Comic Strips

Ironically Game of Thrones was ruined because the show runners got an offer to do a Star Wars movie. They turned down HBOs offer to do more episodes of GoT and instead hurried through and botched the ending because they wanted to get started on that Star Wars project. They botched GoT so bad that Disney got rid of their movie. Serves them right.

100% this it was Rian Johnson's inability to work from someone else's starting point.

To add to your list. Finn. Johnson butchered Finn's story so much that the actor vocally said he would never take another Star Wars job.

He was supposed to be a Luke analog. He was supposed to be force sensitive. He was supposed to confront Phasma. The first movie projected so many hints at the path many of these characters were going to take in the trilogy. There was a parallel to Finn and Rey. Finn's force awakening literally breaks his mind control and we see Kylo sense him!

Johnson came in and burned all of those threads.

I accepted a lot about Episode VIII, but the ruin of the Finn stuff is where it actually became unforgivable for me.

You're right with all your bullet points. Episode VIII has a fundamentally broken plot in many ways. The thing that it has going for it though is that it has a few actual themes that I found interesting. I like that Johnson questioned the whole light side dark side polarity and that Rey came from nobody in particular. I liked the rejection of the Skywalker family and assertion that heroes could come from anywhere. If it had followed a better movie, "let the past die" would have been a legitimate highlight for me. It didn't work in the trilogy it's a part of, but if the trilogy had been based around the VIII we got I think it could have worked as a sequel trilogy to Star Wars.

And the thing is that I think those are about the only things I particularly like in the entire sequel trilogy besides Babu Frik (I hate how much I love that little dude), and that makes episode VIII the best of a trilogy of bland to bad movies for me. Episode VII was the best constructed of them, and it had cool stuff, but it didn't do anything that made me think "oh that's interesting" (like VIII did) because so much of it was nostalgia based 'memberberries. You're right about it being made to address fan concerns, but that was only relevant in 2015, and I'm looking back at in 2026. Episode IX was just a train wreck start to finish, and I don't particularly blame it because it had the unenviable task of following up VIII, but it's still just bad with nothing interesting to show for it.

The force awakens basically had that same problem though, effectively undoing everything concluded in return of the Jedi. Granted there's a time gap but there's no explanation as to why the former rebels (whatever they were called at that time I forgot) were still such a small force compared to the new big bad (something order?), not to mention why this order exists in the first place, what their motivations were, how they got their numbers and resources, etc. They're just a galaxy-level threat sprung from thin air. It seems pretty clear to me that JJ just wanted to remake a new hope with as little consideration of the conclusion of return of the Jedi as he could get away with, plot holes be damned. RJ tried to address some of these plot holes but even he doesn't really attempt to justify the something-order's existence. If the force awakens was the first star wars movie as a new hope was then it wouldn't be such a big deal, but coming just a few decades after the return of the Jedi, there ought to be some explanation for how they lost so much progress in that time, preferably in the first act. But nah, it's just "somehow the empire returned (with cool new branding)" because JJ can't write a plot to save his life.

If you're doing that, Discovery S2 to S3 will be the longest road ever.