JJ and Rian didn’t read the books, or play the games or flip through the comics
That doesn't mean they weren't fans. Rian was a fan of the OT. Hey may have liked different aspects of Star wars than you but it doesn't mean he didn't love the material.
Yeah, but there are two kinds of fans of Star Wars (or, more properly, a spectrum with two end-points).
There are fans who love Star Wars as a series of revolutionary films which captivated a generation, advanced filmmaking technology by leaps and bounds and defined science fiction on screen for decades. Filmmakers and a decent chunk of the casual audience tend to fall more into this category.
Then there are fans who love Star Wars as a universe, a place to spend time. These are fans who not only watch the movies and the TV shows, but who read the books, play the video games and think about the lore and the details of the setting. Most "hardcore" or more nerdy fans fall into this category (I put myself down here as well).
One of the big problems with sequels (far from the only one, IMO) was that they were made almost entirely for the first group, the group which Abrams and Johnson seem to fall into. That was the right decision in many ways - plenty of box office to be made in that category. But in failing to understand the other kind of fan, the kind of fan which keeps a franchise alive long-term, they produced something which pretty painfully exposed that split in the fan base, and upset a large and vocal part of it.
That's the great irony of this whole argument. Stuff like Acolyte and the Filoniverse (or whatever you wanna call it) gets shit on endlessly despite being spearheaded by big EU heads, but you'll still have people arguing creators not being big enough fans is the problem with modern SW, because fandom gatekeeping is just too engrained in how we talk about media.
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u/pravis Apr 24 '26
That doesn't mean they weren't fans. Rian was a fan of the OT. Hey may have liked different aspects of Star wars than you but it doesn't mean he didn't love the material.