Spoilers What do casual fans get wrong about Star Wars?

So there's one major thing that basically every Star Wars hardcore completionist is likely to "get wrong" (by which I mean more miss out on), along with many people creating Star Wars media to cater to completionists, but that I think a casual fan is likely to "get right". And that is that Star Wars is (or was originally) supposed to take place in an alien setting where all the elements don't make sense to you the viewer. Lucas said (per a director's commentary I encountered a few years ago) that he was struck when he saw Kurasowa's samurai films in film school by how he didn't understand many of the customs and material culture in them but nevertheless found the narratives compelling (and I think he said that helped him focus more on the universal human element or the plot or whatever). And so he had the idea to worldbuild with lots of little unexplained elements just there to be strange and different and mysterious. Tatooine sequences at the beginning of the original Star Wars is paced very slow to us today to help people adjust to such a strange setting. Sure we're supposed to more or less figure out what a Jawa is, but what it means to "go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters" can just be left a mystery.

From almost the beginning this scheme of a universe filled with little mystery details broke down. Fans wanted to know about everything, because it all looked cool. Kenner needed to name all the toys they made, even for background characters and blink if you miss them vehicles. By the 90s we were getting short stories for every random one shot alien in the Mos Eisley Cantina and so forth, and I owned some sort of Star Wars encyclopedia. Indeed, contradictorily Lucas himself liked to have answers for all manner of details, his worldbuider impulse somewhat getting in the way of the cinematic reason he was doing all that worldbuilding. Now we live in a true information age where the Star Wars mysteries not answered by Wookipedia are few, far between, and usually big, intentional things like Yoda's species.

Which is all just to say that a casual viewer gets to actually experience this stuff as originally intended.
I think we have a winner here. As a causal, I very much liked the ambiance and experience I got with OT SW. I like the world being mysterious and with every piece that explained things deeper the less interested I got. At some point, the world felt much smaller, much less alien. They stopped putting languages into the films/shows because people dont like reading. They used fancy CGI to change the aesthetics, and started adding in Easter eggs from wherever that casual viewers have no context for. There was definitely a shift from alien culture to well known fan service at some point that this causal doesnt get (nor really wants to).
 

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Taking this seriously for a second: once, long ago, I read a science fiction novel set on a world which had an extremely stratified society, likely as a commentary on colonialism. I only vaguely recall the novel (I thought it was an Asimov novel but it doesn't seem that way as I look at his bibliography), but basically you had a small population of highly technologically advanced people controlling a whole planet, with extremely strict laws on interaction (e.g. the "lessers" weren't even allowed to talk to or look at the ruling class). But controlling a whole planet of people was a bit too hard logistically, so they recruited intermediaries from among the conquered population by administering tests to get the best and brightest to work for them, still in subservient roles but with immensely higher standards of living than the common population. However, these intermediaries were expected to dedicate themselves to service, and were not allowed to have children or marry. Over the course of the novel, it turned out that this was a sneaky eugenics program: by recruiting the smart and ambitious ones and then forbidding them from having children, the idea was to remove those traits from the gene pool (it didn't work out very well).

Anyhow, when Attack of the Clones talked about Jedi not being allowed to marry or have emotional attachments, I thought of that story. Force sensitivity is clearly a genetic trait, and if you recruit the force sensitive babies to your weird space wizard cult and forbid, or at least de-incentivize, children, that's not going to be good for the prevalence of force sensitivity in the long run.

Also, if anyone recognize the story I'm talking about and can help me identify it, that'd be awesome. The idea clearly stuck with me, even if the name did not. I can't have been more than 18 when I read it, so it must have been published no later than 1994 (and probably earlier to account for translation and such).
Update: it is an Asimov novel: The Currents of Space. Credit to u/Commissar_Tarkin over on Reddit - The heart of the internet.
 

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