I was actually waiting for the Thrawn series to come out back then. I had heard that Lucas was going to allow authors to write books in his galaxy and absent any sequels (which I expected before the prequels) I was hungry for that. I already knew Zahn as I was a big fan of the Cobra trilogy (heyyyyyy…where did Halo and Master Chief get some of their plot ideas now?!)Great summary, I couldn't have said it any better. The loss of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, the destruction of Alderaan in front of Leias eyes, the death of Owi Wan, the devastating defeat at Hoth, Lukes Training, Hans freezing, the loss of Lukes hand, the reuniting of Han and Leia, the turn to the light side and death of Vader and the turn to the dark side of Anakin were emotional on a level that the sequels never reached.
I don't know if any of you know the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn from the Mid 90ies. In my opinion these books did everything right in terms of proper Star Wars sequels. They brought enough new to the table to stand their own ground, yet remained incredibly faithful to the lore. The new characters like Thrawn and Mara Jade were deep and interesing, as were the new locations. For example Landos new mining project was a moving city atop of dozens of old AT-ATs on the dark side of a planet close to a sun. What a followup to Cloud City. Imagine that on the big screen. Zahn also came up with Coruscant as the capital planet.
With Disney Star Wars pretty much all we get are the next desert, ice and forest planets. Like there's nothing else in this galaxy.
I often think, why oh why didn't they turn the Thrawn Books into sequels back in the late 90ies or early 2000s, when the original Cast was still young enough to pull it off. Well, in a couple of years some tech savvy nerd can probably create this using deep fakes and AI generated images in his celar.
Mara Jade is also a favorite of mine. Fortunately the whole Thrawn thing seems to have been relegated to Dave Filoni's good hands. Ahsoka is another favorite so I know Filoni and Favreau will treat Thrawn right (Filoni already has with Thrawn).
I had expected the sequels to in their own way hand off 'successors' to Leia, Luke and Han with those original three characters being mentors or trainers, or…something. That didn't happen and because of it we are now stuck with deaging the originals.
The newer Star Trek movies were successful in part (their level of success can be argued) because the main actors had a say in who the torch was handed to for their characters. The Star Wars sequels didn't even get that.
