With a seemingly innocent tweet, Disney just inadvertently kicked a hornet’s nest the size of a Rancor. The official Star Wars U.K. Twitter account intended, seemingly, to encourage fans to rewatch the Skywalker Saga on Disney Plus, by tweeting a touching parallel between young Anakin Skywalker of the prequels, and adoptive Skywalker Rey of the sequels; instead, it reignited the old fan war over Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
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“Sometimes a journey starts with a goodbye,” reads the caption to the tweet, which contains a video that likens Shmi Skywalker saying goodbye to her son as he goes off with the Jedi, to the last time Rey’s mother saw her daughter before handing her over to Unkar Plutt. A classic and poignant instance of Star Wars rhyming like poetry, right?
Well, not so much. Fans proceeded to tear the comparison apart; Shmi’s decision to allow Anakin to train with the Jedi was a selfless one, whereas Rey’s mom’s choice was essentially to sell her only child into slavery.
The offending tweet also brought back bitter memories of TROS controversially retconning The Last Jedi‘s alternate explanation for Rey’s origins; that her parents were nobodies who didn’t care about her.
“This is Shmi Skywalker slander.”
Others, though, were more compassionate towards Rey’s parents’ difficult situation.
Meanwhile, some pretend TROS never happened…
Disney really hit a nerve with this one.
The debate caused by this one innocuous tweet brings into focus that the Sequel Trilogy continues to incite the most passionate backlash of anything in the Star Wars franchise, while the Prequel Trilogy, once reviled, has been totally reappraised in recent years, and is as precious now to fans of a certain age as the Original Trilogy is to kids of the ’70s and ’80s. Maybe the sequels will get the same kind of treatment in 20 years’ time.
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Published: Feb 21, 2022 04:48 pm