Re: Kathleen Kennedy to step down from Lucasfilm?
I will forever say it's utter BS to say the only way to have handled Luke in TLJ was total character assassination. He could have just become indifferent, or they could have gone with a number of other avenues. There was no reason for Luke to have been the final nail in Ben's fall. Obi wan didn't push Anakin over the edge by thinking about stabbing him in the back in the middle of the night.
The powerful jedi of the prequels were far from the main focus and didn't detract from the story of Anakin, obi-wan, or anyone else.
I've talked about this before, but I think the issue is this:
Within the context of the ST, you have certain structural issues that are competing against each other. On the one hand, you want to bring in a new crop of heroes. The old actors are aging, are far less convincing as action heroes, and may not be around in the real world to keep filming new films. On the other hand, they're your anchor to the OT, and you really want to tie the new saga films to the OT. Finally, there's the issue of these characters already being "leveled up" in the sense of being powerful, having influence, having resources, and/or having abilities at their fingertips. There's no struggle for them that they can't get out of IF the state of affairs of the galaxy is what you saw at the end of ROTJ: the Rebels won, everything is hunky dory, the Empire and Sith are defeated, and evil is basically gone from the galaxy. It's all the EU setting stuff. How do you create real drama, real stakes, if your OT characters are already at the top of their game? What challenges can they face? You really have limited options.
I knew once they announced they'd include the old crew that at least some of 'em were gonna die in the new films. I also knew that the "happily ever after" ending of ROTJ would be undone in some way because it had to be.
Where I think things went a little wrong is in dropping us smack in the middle of the story with zero bearings. With the OT, the story was fresh. You didn't go in with preconceived notions of what came before or what would come next. The opening crawl was just the bare setting for the story. With the PT, again, the story was entered into by the audience with no sense of
preceding events. All we knew was what would come
eventually, but not how we'd get there. So, the story became all about revealing how that all occurred.
The ST is different, though, and the place in the story where TFA drops us is incredibly different from what happened at the end of ROTJ. I think the films needed a
lot more context provided, either in the opening crawl, or in gradually introducing us to the new setting in terms of the events that lead to it. In other words, I think it would make more sense story-wise to show more of the fall of the ROTJ-status for the galaxy and
then lead into a true "fight against the First Order." I think this could probably have been done with a single transitional film that acts as a fulcrum for the newer stories, but it would also require delaying the introduction of the central hero (Rey) and would still undo everything that happened in ROTJ. I expect a lot of people who criticize TLJ would have been fine with undoing ROTJ as long as it didn't feel like it came out of left field and was all very hastily revealed. But because of how the ST has been structured, that's not how it went.
I still maintain that Luke's behavior makes sense in context if you can accept the single event that sets off the chain reaction (Luke igniting his blade over a sleeping Ben), and I think that still fits with his character, but having more time to see how he got to that point would've helped.
Not everyone would accept this, of course. Although there aren't many on this board that I've seen, I'm sure there are people out there for whom the old EU books are basically the Star Wars they really want. I think they're a pretty small minority, though.
). I didn't like TLJ but I ordinarily don't post about it but I need to respond to this haha. 
