I am genuinely curious and concerned as to whether George either has legit memory issues, or is a pathological liar. Neither is a particularly pleasant thing to contemplate about someone you generally admire, respect, and are thankful toward for what they have given you. So I haven't dug too deeply. But given how often he's changed his story while maintaining he hasn't, or "always intended for it to be this way", or like that...?
So regardless of what took place at those early meetings, I wouldn't put it past George to have changed his mind several times since without realizing/admitting it.
I pretty much agree with everything
Solo4114 has said in his last couple posts. For all that I've spent a while on my 'grand re-write' of the saga, I am also all too mindful that what we've got is... what we've got. The project grew out of that very awareness of the story not unfolding in ways I expected or, sometimes, wanted -- and learning to distinguish between the two. What I didn't like merely because it ran counter to what we would now call headcanon or fan-fiction, but inherently worked and added to the narrative... And what was just bad story choices (or, I learned later, was story foreshortening brought on by real-world issues such as ennui or lack of sufficient creative energy/vision).
So in the time since, with that at one end and the extant canon at the other, I've come up with an in-between "what's the absolute minimum needed to make that weak/bad story element less so?" approach. Get rid of the 'virgin birth' and downplay midi-chlorians, say. Add one line that Jedi are forbidden to marry...
while they're Padawans. Step Leia back to being Luke's cousin, with his sister as yet unrevealed (maybe Rey's mysterious mother?). Stuff like that, that leaves almost the entirety of the film stock as is.
Because, character moments like those aside, I am overall satisfied with the direction the larger story has gone. Most of my recommended tweaks to TLJ would be in sequence, rather than content (I can't do anything to change Rian's questionable lens and lighting choices, alas). Bump all of the fleet/Canto Bight stuff to the first part of the movie, and then shift to focus on Rey on Ahch-to, up until she shows up to save the day... kinda. Better if that were the split point between two episodes. There's a little more to it than that, but I'm not going to get that granular again in a thread where a nonzero number of participants don't like the
content, regardless of sequence. About the only things I'd flat-out cut would be the secret Rebel decoder ring and the stable boy Force-calling his broom.
So, in the end, I don't know that it matters much who came up with what when. Either one likes it despite its flaws, like all of Star Wars, or one doesn't. If the latter, one may need to leave the fandom for a while, as it's going to continue adding and discussing new content. I largely checked out of Trek fandom from around the whole end of Voyager/beginning of Enterprise/release of Nemesis period. Too much discussion about creative offerings I felt
drastically missed what Trek was, in general, and what those ships and characters meant and deserved, in particular. Still haven't really gotten back into that side of things, even close to twenty years on. JJ-Trek and Discovery are more, even worse, missteps, IMO. But costume and model discussion I can do again, and I do. I still fondly revisit the older stuff, and have fading hopes for
good new stuff, but my ardor took a massive hit.
I would never dream of, or advocate, giving up on it entirely. Every time I see someone is going to sell off their collection, or get rid of their costumes, or like that, I
strongly encourage them to wait a bit. I know if I had gotten rid of any of my Trek stuff, I'd've come to regret it. "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow -- but
soon. And for the rest of your life." Wait and see. We're in such a differently-paced world now. It's only been four years since the big public announcement. Three since TFA was released. In that same time period, originally, we were also off to a rocky start. Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the Marvel comics, and the newspaper strips were all...
kind of Star Wars...? The Holiday Special? Woo. A sequel that took things in a direction a lot of people didn't expect and many didn't like? So calm down, step back if you're not liking this current stuff. They're learning -- and blundering -- and more will be coming out in the next few years. See what happens then, before decrying this as the beginning of the end. Or the end of the middle. Or the end of the beginning. Or whatever it turns out to be.
