Surely your opinion of me is one or two degrees higher than arbitrarily tossing me in with the Gamergaters and old-man-with-caners.
More than several! Meant to be clearer when I said speaking generally, sorry
I've said the same elsewhere recently, a lot of the actual like / dislike doesn't really matter to me (other than the GGers and that kind of ilk, where my like / dislike isn't really related to Star Wars anyway). If you love, say, The Rise of Skywalker (unlikely), or hate The Last Jedi (50 / 50 bet given its divisive nature) . . . these are all valid. But as someone in a group of folk that are roughly (to my knowledge) around my age or older (some a lot older), it's funny in my opinion to see what I think are fanbase patterns repeating.
Honestly in a way the prequels were probably more internally-coherent than the OT or the sequel trilogy. The plan was laid out (unlike the sequels, or rather, it's probably more accurate to say the sequels were heavily course-corrected
during the trilogy, nevermind what happened after), and it wasn't significantly tinkered with to my knowledge (unlike the OT). But at the same time (even if I view them a lot more warmly than I did once upon a time - and I'm saying this as someone who recently rewatched 4 - 6 then 1 - 3), there are obvious weaknesses. Some of these stem from telling a story that has to be told (which is why I appreciate for example Filoni's Clone Wars - and Tarkovsky's before that - it fleshes out the rushed nature of
having to be about the rise of Vader through Anakin's fall), some of these are because Lucas™, and some of these are just, honestly,
awful dialogue. That "sand gets everywhere" line really is only good for the meme, and again it's literally in my recent memory
The OT was very much a space Western on-the-fly kind of thing. The success was rapid, it was built for a different time, and still Lucas couldn't stop tinkering.
Which then brings us back to the sequels. Made by Disney, discarding what we know were Lucas' early thoughts on where 7 - 9 could do
and the entirety of the EU (sorry not sorry, I still don't miss it despite most of my SW novels being EU. Maybe all of them, actually). Made by Disney in full mouse-driven corporation mode, after the explosive success of the early MCU (literally riding on the Avengers and Captain America: Winter Soldier, ignoring little roadbumps like Thor 2, with tie-in TV going full-swing at the same time). It was always going to be a different beast (good and bad, and that's where we the fans sit - arguing about the good, and the bad
).
I think tonally, the sequel trilogy was a mess, but then again I'm someone who liked TLJ, so that colours my take on the whole situation somewhat. I think IX should've tried an awful lot harder than it did to reconcile the TLJ, instead of serving as some milquetoast rejection of that kind of film direction. And I
liked TFA. I thought it was a decent retreading of Star Wars, with the obvious ANH parallels. I loved TLJ, and I sat through TRoS because, well, it was Star Wars, and despite how it ended I was invested in some of the character arcs. I'm not a Rian Johnson evangelist, either (still haven't watched Knives Out, either of them).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is Disney, and there is 2010 - 2020s Internet culture, and there's a lot of stuff (the absence of the direct hand of Lucas, the abolishing of the EU) that all feed into a specific context when it comes to the sequel films, that don't really fall on the films themselves. And there's stuff that falls on the films as well, of course, but that's the same of the prequels; of the OT. Every one of us sits somewhere differently (as all fans do) in this spectrum, or bog haha, of weighted factors that determine to what level we can tolerate the various bits and pieces than chip away at the image of each of the films, and the connection between each film in each trilogy also. This is a bit redundant to explain to everyone here, I'm just labouring the point. We all know what it's like to be a fan of something. I just think that the sequel trilogy is very current, and when you combine that with Disney's drive to maximise viewership for the profit engine (which is in no way unique to Disney), you end up with a very easy target. One that once we're quite a few years ahead of, maybe we'll look back differently?
Or maybe I'm fooling myself. But I said the same thing as a wonderfully young and naive teenager, so here's me going two for two!