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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9761424" data-attributes="member: 6988941">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.</blockquote>

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