V: The ‘Star Wars’ universe has just become pathetic. The original series of licenced fiction were bad, but the official materials in the past few years have just destroyed it. Well, the original films paint this picture of a gigantic, sprawling galaxy. Then the films and ancillary material make basically everyone important know everyone else. And then rigourously map out and explain as much as they can. Making the universe seem simple and trivial.
This is even without all the badness of the prequel films. The prequel films tried to normalise all these little interesting features of the original films. The original films hint at some allegorical parallels, but the prequel films just go over the top trying to cast each new species introduced with an existing ethnic group. So now all the flying things are Jews, the trade federation guys are all Chinese, the floppy eared guys are all Jamaicans. And it's this constant theme of racial essentialism. Humans are the only species which show any variation in accent, culture, or personality.
Then lots of weak fan service. The videogame lets you fight and beat Darth Vader. The television shows that Jabba the Hut is, like, Luke's brother-in-law, and Chewbacca bagged his groceries at the supermarket. Oh, and then lots of really stupid political content.
The ‘Battlestar Galactica’ prequel series ‘Caprica’ had this, too, which is what made it so incredibly boring. Very dull, simplistic political plots. It's like if you took the love triangle stories from any average soap opera and just replaced ‘X loves Y’ with ‘X is allied with Y‘. No consistency or realism, and just lots of names and dates to memorise, but no real thematic content.
This isn't even touching the bad acting and just general dumbness in plots. There's an episode of ‘Clone Wars’ where the main characters stumble across an enemy Jedi's base. And one of the supporting characters is, like, let's finish our main mission first. But, no, they decide to set a trap for the evil Jedi, but they do it so incompetently, the enemy Jedi side steps it trivially, and they have no real backup if he exploits the obvious flaw of their trap.
So he kills the supporting character and gets away. And at the end of the episode, the main characters are, like: "Man, war is so bad. We lost a good man today". Even though it was their own decisions and incompetence that precipitated everything that happened in the episode.
It's one of those shows where, like, the good guys will take a bad guy hostage without checking him for hidden weapons, and then the bad guy will conveniently escape at just the right moment to advance the plot.
One good example of how they take something that was interesting in the original movies and then beaten to death is Yodi's speech patterns. In the original movies, there is this conceit where he speaks in this sometimes reversed English. He is this oriental master of some sorts. But this is done very naturally as just a little ornamentation of the character. But in the movies and the series, they decided to make this a central feature. So now he always speaks in this exact same fashion, which just comes across as lame, clumsy, and annoying.
As you can see, it's such a stupid conceit, they can't actually give the character any good dialogue, because the addition of too many relative clauses would quickly make him incomprehensible. So it has this side-effect of disallowing the character from ever speaking more than the simplest of phrases.
