Not a terrible theory, but we don't have so much as a throwaway line supporting it. Much like how Leia claimed to remember their mother's face in Episode 6 I think its just something that Lucas forgot about or retconned in his head while huffing CGI polygons off a hooker's ass between Prequel takes. The timeline of 1-6 is already fucked, and I'm gonna summon up my ~2004 self and rant a bit for you. The prequels have grown on me over the years, you see. Its incredibly obvious to me that there was intended to be a sizable time gap in between episode 3 and 4 in which several things were supposed to originally happen. The most important of these is Anakin becoming Vader and hunting down the Jedi. At some point he met Padme/Luke and Lei's mother and knocked her up unawares. Maybe left her for dead or some shit. Meanwhile Obiwan find out about it and gets involved and spirits her and the newborns away. Leia lived with her mother for at least a few years of her childhood, thus explaining her memories of her, and when the mother died (hunted down and killed by Vader? Who knows) Leia was given up to the Organas for adoption. Meanwhile Obiwan had taken Luke to Tattooine as a baby and he grew up with the Lars' family. At some point during this "in between" time period is when Vader (already part cyborg due to his many battles with Jedi) finally catches up with Obiwan, tries to exterminate him like the rest, and gets the rest of his shit wrecked while Obiwan escapes. It is at that point that Vader becomes a full cyborg with the suit and all. However Lucas was insistent on showing Anakin become Vader and Padme dying in the actual movie and so put this entire part of his character arc on fast-forward, which fucked up the timeline for everyone else. I wrote a fanfic for a bet back then where Episode 1 happened as normal, the Clone Wars were actually a fight between separatists who used clones and the Republic and were secretly controlled by the Sith, and where the Jedi Order came out of the shadows (having been regarded as a myth for most of history) to aid the Republic because the Sith were involved. Obiwan met Anakin as a force-sensitive transport pilot, and after everything goes pear shaped and the Jedi get nuked at the end of Episode 2, not 3, Obiwan goes on the run and spends a couple years bro-ing around the galaxy with Anakin and teaching him how to use his powers until he becomes a full fledged Jedi. In Episode 3 some shit happens and it ends with Padme pregnant and on the run and Anakin turns to the dark side and joins the Emperor. Then we get a TV series or something covering the time I talked about above, and then like a 13 year timeskip into A New Hope and Bob's your uncle.

>>415 The prequels are honestly fine, just lacking subtlety. If the same events happened but felt character-driven then it would be okay. That said, I'd be fine with some tweaks to the politics to make it happen. Trade embargoes enforced by a droid army make little sense. Why doesn't everyone use a droid army? Why doesn't everyone use a clone army? It's Star Wars so no time is spent explaining how the world is, but "evil empire has giant capital ships and cyborg knights" didn't really need explaining. The galaxy's economy shouldn't, either... unless you're going to mention it explicitly. Otherwise, I mostly would like small changes. Obi-Wan should be the impulsive youngster in Phantom Menace, but Qui-Gon fulfills this role somehow. Swap that. Clone Wars should be more Anakin and Obi-Wan centric to show Obi-Wan maturing into a mentor at a younger age than he otherwise would. You have to address the elephant in the room, which is "what even is a clone war". Arguably, a war fought by clones on one side is the lamest version of that. What about a civil war caused by the adoption of clone troopers themselves? I'd suggest a war where major political figures and Jedi are cloned, but honestly the best conclusion to an arc like this is "cloning is non-viable except for short-term, expensive shock troops that are expendable". Have them degrade rapidly after a few years. Long enough to splinter the Republic, make people choose sides, and then let Palpatine engineer a win. Fights between droids and clones aren't interesting because there are no stakes, so focusing on the political intrigue and assassinations would be a good idea. They did sorta do this, but still conceded a big action climax with too much going on. I love Grievous but I would prefer SpiderMaul because he serves as a foil to Obi-Wan and likewise can represent secret Sith life-preserving technology to foreshadow Darth Vader's suit. Grievous arguably does the same but mostly his gimmick is "lol 4 lightsabers go woooosh" and that's it. Total waste of a fun character. Dooku also got the shaft. One of the best actors of all time, he shows up briefly in each movie to establish being a Jedi turned evil. No real character development. Would have been better to have him impede investigations in Episode 2 and then, when excommunicated, overtly turning against them to act as a lightning rod away from Palpatine and excuse crackdowns on the Jedi as a whole "for everyone's safety", which can be used to weed out vocal opponents. You know, a slow march towards fascism instead of just "lol Order 66 engage". Could there be a longer gap between Episode 3 and 4? Yeah, I don't think making it 30-40 years instead of 20 would hurt, to really put the Republic in the past. But too much has to happen in the gap that isn't covered otherwise. Having Vader's injuries be the result of a showdown with Obi-Wan is properly climactic and makes the most sense poetically, even if it is a bit rushed. The main issue is, if you do this, it ages up Luke and Leia which completely breaks their character development. That, or you have to have Padme get pregnant later on. But that just doesn't work out. I will defend Episode 3's character development of Anakin. Should Clone Wars have shown more actual distaste for the council? Absolutely. Complaining a bunch about them didn't make anyone sympathize. But Episode 3 makes sense. Anakin wanted to save Padme from dying, couldn't access the archives for that, and Palpatine outright handed him the promotion he wanted... except the council veto'd the rank increase. Lucas just screwed it up by cutting the whole "oh the archives for premonitions are available to masters only!" bit from the movie, so Anakin just looks like he wants the prestige of the rank and is willing to murder his friends for that. No, he's willing to turn on his friends because he wants to save his secret wife.

One thing I always found interesting is the strong theme that The Jedi Order is corrupted by the time of the prequels. In interviews and such, Lucas seems to not intend this at all, but in the films themselves, it works so well. Of course there is the bit where The Jedi are turned into a military force, which is acknowledged as being wrong within the films, but then we also see them make multiple judgements that are incorrect, and since they're prequels, we know they're incorrect as they make them. Anakin IS the Chosen One, he does bring balance to The Force, but Yoda was going to disregard that and not allow him in. Qui-Gon, a hippie spiritual type who disregards the letter of the law in favor of its spirit, could sense further ahead and saw that, even though he would do terrible things as Vader, he ultimately still would fulfill his destiny. And not only does he end The Sith, but he also ends The Jedi, as if both were corrupting The Force. And given that we see the Jedi were corrupted, this makes sense. By the end, Luke is the only one left, but he didn't even finish Jedi school, and the Jedi school he dropped out of was obviously not the type that the Jedi Order used before their downfall. Not only was he older, and Yoda had to teach him in unorthodox circumstances, but by that time, Yoda seemed to see and learn from some of his own mistakes as well. Whatever Luke is, he is not the same type of thing that the characters of the prequels were, except for arguably Qui-Gon. Of course, the fact that Qui-Gon was an influence on Anakin is important as well, and a large part of what saves the day in the end, but the fact that he wasn't able to train him fully himself resulted in Anakin being corrupted by Jedi who were themselves already corrupted, notable Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan was better than most, due to his training by Qui-Gon, but was shown to never fully get Qui-Gon's teachings, and thus still had a bit of the corrupted, bureaucratic influence of the Order in him, and then this results in him being unable to properly train Anakin. It's not because Obi-Wan is a bad Jedi, he's better than most, but training Anakin was always going to be an extraordinary job, and while he did it well enough to save the day at the very end, it resulted in a lot of messed up stuff in the middle (Darth Vader). When Obi-Wan says that he failed Anakin, he might be hard on himself, but only a tiny bit. He didn't do as well as Qui-Gon would have done, even if he was second best. But of course we can sympathize with his very difficult situation. >tl;dr: The Jedi Council was corrupted by bureaucracy and itself needed to be destroyed, along with The Sith, to bring balance to The Force, and that's precisely what Anakin did. Vader destroying The Jedi was actually the will of The Force. They, like Anakin, had good intentions, but were flawed, and their destruction was ultimately good. In the end, there is no organized religion dedicated to messing with The Force, for good or evil. Both take it out of balance. The movies seem to actually establish this quite well, but in interviews and such, it's like Lucas doesn't even realize he did it. >>414 >the description of Vader's belief system as an "ancient religion" whereas the Jedi order collapsed only a generation prior. This isn't complicated. It was ancient even when it was still practiced. Ancient doesn't have to refer to when it ended. If anything, in almost all uses it would refer to when it began. >Yoda, who is old enough to have taught Qui-Gon or one of his predecessors) Yoda did teach Qui-Gon, not to mention Obi-Wan. This seems like something that was almost a plot hole when they introduced Qui-Gon, until they established that Yoda teaches the younglings. >>415 >Much like how Leia claimed to remember their mother's face in Episode 6 I can buy that this is just a vague memory from birth. That's believable, especially in context. >>416 >Why doesn't everyone use a droid army? Because the planets/groups that control battledroid manufacturing are on the other side of the war? >Why doesn't everyone use a clone army? The other side already had battledroids. >Obi-Wan should be the impulsive youngster in Phantom Menace, but Qui-Gon fulfills this role somehow. Qui-Gon is a rebel because the Jedi Order overall was wrong, and they needed an influence in the right direction to go against them, but still be respected enough to get away with it.

>>417 I recently got into reading the thrawn trilogy because my friend wouldn't shut up about it and i ended up enjoying it more than the movies.

>>414 >The prequels are honestly fine, just lacking subtlety. The prequels were an utter failure when the Clone Wars that Obi Wan talked about was just about a bunch of cloned dudes fighting robots and not people duking it out with cloning technology like in The 6th Day. It would made have so much sense more sense why Vader ended up in the Gimp suit and had such a bitter outlook on live, why technology decaded ect. The type of story one could have told with this kind of setup would also be wastly different then this shitty politics plot we got instead.