The Last Airbender was a bad movie. It took a beloved franchise and made it boring. The writing was dreadful, the sfx and visuals were mundane and uninspired, and it was disrespectful to the fans of the franchise. It was a poor adaptation with minimal standalone value

The Star Wars Holiday Special is an abomimation, a crime against humanity. It took the characters from a beloved franchise and gave them acid and a public acces tv show. It wasn’t just disrespectful, or poorly done. It was proactively offensive to the viewer.

It’s like, if you go to a restaurant and order Spaghetti Bolognese, but that’s not what they bring you. The Last Airbender would be a plate of plain, mushy macaroni and a side of ketchup, but they insist on pronouncing it “pasta boloney.” The Star Wars Holiday Special is gagh with a sauce made from expired horseradish, maple syrup, and goat vomit.

If you’re an Avatar fan, watching The Last Airbender will make you angry and sad. If you’re a Star Wars fan, watching the Holiday Special will make you nauseated and afraid.

It’s really hard to convey just how bad the Star Wars Holiday Special is without watching it, but anyone who has watched it will agree that nobody else should ever watch it. Descriptions and clips really don’t do it justice. It is so much worse than the sum of the parts. Everyone involved in making it has apologized for its existence.

And if all of that makes you morbidly curious to watch the special, I’ve been there. I know what you’re feeling, and how you plan to maybe have a drink or get high and watch it for a laugh. Don’t. Your life will be worse. And then you’ll find yourself trying to convince someone not to watch it, and realize you’ve made it sound interesting.

At least there are no drowned ghosts coming out of your television to murder you.

A huge part of enjoying a movie for me is simply being able to sit through it without wanting to puncture my eardrums. Apart from a couple of truly lovely sequences, thinking specifically of McDiarmid in the literal “space opera” and the dialogue-less Order 66 tone poem, ROTS has almost all the same issues with direction, writing, and and acting that AOTC does. The performances are stilted, the dialogue needed more than one additional draft, and different takes should have been filmed and/or used.

Every explanation I’ve heard from fans or even GL just rings hollow; the OT had some groaners, but by and large the cast and crew kept the floor higher, and contemporary reviews of ANH from '77 are not nearly as hard on the acting as you may have heard. Everyone was coming out of New Hollywood and a very naturalistic style, and while no one was getting nominated for performances, there was give and take that worked out better. On that front, the ST has parts that don’t hold up upon reflection, but other than a little too much Marvel zingerness, it’s just much nicer to sit through even when it makes little sense.

As for TLJ, it has some issues with pacing and a fairly big one with the framing device of the slow-speed chase, but by and large I loved 90% of what it was doing, especially in light of the soft-reboot mindset and thin world-building that JJ left Rian Johnson with. Luke abandoned the galaxy in shame after Kylo blew everything up and cannot be found: there are literally only two options: He’s hiding while searching for something, or he’s hiding because he thinks he’s a problem. Rian picked one, and picked one that was more interesting to explore, character-wise. I can appreciate it. Maybe it’s always a mistake to revisit iconic characters after decades away, but “Jake Skywalker” struck me as a perfectly plausible backslide for the Luke we saw in TESB specifically, but also the OT generally. His ability to shake it off and embrace his own legacy and make a personal sacrifice to save his friends and ideals absolutely worked for me. I am a foolish and grizzled veteran of the stupid /r/starwars TLJ threads, so I could go on and on about Snoke and Rose and all of it, but suffice it to say I am one of those TLJ weirdos. Flawed as it is, it’s better than anything since the OT.

Finally, the ROTS novel. If this and this and this are your cup of tea, then you do you, but I actively dislike Stover’s style.

The prequels killed SW for me and TFA/TLJ brought my love for the series back. And then TRoS killed it again.

It’s all relative, we all take different things out of these movies. I don’t think you’re wrong for enjoying the prequels but man I couldn’t disagree with you more that they’re good movies.

I have to try hard to remember that my own perceptions as one of the last of the OT kids (saw ROTJ in theaters as a young child) are informative, but not definitive. Everybody enjoys what they enjoy, but the particular areas where the PT was lacking, combined with the insane buildup in the fallow period from 83-99, left me trying to will TPM to be better than it was, and just feeling beat down by the next two.

TFA made a particular point to address the specific shortcomings in the PT, and I give it a lot of credit for that, but it made a lot of brand new mistakes. Mistakes I think TLJ was doing a wonderful job of fixing, until they overcorrected and made TROS, which pissed off literally everybody and left it tied for last in my order despite it being bad (to me) in a very different way than AOTC.

The thing that speaks best of TROS is that it wraps the whole era up in what amounts to a single terrible year for the New Republic.