By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda warned Luke Skywalker that what was waiting for him in Dagobah’s mysterious Dark Side cave was “only what you take with you.” Luke insisted on taking weapons inside, resulting in a dream-like duel with Darth Vader who was revealed to be wearing Luke’s face. Yoda was trying to teach his hard-headed apprentice a lesson about anger and fear, but his famous Star Wars line also serves as a prediction for the decline of this franchise after it was bought out by Disney.
Yoda Saw The Future Of Star Wars
How the heck could a single line from Yoda in the second Star Wars movie predict the decline of the franchise decades later? It all comes down to the refrain of every disgruntled fan that you find online: “this isn’t my Star Wars!” You see, the franchise has been around long enough now that it has multiple generations of fans, and all of them have a different idea of what this famous galaxy far, far away should be like.
To older fans (like, “saw the early movies in the theaters decades ago” old) of the Original Trilogy, Star Wars is mostly just well-produced sci-fi…a blockbuster adaptation of the kinds of Flash Gordon serials that George Lucas himself grew up loving. To those fans’ children, the OT was a launchpad for an expansive world whose toys led to the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which created an interconnecting world of books, comics, and games.
The Prequel Trilogy was very deliberately aimed at a younger generation, which is why The Phantom Menace was plagued by an annoying talking cartoon that alternates between stepping in poop and getting farted on by some other CGI monstrosity. Finally, the Sequel Trilogy was made for a more progressive generation of fans, which is why it’s a girl power nostalgia fest whose most interesting feature is our protagonist’s relationship with a broody bad boy.
So, what does this little franchise history lesson have to do with Yoda’s Empire Strikes Back line and Star Wars’ decline? The short answer is that every annoyed fan saying “this isn’t my Star Wars” is telling the truth, but each generation of fans loves something different about these characters and movies.
This is a big part of why the prequels received so much hate years ago: older fans finally got new films in their favorite franchise and were understandably annoyed that they was nothing like what came before. Ironically enough, many of those who fell in love with the prequels were equally annoyed when the sequels traded in those earlier films’ humor and heart for J.J. Abrams’ annoying mystery box storytelling and its thick coating of mock Spielbergian mythmaking.
In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda’s warning to Luke was quite literal: he got out of that Dark Side cave what he brought into it, and since he walked in with weapons and anger, he was confronted with a vision of himself transformed into Darth Vader. Now, Yoda’s words apply to Star Wars fans complaining about the franchise’s decline because everyone is getting out of these movies and these shows what they bring to them. Someone expecting Ahsoka to be exactly like Rebels will be disappointed, but someone who goes in with an open mind (without weapons, if you will) is far likelier to enjoy what they see.
Now, Yoda’s eerily prescient prediction doesn’t mean that modern fans should accept slop or refrain from commenting on a perceived decline in quality. However, it’s important to remember that “decline” is relative: the popularity of the prequels proves that one fan’s trash is another fan’s treasure. Plus, it doesn’t help that YouTube has developed an entire cottage industry of getting fans to hate franchises like Star Wars long before the latest films or shows are released.
That means that in addition to different generations of Star Wars fans having different expectations, far too many of them get riled up by YouTubers and, like Luke Skywalker before them, go into new films and shows with anger. Like the would-be Jedi, they get confronted by a manifestation of their fears and perceive the latest Star Wars content as some sort of monstrous creation destroying their childhood. Yoda may have failed to teach Luke enough before the cave, but it’s not too late for Star Wars fans complaining about the franchise’s decline to learn from the Jedi Master and stop projecting their own emotions onto everything they watch.
