All Things Star Wars

[Laurana Kanan]

 

[warpus]

I think it's really lame they are using the Bad Batch series to try to fix the Palpatine storyline from the sequel trilogy.. but I'm watching anyway.

 

[Synobun]

I think it's really lame they are using the Bad Batch series to try to fix the Palpatine storyline from the sequel trilogy.. but I'm watching anyway.

Pretty much all of the recent media is designed around fixing the sequels, since they are unwilling to retcon/rework.

 

[Patine]

Pretty much all of the recent media is designed around fixing the sequels, since they are unwilling to retcon/rework.

Another reason I still stand by the Prequels being better.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Pretty much all of the recent media is designed around fixing the sequels, since they are unwilling to retcon/rework.

I'm now wondering if I've ever known a mainstream franchise so bitterly at war with itself in studio, never mind the fanbase.

 

[Synobun]

I'm now wondering if I've ever known a mainstream franchise so bitterly at war with itself in studio, never mind the fanbase.

Star Trek, ish, maybe. The studio strife is kept under wraps for the most part, but occasionally there's an exceptionally bitter quote from a showrunner about executive tampering and intervening that implies an almost Kathleen Kennedy-esque approach. Trekkies are just less obnoxiously loud than Star Wars fans.

My take on the fandom split with the sequels is that even those who liked them should want a redo. A lack of coherence is a negative no matter what, and the series can only benefit from a plan that knows what it's doing and how. There is so much damage control happening with subsequent shows that it's a pretty heavy chain anchoring the franchise down, and that's simply not good even if you like most of what it's churning out. Having boundaries to create within is fine, but a lot of what's being made has to involve contorting to make things fit. It's an unnecessary obstacle and stifles creativity. It's less "I wonder what happened in between " and more "Oh god how do I make this make sense?"

 

[Patine]

I'm now wondering if I've ever known a mainstream franchise so bitterly at war with itself in studio, never mind the fanbase.

Star Trek, ish, maybe. The studio strife is kept under wraps for the most part, but occasionally there's an exceptionally bitter quote from a showrunner about executive tampering and intervening that implies an almost Kathleen Kennedy-esque approach. Trekkies are just less obnoxiously loud than Star Wars fans.

My take on the fandom split with the sequels is that even those who liked them should want a redo. A lack of coherence is a negative no matter what, and the series can only benefit from a plan that knows what it's doing and how. There is so much damage control happening with subsequent shows that it's a pretty heavy chain anchoring the franchise down, and that's simply not good even if you like most of what it's churning out. Having boundaries to create within is fine, but a lot of what's being made has to involve contorting to make things fit. It's an unnecessary obstacle and stifles creativity. It's less "I wonder what happened in between " and more "Oh god how do I make this make sense?"

From what I had read, Pokemon had gotten that bad for a while, but only in it's Japanese fanbase, so we didn't commonly hear about it here.

 

[warpus]

Pretty much all of the recent media is designed around fixing the sequels, since they are unwilling to retcon/rework.

Yeah, I wish they just focused on other storylines. Focusing on fixing screwups just puts a spotlight on those screwups. Makes a lot more sense to just forget about Palpatine completely and move on to something else. The Star Wars universe should be a huge place, there should be an almost infinite number of stories you can tell that don't revolve around something we've already seen and have been groaning about. Just seems to be a bit of a waste of a show for me. Bad Batch wasn't top notch storytelling or anything, but at least it was doing its own unique thing. Now it's sort of been absorbed into a clean-up operation. It would have been far better to take the show into a unique direction and allow it to continue doing its own thing and forging its own way forward.

It's almost as if the creative heads at Disney just.. don't know how to write good stories. I mean, that can't be true, they've produced a lot of non SW content that was well written and thought up. But for instance.. the live-action Ahsoka show.. The first couple episodes seemed so clunky to me. It's like they couldn't really figure out a good story for these characters, but they knew they wanted such and such character there.. so they just sort of introduced them without it really being well thought out. The story got a bit more interesting later, but it's something I've noticed with Disney SW content - the setup is usually kind of lame. The first bunch of Obi Wan episodes might as well not even have been there. It's like they just wanted certain characters there, so.. they threw them into the story and gave the writers some sort of a tight deadline to "make it work". And it really didn't. Only the last 2 episodes of that show were what I would call good storytelling. Not amazing even, but definitely worthy of a watch. Everything leading up to that was just.. meh.

The whole "badarse or evil characters have a raspy voice" thing is also getting.. very old. The most interesting characters, whether they are evil, or good, or something in between, do not share common trope mannerisms. Not every evil characters needs a helmet, a raspy voice, or a cloak. Mix it up a bit. Sheesh

 

[tjs282]

My 2 cents on this, which just occurred to me, is that my enjoyment of the official-canon SW-related media I've consumed to date, has generally been inversely proportional to its timeline-distance from the OT, and particularly ESB (which I still regard as the best of the bunch).

 

[Clubber Lang]

BB - That cloned Zillo-Beast gonna go Godzilla on Tantiss.

---------------

''They no match for Droidekas!''

(1st look Neimoidians, The Acolyte)

 

[Laurana Kanan]

SK D+ spot featuring Lee Jung-Jae with a little bit of new footage.

 

[Gori the Grey]

The Star Wars universe should be a huge place, there should be an almost infinite number of stories you can tell that don't revolve around something we've already seen and have been groaning about.

My theory is that the felt size of the SW galaxy is a storytelling trap. (It's a trap!) One thinks of the Senate, with each of those little floating decks representing a system. "There must be room in such a place for other stories," we think to ourselves. But that whole space had and overcame a threat scaled to it: a weapon that could destroy whole planets. Any other story you try to tell in that galaxy must have reference to that story. Any new threat has, somehow, to be bigger or else everyone will say, "Hey, we just faced down a planet-destroying weapon; why do you expect us to care about your puny threat?" But nothing really can be bigger. And any story set during the Empire has to be in reference to it because that is what was going on in the galaxy at that time. Remember, it reached even to the Tatooine system, which Luke characterized as the place farthest from any bright center of the universe. Everyone who tries to tell a story in the SW galaxy is automatically forced to tell a smaller story than the one told in the OT, and a derivative story, one that can't set its own most basic terms.

Make a new galaxy. Tell its story.

That's why this

My 2 cents on this, which just occurred to me, is that my enjoyment of the official-canon SW-related media I've consumed to date, has generally been inversely proportional to its timeline-distance from the OT, and particularly ESB (which I still regard as the best of the bunch).

has almost the same validity as a mathematical formula.

 

[Gorbles]

Always fun to see takes on sequel when the OT is characterised by literal massive plot pivots inbetween movies, and smoothing over the dissonance this caused (Luke and Leia, anyone)?

Like I get it, bad doesn't excuse bad, and there's plenty about the sequels I criticise (though, mainly IX), but it feels like this is at least partly a thing where the latest iteration is the horse to be beaten (after being a teenager throughout the prequel era and basically discovering the Internet at the time where vitriol for said films was very, very high).

(that and the "culture war" stuff glommed onto Disney and certain folks involved with Star Wars in particular, which didn't help the Internet discourse around the films, generally-speaking)

 

[Synobun]

Always fun to see takes on sequel when the OT is characterised by literal massive plot pivots inbetween movies, and smoothing over the dissonance this caused (Luke and Leia, anyone)?

Like I get it, bad doesn't excuse bad, and there's plenty about the sequels I criticise (though, mainly IX), but it feels like this is at least partly a thing where the latest iteration is the horse to be beaten (after being a teenager throughout the prequel era and basically discovering the Internet at the time where vitriol for said films was very, very high).

(that and the "culture war" stuff glommed onto Disney and certain folks involved with Star Wars in particular, which didn't help the Internet discourse around the films, generally-speaking)

Surely your opinion of me is one or two degrees higher than arbitrarily tossing me in with the Gamergaters and old-man-with-caners.

 

[Gorbles]

Surely your opinion of me is one or two degrees higher than arbitrarily tossing me in with the Gamergaters and old-man-with-caners.

More than several! Meant to be clearer when I said speaking generally, sorry

I've said the same elsewhere recently, a lot of the actual like / dislike doesn't really matter to me (other than the GGers and that kind of ilk, where my like / dislike isn't really related to Star Wars anyway). If you love, say, The Rise of Skywalker (unlikely), or hate The Last Jedi (50 / 50 bet given its divisive nature) . . . these are all valid. But as someone in a group of folk that are roughly (to my knowledge) around my age or older (some a lot older), it's funny in my opinion to see what I think are fanbase patterns repeating.

Honestly in a way the prequels were probably more internally-coherent than the OT or the sequel trilogy. The plan was laid out (unlike the sequels, or rather, it's probably more accurate to say the sequels were heavily course-corrected during the trilogy, nevermind what happened after), and it wasn't significantly tinkered with to my knowledge (unlike the OT). But at the same time (even if I view them a lot more warmly than I did once upon a time - and I'm saying this as someone who recently rewatched 4 - 6 then 1 - 3), there are obvious weaknesses. Some of these stem from telling a story that has to be told (which is why I appreciate for example Filoni's Clone Wars - and Tarkovsky's before that - it fleshes out the rushed nature of having to be about the rise of Vader through Anakin's fall), some of these are because Lucas™, and some of these are just, honestly, awful dialogue. That "sand gets everywhere" line really is only good for the meme, and again it's literally in my recent memory

The OT was very much a space Western on-the-fly kind of thing. The success was rapid, it was built for a different time, and still Lucas couldn't stop tinkering.

Which then brings us back to the sequels. Made by Disney, discarding what we know were Lucas' early thoughts on where 7 - 9 could do and the entirety of the EU (sorry not sorry, I still don't miss it despite most of my SW novels being EU. Maybe all of them, actually). Made by Disney in full mouse-driven corporation mode, after the explosive success of the early MCU (literally riding on the Avengers and Captain America: Winter Soldier, ignoring little roadbumps like Thor 2, with tie-in TV going full-swing at the same time). It was always going to be a different beast (good and bad, and that's where we the fans sit - arguing about the good, and the bad ).

I think tonally, the sequel trilogy was a mess, but then again I'm someone who liked TLJ, so that colours my take on the whole situation somewhat. I think IX should've tried an awful lot harder than it did to reconcile the TLJ, instead of serving as some milquetoast rejection of that kind of film direction. And I liked TFA. I thought it was a decent retreading of Star Wars, with the obvious ANH parallels. I loved TLJ, and I sat through TRoS because, well, it was Star Wars, and despite how it ended I was invested in some of the character arcs. I'm not a Rian Johnson evangelist, either (still haven't watched Knives Out, either of them).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is Disney, and there is 2010 - 2020s Internet culture, and there's a lot of stuff (the absence of the direct hand of Lucas, the abolishing of the EU) that all feed into a specific context when it comes to the sequel films, that don't really fall on the films themselves. And there's stuff that falls on the films as well, of course, but that's the same of the prequels; of the OT. Every one of us sits somewhere differently (as all fans do) in this spectrum, or bog haha, of weighted factors that determine to what level we can tolerate the various bits and pieces than chip away at the image of each of the films, and the connection between each film in each trilogy also. This is a bit redundant to explain to everyone here, I'm just labouring the point. We all know what it's like to be a fan of something. I just think that the sequel trilogy is very current, and when you combine that with Disney's drive to maximise viewership for the profit engine (which is in no way unique to Disney), you end up with a very easy target. One that once we're quite a few years ahead of, maybe we'll look back differently?

Or maybe I'm fooling myself. But I said the same thing as a wonderfully young and naive teenager, so here's me going two for two!

 

[Laurana Kanan]

Spoiler :

 

[warpus]

My theory is that the felt size of the SW galaxy is a storytelling trap. (It's a trap!) One thinks of the Senate, with each of those little floating decks representing a system. "There must be room in such a place for other stories," we think to ourselves. But that whole space had and overcame a threat scaled to it: a weapon that could destroy whole planets. Any other story you try to tell in that galaxy must have reference to that story. Any new threat has, somehow, to be bigger or else everyone will say, "Hey, we just faced down a planet-destroying weapon; why do you expect us to care about your puny threat?" But nothing really can be bigger. And any story set during the Empire has to be in reference to it because that is what was going on in the galaxy at that time. Remember, it reached even to the Tatooine system, which Luke characterized as the place farthest from any bright center of the universe. Everyone who tries to tell a story in the SW galaxy is automatically forced to tell a smaller story than the one told in the OT, and a derivative story, one that can't set its own most basic terms.

Make a new galaxy. Tell its story.

That's why this


has almost the same validity as a mathematical formula.

They almost did this with Ahsoka.. or maybe they did use it to set something like that up? I didn't really enjoy that show enough to think about that too much at the time. It was alright but not amazing. I guess we'll see?

Imagine a show like Ozark set in the Star Wars universe though, just to pick a random good show with solid characters and an interesting story. Why would it necessarily have to reference the Death star? Ozark never mentioned 9-11 or the cuban missile crisis, or ww2 even. It focuses on its own niche and sticks to that. I mean, the Vietnam/American war comes up, but only in a context that matters. Why can't SW do something like that? Give us a good crime drama set on some planet, with the empire or whatever as the backdrop that only shows up when it's relevant to the story.. if it ever is. There are crime families in the SW universe, there's bounty hunters, there's all sorts of interesting stuff. There should be a lot of good stories possible that have nothing to do with anything we've seen so far.

 

[Laurana Kanan]

 

[Clubber Lang]

^Bomber Barris in dark troubles.

---------------------

I got up early to go for a morning run, but the weather was chaotic (Rain, lightning, thunder and more lightning) so i threw on the BB s3 Finale till the elements calmed down.

Best episode of the entire show, felt like a kid again getting up and running downstairs to watch saturday morning cartoons.
They did not go cheap on us (48 mins).

SW related media will proably deal with the time jump period and the BB are being set up for a live-action switch.

Sale Ne
Edmon Rampart
Ventress did not show up, guess they felt her force powers and abilities might of taken some of the shine off the Batch.

BB = SW A-Team.

''You're all clear, kid, now let's blow this thing and go home!''



Now that was some special forces shootin', Crosshair one hand and Omega with the assist..Hemlock zapped.
Blammed the hell out the CX Dagger vessel engines as well.








Mission complete, soldiers.

 

[Synobun]

I am a little disappointed that Ventress really was just a cameo, but I'm otherwise satisfied and really appreciative of the ending they went with.