This is the Filoni influence in a nutshell, he seems pre-occupied with skipping past the "boring" parts of storytelling (compelling dialogue, justified character development, reflecting on any...
Exemplary
All the characters sigh all their stilted expositionary dialogue in the same bored-sounding way, while a nonstop John Williams soundalike score farts away in the background.
This is the Filoni influence in a nutshell, he seems pre-occupied with skipping past the "boring" parts of storytelling (compelling dialogue, justified character development, reflecting on any honest aspect of the human condition etc.) in order to get to the action sequences and "cool star wars moments".
Don't get me wrong, I love a good cool Star Wars moment, and the action sequences in Ahsoka have been pretty cool (Dawson is a great physical performer), but the sense I get is that, after the critical success of Andor, Filoni is trying to inject some of that quality into this series but he doesn't really understand the mechanics of what made Andor so compelling.
The Ahsoka showrunners seem to think it was the slowness of Andor what captured people's interest, so Ahsoka lingers awkwardly in all these weird moments, slows down inexplicably during scenes but with no real information being developed. Instead it's just the same rote exposition with longer pauses inbetween.
Not to say it's all terrible, but you really get the sense that Rosario Dawson is painfully under utilized. She's putting more into this role than is really being given to her by the show runners and writers. Filoni and co. unfortunately are just not that good at writing character, where as Gilroy and his writers applied the same principles he brought to Chernobyl (edit: mixed him up with Mazin) Michael Clayton to his Star Wars story and it adds so much more narrative heft.
I know Filoni is a genuine fan, so I feel bad digging on him, but I do kind of wish he had less influence on the franchise over all. His fixation on world building doesn't always produce the best results.
Yeah, you get a lot of fans that say stuff like how "Filoni is the last student of George Lucas," which is true to an extent. He does a great job of creating some of those core Star Wars moments....
Yeah, you get a lot of fans that say stuff like how "Filoni is the last student of George Lucas," which is true to an extent. He does a great job of creating some of those core Star Wars moments. It's unfortunate that he doesn't seem to be all that great at contextualizing those moments in interesting or meaningful ways. I think part of the reason Andor works so well is that it gets back to the anti-imperialist political message at the core of Star Wars. The Favreau/Filoniverse frankly has terrible politics, and consequently the Star Wars feel of it all feels hollow and reduced to little more than lightsabers.
On the other hand, Favreau and Filoni have been pretty true to the heart of Star Wars in the merchandising department, at the very least.
For sure, Gilroy said himself back when he was called in to do triage for Rogue One that he didn't actually have that great of an interest in Star Wars, and it's that lack of preciousness that's...
For sure, Gilroy said himself back when he was called in to do triage for Rogue One that he didn't actually have that great of an interest in Star Wars, and it's that lack of preciousness that's what allowed him to take the universe down a different route. With Andor he said he aimed to create a Star Wars story that would satisfy even someone who was unfamiliar with any SW stuff.
Though he also has said that part of the reason they were able to get "weird" with Andor was because the Mandalorian was taking care of that financial/merchandising/fan service aspect of the franchise. So there is certainly some value to the contributions of people like Filoni and Favreau in that sense, maybe just a little out-sized.
It took me over 6 months to finally get around to watching Andor. I was just so disappointed with Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi that I really couldn't bring myself to be dragged through the mundane...
It took me over 6 months to finally get around to watching Andor. I was just so disappointed with Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi that I really couldn't bring myself to be dragged through the mundane crap again.
Andor hits so good. That conversation between the deputy inspector and his boss about the murder investigation in the first episode is the perfect example of exactly what is missing in all the other shows.
I'm excited to see season 2 when it finally arrives, but it has finally given me something I can point to and show what all the other shows are missing which is preventing me from finding the energy to watch anything else coming out from the Filoni/Favreau camp.
What scenes? All I see is western movie tropes (western as in cowboys, not western as in "the west") being applied to Star Wars. Much of the lingering is just letting the audience think while the...
Ahsoka lingers awkwardly in all these weird moments, slows down inexplicably during scenes but with no real information being developed
What scenes? All I see is western movie tropes (western as in cowboys, not western as in "the west") being applied to Star Wars. Much of the lingering is just letting the audience think while the characters stare at each other intently, actors conveying stuff with acting instead of expository dialog explaining their feelings.
Would the mexican standoff in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly been better if everyone had kept talking about how they feel, instead of letting the music and actor's faces do the work?
Any scenes that aren't part of an action sequence really. There are just a lot of shots of characters looking off camera awkwardly, holding their gaze on nothing with no real expression for a beat...
Any scenes that aren't part of an action sequence really. There are just a lot of shots of characters looking off camera awkwardly, holding their gaze on nothing with no real expression for a beat or two too long. It almost feels like it's edited to pad things.
I feel, as the audience, that I'm expected to "fill in their thoughts" for these weird beats, but there's nothing we've learned or been shown really to digest at these parts and the actors seem to not have a good grip on their characters' deeper motivations (which I would chalk up to shallow writing).
The sense I get is that the showrunners direct these scenes as a formula of actions that needs to be completed so they can move to the next scene, rather than a chance to layer in subtext and explore character in small moments while also moving the plot forward.
Consider this scene from Andor. Obviously Skarsgård gives a big performance, but just as important to making this scene work is the reaction shots of Robert Emms' character in the elevator -- he's saying nothing, but having just heard him earlier mention how he's struggling to balance his family life with his work for Luthen, you can read his thoughts just from the small emotions on his face. He has no dialogue, but you're getting new insight from his performance regardless.
He's thinking about his family and how the cost of revolution could very well be giving them up, we are learning that this is a character who isn't just using his family as an excuse for cowardice, but has a deep connection to his family, characters that we never even see. And it also reveals by contrast just how deep Luthen's own willingness to sacrifice runs, he's operating on an entirely different level of expectations.
Now compare it to the scene from Ahsoka episode 1 (~35:00m), when Sabine and Ahsoka first discuss the map aboard Ahsoka's ship -- we're made to understand there's a history here, but there's nothing in the performance or direction really motivating us to feel or think about things more deeply. This could've been an opportunity for a really strong performance and to hang the scene on any number of themes, instead we kind of get something that feels wooden and shallow even though the dialogue and blocking tells us the practical information we need to understand the plot. I'm not feeling anything "underneath" the acting.
I want to add, if you enjoy the show that's perfectly fine and none of this is a judgement on your taste or preference (I am still watching and enjoying Ahsoka myself, after all). I mostly just have a compulsion to analyze film that sometimes makes enjoying pulpy type stuff a bit difficult and I end up a bit annoyed when a show doesn't take the audience's attention and capacity as seriously as others. But really, my criticism comes more out of an academic kind of interest in talking about film than one of real emotional investment either way in the show.
I loved rebels but agree here that watching ashoka I have also noted tons of weird pauses and have a feeling some of the actors are remember their lines as they talk. I feel like some of the...
I loved rebels but agree here that watching ashoka I have also noted tons of weird pauses and have a feeling some of the actors are remember their lines as they talk. I feel like some of the actors are really good at conveying presence on screen while being silent while others are super awkward. I can't really put my finger on it, I felt the vfx people knocked it out of the park with the world building, but I'm not really digging the acting and pace.
Although I don't necessarily share the OPs view point on them, I can see how there's a difference between a climactic scene with a tense wordless stand off, versus a series that has multiple...
Although I don't necessarily share the OPs view point on them, I can see how there's a difference between a climactic scene with a tense wordless stand off, versus a series that has multiple standoffs at varying levels of intensity. Good, Bad, Ugly works because, well, we all know the stakes and the characters (culturally, in the West, at this point too. Even if only from memes, you know they're not friends.) but Ashoka doesn't have that same level of... I dunno, build up to each stand off, in my opinion.
If you're just coming in cold to Ahsoka without having seen any of the animations, I can understand if you feel there's no buildup. It's a much better show if you've seen all of Clone Wars and...
If you're just coming in cold to Ahsoka without having seen any of the animations, I can understand if you feel there's no buildup.
It's a much better show if you've seen all of Clone Wars and Rebels. Without the background for Ahsoka and her relationship with Sabine and Anakin from those it might still be decent but not as good.
I dunno, I loved Rebels and TCW but Ahsoka really doesn’t feel like a continuation of either of those shows to me. The characters don’t feel the same at all beyond their costumes, and all the...
I dunno, I loved Rebels and TCW but Ahsoka really doesn’t feel like a continuation of either of those shows to me. The characters don’t feel the same at all beyond their costumes, and all the issues raised in this thread have stuck out like a sore thumb to me.
Something that stood out to me in Andor was how practically every character is interesting and compelling, no matter how short their screentime. Yet Ahsoka can’t do the same for its leads across four episodes — a whole movie’s worth of screentime. I don’t blame the cast, it’s just poorly written.
It's easier to start a story from pretty much a blank slate. The only thing really locked down is Cassian Andor's fate in Rogue One - they can just invent the rest. Ahsoka needs to keep track of...
It's easier to start a story from pretty much a blank slate. The only thing really locked down is Cassian Andor's fate in Rogue One - they can just invent the rest.
Ahsoka needs to keep track of everything that happened in 77 episodes of Rebels and 133 eps of The Clone Wars or else the fans will have a hissy-fit :)
To preface this, this is coming from a former Star Wars fan. What a terrible review from someone who's last dip in the Star Wars was the sequels. The reason for this is that Thrawn was a beloved...
To preface this, this is coming from a former Star Wars fan.
What a terrible review from someone who's last dip in the Star Wars was the sequels. The reason for this is that Thrawn was a beloved Star Wars baddie in Legends and to be boiled down as:
Now, you’ll remember that the point of this series is that Ahsoka must face an extremely bad baddie (who, incidentally, is called Thrawn, and wouldn’t you be evil too if your name was an abbreviation of “thawed prawn”?)
The entire point of Thrawn was to represent the best the Empire had to offer, which was a cold and calculated admiral that was also very motivated for his goals and the Empire's.
The character of Sabine Wren is a decent new addition,
Sabrine is not new, she is from Star Wars Rebels. I.e. The series where this show is supposed to be picking its story from.
The thing that I agreed with him is that:
In a fair and logical world, Star Wars would recover from the disappointment of Ahsoka by going fallow for a significant amount of time. Take a decade off, make people start to miss it again, then come back with a bang. But that isn’t the way the world works any more. Instead, we’re doomed to be force-fed this stuff in thinner and thinner dilutions, without a break, for years and years until we’re all utterly sick of it. Lucky us.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen this new show yet. But I feel it is a huge mistake to make a live-action show, market it as something it isn't, but in actuality you'll miss out on quite a few things if...
Sabrine is not new, she is from Star Wars Rebels. I.e. The series where this show is supposed to be picking its story from.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen this new show yet.
But I feel it is a huge mistake to make a live-action show, market it as something it isn't, but in actuality you'll miss out on quite a few things if you didn't see the cartoon. Gunn is doing the same with DC, even going further with saying that video games are going to be canon too. It just kind of disengages people I think.
That's how I felt with Mandalorian, anyway. I could follow the story just fine, but it was really obvious that I was missing out on things that I had no way of knowing because I hadn't watched these animated shows first - and I have no interest in them anywaybecause they're obviously made for kids, or at least 'family'.
Anyway it just leaves a slightly sour taste in my mouth that they went this way with it. I don't care that an animated show is canon, I just care that I'm not feeling left out when watching live-action stuff. They should keep it separate imo
Star Wars has always been- outside the original trilogy which were just some sci-fi movies- marketed to kids. Lets not pretend this is some high drama serial. This has pretty much always been a...
That's how I felt with Mandalorian, anyway. I could follow the story just fine, but it was really obvious that I was missing out on things that I had no way of knowing because I hadn't watched these animated shows first - and I have no interest in them anyway because they're obviously made for kids, or at least 'family'.
Star Wars has always been- outside the original trilogy which were just some sci-fi movies- marketed to kids. Lets not pretend this is some high drama serial. This has pretty much always been a platform to draw in children and the fact that nerddom mythologized it was just serendipity.
I agree with you that Star Wars has always been marketed towards kids, with some things for the adults that were stuck watching it with their kids, part of the reason why I stopped watching Star...
Star Wars has always been- outside the original trilogy which were just some sci-fi movies- marketed to kids
I agree with you that Star Wars has always been marketed towards kids, with some things for the adults that were stuck watching it with their kids, part of the reason why I stopped watching Star Wars is because they are trying to make it something it has never been. We had seen this in the last season of the Mandalorian with the torture scene, which for a IP that has been traditionally been ment for kids was out of left field.
It reminds me in a bad way of Kingdom Hearts. The first game came out with a pretty straightforward adventure story. The second came out with one that was a bit more convoluted, but you could...
It reminds me in a bad way of Kingdom Hearts.
The first game came out with a pretty straightforward adventure story. The second came out with one that was a bit more convoluted, but you could handwave away whatever you didn't understand and still have a good time. By the time the "third" game came out, if you hadn't played the many handheld/mobile games there could be minutes where the characters are speaking/reacting to basically gibberish in the form of a soap opera plot. Still with Mickey in a supporting role, but he's not as important as someone's body-clone, which is different form their soul-clone, but that was a cutscene from the game for the handheld that's been out of production for years now.
Don't bog everything down by adding complexity to try and draw people to buy/watch other bits just so they know what's going on.
I would slightly disagree with the KH point. It was frustrating to have to buy different consoles, but KH3 isn't the third game in the series, it's the 13th. BBS, CoM, Days aren't spin-offs,...
I would slightly disagree with the KH point. It was frustrating to have to buy different consoles, but KH3 isn't the third game in the series, it's the 13th. BBS, CoM, Days aren't spin-offs, they're the next games of the series. So if you went from the first KH game (1) to the third (2), some things are confusing. Then if you go from the third (2) to the thirteenth (3), then yeah, absolutely nothing is gone to make sense, you've skipped 10 games worth of story.
That's not unique to KH. If you go straight from Harry Potter 1 to Harry Potter 6, it will also be gibberish. You're not really meant to be skipping the story like that.
Hence the "" on "third", but if it's really the 13th full entry they wouldn't/shouldn't have named it "KH3". With a book series for example any 1.1/1.5, supplemental short stories?, are not needed...
Hence the "" on "third", but if it's really the 13th full entry they wouldn't/shouldn't have named it "KH3". With a book series for example any 1.1/1.5, supplemental short stories?, are not needed to be read to understand the main story. They're flavor to add depth. CoM is KH1.5, and it's not necessary to understand what's going on in KH2. It's nice, but KH2 is it's own sequel from KH1 and it's understood that time has passed and 'stuff' has happened in between. They originally didn't plan to explain the time between KH1 and KH2 at all.
Before Kingdom Hearts went crazy with the concept, mobile/handheld entries in a series were incredibly optional. No one playing through God of War feels like they're missing something from not playing the PSP game. Link's Awakening and the Oracle games are fantastic, but never get referenced in mainline Zelda games.
To their credit they've done a pretty great job of repacking/porting 1.5/2.5/2.8 so you don't need to track down a GBA or watch cutscenes from the discontinued mobile/browser game on youtube.
To your first point, when the second game in the series isn't called 2, you kinda know what you're in for. For my part, I like the crazy titles. It's one of its charms. You can play 2 without CoM....
To your first point, when the second game in the series isn't called 2, you kinda know what you're in for. For my part, I like the crazy titles. It's one of its charms. You can play 2 without CoM. You'd be missing a lot of info about DiZ, the 5 members of the Organisation Sora killed. And why is Sora in a pod, everything about Naminé. KH2 addresses some of these things, but not all of them. And that's only because you skipped one game. If you play from 2 to 3, you skipped ten (or nine, I forget) whole games. So of course 3 would be absolute nonsense.
I'm not sure when the non main PS games were optional. The only in-between games between numbered titles has been CoM, and I would argue it's not really optional if you want to understand the story. But if the last game someone played was 2, then they waited a decade and skipped every single other game that came out in between... I'm not sure what they'd be expecting. Every game, even coded, added to the story. It'd be odd for 3 to not incorporate that.
I don't know man, it's like dropping into season 4 of GoT and being surprised that it's confusing. Well yeah, you're dropping in the middle of the story.
You're right about it being difficult to play now. Particularly because you're missing all the gameplay and dialogue sections of games like Days. But at the time, it wasn't a problem, provided you had the billion consoles they wanted you to have.
It’s more like watching “Season 1” of the HBO show, then officially labeled “Season 2” on HBO and being lost because the creators expected you to have also watched the real season 2 on...
I don't know man, it's like dropping into season 4 of GoT and being surprised that it's confusing. Well yeah, you're dropping in the middle of the story.
It’s more like watching “Season 1” of the HBO show, then officially labeled “Season 2” on HBO and being lost because the creators expected you to have also watched the real season 2 on pay-per-view, a broadway play bridging S1 and RealS2, the real season 3 on Disney+, an indie film bridging RealS2 and RealS3, and a direct-to-dvd-only miniseries and supplementary flip-book between RealS3 and “Season 2”.
Not only is it misleading, but it’s completely unreasonable. And the tv analogy doesn’t even capture the significant cost of multiple video game platforms well.
I mean, more to the point, it's like watching the movie series called "Avengers" and being confused that they never fully explain Captain America's story, or who Dr Strange is, or how Iron Man got...
I mean, more to the point, it's like watching the movie series called "Avengers" and being confused that they never fully explain Captain America's story, or who Dr Strange is, or how Iron Man got his powers. You are meant to be watching Iron Man, First Avenger, etc, and everyone involved with the series would know that. Conversely, anyone even slightly familiar with KH3 would know that you can't jump into it from KH2. We knew it was the end of the Dark Seeker saga, we knew it would go into the history of the foretellers, we knew it would resolve the story of the different trios.
I would certainly be opposed to a SE mandate of calling every title KH1, KH2, KH3, KH4 just because it confused someone that vaguely remembers playing the game a decade ago. How does that make any sense? Let them have their quirky titles. It's not hurting anyone.
Not every game (or movie, or book) is meant to be an entry point for new fans, right?
Quirky titles are fine. Numbered titles are fine. Mixing them becomes a problem when expected to consume in a certain order, as the numbers indicate a sequence that’s broken by the quirky titles....
Quirky titles are fine. Numbered titles are fine. Mixing them becomes a problem when expected to consume in a certain order, as the numbers indicate a sequence that’s broken by the quirky titles. The problem is magnified when exclusively spread across multiple platforms.
Playing KH3 after KH2 isn’t using KH3 as an “entry point for new fans”; it’s a logical continuation of the sequentially labeled series on the same platform line.
The MCU has three advantages over the KHU.
First is that the MCU all the same platform (movies with theatrical release). Easier to keep track of and no extra investment or setup to consume them all outside of the ticket price for the showing. KHU, on the other hand, is split across multiple consoles and handheld platforms, representing a significant departure from the norm and an unreasonable cost for most consumers who otherwise wouldn’t have them all, on top of the purchase of the games themselves.
The second is that, over time, superheroes have permeated pop culture to the point that everyone has at least a passing familiarity with, if not specific heroes, at least the general framework for typical superhero settings and stories. That significantly aids understanding and even jumping in cold without needing to know specifics. KHU, while it used some familiar faces, uses them in a different universe for a different and increasingly complex story. All of the pop culture familiarity is made useless to fill in the gaps, so consuming everything and in order becomes more important. Having watched some recaps of the story, it is on a whole different level of complexity and convolution than the MCU.
Third, and largely as a result of the first two points, is that the MCU is surprisingly friendly to pick, choose, and jump in whenever and wherever while still enjoying it and not feeling too lost, for both comic fans and the general public alike. Each character movie (set) can more or less be enjoyed as standalone things. The crossover Avengers entries are still enjoyable on their own, and are generally comprehensible fairly quickly without having followed the rest of the universe closely.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Anecdotally, I don't know a single KH fan that's actually confused by this. Obviously there's bias there, but of the criticisms I've...
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Anecdotally, I don't know a single KH fan that's actually confused by this. Obviously there's bias there, but of the criticisms I've seen levied at 3 (and there's many), this isn't one that's gotten much traction.
The fact that they're on different platforms? That's annoying. The fact that you need to play all the games in order of release to understand the next game? IMHL, that's reasonable.
Unfortunately, these shows are only happening because of the kids who never grew up and who think Dave Filoni is the second coming of the savior--George Lucas. That also means they're the ones who...
Unfortunately, these shows are only happening because of the kids who never grew up and who think Dave Filoni is the second coming of the savior--George Lucas. That also means they're the ones who actually liked all the prequels because they were little kids even when the third one came out so they also think the prequels are Shakespearean masterpieces and not what happens when someone who doesn't understand human interaction makes a trilogy about human interaction.
So now we're stuck with Dave Filoni making the greatest shows ever. That is, live action versions of the middling children's shows he made, although the Clone Wars actually had several actually good episodes/arcs in its later seasons. The Mandalorian seems to operate on six-year-old logic, which is fine for a kids' show, but I'd rather have the eight-year-old logic of the movies.
They sort of did this with the films to be fair. Not anywhere near a decade, but they shelved all of the prospective movies after Rise of Skywalker and stuck to TV for a while. Maybe the answer is...
In a fair and logical world, Star Wars would recover from the disappointment of Ahsoka by going fallow for a significant amount of time. Take a decade off, make people start to miss it again, then come back with a bang. But that isn’t the way the world works any more. Instead, we’re doomed to be force-fed this stuff in thinner and thinner dilutions, without a break, for years and years until we’re all utterly sick of it. Lucky us.
They sort of did this with the films to be fair. Not anywhere near a decade, but they shelved all of the prospective movies after Rise of Skywalker and stuck to TV for a while. Maybe the answer is to do something akin to Marvel phases, but alternate. So Phase I is 4-6 years of meticulously planned out movies, with little to no TV. During which time all the various shows that will be released during Phase II are storyboarded, scripted, and workshopped to be cohesive and interesting. Then Phase II is the same in reverse: focus on releasing TV shows and concentrate on getting together a cohesive plan for the next string of movies. And just keep alternating forever into the future. That way Disney gets its endless string of content, and we the long-suffering fans can pretend that it's higher quality because more thought seemingly went into it.
I'm going to be honest, this article reads like it was written by a guy who went to see Phantom Menace in theaters during a sleepover for his birthday, but he fell asleep and his friends drew...
I'm going to be honest, this article reads like it was written by a guy who went to see Phantom Menace in theaters during a sleepover for his birthday, but he fell asleep and his friends drew penises on his forehead and he has projected that trauma onto Star Wars.
Is Ahsoka a show for the masses? Absolutely not. If you aren't a Star Wars enthusiast that has tracked the entire timeline (Or at minimum the video media) then you aren't going to be very attached and you're going to probably spend a lot of time laughing at the wiggly flaps. But everything I've heard from Star Wars enthusiasts in my life is that they're pretty happy with it and I'm friends with a LOT of them, many of whom have trashed other shows for quality issues.
It kind of feels like Disney is fine with their SW content not being mass consumed, because there's a ton of content out there now. Movies/TV shows can't hit the kind of saturation like they used to and I kind of think that's cool, because now we get to see some really niche stuff produced and it may only be beloved by a smaller community, but it is still beloved.
I say this as someone who watched one episode of Ahsoka and thought 'This ain't for me."
In your narrative, Disney has suddenly become really stupid somehow and they are hemorrhaging money from SW. In mine, they have a backroom of accountants who's sole job is to calculate...
In your narrative, Disney has suddenly become really stupid somehow and they are hemorrhaging money from SW. In mine, they have a backroom of accountants who's sole job is to calculate profitability down to the decimal. I dunno, I feel like it's unlikely Disney has suddenly lost all sense and more likely that they are playing a long game and, like I said, many studios aren't catering to (gestures widely) everyone and sometimes it's more complicated than counting singular viewership.
This is Disney so I'm sure they also account for all secondary and tertiary sales that could relate too. Posters, toys, pins, birthday cards, shirts, pajamas, books, spin-off books, comics, food...
This is Disney so I'm sure they also account for all secondary and tertiary sales that could relate too.
Posters, toys, pins, birthday cards, shirts, pajamas, books, spin-off books, comics, food items, theme park additions and anything else they can stick their logo or characters on.
That was the point I was trying to highlight. There's a qualitative difference between a viewer who sees a blockbuster once and one who watches it 10 times a year, owns it on every platform,...
That was the point I was trying to highlight. There's a qualitative difference between a viewer who sees a blockbuster once and one who watches it 10 times a year, owns it on every platform, listens to the score, etc. Star Wars, more than most media, is really effective with that. The people I know who love the Disney universe looooove it and spend so much money buying merch.
Lucasfilm is perhaps the worst run division at Disney right now. Their budgets are overblown due to bad leadership and Disney is gonna want to stop that as they look to cut costs company wide....
Toys and other merchandise don’t sell as well as they used to. But even then if the shows/movies aren’t that popular neither will the merchandise be. As The Flash has shown this year.
Bob Iger’s ethos when he first took on the helm at Disney was that the movies they were making was the lifeblood of everything else at Disney. It’s what led to toys being sold, and it’s what led to theme park visits. That’s why he bought Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. This idea that studios don’t actually care if no one is watching the stuff they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on because of toys is silly.
That's all good context, I appreciate it. I think the only clarification I'd add to my statement, which I think got lost because of your last sentence, is that I wasn't trying to make the argument...
That's all good context, I appreciate it. I think the only clarification I'd add to my statement, which I think got lost because of your last sentence, is that I wasn't trying to make the argument that Disney is in it for the art. I know Disney is in it for the money and therefore seeks the maximum possible exposure. I was trying to say that I think the landscape of viewership has changed entirely and there's a qualitative difference between a single viewer from 1999 and 2023. My guess is that companies have realized that they can make more money by releasing content that will be merchandise supported to a dedicated viewership. I grew up loving Star Wars when I was a kid, loved the prequels as a teenager, but have found the new universe to be relatively sparkless for me. But so many of my friends are diehard viewers, much like my friends who love anime. They will watch it over and over again, they're passionate as hell and because of that they spend a lot of money on the related merch. That's it, I just wanted to clarify.
It's not just Disney though. There are quite a few blockbuster TV shows the last several years that have these insane budgets. Like, there is no way something like Rings of Power actually makes...
It's not just Disney though. There are quite a few blockbuster TV shows the last several years that have these insane budgets. Like, there is no way something like Rings of Power actually makes money for Amazon. Similarly, Ahsoka with its +$100M budget isn't going to make that back in terms of subscribers on Disney plus. Merch is probably great for them but then take a better example like how Netflix does movies with insane budgets as well. Are they really going to earn $200M worth of subscribers back from Red Notice? I don't think so and I don't think any amount of accountants are going to be able to figure it out either when there are so many variables.
We can also take WB originally intending Blue Beetle to be released on HBO Max, but deciding against it because I assume they realised these huge budget releases going straight to streaming won't make money. It's a $120M budget movie and has recently gotten to $100M worldwide box office, so it's a major flop, but it's probably more than they would have earned by releasing it on their streamer.
I think the age of big budget TV and straight-to-streaming movies is soon to be over. It just doesn't make sense
Interesting, I would have said the opposite: Star Wars is getting better and it's without Lucas' involvement. The review (is it a review?) does not mention Andor, which, hands down, is some of the...
Interesting, I would have said the opposite: Star Wars is getting better and it's without Lucas' involvement.
The review (is it a review?) does not mention Andor, which, hands down, is some of the best television of recent years and best Star Wars since the original trilogy. The Mandalorian is honestly pretty bland in comparison but it already was a huge step up for the franchise. I'm waiting for all the Asoka episodes to be out so I can binge watch in a few days but I'm confident it is also at least decent (all other reviews point in that direction).
Lucas happily ruined Star Wars all on his own (and with absolute creative power) with the prequel episodes. Him handing off the franchise was good. I can hate JJ Abrams and his goddamn mystery box with a passion but his sequels are better than the sterile garbage that were the prequels. And for whatever reason, the new tv shows are actually... good. Occasionally great, even. If they want to milk the franchise, do it this way. A few new ideas, understanding the appeal of the originals, it's ok.
Nobody complains that the Daniel Craig movies ruin From Russia with Love. Nobody complained that Bladerunner 2049 or that Mad Max: Fury Road devalued the original universe. Because they were good. We're so conditioned that all sequels have to suck, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't disagree with you, but I think on the whole the prequel trilogy is more interesting than the sequel trilogy, even if it was very poorly written. The Force Awakens is a poorly thought out...
I don't disagree with you, but I think on the whole the prequel trilogy is more interesting than the sequel trilogy, even if it was very poorly written.
The Force Awakens is a poorly thought out re-hash of A New Hope. It undoes everything accomplished in Return of the Jedi for the sake of resetting most of our OT heroes back to square one. Leia is the leader of a scrappy resistance again. Han and Chewie are smugglers again. The fact that the New Republic basically collapsed within 30 years is an embarassment for our protagonists.
The Last Jedi is actually good. I would rank this up there with the OT in terms of quality. I like that it tried new things. It put a very interesting spin on the relationship between the hero and the villain. And it gave us a fascinating glimpse into what civillian life is like in the Star Wars universe.
The Rise of Skywalker is just as poorly written as anything in the prequel trilogy. "Somehow, Palpatine returned" really sums up the whole movie for me. To add insult to injury, the film pretty much goes out of its way to ignore or even retcon most of the interesting decisions made by The Last Jedi, presumably to try and counteract all the braindead nerd outrage that movie garnered.
While the prequel movies are famously poorly written, underneath I think they were still hiding a lot more quality world building. Lucas didn't set out to just remake his OT. He invested a lot of time and money into making the prequels stand out as their own thing, with good production design and a fleshed out world that felt genuinely different from the one we saw in the OT.
The reason Mad Max: Fury Road and Blade Runner: 2049 are beloved by fans is because they are both exceptionally well written and executed movies. And perhaps more importantly, they respect the legacy of their predecessors. BR2049 in particular does a great job of expanding on the themes of Blade Runner while pushing the universe forward in a sensible manner.
That is also with the fact that Leia was a disgraced senator. And the reason that she is disgraced is that people found out who her biological father was. Despite the fact that she grew up on...
Leia is the leader of a scrappy resistance again.
That is also with the fact that Leia was a disgraced senator. And the reason that she is disgraced is that people found out who her biological father was. Despite the fact that she grew up on Alderaan, with her adapted father being a well known senator out spoken against the Emperor in the senate. And coupled with the fact that she had sacrificed her life to fighting against the Empire, just to have people that it was just a rebellious youth thing is mind boggling stupid.
And coupled with the fact that the sequels had under used John Boyega's (who is a good actor) character Finn, to the point where he does not want to be associated with Star Wars any more. Which you can fucking see in the interviews of him before the first one, which was full of energy, was released to after the last one was released in regards to this subject, which you can that Boyega was just done with Star Wars (such as the Vulture article about it). And we were promised that his character was going to play a bigger role, such as being forced sensitive, besides being the comical relief character that Finn ended up as.
While the prequel movies are famously poorly written, underneath I think they were still hiding a lot more quality world building.
That is the charm of the prequels, is that yeah they had some pretty bad writing but they still had the soul that made the originals great and we saw the rise and the reason for the fall of Vader to the Dark Side. Which the sequels never had, like you had said, they were just rehashes of the OT. At least, the Last Jedi had some interesting ideas, such as the glimpse into the civilian life, as you had pointed out, but having killed the major bad, that the built up for two movies, was such a stupid play, like the writers and director forgot that it was a trilogy that they were suppose to be making, and not two movies.
For me, this is the core problem with the sequel trilogy - a lack of a driving vision and loads of insecurity. Instead of going "yes, and", Last Jedi lifts a huge middle finger towards Force...
like the writers and director forgot that it was a trilogy that they were suppose to be making, and not two movies.
For me, this is the core problem with the sequel trilogy - a lack of a driving vision and loads of insecurity. Instead of going "yes, and", Last Jedi lifts a huge middle finger towards Force Awakens, and then Rise of Skywalker raises its finger towards Last Jedi. Force Awakens itself started off with its finger towards the prequels, but before the other two came out, this came across more as a pallette-cleanser.
I actually respect and enjoy what TLJ was trying to do in its rejection of TFA's setup, but it being not even half-baked did it no favors. Then RoS's "course correction" doomed the whole trilogy to being the mess it is.
I think this is a bit of an unfair take. If you're going to spend an entire movie trying to destroy the very concepts of Sith and Jedi, who's actually your target audience here? I would bet that...
The Rise of Skywalker is just as poorly written as anything in the prequel trilogy. "Somehow, Palpatine returned" really sums up the whole movie for me. To add insult to injury, the film pretty much goes out of its way to ignore or even retcon most of the interesting decisions made by The Last Jedi, presumably to try and counteract all the braindead nerd outrage that movie garnered.
I think this is a bit of an unfair take. If you're going to spend an entire movie trying to destroy the very concepts of Sith and Jedi, who's actually your target audience here? I would bet that Disney discovered that it was no one. The braindead nerds were actually the people buying tickets to these movies, and trying to destroy their decades old universe was an incredibly stupid thing to do. So of course they reversed course. Sure, they reversed into a ravine, but they didn't have a choice.
Disney wouldn't have damnatio memoria'd the second movie because of outrage. They would've done it because it lost money.
I think that is an unfair take. I did not walk away from The Last Jedi thinking that the entire concept of Sith/Jedi was being destroyed or even challenged. I walked away thinking they tried to...
If you're going to spend an entire movie trying to destroy the very concepts of Sith and Jedi, who's actually your target audience here?
I think that is an unfair take. I did not walk away from The Last Jedi thinking that the entire concept of Sith/Jedi was being destroyed or even challenged. I walked away thinking they tried to find a new way to expand on the moral dillemmas and temptations originally explored in the latter two OT films.
But then again, I never had this hardline black and white view of the Sith/Jedi conflict that some Star Wars fans have. And maybe that is why my favorite piece of Star Wars media is actually Knights of the Old Republic II.
Oh, I absolutely love KOTOR2 as well. But (for me), it seemed obvious they wanted to close the chapter on some of the concepts of what came before. Gone were the Sith, now we have a Supreme Leader...
Oh, I absolutely love KOTOR2 as well. But (for me), it seemed obvious they wanted to close the chapter on some of the concepts of what came before. Gone were the Sith, now we have a Supreme Leader and the Knights of Ren. Gone were the Jedi. Luke was dead and the book burnt. It's been years since I watched it so the details escape me now, but the way I interepted it was that they were doing away with the whole thing. Let the past die kill if if you have to, etc.
Problem is, that past is what you're trying to tap into. The only way any of this works is if you bring the braindead nerds on that journey. If you aren't able to do that, you have no audience left. And this isn't a theory, this is exactly what happened. They pissed off the only people that cared about space monks with laser swords, and that was the end of that experiment.
The difference between KOTOR2 and the Last Jedi is that KOTOR2 is good. It asks interesting questions about the Star Wars universe without throwing it all out.
A lot of that boils down to The Last Jedi needing to make sense of the mess that it's predecessor made. The big reset button that gave us The First Order, made Han and Chewie smugglers again, and...
A lot of that boils down to The Last Jedi needing to make sense of the mess that it's predecessor made. The big reset button that gave us a new Empire The First Order, made Han and Chewie smugglers again, and killed off the New Republic so Leia could be a resistance leader again.
The obvious setup, from JJ Abrams perspective, was to turn Luke into Yoda 2.0 so he could train Rey and she could rebuild the Jedi Order, again. This would have been the lazy uninteresting way out, at least in my book. But I get why many people would have preferred it.
While I get that people don't like Luke being knocked down a few pegs from where we last saw him, it makes the story work significantly better. For one, it provides him an actual character arc, and one that resonates with and reinforces his arc from Empire Strikes Back. Second, it provides us a much more intimate, character-driven view of how things started going to shit between the Battle of Endor and the present.
All the stuff that The Last Jedi supposedly threw away was already thrown away by its predecessor. It was forced to contend with the fact that the Jedi Order had once again collapsed, within the last 30 years, under Luke's watch. I just don't see how you explain that without assassinating his character or ignoring the problem entirely.
I think you're right that the competiting visions of the two directors probably did the most damage. While I don't like Last Jedi, I really didn't like the Force Awakens and was surprised that...
I think you're right that the competiting visions of the two directors probably did the most damage.
While I don't like Last Jedi, I really didn't like the Force Awakens and was surprised that many people did. It destroyed all of the cast to reset them. It also reset the political situation, like you said. It was a deeply unambitious movie, having no intention of telling its own story. Last Jedi, to its credit, tries to tell its own story.
But I think there's a difference between how these two movies treat the past. Force Awakens was in one extreme, where it just wanted to recreate the first movie shot by shot. Last Jedi goes the other way, and tries to destroy every familiar concept and establish its own lore going forward. I'm no writer or director, but I'm sure there was a way it moving the universe forward without explicitly trying to eradicate it.
Unfortunately, this is the year 20XX and someone will always complain about something, even if it's good, see the Furiosa hate and everything. Can we dismiss criticism of it seems like reaching...
Nobody complained that Bladerunner 2049 or that Mad Max: Fury Road devalued the original universe.
Unfortunately, this is the year 20XX and someone will always complain about something, even if it's good, see the Furiosa hate and everything. Can we dismiss criticism of it seems like reaching rage bait? Sure, but someone still complained even if it was manufactured.
One of my best friends is a massive Star Wars fan, and we frequently talk about what we would do if we were to helm a new era for the property. The first thing would be to do a second great purge...
One of my best friends is a massive Star Wars fan, and we frequently talk about what we would do if we were to helm a new era for the property. The first thing would be to do a second great purge of the universe, and give ourselves a nice, clean slate to work from. Simply put, the next film should begin with the opening crawl:
Star Wars Book II Episode I
1000 years have passed since the defeat of Emperor Palpatine, and the galaxy has enjoyed a period of prosperous peace after a long dark age.
Full reboot, kill everything with fire. 1000 years is enough time to clear the decks and for the events of history to become legend. No familiar faces, no force ghosts, no lightsabres, nothing. Update the design language enough to make it still feel like Star Wars (this is more important than the look), and start from scratch.
Now we don't fully purge the Force from the series, because it's an iconic part of the story. But what we do is turn it back into the "ancient religion" that Vader was mocked for in A New Hope. Maybe there's a planet out there that has a population of Force users quietly living out their lives as demi-gods, but unconcerned with the goings on of the rest of the galaxy (and possibly even completely cut off from it). But they are not Sith, or Jedi. They just live with the Force and it is mundane to them. They have a certain set of uses for it, and as far as they're concerned that's all there is (establishing rules for the use of the force is sorely needed at this stage).
Elsewhere, the main story of the first trilogy in Book II should be emancipation of droids. After the fall of Palpatine and a long dark age afterwards, droids are back to being slaves (rather than the "helpful pets" that the sequel trilogy seems to want to brand them as), but there is rebellion in the offing. This will be this series' War. It's still got a good vs. evil vibe which is so important to Star Wars, but it tells a compelling story, and gives us new territory to explore with Star Wars: what is consciousness, and how do droids prove that they have it? Maybe we eventually see a droid created that can harness the Force. If the third episode of Book II ends with the victory of the free droids, then you have a lot of set-up for friction and character interaction in the next 6 episodes, whatever the over-arching plot of those ends up being.
We continue padding out this half-baked idea every 6 months or so when enough gin has flown. It's good fun to think about, but it'll never happen. I might turn it into a TTRPG setting or something though.
Interesting ideas re: the droid war! I agree completely that they have got to move on. I'm not saying there are no interesting plots left in the current Star Wars timeline (battle of endor +/- 30...
Interesting ideas re: the droid war!
I agree completely that they have got to move on. I'm not saying there are no interesting plots left in the current Star Wars timeline (battle of endor +/- 30 years), but I think they're increasingly difficult to find. The writers would have a much better chance if they were to be given a clean slate.
A full clean slate 1000 or 10000 years after would be amazing! There's so much potential being wasted on projects set between movies 1 and 9. We already know what happens.
A full clean slate 1000 or 10000 years after would be amazing! There's so much potential being wasted on projects set between movies 1 and 9. We already know what happens.
The author seems to contradict the headline here. If Ahsoka isn't as bad as previous efforts, how can Star Wars be going from bad to worse? Speaking of the Kenobi series though, I never watched...
The worst thing is that, as tortuously slow as Ahsoka is, it still isn’t bad by Star Wars standards. It isn’t bad on the scale of the pointless Obi-Wan Kenobi series, or that last JJ Abrams film ...
The author seems to contradict the headline here. If Ahsoka isn't as bad as previous efforts, how can Star Wars be going from bad to worse?
Speaking of the Kenobi series though, I never watched the series but there's a few 2 hour edits of it floating about (that try to re-shape it back to a movie again) - of them "The Boonta Eve Redux" is the one I liked the most.
Headlines are almost never determined by the actual writer, but the editor instead. A headline that doesn't quite match up to the article is a common occurrence as a result. This headline is...
Headlines are almost never determined by the actual writer, but the editor instead. A headline that doesn't quite match up to the article is a common occurrence as a result.
This headline is particularly bad, nothing about it matches the tone of the article.
So far Ahsoka is an extrusion of some of the best parts of Rebels and (to a lesser extent) Clone Wars; Basically it's a reward for kids who grew up with these CG shows and adults who stuck it out...
So far Ahsoka is an extrusion of some of the best parts of Rebels and (to a lesser extent) Clone Wars; Basically it's a reward for kids who grew up with these CG shows and adults who stuck it out through all the weak writing they contained (particularly early on). No big surprise that someone so trapped in the 80's that they are trying to draw a line between George Lucas and Star Wars as it exists in 2023 hates it.
Don't get me wrong: There's a lot of bad Star Wars out there (don't get me started). But this ain't it, boss.
Tiny updates are on the way. Small text rendering bugs and tild.es short links fixed. Still working on iOS app with October deadline for first alpha. After that I hope to start adding more...
Tiny updates are on the way. Small text rendering bugs and tild.es short links fixed.
Still working on iOS app with October deadline for first alpha. After that I hope to start adding more features to both apps.
This is the Filoni influence in a nutshell, he seems pre-occupied with skipping past the "boring" parts of storytelling (compelling dialogue, justified character development, reflecting on any honest aspect of the human condition etc.) in order to get to the action sequences and "cool star wars moments".
Don't get me wrong, I love a good cool Star Wars moment, and the action sequences in Ahsoka have been pretty cool (Dawson is a great physical performer), but the sense I get is that, after the critical success of Andor, Filoni is trying to inject some of that quality into this series but he doesn't really understand the mechanics of what made Andor so compelling.
The Ahsoka showrunners seem to think it was the slowness of Andor what captured people's interest, so Ahsoka lingers awkwardly in all these weird moments, slows down inexplicably during scenes but with no real information being developed. Instead it's just the same rote exposition with longer pauses inbetween.
Not to say it's all terrible, but you really get the sense that Rosario Dawson is painfully under utilized. She's putting more into this role than is really being given to her by the show runners and writers. Filoni and co. unfortunately are just not that good at writing character, where as Gilroy and his writers applied the same principles he brought to
Chernobyl(edit: mixed him up with Mazin) Michael Clayton to his Star Wars story and it adds so much more narrative heft.I know Filoni is a genuine fan, so I feel bad digging on him, but I do kind of wish he had less influence on the franchise over all. His fixation on world building doesn't always produce the best results.
Yeah, you get a lot of fans that say stuff like how "Filoni is the last student of George Lucas," which is true to an extent. He does a great job of creating some of those core Star Wars moments. It's unfortunate that he doesn't seem to be all that great at contextualizing those moments in interesting or meaningful ways. I think part of the reason Andor works so well is that it gets back to the anti-imperialist political message at the core of Star Wars. The Favreau/Filoniverse frankly has terrible politics, and consequently the Star Wars feel of it all feels hollow and reduced to little more than lightsabers.
On the other hand, Favreau and Filoni have been pretty true to the heart of Star Wars in the merchandising department, at the very least.
For sure, Gilroy said himself back when he was called in to do triage for Rogue One that he didn't actually have that great of an interest in Star Wars, and it's that lack of preciousness that's what allowed him to take the universe down a different route. With Andor he said he aimed to create a Star Wars story that would satisfy even someone who was unfamiliar with any SW stuff.
Though he also has said that part of the reason they were able to get "weird" with Andor was because the Mandalorian was taking care of that financial/merchandising/fan service aspect of the franchise. So there is certainly some value to the contributions of people like Filoni and Favreau in that sense, maybe just a little out-sized.
It took me over 6 months to finally get around to watching Andor. I was just so disappointed with Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi that I really couldn't bring myself to be dragged through the mundane crap again.
Andor hits so good. That conversation between the deputy inspector and his boss about the murder investigation in the first episode is the perfect example of exactly what is missing in all the other shows.
I'm excited to see season 2 when it finally arrives, but it has finally given me something I can point to and show what all the other shows are missing which is preventing me from finding the energy to watch anything else coming out from the Filoni/Favreau camp.
What scenes? All I see is western movie tropes (western as in cowboys, not western as in "the west") being applied to Star Wars. Much of the lingering is just letting the audience think while the characters stare at each other intently, actors conveying stuff with acting instead of expository dialog explaining their feelings.
Would the mexican standoff in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly been better if everyone had kept talking about how they feel, instead of letting the music and actor's faces do the work?
Any scenes that aren't part of an action sequence really. There are just a lot of shots of characters looking off camera awkwardly, holding their gaze on nothing with no real expression for a beat or two too long. It almost feels like it's edited to pad things.
I feel, as the audience, that I'm expected to "fill in their thoughts" for these weird beats, but there's nothing we've learned or been shown really to digest at these parts and the actors seem to not have a good grip on their characters' deeper motivations (which I would chalk up to shallow writing).
The sense I get is that the showrunners direct these scenes as a formula of actions that needs to be completed so they can move to the next scene, rather than a chance to layer in subtext and explore character in small moments while also moving the plot forward.
Consider this scene from Andor. Obviously Skarsgård gives a big performance, but just as important to making this scene work is the reaction shots of Robert Emms' character in the elevator -- he's saying nothing, but having just heard him earlier mention how he's struggling to balance his family life with his work for Luthen, you can read his thoughts just from the small emotions on his face. He has no dialogue, but you're getting new insight from his performance regardless.
He's thinking about his family and how the cost of revolution could very well be giving them up, we are learning that this is a character who isn't just using his family as an excuse for cowardice, but has a deep connection to his family, characters that we never even see. And it also reveals by contrast just how deep Luthen's own willingness to sacrifice runs, he's operating on an entirely different level of expectations.
Now compare it to the scene from Ahsoka episode 1 (~35:00m), when Sabine and Ahsoka first discuss the map aboard Ahsoka's ship -- we're made to understand there's a history here, but there's nothing in the performance or direction really motivating us to feel or think about things more deeply. This could've been an opportunity for a really strong performance and to hang the scene on any number of themes, instead we kind of get something that feels wooden and shallow even though the dialogue and blocking tells us the practical information we need to understand the plot. I'm not feeling anything "underneath" the acting.
I want to add, if you enjoy the show that's perfectly fine and none of this is a judgement on your taste or preference (I am still watching and enjoying Ahsoka myself, after all). I mostly just have a compulsion to analyze film that sometimes makes enjoying pulpy type stuff a bit difficult and I end up a bit annoyed when a show doesn't take the audience's attention and capacity as seriously as others. But really, my criticism comes more out of an academic kind of interest in talking about film than one of real emotional investment either way in the show.
I loved rebels but agree here that watching ashoka I have also noted tons of weird pauses and have a feeling some of the actors are remember their lines as they talk. I feel like some of the actors are really good at conveying presence on screen while being silent while others are super awkward. I can't really put my finger on it, I felt the vfx people knocked it out of the park with the world building, but I'm not really digging the acting and pace.
Although I don't necessarily share the OPs view point on them, I can see how there's a difference between a climactic scene with a tense wordless stand off, versus a series that has multiple standoffs at varying levels of intensity. Good, Bad, Ugly works because, well, we all know the stakes and the characters (culturally, in the West, at this point too. Even if only from memes, you know they're not friends.) but Ashoka doesn't have that same level of... I dunno, build up to each stand off, in my opinion.
If you're just coming in cold to Ahsoka without having seen any of the animations, I can understand if you feel there's no buildup.
It's a much better show if you've seen all of Clone Wars and Rebels. Without the background for Ahsoka and her relationship with Sabine and Anakin from those it might still be decent but not as good.
I dunno, I loved Rebels and TCW but Ahsoka really doesn’t feel like a continuation of either of those shows to me. The characters don’t feel the same at all beyond their costumes, and all the issues raised in this thread have stuck out like a sore thumb to me.
Something that stood out to me in Andor was how practically every character is interesting and compelling, no matter how short their screentime. Yet Ahsoka can’t do the same for its leads across four episodes — a whole movie’s worth of screentime. I don’t blame the cast, it’s just poorly written.
It's easier to start a story from pretty much a blank slate. The only thing really locked down is Cassian Andor's fate in Rogue One - they can just invent the rest.
Ahsoka needs to keep track of everything that happened in 77 episodes of Rebels and 133 eps of The Clone Wars or else the fans will have a hissy-fit :)
To preface this, this is coming from a former Star Wars fan.
What a terrible review from someone who's last dip in the Star Wars was the sequels. The reason for this is that Thrawn was a beloved Star Wars baddie in Legends and to be boiled down as:
The entire point of Thrawn was to represent the best the Empire had to offer, which was a cold and calculated admiral that was also very motivated for his goals and the Empire's.
Sabrine is not new, she is from Star Wars Rebels. I.e. The series where this show is supposed to be picking its story from.
The thing that I agreed with him is that:
Edit: changed a word
Disclaimer: I haven't seen this new show yet.
But I feel it is a huge mistake to make a live-action show, market it as something it isn't, but in actuality you'll miss out on quite a few things if you didn't see the cartoon. Gunn is doing the same with DC, even going further with saying that video games are going to be canon too. It just kind of disengages people I think.
That's how I felt with Mandalorian, anyway. I could follow the story just fine, but it was really obvious that I was missing out on things that I had no way of knowing because I hadn't watched these animated shows first - and I have no interest in them anywaybecause they're obviously made for kids, or at least 'family'.
Anyway it just leaves a slightly sour taste in my mouth that they went this way with it. I don't care that an animated show is canon, I just care that I'm not feeling left out when watching live-action stuff. They should keep it separate imo
Star Wars has always been- outside the original trilogy which were just some sci-fi movies- marketed to kids. Lets not pretend this is some high drama serial. This has pretty much always been a platform to draw in children and the fact that nerddom mythologized it was just serendipity.
I agree with you that Star Wars has always been marketed towards kids, with some things for the adults that were stuck watching it with their kids, part of the reason why I stopped watching Star Wars is because they are trying to make it something it has never been. We had seen this in the last season of the Mandalorian with the torture scene, which for a IP that has been traditionally been ment for kids was out of left field.
It reminds me in a bad way of Kingdom Hearts.
The first game came out with a pretty straightforward adventure story. The second came out with one that was a bit more convoluted, but you could handwave away whatever you didn't understand and still have a good time. By the time the "third" game came out, if you hadn't played the many handheld/mobile games there could be minutes where the characters are speaking/reacting to basically gibberish in the form of a soap opera plot. Still with Mickey in a supporting role, but he's not as important as someone's body-clone, which is different form their soul-clone, but that was a cutscene from the game for the handheld that's been out of production for years now.
Don't bog everything down by adding complexity to try and draw people to buy/watch other bits just so they know what's going on.
I would slightly disagree with the KH point. It was frustrating to have to buy different consoles, but KH3 isn't the third game in the series, it's the 13th. BBS, CoM, Days aren't spin-offs, they're the next games of the series. So if you went from the first KH game (1) to the third (2), some things are confusing. Then if you go from the third (2) to the thirteenth (3), then yeah, absolutely nothing is gone to make sense, you've skipped 10 games worth of story.
That's not unique to KH. If you go straight from Harry Potter 1 to Harry Potter 6, it will also be gibberish. You're not really meant to be skipping the story like that.
Hence the "" on "third", but if it's really the 13th full entry they wouldn't/shouldn't have named it "KH3". With a book series for example any 1.1/1.5, supplemental short stories?, are not needed to be read to understand the main story. They're flavor to add depth. CoM is KH1.5, and it's not necessary to understand what's going on in KH2. It's nice, but KH2 is it's own sequel from KH1 and it's understood that time has passed and 'stuff' has happened in between. They originally didn't plan to explain the time between KH1 and KH2 at all.
Before Kingdom Hearts went crazy with the concept, mobile/handheld entries in a series were incredibly optional. No one playing through God of War feels like they're missing something from not playing the PSP game. Link's Awakening and the Oracle games are fantastic, but never get referenced in mainline Zelda games.
To their credit they've done a pretty great job of repacking/porting 1.5/2.5/2.8 so you don't need to track down a GBA or watch cutscenes from the discontinued mobile/browser game on youtube.
To your first point, when the second game in the series isn't called 2, you kinda know what you're in for. For my part, I like the crazy titles. It's one of its charms. You can play 2 without CoM. You'd be missing a lot of info about DiZ, the 5 members of the Organisation Sora killed. And why is Sora in a pod, everything about Naminé. KH2 addresses some of these things, but not all of them. And that's only because you skipped one game. If you play from 2 to 3, you skipped ten (or nine, I forget) whole games. So of course 3 would be absolute nonsense.
I'm not sure when the non main PS games were optional. The only in-between games between numbered titles has been CoM, and I would argue it's not really optional if you want to understand the story. But if the last game someone played was 2, then they waited a decade and skipped every single other game that came out in between... I'm not sure what they'd be expecting. Every game, even coded, added to the story. It'd be odd for 3 to not incorporate that.
I don't know man, it's like dropping into season 4 of GoT and being surprised that it's confusing. Well yeah, you're dropping in the middle of the story.
You're right about it being difficult to play now. Particularly because you're missing all the gameplay and dialogue sections of games like Days. But at the time, it wasn't a problem, provided you had the billion consoles they wanted you to have.
It’s more like watching “Season 1” of the HBO show, then officially labeled “Season 2” on HBO and being lost because the creators expected you to have also watched the real season 2 on pay-per-view, a broadway play bridging S1 and RealS2, the real season 3 on Disney+, an indie film bridging RealS2 and RealS3, and a direct-to-dvd-only miniseries and supplementary flip-book between RealS3 and “Season 2”.
Not only is it misleading, but it’s completely unreasonable. And the tv analogy doesn’t even capture the significant cost of multiple video game platforms well.
I mean, more to the point, it's like watching the movie series called "Avengers" and being confused that they never fully explain Captain America's story, or who Dr Strange is, or how Iron Man got his powers. You are meant to be watching Iron Man, First Avenger, etc, and everyone involved with the series would know that. Conversely, anyone even slightly familiar with KH3 would know that you can't jump into it from KH2. We knew it was the end of the Dark Seeker saga, we knew it would go into the history of the foretellers, we knew it would resolve the story of the different trios.
I would certainly be opposed to a SE mandate of calling every title KH1, KH2, KH3, KH4 just because it confused someone that vaguely remembers playing the game a decade ago. How does that make any sense? Let them have their quirky titles. It's not hurting anyone.
Not every game (or movie, or book) is meant to be an entry point for new fans, right?
Quirky titles are fine. Numbered titles are fine. Mixing them becomes a problem when expected to consume in a certain order, as the numbers indicate a sequence that’s broken by the quirky titles. The problem is magnified when exclusively spread across multiple platforms.
Playing KH3 after KH2 isn’t using KH3 as an “entry point for new fans”; it’s a logical continuation of the sequentially labeled series on the same platform line.
The MCU has three advantages over the KHU.
First is that the MCU all the same platform (movies with theatrical release). Easier to keep track of and no extra investment or setup to consume them all outside of the ticket price for the showing. KHU, on the other hand, is split across multiple consoles and handheld platforms, representing a significant departure from the norm and an unreasonable cost for most consumers who otherwise wouldn’t have them all, on top of the purchase of the games themselves.
The second is that, over time, superheroes have permeated pop culture to the point that everyone has at least a passing familiarity with, if not specific heroes, at least the general framework for typical superhero settings and stories. That significantly aids understanding and even jumping in cold without needing to know specifics. KHU, while it used some familiar faces, uses them in a different universe for a different and increasingly complex story. All of the pop culture familiarity is made useless to fill in the gaps, so consuming everything and in order becomes more important. Having watched some recaps of the story, it is on a whole different level of complexity and convolution than the MCU.
Third, and largely as a result of the first two points, is that the MCU is surprisingly friendly to pick, choose, and jump in whenever and wherever while still enjoying it and not feeling too lost, for both comic fans and the general public alike. Each character movie (set) can more or less be enjoyed as standalone things. The crossover Avengers entries are still enjoyable on their own, and are generally comprehensible fairly quickly without having followed the rest of the universe closely.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one. Anecdotally, I don't know a single KH fan that's actually confused by this. Obviously there's bias there, but of the criticisms I've seen levied at 3 (and there's many), this isn't one that's gotten much traction.
The fact that they're on different platforms? That's annoying. The fact that you need to play all the games in order of release to understand the next game? IMHL, that's reasonable.
Unfortunately, these shows are only happening because of the kids who never grew up and who think Dave Filoni is the second coming of the savior--George Lucas. That also means they're the ones who actually liked all the prequels because they were little kids even when the third one came out so they also think the prequels are Shakespearean masterpieces and not what happens when someone who doesn't understand human interaction makes a trilogy about human interaction.
So now we're stuck with Dave Filoni making the greatest shows ever. That is, live action versions of the middling children's shows he made, although the Clone Wars actually had several actually good episodes/arcs in its later seasons. The Mandalorian seems to operate on six-year-old logic, which is fine for a kids' show, but I'd rather have the eight-year-old logic of the movies.
They sort of did this with the films to be fair. Not anywhere near a decade, but they shelved all of the prospective movies after Rise of Skywalker and stuck to TV for a while. Maybe the answer is to do something akin to Marvel phases, but alternate. So Phase I is 4-6 years of meticulously planned out movies, with little to no TV. During which time all the various shows that will be released during Phase II are storyboarded, scripted, and workshopped to be cohesive and interesting. Then Phase II is the same in reverse: focus on releasing TV shows and concentrate on getting together a cohesive plan for the next string of movies. And just keep alternating forever into the future. That way Disney gets its endless string of content, and we the long-suffering fans can pretend that it's higher quality because more thought seemingly went into it.
I'm going to be honest, this article reads like it was written by a guy who went to see Phantom Menace in theaters during a sleepover for his birthday, but he fell asleep and his friends drew penises on his forehead and he has projected that trauma onto Star Wars.
Is Ahsoka a show for the masses? Absolutely not. If you aren't a Star Wars enthusiast that has tracked the entire timeline (Or at minimum the video media) then you aren't going to be very attached and you're going to probably spend a lot of time laughing at the wiggly flaps. But everything I've heard from Star Wars enthusiasts in my life is that they're pretty happy with it and I'm friends with a LOT of them, many of whom have trashed other shows for quality issues.
It kind of feels like Disney is fine with their SW content not being mass consumed, because there's a ton of content out there now. Movies/TV shows can't hit the kind of saturation like they used to and I kind of think that's cool, because now we get to see some really niche stuff produced and it may only be beloved by a smaller community, but it is still beloved.
I say this as someone who watched one episode of Ahsoka and thought 'This ain't for me."
They're not. Companies don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars for their shows to be niche.
In your narrative, Disney has suddenly become really stupid somehow and they are hemorrhaging money from SW. In mine, they have a backroom of accountants who's sole job is to calculate profitability down to the decimal. I dunno, I feel like it's unlikely Disney has suddenly lost all sense and more likely that they are playing a long game and, like I said, many studios aren't catering to (gestures widely) everyone and sometimes it's more complicated than counting singular viewership.
This is Disney so I'm sure they also account for all secondary and tertiary sales that could relate too.
Posters, toys, pins, birthday cards, shirts, pajamas, books, spin-off books, comics, food items, theme park additions and anything else they can stick their logo or characters on.
That was the point I was trying to highlight. There's a qualitative difference between a viewer who sees a blockbuster once and one who watches it 10 times a year, owns it on every platform, listens to the score, etc. Star Wars, more than most media, is really effective with that. The people I know who love the Disney universe looooove it and spend so much money buying merch.
Lucasfilm is perhaps the worst run division at Disney right now. Their budgets are overblown due to bad leadership and Disney is gonna want to stop that as they look to cut costs company wide.
Toys and other merchandise don’t sell as well as they used to. But even then if the shows/movies aren’t that popular neither will the merchandise be. As The Flash has shown this year.
Bob Iger’s ethos when he first took on the helm at Disney was that the movies they were making was the lifeblood of everything else at Disney. It’s what led to toys being sold, and it’s what led to theme park visits. That’s why he bought Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. This idea that studios don’t actually care if no one is watching the stuff they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on because of toys is silly.
That's all good context, I appreciate it. I think the only clarification I'd add to my statement, which I think got lost because of your last sentence, is that I wasn't trying to make the argument that Disney is in it for the art. I know Disney is in it for the money and therefore seeks the maximum possible exposure. I was trying to say that I think the landscape of viewership has changed entirely and there's a qualitative difference between a single viewer from 1999 and 2023. My guess is that companies have realized that they can make more money by releasing content that will be merchandise supported to a dedicated viewership. I grew up loving Star Wars when I was a kid, loved the prequels as a teenager, but have found the new universe to be relatively sparkless for me. But so many of my friends are diehard viewers, much like my friends who love anime. They will watch it over and over again, they're passionate as hell and because of that they spend a lot of money on the related merch. That's it, I just wanted to clarify.
It's not just Disney though. There are quite a few blockbuster TV shows the last several years that have these insane budgets. Like, there is no way something like Rings of Power actually makes money for Amazon. Similarly, Ahsoka with its +$100M budget isn't going to make that back in terms of subscribers on Disney plus. Merch is probably great for them but then take a better example like how Netflix does movies with insane budgets as well. Are they really going to earn $200M worth of subscribers back from Red Notice? I don't think so and I don't think any amount of accountants are going to be able to figure it out either when there are so many variables.
We can also take WB originally intending Blue Beetle to be released on HBO Max, but deciding against it because I assume they realised these huge budget releases going straight to streaming won't make money. It's a $120M budget movie and has recently gotten to $100M worldwide box office, so it's a major flop, but it's probably more than they would have earned by releasing it on their streamer.
I think the age of big budget TV and straight-to-streaming movies is soon to be over. It just doesn't make sense
Interesting, I would have said the opposite: Star Wars is getting better and it's without Lucas' involvement.
The review (is it a review?) does not mention Andor, which, hands down, is some of the best television of recent years and best Star Wars since the original trilogy. The Mandalorian is honestly pretty bland in comparison but it already was a huge step up for the franchise. I'm waiting for all the Asoka episodes to be out so I can binge watch in a few days but I'm confident it is also at least decent (all other reviews point in that direction).
Lucas happily ruined Star Wars all on his own (and with absolute creative power) with the prequel episodes. Him handing off the franchise was good. I can hate JJ Abrams and his goddamn mystery box with a passion but his sequels are better than the sterile garbage that were the prequels. And for whatever reason, the new tv shows are actually... good. Occasionally great, even. If they want to milk the franchise, do it this way. A few new ideas, understanding the appeal of the originals, it's ok.
Nobody complains that the Daniel Craig movies ruin From Russia with Love. Nobody complained that Bladerunner 2049 or that Mad Max: Fury Road devalued the original universe. Because they were good. We're so conditioned that all sequels have to suck, it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I don't disagree with you, but I think on the whole the prequel trilogy is more interesting than the sequel trilogy, even if it was very poorly written.
The Force Awakens is a poorly thought out re-hash of A New Hope. It undoes everything accomplished in Return of the Jedi for the sake of resetting most of our OT heroes back to square one. Leia is the leader of a scrappy resistance again. Han and Chewie are smugglers again. The fact that the New Republic basically collapsed within 30 years is an embarassment for our protagonists.
The Last Jedi is actually good. I would rank this up there with the OT in terms of quality. I like that it tried new things. It put a very interesting spin on the relationship between the hero and the villain. And it gave us a fascinating glimpse into what civillian life is like in the Star Wars universe.
The Rise of Skywalker is just as poorly written as anything in the prequel trilogy. "Somehow, Palpatine returned" really sums up the whole movie for me. To add insult to injury, the film pretty much goes out of its way to ignore or even retcon most of the interesting decisions made by The Last Jedi, presumably to try and counteract all the braindead nerd outrage that movie garnered.
While the prequel movies are famously poorly written, underneath I think they were still hiding a lot more quality world building. Lucas didn't set out to just remake his OT. He invested a lot of time and money into making the prequels stand out as their own thing, with good production design and a fleshed out world that felt genuinely different from the one we saw in the OT.
The reason Mad Max: Fury Road and Blade Runner: 2049 are beloved by fans is because they are both exceptionally well written and executed movies. And perhaps more importantly, they respect the legacy of their predecessors. BR2049 in particular does a great job of expanding on the themes of Blade Runner while pushing the universe forward in a sensible manner.
That is also with the fact that Leia was a disgraced senator. And the reason that she is disgraced is that people found out who her biological father was. Despite the fact that she grew up on Alderaan, with her adapted father being a well known senator out spoken against the Emperor in the senate. And coupled with the fact that she had sacrificed her life to fighting against the Empire, just to have people that it was just a rebellious youth thing is mind boggling stupid.
And coupled with the fact that the sequels had under used John Boyega's (who is a good actor) character Finn, to the point where he does not want to be associated with Star Wars any more. Which you can fucking see in the interviews of him before the first one, which was full of energy, was released to after the last one was released in regards to this subject, which you can that Boyega was just done with Star Wars (such as the Vulture article about it). And we were promised that his character was going to play a bigger role, such as being forced sensitive, besides being the comical relief character that Finn ended up as.
That is the charm of the prequels, is that yeah they had some pretty bad writing but they still had the soul that made the originals great and we saw the rise and the reason for the fall of Vader to the Dark Side. Which the sequels never had, like you had said, they were just rehashes of the OT. At least, the Last Jedi had some interesting ideas, such as the glimpse into the civilian life, as you had pointed out, but having killed the major bad, that the built up for two movies, was such a stupid play, like the writers and director forgot that it was a trilogy that they were suppose to be making, and not two movies.
For me, this is the core problem with the sequel trilogy - a lack of a driving vision and loads of insecurity. Instead of going "yes, and", Last Jedi lifts a huge middle finger towards Force Awakens, and then Rise of Skywalker raises its finger towards Last Jedi. Force Awakens itself started off with its finger towards the prequels, but before the other two came out, this came across more as a pallette-cleanser.
I actually respect and enjoy what TLJ was trying to do in its rejection of TFA's setup, but it being not even half-baked did it no favors. Then RoS's "course correction" doomed the whole trilogy to being the mess it is.
The sequel trilogy is the cinematic equivalent of watching your divorced parents pick a fight during custody exchange at the Applebee’s.
I think this is a bit of an unfair take. If you're going to spend an entire movie trying to destroy the very concepts of Sith and Jedi, who's actually your target audience here? I would bet that Disney discovered that it was no one. The braindead nerds were actually the people buying tickets to these movies, and trying to destroy their decades old universe was an incredibly stupid thing to do. So of course they reversed course. Sure, they reversed into a ravine, but they didn't have a choice.
Disney wouldn't have damnatio memoria'd the second movie because of outrage. They would've done it because it lost money.
I think that is an unfair take. I did not walk away from The Last Jedi thinking that the entire concept of Sith/Jedi was being destroyed or even challenged. I walked away thinking they tried to find a new way to expand on the moral dillemmas and temptations originally explored in the latter two OT films.
But then again, I never had this hardline black and white view of the Sith/Jedi conflict that some Star Wars fans have. And maybe that is why my favorite piece of Star Wars media is actually Knights of the Old Republic II.
Oh, I absolutely love KOTOR2 as well. But (for me), it seemed obvious they wanted to close the chapter on some of the concepts of what came before. Gone were the Sith, now we have a Supreme Leader and the Knights of Ren. Gone were the Jedi. Luke was dead and the book burnt. It's been years since I watched it so the details escape me now, but the way I interepted it was that they were doing away with the whole thing. Let the past die kill if if you have to, etc.
Problem is, that past is what you're trying to tap into. The only way any of this works is if you bring the braindead nerds on that journey. If you aren't able to do that, you have no audience left. And this isn't a theory, this is exactly what happened. They pissed off the only people that cared about space monks with laser swords, and that was the end of that experiment.
The difference between KOTOR2 and the Last Jedi is that KOTOR2 is good. It asks interesting questions about the Star Wars universe without throwing it all out.
A lot of that boils down to The Last Jedi needing to make sense of the mess that it's predecessor made. The big reset button that gave us
a new EmpireThe First Order, made Han and Chewie smugglers again, and killed off the New Republic so Leia could be a resistance leader again.The obvious setup, from JJ Abrams perspective, was to turn Luke into Yoda 2.0 so he could train Rey and she could rebuild the Jedi Order, again. This would have been the lazy uninteresting way out, at least in my book. But I get why many people would have preferred it.
While I get that people don't like Luke being knocked down a few pegs from where we last saw him, it makes the story work significantly better. For one, it provides him an actual character arc, and one that resonates with and reinforces his arc from Empire Strikes Back. Second, it provides us a much more intimate, character-driven view of how things started going to shit between the Battle of Endor and the present.
All the stuff that The Last Jedi supposedly threw away was already thrown away by its predecessor. It was forced to contend with the fact that the Jedi Order had once again collapsed, within the last 30 years, under Luke's watch. I just don't see how you explain that without assassinating his character or ignoring the problem entirely.
I think you're right that the competiting visions of the two directors probably did the most damage.
While I don't like Last Jedi, I really didn't like the Force Awakens and was surprised that many people did. It destroyed all of the cast to reset them. It also reset the political situation, like you said. It was a deeply unambitious movie, having no intention of telling its own story. Last Jedi, to its credit, tries to tell its own story.
But I think there's a difference between how these two movies treat the past. Force Awakens was in one extreme, where it just wanted to recreate the first movie shot by shot. Last Jedi goes the other way, and tries to destroy every familiar concept and establish its own lore going forward. I'm no writer or director, but I'm sure there was a way it moving the universe forward without explicitly trying to eradicate it.
Unfortunately, this is the year 20XX and someone will always complain about something, even if it's good, see the Furiosa hate and everything. Can we dismiss criticism of it seems like reaching rage bait? Sure, but someone still complained even if it was manufactured.
One of my best friends is a massive Star Wars fan, and we frequently talk about what we would do if we were to helm a new era for the property. The first thing would be to do a second great purge of the universe, and give ourselves a nice, clean slate to work from. Simply put, the next film should begin with the opening crawl:
Full reboot, kill everything with fire. 1000 years is enough time to clear the decks and for the events of history to become legend. No familiar faces, no force ghosts, no lightsabres, nothing. Update the design language enough to make it still feel like Star Wars (this is more important than the look), and start from scratch.
Now we don't fully purge the Force from the series, because it's an iconic part of the story. But what we do is turn it back into the "ancient religion" that Vader was mocked for in A New Hope. Maybe there's a planet out there that has a population of Force users quietly living out their lives as demi-gods, but unconcerned with the goings on of the rest of the galaxy (and possibly even completely cut off from it). But they are not Sith, or Jedi. They just live with the Force and it is mundane to them. They have a certain set of uses for it, and as far as they're concerned that's all there is (establishing rules for the use of the force is sorely needed at this stage).
Elsewhere, the main story of the first trilogy in Book II should be emancipation of droids. After the fall of Palpatine and a long dark age afterwards, droids are back to being slaves (rather than the "helpful pets" that the sequel trilogy seems to want to brand them as), but there is rebellion in the offing. This will be this series' War. It's still got a good vs. evil vibe which is so important to Star Wars, but it tells a compelling story, and gives us new territory to explore with Star Wars: what is consciousness, and how do droids prove that they have it? Maybe we eventually see a droid created that can harness the Force. If the third episode of Book II ends with the victory of the free droids, then you have a lot of set-up for friction and character interaction in the next 6 episodes, whatever the over-arching plot of those ends up being.
We continue padding out this half-baked idea every 6 months or so when enough gin has flown. It's good fun to think about, but it'll never happen. I might turn it into a TTRPG setting or something though.
Interesting ideas re: the droid war!
I agree completely that they have got to move on. I'm not saying there are no interesting plots left in the current Star Wars timeline (battle of endor +/- 30 years), but I think they're increasingly difficult to find. The writers would have a much better chance if they were to be given a clean slate.
A full clean slate 1000 or 10000 years after would be amazing! There's so much potential being wasted on projects set between movies 1 and 9. We already know what happens.
The author seems to contradict the headline here. If Ahsoka isn't as bad as previous efforts, how can Star Wars be going from bad to worse?
Speaking of the Kenobi series though, I never watched the series but there's a few 2 hour edits of it floating about (that try to re-shape it back to a movie again) - of them "The Boonta Eve Redux" is the one I liked the most.
Headlines are almost never determined by the actual writer, but the editor instead. A headline that doesn't quite match up to the article is a common occurrence as a result.
This headline is particularly bad, nothing about it matches the tone of the article.
So far Ahsoka is an extrusion of some of the best parts of Rebels and (to a lesser extent) Clone Wars; Basically it's a reward for kids who grew up with these CG shows and adults who stuck it out through all the weak writing they contained (particularly early on). No big surprise that someone so trapped in the 80's that they are trying to draw a line between George Lucas and Star Wars as it exists in 2023 hates it.
Don't get me wrong: There's a lot of bad Star Wars out there (don't get me started). But this ain't it, boss.
I've actually never seen Rebels or Clone Wars and I'm thoroughly enjoying Ahsoka. I'll probably end up watching the shows afterwards.
In that case don't miss Tales of the Jedi which makes a good chaser.
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Welcome to Tildes Google Engineer!
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@TalkLittle does this mean new (big?) updates are on the way?
Tiny updates are on the way. Small text rendering bugs and
tild.esshort links fixed.Still working on iOS app with October deadline for first alpha. After that I hope to start adding more features to both apps.
I'm glad to hear that! I'm especially looking forward to notifications so that I can stop using my browser!