I wouldn't take deadspin's view of anything as representative of real people.
I don't agree with Rich that there is no room in the SW universe for anything but rehash. That seems like a bitter jab rather than a reality. They could have had "Team Ken" and gone in that direction. The problem is those in charge don't seem ready to do world building or referencing the larger SW world. This is the curse of fan-fiction writing. Thinking you love something but not realizing its an established fictional world with reasons behind it, so everything you try to do in it is just playing dollies because you got no world building skillz.
How isn't Star Wars limited? Same tech, same premise (rebels vs empire), its politics is minimal because it's mostly limited to the movie format and that kind of thing can ruin its pacing, it has to adhere to a specific number of qualifiers and rules to constitute as a pleasing Star Wars story such as adhering to the the pulp origins that inspired it (Flash Gordan). Even things like KOTOR games are like this. It's like taking self contained three movies and just squeezing till no more juice is left. In order for Star Wars to be considered Star Wars it has to have certain elements. Its world building is limited and so much needs to be assumed regarding how they live their lives. So in order to make up for that, you have to have AT AT's, AT ST's, X-Wings, Tie Fighters, Star Destroyers, lightsabers, and all this other crap to make it recognizably Star Wars. And you are distinctly limited to the kinds of stories you can tell. It's boring. What more could they possibly hope to get more out of Star Wars? What exactly is left to milk? Or left to say? And the things that want to be said likely can't be said because all of the above - Star Wars has fit specific qualifiers - since it's a part of a corporate machine.
How isn't it limited? Seriously?
You will have Empire Tech. You will have Jedis. Yes, that is part of the deal, but it's not limiting. Lucas prequels added to the world. You had different ships. Stormtroopers appear as an invention in the second film. So, *gasp*, you can have inventions and move forward. You just know how to world build from within an established world.
There is nothing about that world that states you have to rehash the same plot over and over. Not the pulp origins. Not the Jedi. Nothing. The rehashing is a product of lack of creative courage.
When the only major difference is different ships, now you know you've got a limited universe. The universe
could be something more but it won't ever be because of the lack of creative courage. Could you imagine a Star Wars movie about regular people impacted by their wars and not a single Jedi or Sith shows up the entire movie?
It gets compared often, so I'll use it. Let's compare Star Wars to Gundam. Both have a canonical timeline (UC in Gundam's case) that has each entry follow up on the net. Gundam is about the atrocity and sin of war. Gundam is about Gundam's and Zaku's and dudes in white masks and newtypes but they've taken multiple Gundam series and changed them. Like, you've got Gundam 0080, where it stars a child who lives on a space colony far removed from the fighting of the war. It uses this canvas to tell a story about idolizing war, using war to sell the glorification and
idea of war to school children. It tells a beautiful story that takes place far beyond what's going on in the main plot of the original series, 0079.
You could never have something like that with Star Wars.
Normally space opera uses their universe as a canvas to tell different kinds of stories. I've already mentioned Star trek. I've already mentioned Gundam. But Star Wars, more than any space opera I can think of, uses far less interesting ideas and any time it goes beyond its working model, it kinda sucks. And yet each new Star Wars is another retread, even its expanded media. Gundam is a series as old as Star Wars and yet has far more pathos and depth. Gundam even abandoned its main storyline and completed it. Something Star Wars will never do. Now Gundam makes a new series and while they have those elements mentioned before (Gundams, Zakus, men in white masks) each new series is about something different. Maybe it's about aliens from the moon trying to invade a scientifically remedial Earth. Maybe it's about terrorism, and the way the main characters' justify their awful acts. Maybe it's about child soldiers who were forced to in order to survive. The point is: there's diversity there. There's depth there. Star Wars even 40 years later, is still about light and dark, good and evil. And it took 40 years for them to bother to have a gray point of view and they even back tracked on
that.
If I were to compare Star Wars to the multitude of space opera media I've consumed, at this point it's probably near the bottom. It's just completely lacking everything. The only thing it has in its favor is nostalgia, and even that's losing its shine because of a Star Wars movie every year.
I bet that by the end of Disney's milk fest a lot of people will realize just how shit Star Wars really is.
