The Phantom Menace doesn't even have a main character. Anakin and Padme is even worse and more toxic than Rey/Kylo. The prequels are racist as hell with a heavy dose of sexism. Vader's turn, the biggest moment in the PT, is rushed and nonsensical, even compared to Kylo's redemption. And if you thought that the fanservice in TROS was bad but stan for the prequels then you're a hypocrite. As the pPT was filled with nonsensical offputting fanservice from the jump, like, Anakin, as a child, built C3PO. Like, at least TFA and TLJ are excellent films with wonderful messages. Also, I always see people in Era threads sayoing, "at least the PT was cohesive." Yea no the fuck it wasn't. As it timeskipped it's way to freedom character relationships were skipped over entirely and substituted with stilted exposition, typically involving characters walking down a hallway. Like, Obi-wan, arguably the second main character of the trilogy, does NOT have an arc. Seriously, he doesn't.
Like it says so much that the biggest online criticism of TFA has NOTHING to do with the actual content or execution. Because suddenly armchair critics came up with "originality" as the end all be all of storytelling quality. If your entire criticism of a film is that it purposefully has callbacks to older films to make a larger point about the franchise's reintroduction into cinema relevance beyond memes and a really good cartoon show. Then yea, it's clearly the better film. If you stan for racism and sexism more than the most overtly feminist SW films then you really need to check yourself.
