The future of Star Wars is Gundam

polygon.com:

The Star Wars franchise is constantly producing a stream of profitable new merchandising and material, including video games, novels, comics, and animated shows. But the film and TV side of Star Wars feels like it’s struggling. Over the past five years, Disney has repeatedly announced plansfor new movies, then unceremoniously canceled them, or just kept them silently back-burnered. Disney Plus’ recent Star Wars live-action shows keep promising new directionsfor the franchise, then pulling backand mixing messages. There’s no clear vision or coherent narrative direction for the screen versions of the franchise, even though they’re the most visible and mainstream part of Star Wars. Everybody seems to want something different out of this grand, sprawling story.

So Polygon is gathering some thoughts about the franchise’s future under the loose banner of What We Want From Star Wars. These opinion essays lay out what we love about the Star Wars universe, and where we hope it’ll go in the future … or a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

The current, odd, stagnant-yet-successful state of Star Wars seems like a needle that’s been threaded by another huge science-fiction franchise nearly as old. Not to imply that the neat solution to a thorny mega-franchise problem is simply “anime,” but Star Wars could learn from how Gundam has navigated the same growing pains. The giant-robot empire spawned by Yoshiyuki Tomino’s landmark 1979 anime Mobile Suit Gundam similarly started small, entered periods of dormancy, and has grown to become a massive, complicated cultural force. So what could Star Wars take from Gundam? Here’s a hint: a lot more than just giant robots.

One of the quirks of the Gundam franchise is that its “core”