10 Things That Annoy You About New Star Wars That Didn't Bother Original Trilogy Fans

"That's not how the Force works!" was Han Solo's typically grumpy response in The Force Awakens to Finn's suggestion that they can just use the Force to figure out how to lower the shields on Starkiller Base. It was also the cry of a number of angry long time fans to some of the never-before-seen Force abilities that were suddenly on show in the sequel films, The Last Jedi in particular.

Episode VIII alone saw such newly unveiled examples of space magic as Luke's interstellar astral projection for the final conflict, Yoda's ghostly control over the elements creating a lightning strike, and, most notably, Kylo and Rey's psychic face-timing. None of these abilities had ever been demonstrated in seven previous movies chock full of various Jedi powers. How can Rian Johnson be allowed to get away with adding so much to the canon?

Really, though, not even Han actually knows how the Force works because George Lucas never really put down a set of rules for what can and can't be done with it. While broadly shown as a set of telepathic and telekinetic abilities, what you can actually do with the Force is left deliberately fairly open to what the plot demands. It is, after all, about more than moving rocks with your mind, even though moving rocks with your mind does appear to be a pretty big part of it.

Sudden new Force abilities are nothing new in the Star Wars saga and certainly weren't invented by The Last Jedi. New powers were introduced all the time in the original trilogy. Most obviously, there was no sense before the final act of that trilogy's final movie that any character could use the Force to just shoot electricity from their fingers. When the Emperor suddenly did that it came as a total shock and was all the better for it.