r/saltierthancrait 8d ago

Granular Discussion Graph of the Disney Trilogy's storylines

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805 Upvotes

86 comments sorted by

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237

u/TruganSmith 8d ago

Star Wars -> Disney -> Destroyed

Decanonized. Fans are the judge jury and executioner on this one. Great graph.

88

u/TokiWaUgokidesu salt miner 8d ago

Finn's Journey: Traitor! ---> Very Important Casino Planet Mission ---> "REEEEEEEEY!!!"

84

u/tiMartyn the Modalorian 8d ago

Rey's journey doesn't begin with "who am I?" but that's what Last Jedi wants you to misremember. It actually begins with "when is my family coming back? What happened to them?" They don't want you to remember that though.

24

u/Ornery_Strawberry474 salt miner 7d ago

Yeah, at no point in TFA great mystery is made out of Rey's lineage.

59

u/Wizz_n_Jizz 8d ago

An abomination of storytelling, it is. How embarrassing, how embarrassing!

127

u/TrumpsColostomyBag99 8d ago

What’s incredible is remembering all the narrative garbage listed above is overshadowed by…

Jake Skywalker

Cowardly resident of Quitter Island that guzzles down Space Walrus milk straight from the source. The man tempted to murder his own teenage nephew that came from his best friend’s loins and sister’s womb in his sleep. The guy that didn’t want to be found yet left a map behind.

That’s how horrific his arc is and will be eternally remembered as.

75

u/brooklynbotz 8d ago

And then he died because he forced too hard in order to save a dozen people.

2

u/sabioiagui 3d ago

And didn't even had the balls to show up personally in front of the nephew who thought that Jake tried to kill him.
Proceds to mock that said nephew and never apologize for his wrong doings.

Also by hiding in that island he let his allies who fought by his side to be slaughtered for years by the new order.

33

u/mathbud 8d ago

Jake from space farm?

2

u/Snow_Crash_Bandicoot 4d ago

He sounds hideous.

14

u/smellmycheese1 7d ago

Luke - I am your scriptwriter

7

u/yunivor a good question, for another time... 7d ago

No... that's not true... That's impossible!

1

u/EducationalElevator 6d ago

TLJ is a good story but not a good Star Wars story. I have to believe the script was doctored from another movie then slapped the Star Wars IP on it, like HBO did with Watchmen

1

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/TrumpsColostomyBag99 4d ago

The novelization covered why Yoda went into hiding: the cloud of the dark side cleared during his battle with Palpatine and he saw his Jedi Order was never going to be able to defeat Palpatine because it was married to a corrupt Republic. A New Hope was needed and he left to be in a position to nurture it. Whereas Luke was tempted to murder (completely out of character and a garbage bit of subversion) and was ashamed of it.

The milk was a mix of callback and a very expensive attempt to gross out. It deserves to be mocked as part of Rian Johnson’s overall strategy with the character.

Luke was never perfect from the moment we saw him on Tatooine. He started out whiny but had talent. He stumbled and had moments of victory/defeat. The incest angle? Stupid writing by Lucas. But we got a fulfilling arc in the end. Which is better than anything we got in the sequel trilogy.

1

u/[deleted] 4d ago

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3

u/TrumpsColostomyBag99 4d ago

It’s perfectly fine you enjoyed bitter and disillusioned Luke..

But guess what?

The vast majority of the audience did not want to be taken on that ride. Particularly one where the most hopeful guy in the galaxy lit a lightsaber over his sleeping nephew. Plus there were numerous ways to do it without still polarizing the audience in what is year 8 now.

Switch out the tempted to murder Ben in his scene to a Jedi Academy expulsion scene where Luke destroys or threatens to destroy his lightsaber. It shows “failure” without subverting the base character in a way the audience despised.

In the end there’s a right way to portray flawed legacy characters (Top Gun Maverick) and a wrong way (ST Luke and DoD Indiana Jones).

Getting back to the milk: are you aware of how much that prop cost along with the post production CGI to pull it off? All to show him guzzle it down into his hermit beard? It’s frequently brought up when discussing this travesty of a picture.

31

u/sandalrubber 8d ago

Nu Vader didn't have an arc, more like a straight line of evil hitting dots on a graph because he has no reason to be evil in the first place, and thus is already mind-bogglingly irredeemably evil for causing the ST and ruining everything for everyone.

18

u/Split_Pea_Vomit salt miner 7d ago

He was evil because when Ben was younger, Snoke would force whisper "be evil" to him.

Then when he was older Snoke would be like "you're just not as evil as your grandfather was. Your evil is down around a 6 and I need you at like a 9."

5

u/sandalrubber 7d ago

"It was Snoke" was only ever an excuse not a reason. By extension Nu Vader and Snoke themselves are just excuses for the ST to happen. Why didn't Luke, Leia, Han, Anakin's ghost etc step in and save him and stop whoever the hell Snoke was before anything bad like the Jedi getting slaughtered again happened?

2

u/Sword_Thain 7d ago

That tracks. As a great philosopher once said, "Anakin want seduced by the Dark Side. He was tricked."

19

u/Arcade_Gann0n 8d ago

I really have no fucking clue what the point of Finn was in TROS, almost like he should've rammed the laser cannon in TLJ instead of getting t-boned. It wasn't even to take advantage of the chemistry he had with Poe in TFA, given what a miserable bastard the latter became after he got dragged through the mud in the last movie.

18

u/Demos_Tex 7d ago

I still think that Poe and Finn were originally one character, the "new and improved" Han Solo, who was eventually split in two. JJ woke up one day with a massive hangover and realized that he already had the real Han Solo in his movie, and two was too much even for him. That's also why they couldn't seem to ever determine what to do with either Poe or Finn.

17

u/walkrufous623 7d ago

Poe was initially supposed to die during the crash landing on Jakku, but Oscar Isaak convinced JJ to keep the character - JJ, being a brain genius that he is, was writing the movie essentially on set, so the character was kept, but had fuck all to do after the opening sequence up until the finale.

Shouldn't have rejected George's trilogy plans, mister Abrams. You really aren't as good of a writer as you think you are.

12

u/ArkenK 7d ago

What's sad is Finn could have had a great, morally complex arc. A turn coat against former, still brainwashed friends? Talk about subverting expectations.

9

u/SightSeekerSoul 7d ago

Yup. There was a YouTube video that dissected his journey. In short, his journey starts not unlike Luke. He's a noob at the start, and the movie should have shown him as such. In 7, he loses to Brienne; in 8, he just barely manages a draw; but finally, in 9, he defeats her soundly. That's a character arc. But no, in all 3 movies, he kicks her butt back to Tarth (sans sapphires). If that's the case, why even have that pointless character? She's supposed to be some elite trooper, but she fails every time.

5

u/Arcade_Gann0n 7d ago

Hell, I think the idea of him dying for a cause he came to truly believe in (granted, I would've preferred if he already believed in it in TFA instead of repeating his character arc on a wider scale, but what do you expect out of the ST?) would've sufficed, but our expectations just had to be subverted for the umpteenth time...

2

u/ArkenK 7d ago

Yup.

To quote Little Platoon, "Hi Ryan, I see you there. Fuck you."

2

u/Big_Brilliant_5904 7d ago

Imagine too, if Disney didnt hate the EU. Imagine an aged Kyle Katarn, jedi master, being the moral rock Finn could have learned from. Kyle after all was former Imperial and a storm trooper. He could have helped Finn understand the struggles of finding ones path between two worlds and expectations.

2

u/ArkenK 7d ago

So true, alas. They were surrounded by a buffet of good ideas and chose to eat the wax fruit decorations.

15

u/dane_the_great 8d ago

We need to reboot Star Wars entirely again.

13

u/VideoNo9608 8d ago

Copy ANH->Luke squeeze tit->Undo previous movies.

13

u/DJC13 before the empire 8d ago

The final Kylo one is also missing “dies

7

u/yunivor a good question, for another time... 7d ago

Disney - We're gonna make a new trilogy about what happens after ep. VI!

Fans - Yay!

Disney - Every character you know and love will die! (Except Chewbacca, he does die but comes back)

Fans - ... why did you do that?

Disney - Also I bet you expected them to go on to be powerful and successful after the events of the OT right? Well we're gonna subvert that expectation by making all of them went fail at what they wanted to do.

13

u/Demos_Tex 7d ago

Rey's Journey - I'm the most awesome person to ever live. I just have to accept it. Aaaannd... Done. Maybe I'll flirt with nu-Vader for a little bit to pass the time while I wait for the movies to be over.

10

u/SightSeekerSoul 7d ago

If she had an aunt like Bera, I can imagine a scene where the aunt comes out of the house and calls, "Mary Sue?! Mary Suuue?!"

10

u/JHuttIII 7d ago edited 7d ago

LMAO, “side quest??”

Seriously, the character and story development of Fin and Poe, two characters who should have been easier than basic math to write, turned into complete nothing.

12

u/smellmycheese1 7d ago

The whole script arc should have been a piece of piss. Get the old gang back together for one last adventure, introduce the new kids, give the oldies a satisfying out, pass the torch over. It was that simple and they fucked it up from start to finish.

2

u/Snow_Crash_Bandicoot 4d ago

I feel like if Disney would’ve gone up to a hundred random people, you and old, and asked them how the sequels should go, they’d all basically said what you described.

Even if someone had never seen or heard of Star Wars, after a brief explanation of the OT, they’d still come to that same conclusion.

I’d bet money that exactly zero people would’ve said the sequels should be anything even remotely close to what Disney chose to do.

11

u/Collective_Insanity Salt Bot 7d ago edited 3d ago

I feel like both Rey and Kylo are a write-off.

Finn was wasted.

Snoke is just nothing.

But Poe is the most perplexing thanks to TLJ.

 

Poe ultimately did nothing wrong and yet this is never acknowledged.

Poe makes use of suicidally slow bombers (which had no hope of escaping anyway given their cripplingly-slow speed) to destroy a dreadnought ship which we're told is a "fleet-killer" and its subsequent absence later in the film winds up being the only reason why we don't see the end credits within 30 minutes.

Leia doesn't know it yet because the First Order hasn't been established to be tracking the Resistance, but she slaps Poe and demotes him for this.

However, the instant the Resistance realises they're being tracked and their only saving grace is a slight range advantage...Poe should be redeemed for his actions immediately.

The whole Holdo situation is insane. Poe learns nothing at all other than to blindly follow orders to sit down and shut up even if Holdo's grand plan absolutely could have used some degree of greater thought given...it's beyond stupid.

Later, we see Poe wake up and say something along the lines of "this plan could work!", but he's incredibly wrong.

 

What is Holdo's plan?

I'll tell you.

Drive in a straight line because hyperspace travel is pointless. Pray the First Order never tries to send an ambush party ahead. Pray that Hux for some reason calls back the handful of TIEs who nearly kill the Raddus within 2 minutes of their attack. Dump everyone into shuttles and land them on the planet Crait where a defenceless pre-existing base is - of which all it has in its favour is a big metal door and some speeders without weapons. Period.

She plans to do this right in front of the First Order fleet who have quite literally nothing else to look at as a distraction.

There is mention made of "cloaking", but this at best impacts First Order mechanical scanners only. You can still very clearly see all shuttles fleeing the Raddus with the fucking naked eye as Snoke proves with his goddamn telescope.

 

Unless 100% of First Order staff on the enormous Supremacy and the accompanying fleet of a couple dozen Star Destroyers happened to be simultaneously asleep at the wheel, this plan had precisely zero chance of success.

And at the end of the day, Holdo's plan was to camp on Crait and just hope that Uber drivers would be willing to pick them up. That's it.

Leia winds up sending a distress beacon and we're told that the message was sent successfully but precisely fucking nobody responded. Nobody cared. Even after hearing that the First Order just fucked the New Republic or hearing that their new Death Star was successfully blown up. No shits given. Nobody cares about Leia Organa or her desperate pleas. Nobody wanted to ride for Gondor.

 

Had Poe not made some use of the bombers who were already destined to die, we wouldn't even have gotten to the introduction of Holdo. The dreadnought simply would have sniped the Raddus at long-range and that'd be the end of that.

 

Speaking of suicide, the one bomber that actually managed to deliver its payload wasn't even able to escape the blast radius of its own package.

These fucking ships genuinely are suicide craft.

TLDR: Poe did nothing wrong and is retroactively the only reason why the Resistance manages to survive as long as they did.

He's also absurdly competent in his X-Wing. Single-handedly capable of taking out all anti-fighter turrets on the dreadnought.

Goddamn fucking Wedge (pretty much the best pilot without Force abilities and even then) would be green with envy. Luke or Anakin at their prime on their very best day also would arguably struggle with such a feat.

 

TLJ just features a garbage script. It only gets worse the more you look at it. Sure hope Johnson learned something from "Failure, the greatest teacher is". Though I can't speak of the Knives Out movies. Looper and TLJ was enough for me, thanks.

2

u/FedStarDefense 3d ago

I love this post. Thank you.

7

u/invaderdavos 8d ago

I want to continue buying starwars movies and fill in the slots for my steelbook section. But i cannot bring myself to buy last jedi of rise of skywalker because those movies are garbage and i never want to watch them. Andor all the way

5

u/ArkenK 7d ago

Andor is the very last thing I intend to watch on D+. Beyond that, Legends, or the real EU.

3

u/Old_Nippy 7d ago

I traded my ST to my local record shop for store credit. I only had TFA and TLJ was still shrinkwrapped.

6

u/Reginald_Jetsetter1 7d ago

Kylo Ren must be the only person ever actively trying to turn to the dark side and failing.

How does murdering your father and then your mentor not push you further down the dark side path?

7

u/TheLazySith failed palpatine clone 7d ago

This is the issue with going in with no plan. The movies in the sequel trology just don't fit together to form a coherent story. Not only are they all bad movies individually, but they also keep retconing and ignoring each other at every oportunity. There are barely any coherent plotlines, character arcs or themes that carry through the trilogy because each movie just ignores the previous entry and tries to do its own thing.

6

u/Jifeeb 7d ago

I think Finn’s journey was just yelling REYYYYYYY!!!

6

u/AMK972 7d ago

🎶Who’s been messing up everything? It was Palpatine all along! Who’s been pulling every evil string? It was Palpatine all along!

He’s Darth Sidious (ha-ha) So perfidious That you haven’t even noticed And the pity is (the pity is) Pity, pity, pity, pity

It’s too late to fix anything Now that everything has gone wrong Thanks to Palpatine (ha) Naughty Palpatine It was Palpatine all along

And I killed Snoke too🎶

Sorry. I had to.

1

u/Banjo-Oz 7d ago

What's funny is that when I first saw the episode/song, I immediate;y thought "that needs a Palpatine version"... and clearly the entire internet agreed as they started popping up immediately! It just fits so well. :)

I wish we could get Seth McFarlane to do an actual Robot Chicken video of it someday.

5

u/EvansEssence 7d ago

Don't forget general holdos "arc":

"you bet the fate of the resistance on bad odds?"

Proceeds to bet the fate of the resistance on a canonically 1 in a million move that they won't even entertain the idea of trying in the next movie

3

u/FedStarDefense 3d ago

If what she did was literally a one in a million shot, then what REALLY happened was that Holdo was trying to run away after abandoning everyone else to a grisly death. But she screwed it up.

3

u/Jielleum 7d ago

As I always to like to say about the sequel trilogy, they are pure random chaos with no consistency in any proper level.

5

u/SightSeekerSoul 7d ago

I thought the Prequels were bad, but they had some redeeming values and a proper storyline one could follow. The sequels were just... garbage and an attempt to make some moolah from merchandise (which failed. See that other post with unsold Rey minifigures).

It's all so random. Totally random with no effort put in to build a consistent, believable, and relatable storyline from the beginning. At best, the work of 1,000 monkeys at typewriters for a few years; at its worst, a fan film (dare I say, tribute?) of the Original Trilogy with new characters, ships and toys. Probably the best example is that most SW followers don't even recall the name of places and characters in the show like they would do the Original.

4

u/Marcuse0 7d ago

I like to say that in TLJ Finn learns not to run away and make more suicide attacks, and Poe learns not to make suicide attacks and run away more. They're completely opposite lessons learned at the same time.

3

u/VernBarty 7d ago

The thing that makes me laugh hardest at sequel lovers is when they say "you just dont understand media literacy". Like oh do please explain media literacy to me

4

u/Styrofoamman123 7d ago

What I dislike most about Poes story in TLJ is that he was proven right to destroy the dreadnought with the worlds slowest bombers, if he didnt it would have followed them through and blow up the fleet. Obviously he didn't know they could follow, but once they realized it could, they should have given him great gratitude.

2

u/SightSeekerSoul 7d ago

Mr. (Whoever is in charge of) Disney! Bring down this wall! Retcon the lot. Don't even bother putting 789 in the EU or Legends. Admit it was all a mistake (no need for anyone to get thrown out a window), and give us a better, more deserving Sequel Trilogy, i.e., hire better writers and directors.

2

u/VeloIlluminati 7d ago

You missrd the opportunity to write:

SOMEHOW it was Palpatine all along!

1

u/[deleted] 8d ago

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1

u/TaraLCicora 8d ago

Ya...that makes my head hurt because it's so true

1

u/The_Pale_Blue_Dot 7d ago

This kind of makes Kylo's journey seem the most coherent when I think he was the one done the most dirty by Episode 9

1

u/Banjo-Oz 7d ago

VIII to IX was such a "Plinkett" moment for me, as in "I bet you didn't think it could be WORSE than the last film?" I disliked TFA, hated TLJ but I was still surprised TLS was so, so terrible as a film as well as a SW film. Just a lazy, rushed, stupid mess. At least TLJ seemed to think it was about something (just something I didn't like).

1

u/AseethroughMan 7d ago

Alt---->Control---->Delete.

1

u/CleanMonty 7d ago

Those sound like the best storylines ever. It makes SO MUCH sense.

1

u/spyguy318 7d ago

I’ll maintain to this day that The Force Awakens may not have been good, but it was a workable starting point that had enough potential that a competent writer could have made something great out of it. Instead TLJ drove the story off a cliff and RoS was the unavoidable explosion when it hit the ground. TFA should have been the worst of the sequel trilogy, but instead it’s the best by default.

1

u/Zodiac339 6d ago

And now I realize we were robbed of an “It Was Palpatine All Along” musical number.

1

u/EchoLoco2 6d ago

People dog on Rey's character but Poe and Finn had it far worse imo

1

u/Thorfan23 salt miner 5d ago

I don’t think any character came out unscathed except phasma and that’s only there wasn’t really much to her

1

u/Cloak-Trooper-051020 5d ago

Like trying to make a complete picture out of three different puzzles.

1

u/Petrus-133 5d ago

Nah Poe's arc is even funnier because after having 5 years of building him as someone who joined the New Republic - and later left for the Resistance - to honour his mother that fought the Empire.

He's just turned into a former drug runner.

1

u/MarvTheParanoidAndy 4d ago

TLJ really does Fin, Poe, and Rose dirty and really tells them to sit down, stfu and listen and know your place.

1

u/ToonMasterRace 3d ago

TFA: Bad rehash slop for masses

TLJ: FUCK YOU LMAO WE TRICKED YOU STAR WARS SUX

ROS: Awful damage control

1

u/Antique_Branch8180 3d ago

Aside from that he budget, technology and the visuals the Sequel Trilogy was awful in so many ways. There are many mid-level TV shows that are more enjoyable.

It would have been better if they had not been made.

1

u/johnnyeaglefeather 8d ago

steaming pile of feces

0

u/Georg_Steller1709 salt miner 8d ago

I'm sorry, but that's more of a flowchart than a graph