Throwing it Away

I haven't been able to get into the new Star Wars sequels.
I love episodes 1-6.
But I can't bring myself to care about 7 or 8 as much. I liked 8 more than 7, but I can't get excited about them.

It's because 7 and 8 do something that pretty much guarantees that I won't like a sequel.
They made me feel like everything that came before was worthless.

So, my favorite part in the original six Star Wars movies is at the end of episode 6.
Everyone is happy and celebrating because after so long, they've finally won. They've finally beaten the bad guys, and they can start to fix everything.


But surprise. Episode 7 starts, and everything's pretty much back to how it was after episode 3. All that progress is completely gone.
And come episode 8, things are even worse. There are what, only 30 good guys left in the entire galaxy?

Star Wars isn't the only thing that's done this. e
The movie, Logan, for example. All of a sudden everyone is dead except for about 3 characters? Everything that they fought for in every other movie meant nothing.


And those new Star Trek movies, where they look at the young Kirk and Spock and everyone are the same. Except they literally go back in time and go down a different timeline (One of the X-Men movies did that too). So they are literally throwing away everything from all of the other Star Trek movies.

The Legend of Korra did some of this too. The world was so different than the world they gave us in Last Airbender.
And of course they destroyed the connection to all previous Avatars. Another version of throwing away what came before.


And luckily this last one isn't a proper sequel. But it has to do with the movie Willow.
At a used bookstore, I spotted a novel that was a sequel to Willow. And it was written by the guy who does Marvel comics. I bought it, thinking that a marvel sequel to Willow must be awesome.
It wasn't. They'd literally killed most of the characters and destroyed some of the main setting. And the couple characters remaining were so changed that they might as well have been different people. Willow even went by a different name.
I stopped reading.

For these sorts of sequels, I try to pretend like they don't even happen XP

Sequels should build from what came before.
Otherwise why make it a sequel at all?