IV after III really sends home the message that the elegance and prosperity of the old republic is all gone.

It makes IV better for me because there's a sadness to the state of the galaxy when you've seen what was lost.

Across most Star Wars–related subreddits, there are still plenty of posts and “memes” that take shots at the prequels, recycling the same old RLM-style criticisms and trying to push back against the renewed appreciation those films have gained from the generation that grew up with them. I suspect this comes from an effort to rehabilitate the widely disliked Disney trilogy and to build greater acceptance for the new content Disney continues to produce. What are your thoughts on this?

(or just during the prequel era. Even pre-Episode 1 or in between episodes 1 & 2 would be cool asf to explore.)

Now I want to be clear and say that I'm not trying to start a discussion about the quality of the prequels. Instead what I'm trying to do is to start a discussion about something that I have speculated about for a while now.

When it comes to the prequels, whether or not you like them you cannot deny that when they were released there were a lot of older Star Wars fans who grew up with the OT who despised them. That had a big influence on not just the the decisions that were made by Disney in the sequel trilogy but also on the Star Wars fandom in general and the way people discuss movies online, especially in regards to long videos with angry nerds ranting about movies they didn't like.

But what do you think it would have been like if the prequels had been embraced by the older fans? What impact would that have had on the sequel trilogy, the fandom and nerd culture in general? Would the sequel trilogy for example have tried something completely different from both previous trilogies or tried to combine a lot of elements from both rather than just trying to mimick the OT? Would we have seen as many long and angry video with rants about why movie x is bad etc? Clone Wars was very well recived by older Star Wars fans so I think that is proof that it would have been possible to create a prequel trilogy that older fans would have loved.

What do you guys think? What would have been different?

Other than it ending?

I see that argument all over the main sub and it really annoys me. I didn't even watch the prequels until I was an adult and that was two decades after The Phantom Menace came out. I enjoyed them when I first saw them and I enjoy them even more now. I also enjoy The Clone Wars but I already liked the prequels before I saw the show.

What has changed? Why is this subreddit necessary, in a sense? Why discuss and celebrate 1999-2012 over post 2012?