Star Wars

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Re: Star Wars

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Jun 28, 2022 1:32 am

Thad wrote:Jesus, though, now I'm thinking about what it would have been like to be a kid watching the premier of Clone Wars in 2008 and then 12 years later it ends on a shot of a mass grave.

That is fucking bleak, and I'm speaking as somebody who was 10 when Batman: TAS premiered and 18 when they did that movie where the Joker tortures and brainwashes Robin.


There's an onscreen torture and death as early as Season 2. It's part of a plot to kidnap and brainwash children en masse.

Definitely a reflection of the, ehh, atmosphere, of the time. And I guess this one too.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 28, 2022 2:23 pm

Yeah, and the middle seasons were really muddled in who the fuck the audience was supposed to be.

I said this back in 2020:

Thad wrote:I wrapped season 4, and it was another season where the episode grouping was really jarring. Not for continuity reasons, like in season 3 (which had parts 1 and 3 of a storyline where part 2 had aired back in season 1, and at least one episode where a character showed up who'd died in a previous episode), but for tonal ones. This is a season whose early going features slapstick episodes centered on Jar-Jar and C-3PO, and whose last three episodes include child sex trafficking, Savage Opress choking somebody to death (onscreen), Darth Maul killing a bunch of kids (offscreen), multiple scenes of fields full of corpses, and Darth Maul monologuing about his intention to torture Obi-Wan to death. It's not uncommon for children's cartoons to get more mature as their audience ages, but it's pretty fucking jarring to have such a massive tonal shift over the course of a single season. It makes a little more sense if you know that these groups of episodes were supposed to air a year apart instead of four months, but it definitely contributes to the sense that the first half of season 3 really doesn't belong.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Tue Jun 28, 2022 8:39 pm

Kenobi episode 6 was also bad. Almost worse than I expected even after the end of 5. Very excited to feel compelled to consume all this media and watch the next horrible season that does ten times the damage to The Clone Wars Maul that this season did to Rebels Grand Inquisitor.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jun 28, 2022 8:47 pm

whyyyyyyy

stop

just stop
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jun 29, 2022 6:44 pm

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This is the kind of shitposting I can really get behind.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed Jun 29, 2022 9:39 pm

Mongrel wrote:whyyyyyyy

stop

just stop


Yeah I kinda hit the mental breakpoint of "this is a chore and I refuse to do any more of it" this morning. I still have all of Rebels and all of Bad Batch and most of Mandalorian Season 2 and all of The Book of Boba Fett and all of Obi-Wan and more Clone Wars and even more and you can't skip any of that.

Fuck you.

Star Wars is just going to be one more thing I refuse to spend my time on this planet spinning my wheels on over and over and it will invariably be one more thing that every acquaintance and algorithm in my life will want to shove down my throat at every opportunity for the next decade and counting. Which, that was always a matter of when.

But like

I'm only presuming to post about it here not because I like ranting, I really actually hate ranting like this guys, but because it's kind of impressive just how much I managed to disassociate it all. Star Wars is back to being... two and a half good movies, in my mind. That's it! No prequels, no sequels, no spinoffs, no... interquels, not even KotOR which is fine on its very own but it ain't no Star Wars, my friend. All that is there but it's some other... well, it basically is indistinguishable from all those books I never read, basically basically basically.

Is that nice? Well, yeah, it's kinda nice. Star Wars the multimedia juggernaut based on one goddamn franchise is still going to be crawling up my every open orifice for the foreseeable eternity, but at least I can appreciate how cool Darth Vader looks again without thinking "whiny prep who's sad about his girlfriend being choked to death by him".

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jun 29, 2022 9:44 pm

Yeah, if you let go and forget the rest, at least you can enjoy the OT, and by god that's better than everything else combined.

Let people enslave themselves to shitty fanfiction - CORPORATE fanfiction! - if they like, but I dropped Trek years and years ago without looking back and I was deeper into that at a younger age than I ever was into Star Wars.

No joke, I bought & read over 200 Trek novels. And I LIKED 'em. Mostly.

(to be fair, they were either decently true to Trek in both tone & characterization, or wildly out of whack in a hilarious way, like "Promising young sci-fi writer who would go on to a great career shoehorns their first novel idea into becoming a Trek episode so they can get published." that they were generally pretty good. Trek's episodic nature lent itself way better to the cheap paperback format than blockbuster Star Wars ever did).
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jun 29, 2022 9:53 pm

Actually kind of wild to realize how many really GOOD hours of Trek there are compared to how many really good hours of Star Wars there are. Plus, even bad Trek can often have a great deal of redemptive entertainment value! (well, okay not over the last few years).

Bad Star Wars is just fucking insufferable.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed Jun 29, 2022 10:05 pm

I think I have more fun dunking on bad Star Wars than bad Star Trek, but not so much fun that I feel like I need to do it two or three times a year.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jun 29, 2022 10:31 pm

Yeah, I've reached a point where I'm like "You know, I could just watch something that's actually... good." Or at least funnier to dunk on.

Bad Star Wars hurts too much to enjoy dunking on it, at least for me.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Niku » Thu Jun 30, 2022 9:00 pm

i don't know who said it in my life but i feel in my soul that i thought the mandalorian made me remember why i liked star wars, but actually it turns out i just like the mandalorian
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Niku » Thu Jun 30, 2022 9:01 pm

anyway don't mind me still happily choking on marvel's dick on a monthly basis i will never get enough of my superhero soap opera slop
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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Thu Jun 30, 2022 11:17 pm

beatbandito wrote:Kenobi episode 6 was also bad. Almost worse than I expected even after the end of 5. Very excited to feel compelled to consume all this media and watch the next horrible season that does ten times the damage to The Clone Wars Maul that this season did to Rebels Grand Inquisitor.

it's been two days and I can't get over it

why the fuck does he call him "Darth" like it's his new fucking first name?
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Re: Star Wars

Postby IGNORE ME » Fri Jul 01, 2022 12:35 am

Because that's what he called Darth Vader.

...in Episode IV, if you happen to actually be referring to Darth Vader.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Fri Jul 01, 2022 6:45 am

So it was for the same reason as in A New Hope...

...because no one had written that Darth was a title, yet.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Wed Jul 13, 2022 12:26 pm

I have entered Season 7 of The Clone Wars, and it's just as hard as I remember. I'm pretty sure I've never made it all the way through.

I knew I always hated the Bad Batch. They are literally taking what was supposed to be the obvious development for the clones as characters across the series and makes them into fucking Hasbro toys. But even the general premise writing is so dumb. I never noticed at first they're the 99th specifically in remembrance of 99. But they choose to call themselves the Bad Batch. So like, who the fuck made the official name for this squad of defects named after a particularly fucked up janitor that died a year before this commando squad is being used in action for the first time we see?

Season 5 was the end of The Clone Wars. We had what we needed to get us to Revenge of the Sith.
Season 6 was a tidy little bow, going back to more focus on various council members and having the final arc of the series be the only ones since the first episode to have Yoda as the focus character is very nice.
Season 7 is fanfiction, as far as I can tell.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Thu Jul 14, 2022 9:30 am

I have finished season 7. Drop the first 8 episodes and it would have been a great little mini-series tying The Clone Wars into the ongoing Disney canon. It's a little frustrating to learn what I thought was nods to clone wars and rebels in the disney properties (manda season 1 and Solo) in pretty inconsequential spots was actually a very specifically planned marketing schedule to make you watch everything they release. Also I can see a much clearer line from The Clone Wars Ahsoka - S7 Ahsoka - Manda season 2 Ahsoka. I still hate her characterization in manda, and it's dumb that over the next like 16 years she'll develop in ways that are completely forgotten for that show. But now I have an easier time seeing that as the kelvinverse split for bad star wars universe where grogu is killed by ben after luke has a bad dream. Out there somewhere is the universe where Ahsoka stuck with the neutral path and didn't end up starting Luke's incredible failure of a new jedi academy.

edit: Oh right, between seasons 6 and 7 I watched the The Clone Wars movie for the first time, Ahsoka's introduction. It was fine. The VA, animation, writing, is all very clearly the sloppy oav pilot for the series. I wouldn't actively recommend it, but it's a fine watch to fill in on all the dumb lore that matters less and less with every new release.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Tue Jul 19, 2022 1:24 pm

I haven't finished Obi-Wan. I watched episode 4 and thought it was a competent mediocrity. It wasn't a misfire like episode 3, but that's because it aimed a lot lower. Episode 3 ends up being a lot more interesting and memorable, even though I didn't think it worked, because I could see what it was trying to do and why it missed the mark. I'd rather see an ambitious failure than a safe success.

I also started watching The Bad Batch, and I'm enjoying it a lot but my main takeaway so far is that the Empire stopped using clones partially because the original Jango Fett DNA sample was beginning to degrade but mostly because Tarkin doesn't understand how sampling bias works.

(Also, nobody seems to be able to agree whether the stormtroopers are conscripts or volunteers, even within the same conversation? Like, there's a scene where they refer to them explicitly as "conscripts" but then whatsisname argues that they're more trustworthy than clones because they've chosen to fight for the Empire voluntarily, which is...the opposite of what "conscript" means? I think this may be one of those "parsec" things where the simplest explanation is that it was written by somebody who didn't understand the words they were using.)

(And it was nice to see Kanan again, but they really should have made him look a little older. I looked it up and he's supposed to be 14 when Order 66 is executed, but he looks like he's about 10, which locks poor Freddie Prinze Jr into trying to do a child voice that he's clearly not cut out for.

Of course, I do realize this is Star Wars, and trying to make sense of any character's age is an exercise in futility. Leia is 10 in Obi-Wan Kenobi -- and played by an age-appropriate actor! -- but looks and acts about 7. And we've already covered 40-year-old Boba Fett being played by a 60-year-old actor.)

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Wed Jul 27, 2022 12:49 am

Ended up liking episode 5 of Obi-Wan pretty well! Not enough Leia, and the ending was straight-up fucking stupid ("Obi-Wan, I am concerned that Vader has learned our secret. I will now explain our secret in detail on this recorded message."), but on the whole it wound up being a pretty good character-based story.

And I'm liking this incarnation of Vader more than I expected to. I said after episode 3 that I understood that they were going for a Vader who's more like the impulsive, hot-headed Anakin of the prequels than the stone-cold badass of the OT, and I thought that was an interesting idea even if it didn't quite work. I thought it worked a lot better this time around, even if it tended to alternate really cool moments with utterly silly ones (that business with the ship). I think this is an interesting era in Vader's development and the live-action stuff's never touched it before (though I guess that's more or less what the current Darth Vader comic series is about).

It worked for me more than it didn't. But endings are hard. I'll see if I'm satisfied with how they bring it home, whenever I get around to the finale.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Fri Jul 29, 2022 12:13 am

The finale was kind of a mess but I feel like there were enough good solid character moments to excuse the nonsensical plot beats that were contrived to lead to them.

I think a lot of the series ends up being "Well, I liked what they were going for here even if they didn't quite pull it off." Obi-Wan's arc was frankly a real mess but it's got some interesting ideas. Vader's first episode was kind of clumsy but I feel like they smoothed out what they were going for in the last two episodes; I like this version of the character, younger and more hotheaded and undisciplined. Reva's story doesn't really make a hell of a lot of sense but we leave her in a pretty interesting place and I wouldn't mind seeing more of her. Hell, I'd like to see a Reva/Ventress teamup, deal with two former Sith who've discovered they have a conscience and a code of honor after all. (Hell, Maul's still alive at this point in the timeline; he'd be a good foil as a former Sith who's bitter about his past but still unrepentantly evil.)

On the whole I guess I liked it? I think the first two episodes were the strongest, the middle two sagged, and then the last two were messy but did enough things right that I liked them anyway. Vivien Lyra Blair was the highlight; the kid's got a bright future.

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