Obi-Wan Kenobi

That was good.

Was the warning at the beginning because of ?

That's true for almost every prequel that directly precedes the existing film/show/book they were released after, though. In Rogue One, from the start you knew the Rebels' plan will succeed and you also (kind of) knew the Rogue One crew at the very least won't be fight-capable come A New Hope, in the Hobbit, you knew Bilbo, Legolas and Gandalf at least would survive and so on.

That's kind of what happens with prequels, barring any alternate universe shenanigans (usually confined to videogame prequels) you pretty much always know the outcome of the story to an extent. The point of them is to flesh out the universe, provide backstory and (potentially) surprise you with characters or events that were originally just footnotes or one-note, but turned out to have compelling stories and great significance when viewed "live" so to speak.

S
Y
N
E
R
G
y

...It's a story that takes place a few decades before Lord of the Rings, starring multiple characters from Lord of the Rings and set in the same world. What exactly would you call that?

Or is your hangup the fact that there's a few decades between Hobbit and LotR, because in that case the Star Wars prequel trilogy also isn't a prequel and you're opening up quite the can of worms

Assuming you know what a book is, obviously.

The hobbit was written first.

Does anyone know if the Hobbit was written first?

That's fair. (at least if you're not someone that only watched the movies)

Counterpoint - The Hobbit was written first but then retconned into the LotR plot after the success of those books (eg, the ring was just some random magic ring instead of the Ring of Power originally). So the prequel tag is still reasonably fair.

That is incredibly charitable. 

Admittedly while I did know LotR and the Hobbit were books long before they became movies, I was unaware of their exact (book) release dates, hence my confusion. Still, I'd say my general point holds, a prequel will rarely (if ever) not connect to the story it's set before unless it's explicitly exploring an alternate universe/timeline/whatever. I just chose my example poorly

But, anyway, hopefully it will bring it around but this has so far kind of gone with my general problem with Star Wars fluff. The OT is so iconic that everything is reverential and revolves around it and there just don’t seem to be many interesting stories to tell with that narrow a focus. Unless it really pulls a rabbit out of the hat, I don’t think this is a story that really needed to be told.

A good prequel will tell it’s own story and justify its existence on its own terms and none of these really do other than the mandalorean and that’s arguably because it has the least to do with the OT. 

And it doesn’t suck, which is important. 

A quick look up of the definition is "a story or film containing events which precede those of an existing work." I think therefore your initial assumption is correct and is also my assumption. 

Didn’t mean to achshually the thread there btw, just thought it was interesting. As you were.