, which I brought up when they first released TLJ, would be Kylo and Rey combining forces to balance the force between the two.

Maybe have Kylo go off the rails and have Rey realize she had to fight him.

That was before RoS came out.

The best aspect of TLJ was Rey and Kylo’s interactions through the force.

That would have been an interesting course, but that would be too deep for Disney Star Wars.

Ask whatever AI you use to “write a better plot for the Star Wars sequel trilogy”. See how much better it is. Mind boggling how botched they made it

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Sure JJ had to fix some things… doesn’t mean his only of doing that was bringing back Palpatine.

It was a terrible choice that made the movie and Star Wars franchise as a whole non-sensical

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He didn't have enough movies to set up a new villain no one knew about.

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People keep giving Force Awakens a pass but it had some real turds and began the undermining of legacy characters. It made Han an absent dad and then killed him off. They didn't have to do that, the EU had a story of Solo twins that would have been a great story to establish with Snoke as the big bad.

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While we can definitely blame Abrams for most of that, at the end of the day it was the mandate from Kathleen Kennedy to J.J. Abrams to not make Luke the center of the story that ultimately doomed the trilogy. Abrams wrote draft after draft and each time he did Luke slowly became the focal point of the story. That would normally tell a creative filmmaker something. However, Abrams was operating under strict instructions from KK not to make Luke the main protagonist of Episode VII. So he eventually had to do the most retarded thing he could think of: "Luke Skywalker is missing..."

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means eliminating the Dark Side. . .not using dark and light equally

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Disagreed.

Luke in legends was essentially a gray Jedi, which was the balance.

That is what I wish they would have leaned towards.

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Who in their right mind spends billions on Star Wars and somehow forgets to come up with a story before launching a sequel trilogy? You had the biggest IP on the planet and didn’t even bother sketching out a basic plot. That’s not just incompetence. That’s legendary stupidity.

Then you start swapping directors annd gave them storytelling control and wonder why everything feels like a train wreck. That’s not a creative choice. That’s a meltdown in slow motion. And the fact that no one at Disney stopped and said, “Hey, maybe we should have a consistent vision before we shovel hundreds of millions into this,” tells me everything I need to know about who’s running the show.

And let’s talk about the biggest slap in the face. You had Luke. You had Leia. You had Han. And you didn’t put them in a single scene together. Not one. That was the emotional payoff fans waited decades for and you tossed it out like it didn’t matter. You had gold in your hands and you threw it in the trash.

Then you turn Luke Skywalker into a bitter coward who gives up on the galaxy because of a vision about a moody kid. The same Luke who stood in front of Vader and the Emperor without flinching suddenly folds like a lawn chair. What were you smoking when you signed off on that?

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this x 1000000000000000000000000

nailed it

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Disagreed.

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George Lucas said it explicitly

If greys use the dark side, they are not in balance.

Legends writers who wrote otherwise misunderstood the concept too, which is why George clarified.

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According to Lucas, the dark side is necessarily a perversion. It is not a natural, necessary form of the Force but a warped imposition on it. Lucas goes in depth on why this is, and how it happens.

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What happens when you go to the dark side is it goes out of balance, and then you get really selfish... when you get selfish, you get stuff. Or you want stuff and when you want stuff, and you get stuff, then you get afraid somebody's going to take it away from you... Once you become afraid that somebody's going to take it away from you, or you're going to lose it, then you start to become angry... And that anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering...

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Lucas described the Light Side as harmony and balance. The Dark Side is a perversion of that. Using both is an imbalance, because you are weighting against balance (The Light Side).


Here is Ahmad Best quoting George:

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"Everybody gets this Force thing wrong. This is from him, not from me. Everybody thinks that the balance is the light side and the dark side, that's not the case. The light side is balanced, the dark side is out of balance. The dark side is easy, it's accessible, it's corruption. It's the easy way out... So when you're talking about the Force, when you're talking about being in balance with the Force, it's not the dark side versus the light side. It's the light side as balance, and the dark side as being the place you don't want to go..."

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LINK

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Who in their right mind spends billions on Star Wars and somehow forgets to come up with a story before launching a sequel trilogy? You had the biggest IP on the planet and didn’t even bother sketching out a basic plot. That’s not just incompetence. That’s legendary stupidity.

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This really is the root of the problem.

Hey everyone, we're making a Star Wars trilogy!
So what's it about?
I don't know
Ok, you're guarding the story, keeping suspense. Good idea
No, really, we don't know. We haven't bothered to write the story, establish main leads beyond "cool Force-powered girl", or anything else. But it's going to have Stormtroopers and TIE Fighters!

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Then you start swapping directors annd gave them storytelling control and wonder why everything feels like a train wreck

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In retrospect, I really don't blame Rian Johnson for what he did. I don't approve of his story, but that's not the point.

I honestly think it started with him fricking around; he wasn't given a plot or any boundaries. And he surely thought "no, this can't be the case. No fricking way. They have to have something in mind. I know, I'll write Luke as a gutless bum, and that will force Lucasfilm to step in and tell me what direction I'm supposed to be going with this".

And he found out- they didn't have any ideas, nor apparently did they care.
So, he wrecked them.