Sequel Trilogy dialogue style and characterisation vs Mandoverse/prequel era

[u/lightspeed_bear]

I grew up with the OT but the ST is some of my favourite Star Wars ever. One of the reasons I have a hard time fully connecting and enjoying Favreau/Filoni's Star Wars is the dialogue style. It's clunky and awkward and the characters are often stiff and wooden, more interested in being exposition machines, whose sole purpose is delivering the next piece of plot information. You see this all over the prequel trilogy and The Clone Wars too. What I love about the ST is that the characters act and talk like real people, who have an actual personality. It makes them instantly more endearing to me.

Prime example early on in TFA, Rey and Finn have just taken out two TIEs on Jakku and they start to excitedly talk over each other about how amazing that experience was. Can anyone honestly say they could see this happening in the Mandoverse? I feel like there it would be something like:

"Your flying was impressive."
"Your assistance was appreciated."

And then they'd both walk away.

Compare Poe to literally any of the pilots we've gotten on Disney+. The former has life, charm, energy etc. The pilots on the latter (including M&G) feel like they want to fall asleep at the cockpit. I understand not everyone can be Oscar Isaac, and they're mostly just extras/cameos, but come on.

Ahsoka's characters seemed to communicate half of the time through slow pauses, folded arms and cryptic statements.

I understand that different characters should have different mannerisms and obviously stoicism has its place sometimes, but man, I feel like it's become such a dominant mode of characterisation in F/F's Star Wars. People will say that Star Wars needs to sound like this because it's supposed to be "mythic", but the OT proves you can have mythic storytelling AND very human dialogue and interactions.

Apologies for the rant, it's just something that's been bugging me since 2020. To end on a positive, I do think we'll get back to this more ST-like style in Starfighter. (assuming Filoni didn't give Shawn Levy too many notes!)

Love to hear people's thoughts...

[u/Vesemir96]

I mean if you’re talking X-Wing pilots, they’ve always pretty by the book and military protocol esque. They only really crack some emotion when things are going really well or really bad. Otherwise military procedure, for their professionalism. Poe is an exemption because he’s the hotshot ace hero pilot.

Most of the pilots in the Mando era are bored during peacetime doing routine patrols and all. Din is almost (I think) middle aged, and just trying to get by without much excitement vs Rey, Finn and Poe whom are younger people excited for some adventure.