r/saltierthancrait

Let's put it all here and not clutter the sub with Dear Diary entries.

Even Jon Favreau, who directed The Mandalorian and Grogu, doesn't understand why he received the assignment to make the show into a movie.

>Favreau openly admitted he doesn’t entirely understand why Lucasfilm selected The Mandalorian and Grogu as the movie for franchise’s theatrical comeback.

It feels like every few months I hear the same rumors and see the same people claiming that any day now, Filoni/Favreau/Whoever is going to use some contrived plot device to make it happen. It isn’t. You know it, I know it, Filoni and the others know it and it’s just sad that we keep going through this same song and dance.
The thing is, that’s about the only thing (I feel) that’ll restore casual and hardcore faith in this dying franchise.

Let’s put it into perspective: The Force Awakens came out over ten years ago with little-to-no supplemental material to keep the fans of the era engaged. Disney Plus has given the casual audience nothing comparable to what was happening in the ten year span from Revenge of the Sith to The Force Awakens.

The Clone Wars.

You can’t tell me that, regardless of how you feel about the quality of the show, that it didn’t keep interest in the brand alive. It also had the benefit of being aimed at children and being shown on prime time television; both of which contributed to widespread viewership. The closest we’ve come is The Mandalorian. And I continue to assert that that was lightning in a bottle; the unique circumstances of the lack of content on Disney Plus, pandemic forcing us all home, and the boost given by Luke’s finale appearance that left everyone intrigued on where we would go next.

The fact is that, quality aside, without these specific factors, the general audience does not care.

I work with kids and most of them don’t even know what Star Wars is, let alone have any interest in all these assorted spin-offs whose sole connection is the brand. The uninitiated are familiar solely with the surface level aspects of the films: Luke, Vader, Leia, the Jedi and maybe the droids. For as much as people complain about the prominence of this one family and how connected everything is, the general audience prefers it this way. It makes things easier to follow, easier to understand; Rey, on her own, is a hard sell because she’s nobody. Except she’s a Palpatine. Except she’s a Skywalker, but not really; Kylo was the last one and he’s gone.

That’s not even going into how John Boyega and Oscar Isaac don’t even want to come back and with the (unproven thus far) allegations surrounding Adam Driver, were left with a boring nothing of a character to carry on the future of the series. One who won’t even be the main attraction of a theme park that, in Kathleen’s hubris, wasn’t modeled after Tatooine because “we have far more Star Wars stories ahead of us than behind us”.

And now we Luke, Han and Leia coming to the park for meet and greets while Rey and Kylo are being brushed to the side.

The fact is, Star Wars cannot escape its legacy and the general audience won’t come back unless they see someone or something familiar. The problem is you killed them off and the intended audience didn’t latch on to the new characters the way the Prequel kids did with Anakin, Padmé and Obi-Wan. And until Disney redoes VII with the core characters, there will never be another film to break a billion at the box office.

Coaxium as explained by the new canon especially in Solo: A Star Wars story, is a rare hyperfuel that requires advanced refining to be used. It is also highly explosive. It is so rare and valuable that it becomes the primary mcguffin for the train heist in that movie.

This is also the justification for why there is a "fuel crisis" in The Last Jedi.

But Coaxium is a lore breaking retcon. Hyperfuel cannot be rare and expensive in Star Wars or else nothing about how hyperspace travel in any of the non-sequel 7 movies makes sense. Throughout all of the OT, PT and Rogue One, characters are jumping all over hyperspace constantly. They are able to do so almost leisurely. Even Luke Skywalker who grew up as a poor moisture farmer on Tatooine was able to purchase passage to Alderaan just by selling his speeder. If hyperfuel was so rare and expensive a journey like that would make no sense. Luke was planning on going to the Imperial academy to become a pilot, how would Owen Lars a "moisture farmer" have had enough money to send him across the stars to that academy if hyperfuel was such a prohibitive cost.

However there is a whole other layer to this problem. In Episode 1: The Phantom Menace the entire opening plot of that movie is about how the taxation of trade routes has led to a blockade of Naboo by the Trade Federation. This implies that there is galactic trade. If hyperfuel is such an expense how does an entity like the Trade Federation even exist? They are so rich and powerful just from moving cargo around that they have enough money to fund their own private armies. If fuel was such an enormous expense how does the Trade Federation make such an enormous profit?

There is also the problem of Coruscant. Coruscant is a planet sized city, with absolutely zero farmland. It is explained in canon that it has a population of 1-3 trillion residents. How could a world like that possibly exist without massive daily imports of food, water and other natural resources? Are we left to assume that FOOD is transported via this very same expensive hyperfuel?

When you ask that question it peels back how impossible the galaxy as we understand it would be if Coaxium was such a rare and expensive resource. Perhaps there is more than one way to make hyperfuel. However that still begs the question, why would coaxium have so much value if it was only one method out of many to produce cheap reliable hyperfuel?

Nothing about this concept of rare and valuable hyperfuel makes sense. It completely breaks the galaxy as we know it. Thank you for coming to my talk.

It's accessible through the Aurebesh text on the sidebar. Just let us know if there's anything worth adding to the list.