Here’s 10 ways to actually save Star Wars…
Star Wars keeps trying to fix itself with nostalgia, cameos, and bigger CGI battles. None of that works. If you want to save Star Wars, you have to burn down the safe formula and rebuild it with human drama, moral ambiguity, and stories that matter. Here’s how.
I. The Lie of Anakin’s Birth
Story: Shmi Skywalker tells young Anakin he had no father, creating the myth of a miraculous birth. But whispers suggest otherwise—maybe a Jedi, maybe a cruel slave master, maybe just a drifter who left. Anakin’s hunger to know the truth festers into obsession, driving him toward darkness.
Why it fixes Star Wars: No more hokey “chosen one” prophecy. Anakin’s fall becomes about lies, abandonment, and longing. He’s not a failed messiah—he’s a boy broken by the truth he never got. That makes him tragic instead of silly.
II. Till Circuits Do Us Part
Story: After decades of loyalty and bickering, 3PO and R2 finally confess they’re in love. Their “wedding” happens in the middle of a firefight, officiated by a glitching droid priest as stormtroopers close in. Absurd and touching, it’s the payoff their whole dynamic has been building toward.
Why it fixes Star Wars: They stop being comic props and become real characters. Machines turn into people, and melodrama becomes heartfelt instead of campy. Star Wars was always a soap opera in space—so lean into it.
III. The False Jedi
Story: He frees the enslaved, heals the sick, and calls himself the last true Jedi. But everywhere he goes, famine follows, governments collapse, and people die. He blames the Order for corruption. He alone thinks he’s righteous. Everyone else sees a nightmare.
Why it fixes Star Wars: No more cartoon villains. He’s terrifying because he’s sincere. This reintroduces moral ambiguity, making Jedi hypocrisy part of the story instead of something fans argue about on forums.
IV. The Force-Eater
Story: Jedi collapse mid-duel. Sith Lords wither away. A parasite spreads across the galaxy, feeding on the Force itself. The more powerful you are, the more vulnerable you become. Both Orders race to cure—or weaponize—it.
Why it fixes Star Wars: The Force stops being a convenient superpower and becomes dangerous again. It turns mysticism into survival horror. Suddenly Jedi and Sith are just as fragile as everyone else.
V. Moisture and Marriage
Story: On a quiet planet, a farmer raises crops, repairs droids, and courts a spouse. War passes like distant thunder—patrols in the distance, whispers of rebellion—but the story is about storms, neighbors, and the small joys worth protecting.
Why it fixes Star Wars: It broadens the tone. Not every story has to be about galaxy-spanning war. Sometimes what’s at stake is a harvest, a family, a home. That’s what gives Star Wars its soul.
VI. The Uprising of the Forgotten
Story: Refugees flee something worse than the Empire, pouring across its borders. Both Empire and Rebels bristle at the influx, exposing their own prejudice. The Empire corrals them into ghettos yet exploits them as cheap labour. When the invader finally arrives, refugees defend their oppressors—only to be crushed harder. At last, they rise up, sack the Imperial capital, and topple the regime. Not for the Rebellion, but for themselves.
Why it fixes Star Wars: The story stops being about generals and starts being about the people everyone else ignores. It forces both sides to confront their xenophobia. And it makes the fall of the Empire something organic—an uprising, not just another Rebel miracle shot.
VII. The Holocron of Comfort
Story: A smuggler cracks open a stolen holocron expecting forbidden combat secrets. Instead, it’s bedtime stories, recipes, and songs. Useless, until he starts reading to refugee kids. The smuggler becomes something he never expected: a caretaker.
Why it fixes Star Wars: It reframes the Jedi as guardians of culture, not just warriors. It says what’s worth saving isn’t tactics—it’s tradition and tenderness. Suddenly the Jedi aren’t just space monks—they’re memory keepers.
VIII. The Droid Who Dreamed
Story: An eccentric inventor gives a droid sleep cycles. At first its dreams are nonsense—until one predicts the future. Sith and Jedi race to control it. The droid itself wonders: are these visions its own, or is it trapped in a destiny it doesn’t want?
Why it fixes Star Wars: It takes droid sentience seriously. Dreams blur the line between prophecy and programming. It fuses tech and mysticism, keeping Star Wars weird and wondrous instead of sterile.
IX. The Aftermath of Clones
Story: The war ends. The clones scatter, each desperate for normalcy. They try farming, marriage, trade. But they age too fast, their trauma runs too deep, and society won’t accept them. One by one, their dreams collapse into despair, violence, or exile.
Why it fixes Star Wars: It forces the saga to acknowledge the human cost of disposable soldiers. Instead of glorifying clone armies, it shows the aftermath—the tragedy of men built for war who never get a real life. It makes the universe reckon with its own cruelty.
X. Ashes of Devotion
Story: A drifter with no allegiance—neither Empire nor Rebellion—lives only for himself. Detached, feared, a psychopath hiding in plain sight. Until he falls for a woman. Her husband is ordered into one last Imperial mission, and for her sake, the drifter intervenes to keep him alive. But the Empire executes the husband out of spite. In front of her, the drifter unleashes his vengeance—slaughtering officers with terrifying precision, relishing every kill. When the blood dries, he confesses his love. She recoils. She’s seen him clearly: not a saviour, but a monster who can only love through destruction. Whatever chance they had dies in that instant.
Why it fixes Star Wars: This is Star Wars as Shakespearean tragedy. It strips away space opera spectacle and delivers human horror: devotion twisted into obsession, love ruined by violence. It mirrors Anakin and Padmé, but without illusions. It’s raw, operatic, and unforgettable.
What these ten ideas do is simple: they stop treating Star Wars like a brand and start treating it like myth. They make the Force dangerous again, give villains believable convictions, show the cost of war, and finally let ordinary people—not just Jedi and Sith—shape the galaxy’s fate.
Most importantly, they bring back tragedy, tenderness, and humanity. That’s how you save Star Wars.
@movies@piefed.social
I’d totally watch the one with R2 and 3P0 getting married.
You’re hired
Hey, uhh, never watched Star Wars. Tell me if you ever make a Star Wars movie, might start then.
@atomicpoet @movies based
Uhhh have you watched or read anything made in the last decade or so? Most of your wishes got made, at least the ones that made sense.
Which ones?
The prequels made Anakin literally a “Space Jesus” prophecy child with no father, thanks to midichlorians. But I’m proposing that Schmi lied.
R2 and 3PO bicker, but it’s played for comic relief only. They never acknowledge love.
Dooku claims to be a reformer, but he’s still moustache-twirling Sith. Kylo Ren thinks he’s finishing Vader’s work, but he knows he’s serving darkness. What I’m proposing is a genuinely sincere Sith convinced he’s a Jedi, whose “help” destroys everything.
Perhaps the one closest to canon is my 10th proposal. Anakin and Padmé touch this space, but Padmé never sees Anakin’s atrocities firsthand until too late. Rogue One has Cassian as a ruthless Rebel, but not this dynamic. What I’m suggesting is a drifter’s love twisted into violence, with the woman witnessing the horror in real time. That exact operatic tragedy has not been done.
I see a suspicous number of em dashes…
Cool—you’ve keyed in on my particular style of writing. I love em-dashes—a good all-purpose piece of punctuation that establishes rhythm of speech.
I’m feeling charitable today. Have another em-dash—
This is one of the things I love about Linux—press the compose key, tap dash thrice, and voilà—a beautiful em-dash for all to gaze upon.