Star Wars

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beatbandito
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Re: Star Wars

Postby beatbandito » Tue Apr 21, 2020 3:29 pm

Hondo is definitely a bad guy, he proudly identifies as a pirate, not a smuggler. Though while stretched I think both clone wars and rebels does a good job of developing his character.

He starts out trying to sell out the jedi, he gives up when it is "no longer profitable". Then he attacks the farm until it's "no longer profitable".

He makes comments about Anakin that seem to have been intended as jokes about anakin's dark side fate but fleshes out Hondo as well. On the other hand he regularly berates Kenobi for always being the good guy under any circumstance. Ahsoka gets both sides, especially with her defense of the younglings (the children he intends to kill to sell their kyber crystals so definitely still not a nice guy.)

Hondo already established a rule about getting involved with jedi and the younglings cinched it. I can't think of him willingly working with jedi again until Ezra. This is all off-the-cuff though so that may not be exact.

Last we see him in clone wars his men betray him for maul, then at the first opportunity he takes them back so they can work together to steal maul's stuff instead.

Then when we first see him in Rebels he works alone now, but teams up with Ezra and at the end Ezra kind of screws Hondo and it's like, he's taken aback, it's exactly how he acts and expects others to act, but comes off as the first time it's ever been so natural. From there Ezra goes out of his way to save Hondo multiple times in a way the clone wars jedi never did, while Hondo is still just using them for his own gain, but never outright betrays them.

Then the final episodes when they track down Hondo he's like "this is so dumb why did you even call me here". And when it's made clear this isn't directly for the rebellion, but for Ezra, Hondo outright states "I would do anything for that boy" in a very serious delivery we never got from him before.

There's also the pig dude that Hondo clearly has a loving relationship with, even if it's just platonic love and he still acts like a dick outwardly. Compared to the clone wars pig dudes that were seemingly swapped out interchangeably for each job and abandoned after.



This is all just as I saw him portrayed on the recent rewtatch, without going back to check on anything so it may not be perfect, (and maybe there is a nook out there that explains how he got space cancer and was abandoned by his crew or whatever) but I think Hondo comes off as a chaotic neutral character who isn't opposed to evil acts and through exposure is made to care a bit more about people close to him.
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Thad
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Thu Apr 30, 2020 1:40 pm

Disney is selling Star Wars-themed face masks with 4 different designs; somehow none of them are Darth Vader.

I want a breathing mask patterned after that famous Star Wars character who breathes through a mask. You know, Baby Yoda.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Tue May 05, 2020 1:29 am

Finally got around to watching Rogue One. I really liked the first act, right up until Forest Whitaker decides to die for no discernible reason. Rest of the movie was still intermittently pretty good, bogged down by the usual Star Wars problems of excessive nostalgia. I mean yeah this is a movie that takes place directly before the original movie but it would have been vastly improved by not including horrifying uncanny valley Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher. And Darth Vader's scene at the end is pretty good but his earlier scene with Castle Vader really didn't need to be in there.

I feel like, out of the various live-action spinoffs and sequels, The Mandalorian is the only one that really gets the balance right of acknowledging continuity while still telling mostly-new stories in mostly-new settings with mostly-new characters, even if it does lean heavily on its two main characters looking a hell of a lot like Boba Fett and Yoda.

(Also I was watching Clone Wars and my wife caught a little bit of it and asked me how old Boba Fett was supposed to be and I looked it up on Wookieepedia and I know this is not new information to anybody but Jesus Christ you guys the Star Wars timeline does not make any sense. Oh, the end of season 2 takes place just a year after Attack of the Clones? Of course it does. I'm not going to ask how Anakin Skywalker got to be a general in that amount of time while simultaneously training an apprentice. I'm sure there's an explanation somewhere in the canon, and I'm sure that, like everything in Star Wars, it will make less sense after I hear the explanation.)

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Re: Star Wars

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue May 05, 2020 2:01 am



But no really the very first scene of the Tartakovsky series is Palpatine going "Yo give Anakin command of the Space Force" and that's, like, day 2 of the Clone Wars.

(Also is it weird that the democratically elected leader has to ask a bunch of weird monks to let his appointee take command of the Republic's armed forces? I feel like that's one of the probably-unintentional tells that Palpatine's beef with the Jedi is "from a certain point of view" justified.)

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Mongrel » Sun May 10, 2020 3:57 am

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(could have also gone in cute thread)
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Mon May 25, 2020 2:52 pm

You know what, as boring and baffling as the prequels' politics are, we need more children's cartoons where every time someone uses the phrase "banking deregulation," it's followed by ominous music and the good guys looking stricken.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Sun Sep 06, 2020 5:10 pm

Still working my way through Clone Wars.

I think when people talk about episodes airing out of order, they're probably talking about season 3, because that's the place where it's most noticeable and jarring; that's the season where you get parts 1 and 3 of a story whose part 2 was back in season 1, and a character popping up despite having died in a previous episode.

About halfway through season 4 and can't say as I'm loving it. Three episodes of the interminable Mon Calamari battle, three episodes starring C-3PO, and then the Krell arc which is dramatically satisfying but narratively a fucking mess. It should have been two episodes shorter; the clones should have relieved Krell of command the second he pulled a lightsabre on one of them. I get that the clones are bred to be compliant and follow orders -- as the script reminds us every three minutes or so -- buuuuut that's not actually remotely evident in their behavior, as 80% of the named clones are like "fuck this guy, I'm not following that order" and Rex is like "no you guys we're soldiers." It comes across less as "clones are fighting their programming" than "Rex is a fucking putz who spends three straight episodes making excuses for an obviously unfit superior officer and orders hundreds of his men to their needless deaths even as they're telling him there's something wrong here, on the justification that he's Just Following Orders." I mean, I get what they were trying to do here, giving Rex a crisis of faith that presages his ultimate rebellion and joining the, er, Rebellion, but IMO they whiffed the story pretty hard, largely hamstrung by Star Wars' inability to have a villain who isn't obviously, cacklingly, pure evil. I think it could have worked with a little more subtlety in Krell's characterization -- really anything short of, say, repeatedly describing his subordinates as if they're animals and threatening to murder them -- but I guess sometimes I ask too much of Star Wars.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Blossom » Sun Sep 06, 2020 8:41 pm

The interminable Mon Calamari battle is what made me drop the show.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:41 pm

If only you'd stuck it out, you would have gotten to see three consecutive episodes about C-3PO next.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon Sep 07, 2020 5:05 pm

There he goes again.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Friday » Tue Sep 15, 2020 4:07 pm



So 2020 doesn't suck quite as much as it could have, I suppose.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Büge » Tue Sep 15, 2020 7:53 pm

If only Gina Carano and Rosario Dawson didn't turn out to be anti-mask and anti-trans
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Fri Sep 25, 2020 12:13 pm

Season 4 finally starts to pick up at the halfway point, with the slavery plot. Some really good character work on Anakin.

The biggest problem is that, where the episodes focus on Anakin's trauma as a former slave, they forget to tell us anything meaningful about what's going on in Ahsoka's head. It's her people who have been abducted and enslaved; this is barely acknowledged, and there's no sign at all that she's taking any of this personally. That, in itself, could be an interesting emotional hook -- she's compartmentalizing and focusing on getting the job done and treating it the same as any other mission? -- but there's no indication in the script or in Eckstein's performance that that's what's happening. She acts like everything is normal, and there's nothing to indicate that it is an act or a coping mechanism; just another day on the farm. So why are the slaves Togruta at all? You could swap in any other random Star Wars race and the story would work just as well -- better, since I wouldn't be spending three episodes wondering why Ahsoka isn't more upset about this. It made me wonder whether it was some other race in earlier drafts of the script, or even just a placeholder, and making the slaves Togruta was a late addition -- but nope, a look at Wookieepedia tells me it was adapted from an arc from the comics and the slaves were always Togruta.

There's also that scene in the first part where Anakin finds out the enemy commander is Zygerrian and immediately assumes he's a slaver -- an assumption which turns out to be completely accurate. It's a bit of a mixed signal. "Remember kids, slavery is bad -- but you can totally judge people you've never met based on their race!"

Those gripes aside, though, it's a good solid arc in a season that badly needed one. It's maybe the best character work on Anakin to date, and it also makes for an interesting compare-and-contrast to the Mandalore arc from the previous season, with Anakin's relationship with the queen serving as a sort of dark mirror to Obi-Wan's relationship with the duchess. (Both arcs even end with Obi-Wan being unwilling to kill a bad guy and somebody else doing it for him.) And as for the "former slave has to go undercover as a slaver" plot -- I was surprised to see these episodes aired a year before Django Unchained was released, because it sure felt like they borrowed that plot point deliberately. Not that I really expected Star Wars to be taking notes from Tarantino , but it sure felt like it was for a minute there.

(I hear he's more of a Trek guy anyway.)

At any rate, it's a big step in the right direction for a season that needed one, and I hope the rest of season 4 is more like this. I know Darth Maul is showing up at some point here, and I really liked his portrayal in Rebels, so I'm looking forward to that.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Tue Oct 20, 2020 12:28 am

Thad wrote:If only you'd stuck it out, you would have gotten to see three consecutive episodes about C-3PO next.


By the way I was mistaken; it's not three consecutive C-3PO episodes, it's a Jar-Jar episode and then two consecutive C-3PO episodes.

Also:

Thad wrote:Not that I really expected Star Wars to be taking notes from Tarantino


When I said that I totally forgot that Rebels did a Kill Bill riff. (Rebels season 3 spoilers, and also Kill Bill Spoilers in case somehow anybody hasn't seen Kill Bill: The final showdown between Darth Maul and Obi-Wan Kenobi is exactly the final fight between the Bride and Bill; it plays up like it's going to be some huge battle but then Obi-Wan fucking wrecks him in two seconds and then holds him while he dies.)

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Friday » Tue Oct 20, 2020 4:30 am

When I said that I totally forgot that Rebels did a Kill Bill riff. (Rebels season 3 spoilers, and also Kill Bill Spoilers in case somehow anybody hasn't seen Kill Bill: The final showdown between Darth Maul and Obi-Wan Kenobi is exactly the final fight between the Bride and Bill; it plays up like it's going to be some huge battle but then Obi-Wan fucking wrecks him in two seconds and then holds him while he dies.)


There's a bit more going on there than just a curb stomp. Obi-Wan deliberately shifts his stance into his old master Qui-Gon's (the baseball bat one) which baits Maul into trying the exact same move he used on Qui-Gon to kill him. But Obi-Wan (having seen the duel between Maul and Qui-Gon and the move that killed his master) now knows the counter and simply slashes right through the middle of Maul's double-bladed saber, killing him.

I also like how Maul's final words are "he will avenge us," implying that Maul knew that they actually shared a greater enemy who had fucked over both their lives: Palpatine.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Tue Oct 20, 2020 5:04 pm

Well-spotted. Dave Filoni clearly paid a lot more attention to Episode 1 than I did.

(There's an episode of the Mandalorian behind-the-scenes series where he lays out that the real point of the Duel of the Fates is to kill Qui-Gon and leave Anakin without a father figure, so that Palpatine could come in and fill that role himself. This is also presumably why Obi-Wan shouts "YOU WERE MY BROTHER!" in Ep3, just to underline that he was never the father figure Qui-Gon would have been, because George Lucas never met subtext he didn't make text.

Palpatine considered Maul to be an acceptable loss in achieving his goal of taking out Qui-Gon, and Maul realizes that by the time he comes back in Clone Wars. I assume. I've got a few episodes to go before I get to that.)

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Friday » Tue Oct 20, 2020 7:54 pm

Palpatine considered Maul to be an acceptable loss in achieving his goal of taking out Qui-Gon, and Maul realizes that by the time he comes back in Clone Wars.


I mean, there's also the fact that Maul's life has pretty consistently sucked ever since Palpatine found him and trained him.

As Obi-Wan says in their duel, what does Maul even have at that point? He's a failure even by his own dark standards.
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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Thu Nov 05, 2020 4:43 pm



Sure, why not.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Wed Nov 11, 2020 2:28 pm

Inverse has a decent rundown describing what various Star Wars characters are up to at the time The Mandalorian occurs. It falls into some obnoxious "you've probably never heard of her" stuff at one point, but it's a pretty good rundown of where the current canon stands for those of us who sort of follow Star Wars but maybe didn't play this game or read that book or the other comic.

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Re: Star Wars

Postby Thad » Sun Nov 15, 2020 2:12 am

And season 2 episode 3, The Heiress, finally ties the series into the Mandalorian arc from Clone Wars and Rebels, and also explains what the deal is with all this "Mandalorians never show their faces" business even though Mandalorians routinely show their faces in those other shows. And Katee Sackhoff returns as Bo-Katan, which I wasn't expecting considering the way season 1 ended.

(I know the first Star Wars character to debut in a cartoon and transition to live action was Boba Fett, but is this the first time they brought back the same actor who originated the role as a cartoon voice to play it in live-action? I'm not counting the disembodied voices in Episode 9, though they were a nice touch; I'm talking actors appearing onscreen.)

All that and I think they did a solid job making it all work for the majority of viewers who haven't watched the cartoons. The continuity is there for the people who recognize it, but Favreau and Filoni have the good storytelling sense to remember that the stories are the cake, and the shared-universe stuff is frosting.

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