A story describes a world. Of necessity, it can only describe part of that world—but we can see the rest of it out there, full of sights and scents and scenery not entirely like but not entirely different from that which is familiar.
A story has a beginning and an end, but those aren’t always—or even often—the beginnings or ends of lives, of longer narratives, of things carried on and carried over, picked up and rejected, chosen and regretted.
A story, as we know, can be just one place to start. We are experiencing, for better or worse, a prequel boom. Mostly it’s on TV, but many of those stories come from (or spill over into) books. And the more of them I watch, the more I wonder: What do we want from prequels, anyway? What are we looking for when we turn back the clock in Westeros, in Middle-earth, on the USS Enterprise and in that galaxy far, far away?
Spoiler warning: There are some slightly vague details about The Rings of Power‘s season finale towards the end.
To tell you the truth, I thought about prequels for days before I remembered that, technically, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is one. This may be the simple effect of my Star Trek knowledge, pre-Discovery, being almost entirely limited to the movies (and my ninth grade math teacher showing us “The Trouble With Tribbles” to illustrate exponential growth). But it’s also, I think, because there is a direct and immediate connection through the characters. It feels less like a prequel and more like a chapter that we just skipped before. We only take one step backwards—not a century, not even a generation. Just a moment. In a way it’s like that Buffy episode where we go back to her at her previous high school, with a previous Watcher, with Angel stalking her from a car. It just lasts much longer.
Strange New Worlds isn’t trying to convince us of connections that aren’t there, or explain the behavior of characters years down the line. It’s showing us where one very famous relationship began, but it’s also giving us very good reasons to be invested in other relationships around Spock and Kirk. That show can’t work without Captain Pike, without the tensions and affections among his crew. It understands that Spock and Kirk didn’t become Spock and Kirk in a vacuum, that they were shaped by the people around them and the experiences they had—and so it builds into that space, into those question marks.
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Into the Riverlands
A good prequel is more questions than answers. Andor has one very solid, looming answer at the end of its story: Cassian Andor dies in Rogue One. There is no getting away from this outcome, but there is the simple fact that when he dies, we know all too little about him. He’s a bundle of questions that Tony Gilroy’s show is taking its time to answer; halfway through the first season, we’re only beginning to grasp how this man winds up sacrificing himself for the Rebellion. But around that, we have to contend with the Empire he’s up against: the fat-cat brass who barely see a given planet’s natives as people; the by-the-book cop who gets in over his head; whatever it is Denise Gough is playing (I really want to know); the tricky maneuvering of people in and closer to power.
Star Wars is, across media, notably good at prequels that don’t feel like prequels. Say what you like about George Lucas’s prequel trilogy—and trust me, I have many things to say—but it rarely feels like it is straining to explain things about Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Instead, it explores who they were to each other, and to those around them, and how that all fell apart as Anakin, traumatized and jealous and needy, was tempted by the Dark Side. The Clone Wars does this even better, eschewing pat explanations for carefully built relationships and situations, struggles and divisions. And Rebels arguably does it even better yet, spinning off a found-family story that only very slowly begins to inch toward the greater canvas with which we’re familiar.
This is often true in Star Wars books, too: They explore moments in character’s pasts which illuminate who they are without offering too-tidy explanations for how their specific characteristics came to be. Master and Apprentice is a character study about the relationship between younger Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon. Leia, Princess of Alderaan imagines a teen Leia (and if you’ve read it, it’s hard to watch the young Leia in Obi-Wan Kenobi without thinking of the teenager she’ll be before long). Ahsoka is a sequel or a prequel, depending on your point of view, and it hones in on her character with a focus we’d never otherwise get to see.
But the thing these stories have in common is the thing they share with Strange New Worlds: They’re only years or generations apart. They are not trying to stretch threads across centuries, let alone millennia. Two hundred years is a brief enough period that echoes from one story may convincingly appear in another. Narrative threads and tropes and callbacks and references that stretch thousand years, on the other hand, can be a direct hit to the suspension of belief.
Every viewer, of course, is going to find something different to love or be annoyed by in a show. Frankly, it is annoying me that I find House of the Dragon to be a more solid series than The Rings of Power, the latter being the one in which I would much prefer to be invested. But where Rings has to work around thousands of years and a tangle of rights issues to tell its story, House has only to walk a tricky line between being Game of Thrones Part II and being its own monster.
If it feels too much like more of the same, that may be less because it’s a prequel, and more because everyone in Westeros is terrible and moments of grace are all too few. House of the Dragon knows that we’re starting with a certain amount of info: That the Targaryens are a dramatic disaster family, full of dragons and drama and incest and infighting; that the Iron Throne is a dangerous place to sit; that all anyone seems to have to do with themselves in this world is scheme, bicker, and murder (sometimes with a side dish of expository sex or gratuitous violence). And so instead of trying to tell a different story, the show tells the same story but with different characters. It could, perhaps, use more characters we can get a little bit invested in, but if you want scheming and bloodshed, it certainly delivers. And it does so without trying to draw too-neat threads to those characters who will show up 200 years down the line. We know the names and the haunted castles, and that’s enough.
But what to make of The Rings of Power? I wanted to love this show. I was a Tolkien-obsessed child, albeit one who could never make it through all the appendices. (I tried and tried!) I wanted narrative, not history. So I am not the person to tell you exactly what happened when and which details the showrunners are creating from whole cloth. (Thankfully, we have Jeff LaSala for that.)
But I am a person who looks at this show and thinks: Did it have to be like this? Did everyone have to have a tidy little motivation and a parallel in the Third Age, the stories we know? Will I ever forgive the show for the suggestion that Isildur’s horse went to go find him, just like his descendant Aragorn’s horse did in the Peter Jackson movies a zillion years later? Would I have put an iota of thought into the question of whether one of these characters was Sauron if there had been anything else to talk about? Is that really all it took to trick Celebrimbor into forging the rings?
One thread of the many tangled up in this show is a thread that is really about character, and it’s the story of Elrond and his bestie Durin and Durin’s most excellent wife Disa. It inches up to wanting to explain “and this is why Legolas and Gimli are Like That!” but these characters pull it back every time, locating the real differences between elves and dwarves (dramatically different sense of time and humor, for one) and finding ways to illustrate that via personality. This isn’t giving little harfoot Nori a very Sam-like friend, or doing some really strange things with the orcs. It’s remembering that a prequel is a story about people we haven’t met yet—or that we only know later. I can believe that Elrond was once an awkward messenger boy between his king and that of the dwarves far more easily than I can believe that Sauron played a “just rule by my side” move with Galadriel and then left her in a stream.
What I wanted from this show was to see a different time in Middle-earth, not to see repeated images and forced connections. (Why is the Balrog there?!?!?) It feels like a story that’s fighting itself, trying to do too many things at once and never letting us settle in with anyone—and fighting the inevitable comparisons with Jackson’s trilogy while also leaning hard into creating resonance with those familiar images.
What do we want from any of these stories? Is it the comfort of the familiar, just slightly changed? It is for the world to get bigger, and all of us little harfoots venturing out to see more of it? Is it a new perspective on a familiar tale? The first prequel I ever recognized as such was Wicked, which at first got my hackles up and then became one of my favorite books. It doesn’t explain how the Wicked Witch of the West came to get murdered by Dorothy Gale; it explores who she was, and what the world that made her was like. (One doesn’t wind up in an isolated castle with a bunch of flying monkeys because one was having a good time of it.)
I want a prequel to show me something I didn’t expect, or give me a new understanding of something I loved or hated. I want it to push the boundaries of the world, or show me that the world wasn’t entirely how I understood it. (I have mixed and vague memories of The Magician’s Nephew, but it certainly changed my view of Narnia.) I want it to feel like a story that needed to be told as much as the previous tale did—not, as Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk so perfectly put it, like “efforts to make and remake things that were already successful and serve them to audiences again, like last night’s roast chicken turned into today’s chicken salad.”
What do you want from a prequel?
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
In a sentence: A prequel should make the world feel bigger.
A good prequel should take the viewer away from story A and start poking around under the scenery to see what interesting stories are happening in the background that we didn’t even know about. I believe in that old adage that everyone is the main character in their own story – a prequel/spinoff should embrace this by giving us those stories.
This is why Andor is succeeding while Book of Boba Fett failed. Andor enrichens the Star Wars universe by giving us people and places we’ve never (or barely – I had completely forgotten until I read this article that Andor appeared in Rogue One. Mon Mothma had two sentences of dialogue) seen before and telling us about the things that are important to them.
Book of Boba Fett made Boba Fett a side character in his own story. It was set in a galaxy full of people, but left us with the impression that all the interesting things in the universe starred the same seven characters.
Unfortunately, Rings of Power is giving me the some of the same feelings – With three thousand years of history to explore, we’re getting the same familiar faces again – Galadriel, Elrond, Gandalf, Sauron – Is the world really so small that these are the only ones with stories worth telling? The best parts of the show, for me, are Nori and Adar and Bronwyn and Arondir – they’re the ones who make the world feel larger and richer and give the illusion that things are happening even in the places where there isn’t a camera to see it.
Excellent piece!
I haven’t yet seen the Rings of Power (I will! Hopefully next week).
But I have been watching Andor, which works extremely well as a prequel.
I think the best prequels are not those saturated with references or useless explanations for basic things (I’m looking at you, Solo!). Prequels that actually work do draw from and towards a familiar story, but also expand the world, not lessen it. For example, one of my favorite Star Wars novels is Rogue One: Catalyst, which works because it fleshes out characters who are important to the movie regardless of the amount of screentime. And it works because it does so well – the focus of the novel is on Galen and Lyra Erso, and on Krennic, and their relationships.
I think the things a prequel focuses on are what usually makes or breaks it: is it easter eggs, in-jokes, literal backstories for objects or catchphrases, etc., or is it the events/people that shaped the circumstances of the later story?
Is the focus on Han Solo’s blaster, or is it on Lyra Erso clearly seeing evil in a man her husband sees as a friend?
@2 What a prequel should do when the story (or licensing agreement) requires them to reuse characters is allow the side or secondary characters to be protagonists in their own right. Especially since those four, for various reasons, were constrained against taking direct actions in LOTR.
@3 I want to phrase your last point as the prequel needs to appreciate it’s subject without being smitten by it.
I want prequels to expand the worlds I know without making me feel like it’s breaking the fourth wall ex. House of Dragons makes me feel like they’re using the show to say hey we’ll do better with this show than we did with the end of Game of Thrones. Whereas the Star Wars shows are great at making me feel like I am just vicariously watching the people of the Galactic Empire going about their business. Prequels are not ment to hit you on the head to get your attention, they are there to open your eyes to the beauty of a creation.
The Best prequels are, I suspect, those that feel like new volumes in an ongoing series rather than just another chapter in the same old story.
There’s only one prequel I would consider a masterpiece. “S’all good, man!” Seriously, if you want to see how it’s done, and how to even improve on your predecessor series, go watch Better Call Saul and take notes.
As for sci-fi and fantasy, there’s one I would consider a minor classic, and that’s the opening to Last Crusade. Why? Because it’s only about twelve minutes long! It covers all the hallmarks of the prequel and has the good sense not to stretch out every little detail of Indy’s life into… a trilogy of movies, a TV series, and a theme park, as today’s business model so tediously does.
When we analyze these Star Wars prequel shows, we might as well be talking about McDonald’s’ process of making hamburgers — oh sorry, no, in that case, we would be talking about the early life of the raccoon before he ended up in that burger.
Leia, Princess of Alderaan made me fall in love with Alderaan and mourn its inevitable tragedy in A New Hope in ways I never did before when it was just a name. Therefore I think it was a very effective prequel.
Another damn good example of prequels would be novel by F.C. Yee set in the world of Avatar the Last Airbender and dealing with the stories of Avatar Aang’s previous lives: Yangchen, Kuruk and Kyoshi. Set 400-500 years before the events of the animated series the novels imagine how the world could look like at that time and which problems Avatars would be called to solve, and does it brilliantly, making some very believable conjectures and expanding the world in time and space.
Excellent critique and review of prequels!
I really like seeing new characters exploring a world or story I’m familiar with, but taking it a step further, or in a different direction that reminds me of why I loved the original world and perhaps the original story that brought me to love it, but it steps up by giving me more to love. Or to dislike, but still appreciate and give a nice thumbs up. I struggled with The Rings of Power because it dealt with parts of the Silmarillion but the events felt out of order and cobbled together. I couldn’t buy Elrond as a young messenger or captain who seemed uncertain of a higher place, and had a bro-buddy politely platonic relationship with During. The evolution of the character didn’t convince me this was a real retelling. Elrond was always a majestic character who seemed to hold his own and has a long, impressive lineage tied with the fates of both Elves and Men, and that hardly fit with the image of him as he’s displayed in this series. Galadriel was also an issue for me. I’d hears about her as a warrior, before her time as the Lady of Lothlorien, but she appears single-minded, cruel when hunting for Sauron, and her character in the show does little to display for me the roots of her compassion and her original mystique. Swallowing the relationship between the Elven scout and the local healer woman did little to boost my faith either. Soe of these characters feel like fill-in and don’t fulfill my requirements for a proper prequel series, or even a prequel. Lots of the Rings is a big, big shoe to fill, and comparisons to the movies are inevitable. I just wished to see less of the little people, the Rings, the heavenly-esque feel of the passage to Valinor (which didn’t seem realistic to me), the inevitability of tie-in to the Third Age, and more originality when it comes to exploring the whole of Middle Earth, through all it’s ages. There were so many other stories, told and untold, like the first tribes of Men, such as the People of Har. I felt the series lacked courage to explore its own frontiers, and instead tread lightly along footpaths already trod long before it’s passage.
Molly, thank you, I enjoyed reading this!
@1, Agrey, you’ve put that so delightful well. “A prequel should make the world feel bigger.” I would also say that a prequel can answer old questions or ask new ones. Sometimes this can be tricky: sometimes the prequel has to convince the audience that they want the question to be asked. For me some of the questions season 1 of the Rings of Power seemed to be asking were ones like what was Mordor before it was Mordor? Who was Sauron before he was *Sauron*? What was Khazad-dum like at its height? The first question so far has been the one I’ve found most fascinating, but it’s not one I had wondered about before starting to watch the show. Nor had I felt any curiosity about who those Elendil and Isildur character were, or Sauron’s journey to Dark Lord-hood. Season 1 of RoP got me invested and interested in all of these places and characters and stories.
This is a really interesting article and now I have something to mull over on a Friday morning!
I will say I love the Star Wars prequels. All of them – the movie trilogy, stuff like Rogue One/Solo, and the shows like Andor, Kenobi, TCW, Rebels. I haven’t gotten to the new canon books but I loved Traviss’s Clone Commando books too. And I think what works for me in all of them is as @1 says – they make the world feel bigger. They respect the era they take place in; they are not JUST about “hey, look at that thing they are heading towards!” (although I will say Solo veers in that direction a few times, and I love Rogue One but the Evazon/Ponda Paba cameo was the one piece of fanservice that totally crossed the line) but build up lore and characters and relationships WITHIN that time period – both relating to the characters in the OT, as well as ones that do not and have their own stories.
In a way, it’s kind of funny to call them prequels because it’s just because the OT came first but there’s probably more stuff detailing the “prequel” era (if we are counting anything before the OT opening crawl as a prequel) than the OT or sequel eras.
I am probably in a minority but I also loved Book of Boba Fett for that reason – I loved seeing the Tuskens, the random Tatooine stuff, etc. I agree there were some issues with the pacing/focus and how that got integrated with the Filoniverse as a whole and how the Tusken storyline was discarded, but I did thoroughly enjoy that story. (It’s not really a prequel so I guess not relevant to this discussion, unless you want to say it’s a prequel to the sequels…)
And for me, the areas where Rings of Power succeeds are the times we also get to see a bit beyond the edges of the map – the Harfoots, the Dwarves, even looking at the Southlanders and the state of Men at this time. It’s the Elvish (and some of the Numenorean) stuff that falls short with me. Some of that I’m sure is because of my known biases/knowledge, but I do feel like I don’t REALLY need forced explanations for why Elrond, Galadriel, etc are the way they are, right down to echoing/repeating the dialogue. It’s not that they shouldn’t be present, but it just doesn’t feel like a natural telling of the story.
Film critic Steven D. Greydanus talks about Shrinking World Syndrome: “As a franchise plays out, very often, the more the mythology expands, the smaller the universe gets. Previously unconnected characters and events that gave the fictional universe a certain expansiveness are increasingly tied together for dramatic effect, until the whole story is about a small group of closely connected individuals.”
Prequels (and sequels too) are bound to the mythology that birthed them by their very nature; however, if the story can’t stand on its legs as rising and falling action (even if it ends on somewhat of a cliffhanger), I believe it will ultimately be unsatisfying. In theatre, I must believe the actor is passing from one room to another rather than leaving the stage to go to his dressing room. There’s an equivalent requirement in film or television, where I need to believe these people are part of a larger tapestry rather than the frame being only what’s in existence. Too much winking at the audience will turn anything into parody of itself.
Star Wars is such a mixed bag, especially now, that it’s become almost it’s own case study of this phenomenon by the nature of its very long shelf life. Thinking about other examples, though: someone mentioned Magician’s Nephew, which very wisely does not touch Narnia for a long time, instead focusing on a new cast and their specific struggles (which are not mere reinventions of later relationships). Lewis occasionally falls into the easter egg trap (we didn’t really need an explanation for the lamppost) but largely keeps the focus tight. I care more at the end about Diggory and his mother and Polly and even Jadis than I do about what it means for the Pevensies. The book tells its own story in a meaningful, and ultimately satisfying way, while connecting back to the source material (better, in fact, than Prince Caspian does, to my thinking).
Compare to The Hobbit movie trilogy (and not the book), where almost everything is about setup for a payoff we’ve already experienced. In fact, I think that very equation may be a way to figure out how to judge merit or at least satisfaction levels. Does the story merely exist to prop up eventual climaxes which already rose and fell, or is there some level of catharsis at the end of the prequel (even if it’s a tragic one?) Are we just treading water until the real story starts, or does it feel like actual history with depth and purpose outside of what we already knew (or thought we knew)? Most importantly, does the new character exist, or is this person merely a shadow or callback to something/someone we already care about?
This lens also helps explain why certain elements of a prequel may become beloved even the the stories themselves are not as well liked, or why a weak story may become better liked over time: the overall structure may be lacking but perhaps the one part that struck a chord or found space to breathe grows into a fandom in its own right. Your mileage will vary precisely because we’re likely to be drawn to certain ideas/people more than others, especially if we’re not fully invested in the overall stakes. And I do think it’s true that stories sometimes come into their own later, after the dust settles (and that some actually lose their appeal, depending on how culture shakes out, while some defining piece becomes its own thing almost apart from the original).
I know there’s a re-watch and commentary going on here on Tor right now, but no love at all for ‘Enterprise’?
What do I want from a prequel? Same thing I want from any show or movie — a good story about compelling characters. If it happens to be set in a universe that’s already built, well, fine. If they’re telling a good story with good characters and we happen to see connections to what’ll come later, good; if those connections are what’s driving things and the story and characters are in service of that, not good.
S
I’ve found a quote from Tolkien’s letters which seems relevant:
I agree that what’s so compelling about The Lord of the Rings is that sense of depth created by the “untold stories”, the various things like the Púkel-men or the Ent-wives which exist on the margins of the main story. Anyone writing a prequel needs to preserve that effect somehow.
@10 hi-five from the other person who really enjoyed (most of) BoBF! And I have NEVER previously understood the fan focus on that character! But he won me over in Mando and now I’m ride or die for him (and his Space Crime Battle Wife).
For that matter I never gave a damn about Obi-Wan, but I enjoyed the hell out of that show too.
Meanwhile, as someone who got into Star Wars fandom via Rogue One, I am quietly losing my mind over Andor – it’s nothing like what I expected, but still feels absolutely true to a character I have been brooding about for five years. And that’s what *I* want from a prequel – something that recontextualizes a story I already know and makes me fall in love with it all over again in new ways.
Meanwhile, I haven’t watched Rings and I don’t plan to, but it appears to be scrupulously avoiding everything I find compelling about Middle-earth. Go figure.
@15 – yeah, I think with Boba there were two main approaches to that show and it will influence how you received it.
If you are into Boba strictly because you’ve built him up as a stone cold badass then this show isn’t really going to give you that. And that’s fine – I’m not saying it’s wrong to have wanted a more underworld type bounty hunter show but that’s not what the show was. (And to be honest, I do think it was rather silly for Disney to keep ACTING like Boba Fett is a “crime lord” when we never see him do any crime. All we see him do is stand up against price gouging and the drug trade.)
But…if you look at maybe the larger context of his life and instead see it as the story of a man at the back half of his life still looking for some sense of tribe/identity and (in keeping with his own heritage as both a clone and a Mandalorian, which is very heavily focused on identity and family) and realizing he’s been at the mercy of crappy bosses who don’t really care about him…well, then the whole story makes sense (and in fact has some really interesting parallels with both Din and Grogu’s story and what it means to be an X or follow a creed). Which is why I wish they had taken the Tusken stuff even further and maybe tied that a little to closely to his reasons for wanting to be a “crime lord”. I felt like at the end they were treated as an afterthought, but it would have been interesting if perhaps his whole motive for doing all this was a long game against the Pykes. Or if the point was just to carve out some protected territory for them. So I do feel they dropped the ball there but otherwise I really enjoyed the story.
My first reaction was that what I most want from prequels is fewer of them. This isn’t fair to the prequels I love pretty much unconditionally (The Clone Wars, Strange New Worlds) or the prequels that gave us a lot of interesting world-expansion and new characters to love while being quite flawed (the SW prequels) or even to prequels that feel like a completely different world but that I enjoy anyway (Discovery).
I’m hesitant to watch much of House of the Dragon not because it’s a prequel, but because it seems to have learned all the wrong lessons from Game of Thrones. ALSO people are still saying “the old gods” and wearing the same fashions that they did in GoT. It doesn’t make worldbuilding-sense.
Even without the inherent hurdle of not having the rights to the Sil, Rings of Power set itself up for some unique difficulties as far as being a prequel is concerned. Some of the main characters are thousands of years old and we know that they live for thousands more. Including the villain. What other franchises have entire cultures of people who don’t die of old age? Yoda is super old, but he’s the only one and he isn’t a main character. Q is presumably super old but he hasn’t appeared in a prequel (thank god). I don’t even want to think about Timelords and prequels in this context so we’re going to ignore that..
The cultures of men, dwarves, etc., presumably change quite a bit between the second and third age because there are so many generations living and dying (don’t ask for specifics, it’s been over a decade since I read the Sil). In counterpoint, elven culture changes differently because they live so long and have few children. That’s put into perspective when Galadriel casually remarks on knowing the founders of Numenor as well as when Durin points out that he’s fallen in love, gotten married, and had children since he last saw Elrond.
In the lifestyle of Harfoots, you can see some roots of Hobbit culture (even if Harfoot culture is wildly inconsistent in the show, that’s a different discussion) and you can imagine how these travelers could grow into the non-adventurers of the Shire.
We don’t see much Dwarven culture in LOTR (Re: Balrog), so it opens the world to learn that Disa sings to the stone. As mentioned before, the wildly different senses of humor and understanding of time that Elves and Dwarves give some context to the often fractious relationship between the two races.
What frustrates me about RoP is how little thought the showrunners seem to have put into the elves as individuals and as a culture, the future of which we will see in LOTR. This would be fine if Galadriel and Elrond remained in supporting roles, but they’re …not. Even if I block out everything I know about Galadriel from the Silmarillion, it’s hard to imagine that RoP will show her growth into the Lady of the Wood in a satisfying way.
I’m going to stop now, but I’m frustrated that RoP has potential that I don’t see being tapped any time soon. The writing is a mess. Alas.
I really agree with your assessment that a good prequel is more questions that answers. That’s why I found recent Star Trek prequels engaging even though they feature some familiar faces. Rogue One and Andor are doing similar things with bringing up questions about the Star Wars universe. These properties manage to expand our knowledge of the respected universes and add more nuance to the properties. Rings of Power – I wanted to love. I love the Lord of the Rings. And the show is a beautiful spectacle. But, that is all that it is. The writing is just not good. It’s nothing but silly mystery boxes that connect and remind us of the third age. And it’s too much of a condensed timeline.
Again, it did not need to be this way. While intellectual properties are bound to grow (and to warp) with accretion of new material, the wellspring of Tolkien’s own work is far from tapped. They could of just focused on say the fall of Numenor…just one aspect of the story. It would have really grounded the show. Oh well.
I really think Star Trek is doing the best job with their prequels and new shows (Picard is a mixed bag but still a fascinating premise). Star Wars has been hit or miss but still fairly enjoyable. And ROP is just a sad, sad, excuse for Amazon to get some more money. I get that some folks enjoy ROP, and I’m happy for them. But, the show really bummed me out.
I’m probably the odd man out here in that I don’t want prequels, I don’t need prequels, and I’m never happy with prequels when I do read/watch them. Oh, well.
Better hair
What I want from a universe is an expansion of my understanding of the universe. I want to see new characters and different historical events (much like I might read about Henry VIII and Queen Victoria). I want to build up a sense of the history of the universe. I want to understand how past events affected present (main timeline) culture. I read (and watch, although I read much more than I watch) prequels for the same reason I read history of my own and other real world cultures. To understand how we got to here.
Spoiler alert for the Dragon Riders of Pern
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In this respect, I think the Pern novels of Anne McCaffrey do prequels best. In the original story, we find out that Pern is not a fantasy world, but a colony that lost their technology. She then proceeds to write (and her children have continued to, less successfully write) about other eras in Pern history. So we learn about the actual colonization and why they relocated away from AVIVAS. We learn how they started to develop new tools to transmit knowledge as their original machinery failed (and they had intended to not be a technological culture from the beginning). We learn how the Harpers were created. We learn Robinton’s personal history before he became the old man that Mennolly and Lessa and F’lar know. We learn how knowledge was lost during a devasting pandemic. We learn the actual story behind the heroic ballad of Moreta’s Ride. All of those things expanded the universe and made us understand why Pern, as we are originally introduced to it, worked the way it did.
@21, great example with Pern.
The best prequel that I have ever read is actually Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom. It tells the story of how Jack went from being a sailor to a pirate, and how he and Beckett became enemies. But it seeks mainly to tell its own story. It’s full of characters we’ve never seen before, and adds to the franchise instead of trying to set up things that happen later. Let’s say that there’s a reason this book is currently going for $90 used.
The magician’s nephew was and is the best book prequel in my opinion, the story doesn’t dwell on what is to come and could easily be a standalone novel, as for movie prequels the Hobbit as got to be one of the worst, I dream of what it could have been.