Spoiler: length, and wasting Fyr's thread space
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I'm fairly surprised at this and the Jar Jar comment earlier, since I thought you were adamantly against making any assumptions about George Lucas based on absolutely nothing except how the assumer feels about him.
I'm raising possibilities, not saying absolute truth. The point is that the default assumption that 'George is responsible for X is based on no knowledge.

It's not a random assumption, see this quote further down
Spoiler: Spoilers?
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Quote Originally Posted by interview
So there are fans that, just to be honest, their interest level in droids or young Jedi is very low. They want to see Maul come on like house-on-fire and destroy things. Oddly, these are probably the same fans that, when we said we were bringing Maul back, were just beside themselves with the logic of that. But our fans evolve and change quite dynamically. [Laughs] And then there will be some kids — probably the younger skewing audience — they’re all about the Jedi training, they’re all about going to Illum. Because that’s something they’ve always imagined, and it’s something I imagined as a kid, to have an opportunity to see that and to go there. So yeah, and then there are people like us that are more like… I don’t know if we’re Star Wars generalists, but we just kind of like it all. Everything we get to see in Star Wars is just a trip to the galaxy and you just accept that something that makes Star Wars special is that it has all these tones and attitudes in it.


So Dave is here directly talking about the need to have different arcs with different tones and subject matter aimed at different parts of the audience.

The ' got on as bend' quote, in context:

George really got on a bend of having an episode about the droids, an episode about the Jedi, an episode about politics. And when I say episode, I mean arc. And he kind of liked to hit those different themes every season.
Droids are listed as one of three options, in the context of the overall plan for a season. It's not given particular prominence over the other plots, other than as three things to hit for a season. Yet there is particular focus in this thread on the droids arc as being related to George's creative input, which is not applied to the Jedi based arcs people like.

Example

The show would have been a lot better had it stayed away from the front lines (literal or otherwise) more often, but I kind of feel like that's more of a symptom. From some of the stuff I've read, I get the impression that the writers didn't have enough autonomy to consistently reach their full potential. Sure, that's very easy for me to say when I had nothing to do with the whole thing; but at the same time it would explain quite a lot if e.g. all the droid-centric arcs were written not because the writers thought there was a story worth telling, but because George Lucas insisted that was the kind of story they needed to tell.
If you're writing for TV, complete creative freedom is a thing that doesn't exist, you are always beholden to the showrunner. If a writer can't do something with a concept as vague as 'droids', then they aren't going to be able to handle most writing gigs in TV.

So you're thinking when the interview mentioned...I guess "going on a bend" is the correct rephrasing...for an arc "about the droids"; he didn't literally mean about the droids, despite the number of episodes about the droids each season had? While also thinking the "about politics" thing was literally about politics?
No the idea of the arcs were probably literal, but 'droids' 'politics' and 'jedi' are extremely broad premises the general idea of hitting those themes per season could well be to have arcs for different parts of the audience rather than specifically because they were about droids, politics, and Jedi. There's no indication that George insisted on those arcs any more than he did the Jedi or politics ones, but the droids ones have particular focus as an example of George's bad decisions, because fandom likes to focus on George's supposed bad decisions over his good ones, even when they have no knowledge of what decisions were actually made.

The reason I'm so hesitant about these kind of assumptions is because they remind me of the 'Star Wars was saved in the edit' assumptions, which are widely held and completely false.



The funny part of all this is that none of us appear to have actually checked which writers wrote which episodes, despite this being super easily available information. Interesting.