verdigris

That's fair I legitimately forgot Solo existed

They are THE MAIN CHARACTERS in the movie you're watching. I think that's a big enough reason to try to make them interesting.

What would make a character interesting? Motivations, conflict, maybe seeing someone change in any way as a result of things that happen in the story?

This is why I said people that enjoy the movie cannot have seen good movies, because some of the defenses are just absolutely ridiculous. "Why do characters need backstories to make them interesting?" Like do I really need to answer that?

Luke at the start of ANH is literally a farmboy with little direction in his life. That's much closer to the "just people" type of character you're describing than anyone in R1, again except for Jyn. Every supporting character in R1 feels like they were designed to be interesting, but everything interesting in their lives happened before the events of the film, and we just get to hear about it a little.

I also think the ending of the movie where we get a big fanservice Darth Vader scene gives the lie to this perception of the movie as a gritty, realistic look at the dark side of the franchise. The movie is pretty transparently just Disney pandering to the adults that grew up with Star Wars and wanted to feel like they could still enjoy it through more adult media. Andor does what Rogue One was trying to do much better, and it's telling that by doing so it barely feels like Star Wars any more.

I'm not talking about the whole movie, I'm saying that the opening 30 minutes of ANH have more character development than the entire movie of R1. We're not "getting to know the every man" in R1, we're told a one-line backstory for each character and they are basically static entities until the time comes for their death scene. Also, none of them are "standard soldiers" except for Jyn. Everyone else is clearly supposed to be an interesting character, they just don't do any of the supporting legwork to actually build the backstories or characterization, they just insist upon them.

To be fair trial and error and RNG are just par for the course with classic roguelikes, but learning how to manage all that is part of the appeal. Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup are probably the two best-supported old classic roguelikes out there. Honorable mentions for Dwarf Fortress, which basically abandoned its roguelike mode in favor of a fortress simulator, and UnReal world, which is a weird outdoor primitive survival game that's a testament to one man's obsession.

There are also more modern offerings like Tales of Maj'Eyal, Caves of QUD, and Dungeons of Dredmor that are fully faithful roguelikes with either more modern graphics or QOL upgrades.

Started playing Spelunky HD again the other day, the sequel is better but the original is still fun to revisit.

Morrowind and Fallout: New Vegas sometimes. I've tried playing the original two Fallout games but I keep bouncing off the first hour or two.

Some Guilty Gear XX AC+R with a friend -- we would love to play some old Tekken games too but we're both on PC so Tekken 7 is the oldest available.

Every once in a while I'll play some Sacrifice, such an amazing game that's dying for a remaster.

Red Letter Media are obvious and I would guess they were the channel being referenced, but I'm not sure because they don't do the misogyny angle.

My favorite YT critic is YMS, his output is less frequent these days but I always enjoy his takes even if I don't agree with all of them, and he covers a lot of more artsy and niche movies, including foreign stuff that I wouldn't even hear of otherwise.

Jenny Nicholson is the biggest source of the essays on stuff I'll probably never watch -- her video on The Vampire Diaries, for example, is unhinged and very funny. She also outputs less and less these days, but seemingly largely because her video lengths keep ballooning, her last one was a 4+ hour video about the massive failure of the Star Wars hotel.

It's so flabbergasting that people can see the problems with the new trilogy but still enjoy the hollow shell of a movie that is R1

I think this is a dumb trope to parrot. Media analysis and critique is valuable artistic output in its own right, and using it to process media that's more complex, or with additional context and research, is a totally valid way to consume and engage with the content. Hell, there are plenty of video essays that I've watched for content that I never watched in the first place, because the analysis was highly entertaining and is much less time consuming than watching an entire several seasons of a TV show or whatever. In some cases that has made me want to go watch the content in its entirety with new appreciation, e.g. House MD.

You know it's explicitly not "free as in beer" right?