The Star Wars fandom can be fairly neatly divided into three generational camps. There are those who grew up with the original trilogy, those who saw the prequels as children, and the newest are the young fans of Disney’s sequel trilogy. Inevitably, there’s usually some friction between them, largely based on which set of movies you happened to grow up watching.
That’s been underlined by a discussion on Reddit, centering around a fan who sees both the prequels and original trilogy as a single indivisible story:
This is just another example of the slow rehabilitation of the prequel trilogy’s reputation. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s they were famously a laughing stock, with George Lucas’ decision to sell up to Disney met with cheers from fans happy that the man responsible for Jar Jar Binks was nowhere near Star Wars.
That’s now changed, with those who were children in 1999-2005 now adults, who have fostered a lot of sentimental attachment to the prequels. The replies reflect this, though many can’t deal with those who say the triptych is beyond criticism entirely. One poster summarizes things as:
“I still love them because when I was 7 and saw Phantom Menace it was the coolest movie I had ever seen but I can totally understand why anyone 10+ years older than me might not like them as much.”
The natural endpoint of this is that in a few years, the currently reviled sequel trilogy will begin to pick up nostalgia value and the Star Wars fandom will finally embrace them as an intrinsic part of the universe. That’ll likely result in some very unhappy gray-haired nerds still unable to accept Rey Skywalker, though by that point we may have a new set of movies for them to gripe over.
Even so, it’ll be a cold day in hell before we ever put up with someone praising the objectively awful The Rise of Skywalker.