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And the prequels/sequels/whatever that work for me, the ones I can really love, are the ones that don't modify resolved character arcs that way. Lord of the Rings immeasurably expands on The Hobbit without suggesting that Bilbo's growth didn't really happen or that he'd need to keep repeating it for some reason. He's a minor presence in LOTR but he's very much the Bilbo from the end of The Hobbit, not the beginning.

My big fear with Rogue One is that it would sand my OT blorbo Anakin Skywalker down into generic fanboy one-dimensional Vader or he'd be much more ROTS-adjacent than OT-adjacent, without the mix of horror, menace, pathos, and occasional (terrifying) cringe that I think defines the character of the OT. Keeping Anakin to a few appearances without pushing his growth backwards or forwards for where he should be at that point, and including the quirks of his OT characterization ("don't choke on your aspirations" as an echo of "apology accepted..." <3), made it possible for me to also love Rogue One for its own sake and characters— there was no insistence that the arcs and resolutions of a completely different work that has been over for ages only seemed satisfying as a big fake-out in order to prop it up. It props itself up!

In fact, Rogue One draws on the conclusive, hopeful cohesion of the OT to underscore its own themes and arcs. When the injured Cassian asks if anyone heard and Jyn assures him someone did, we not only know from other scenes in the film that the Rebellion has heard, we've got the OT in the back of our heads, and the unbending commitment of the OT Rebellion to fighting the Empire. Rogue One doesn't say "maybe they aren't really," it says "maybe this is how they got that way." The very completeness of the OT is treated as a strength, not a problem.

This isn't an argument that Lucasfilm is The Good Franchise that doesn't pull the "lalala what arc" nonsense; it does the obnoxious franchise shit all the time. Rogue One specifically, though, steps carefully to avoid framing anything in the OT (or the prequels, for that matter) as incomplete, as any kind of fake-out that somehow needed Rogue One decades later to truly succeed as a story. Even the explanation for the fault in the Death Star design doesn't carry the sense of "this missing detail needed to be fixed" so much as an opportunity for storytelling that wouldn't disrupt the OT.