spoiler

They're continuing the rehabilitation of the space nazis (with celebrities! 🎉) and now doing a "the robot slaves are grateful to serve" thing. Everything's going great.👍

    • kristina [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      mandalorian is good. andor is honestly one of the most poorly executed plots ive seen given the production value. too much focus on too many characters

      the prison episode was pretty cool though. the prison manager guy just saying 'i cant swim' and supposedly dying off screen after so much characterization was just absolutely nuts to me. truly terrible writing.

      • Shoegazer [he/him]
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        edit-2
        1 year ago

        :jesse-wtf: it’s a revolution. It would be as lib as every other Star Wars media if it was just Andor shooting everyone himself

        the prison episode was pretty cool though. the prison manager guy just saying ‘i cant swim’ and supposedly dying off screen after so much characterization was just absolutely nuts to me. truly terrible writing.

        :biden-alert:

        • kristina [she/her]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Just because it's a revolution doesn't mean it's written well. Snow piercer sucks too

          I'm of the opinion that people here don't have a critical eye for harmful tropes and bad /dead end storytelling. They see vaguely left wing thing in media and start jerking it

          For left wing things that are actually written well off the top of my head I'd suggest Harley Quinn animated tv show, the Boys, Everything everywhere all at once as examples

          Squid game and parasite are also concise

          Andors characterization is awful and the most characterized person (the prison squad manager) dies off screen. Andor himself is essentially a blank slate character. There are side characters in other shows that have more emotional range and impact than the eponymous character of this show

  • Dolores [love/loves]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    i was getting more sus vibes from "direct democracy" no-body wants to work bullshit

    lib showrunners think robot slaves are fine and dont even consider thats the problem, its exclusively that people have unrestrained democracy and dont want to work

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, that caught my attention as well.

      spoiler

      Really, that should have been my immediate red flag for episode bad guy.

  • AHopeOnceMore [he/him]B
    ·
    1 year ago

    I thought the previous one wasn't so bad. Both of the "reformed" characters are presented as unreformable: one as driven to pursue eugenics work regardless of the reform framework preventing it, the other clearly a neo-imperial and utterly unreformed.

    This episode had Jack Black as a dumbass bourgeois "reformed" imperial buffoon who continually fucks up but is rewarded for it by a system that continues to be bourgeois.

    • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Another thing that bothered me about Space Mengele was what finally set him off...

      S03E03 spoilers

      The Republic was decommissioning and scrapping old Imperial ships including their onboard inventory of medical supplies, which, OK, at face value, yeah, maybe that stuff could have been useful for people affected by the bloody war against the Empire and/or the Imperial Remnant, but no, not really. The Empire is extremely speciesist and human-centric -- you almost never see non-humans aboard an Imperial vessel or station unless they're bounty hunters or test subjects. The Star Wars universe has how goddamned many sentient, space-faring species in it, and we never see so much as a Twi'lek comms officer or whatever (Thrawn notwithstanding). Therefore, it's safe to assume that the med kits on those ships aren't going to be very useful for non-human physiology -- hence the fact that they're going in the trash. Like, fuck, dude. As if having cravings for space MREs wasn't bad enough; duder can't even get moral outrage right.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Continuing his trend from Clone Wars, Filoni is great at telling a story about the failures and intrinsic problems with liberal democracy that you have to analyze to get because he’s completely unaware he’s doing it

  • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    As embarrassing as Book of Boba Fett was, its celebrity cameos were at least brief enough to not be awful

  • kristina [she/her]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    the droid did mention that biological creatures sleep a lot and droids live so long that they actually didnt care about doing labor

    also its sort of applying human norms to a different species (who may havbe been made and programmed by another alien intelligence, so super alien). labor is strenuous and painful for us, its likely a droid can just autopilot menial labor tasks without any concern

    but yes, the guy wanting to genocide them was wild. i maintain that the CIS (oh no) are the good guys tbh. clone armies are evil af

    • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      i maintain that the CIS (oh no) are the good guys tbh

      This is basically canon -- the breakaway systems all had legitimate grievances with the Republic, since their worlds typically had their all of their resources and wealth extracted and shipped off to the core systems. They were the good guys right up until the movement was hijacked by the Trade Federation, Techno Union, and Banking Clan, who were more interested in war profiteering. You can even see some of this in the Tales of the Jedi series; right before Dooku turns, he's bordering on calling for revolution upon seeing the material conditions on one of the mid-rim planets that ended up joining the CIS. But of course, in typical Disney show fashion, wanting better conditions is bad ackshaully, because evil space wizards.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I caught all that and it didn't make it better for me, honestly. Especially when the big reveal was that

      spoiler

      the recreational imbibement they participated in was actually maintaining their programming that was likely giving them these beliefs about being happy to serve.

      • Findom_DeLuise [she/her, they/them]
        ·
        1 year ago
        spoiler

        I assumed it was just applying things like OS or security patches, but yeah, it's a pretty dark implication since they aren't entirely sentient and their programming keeps them suppressed

        • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
          hexagon
          ·
          1 year ago
          spoiler

          I mean, probably that, but also we see what it's capable of. We KNOW they've been reprogrammed. Like you say, there are implications. The meaning of robot derives from forced labor! :no-mouth-must-scream: it just screams Harry Potter house elves all over again, for me.

    • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      i maintain that the CIS (oh no) are the good guys tbh. clone armies are evil af

      i think george fucked up, we usually name wars after who we fought against and all the implication in books and shit was thrown out when he made it the republic's clone army.

  • ssjmarx [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    robot slaves

    The Star Wars canon needs to just come out and establish beyond any doubt that the robots are just running ChatGPT and aren't actually sentient. Like Luke had a sentimental attachment to R2-D2 but he didn't really care when it got smoked. This franchise isn't, wasn't, and never will be Asimov-tier, so it would be best for everyone to just sidestep all of those implications.

    • Ericthescruffy [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I respectfully disagree. .....not about it never being Asimov tier but that ambiguity and it's implications I think is actually I think a big staple of the series and super important.

      You say that they need to say that they are running the equivalent of chat gpt and aren't actually sentient....but here's your friendly reminder that we have people, today, who are arguing shit like chat gpt is sentient and deserves rights...so I'm not sure that would even work out.

      Also, going back to 1977 with the first movie you had the bar tender on mos eisley saying "your droids....we don't serve their kind here", so there's always been the implication of a race/class tension....which also makes sense when you remember that the whole series was heavily inspired by hidden fortress.

      • hahafuck [they/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        here’s your friendly reminder that we have people, today, who are arguing shit like chat gpt is sentient and deserves rights…

        Are they correct to argue this, in your opinion? Conceivably in our future and in SW's past these debates will be / were solved civilizationally. SW is very inconsistent but presumably they landed on 'chatGPT3PO is only a sophisticated mimicry of life', and the prejudice against them might be more to do with them being used as powerful genocidal weapons a generation prior than a class anxiety because of droid labor

        • Ericthescruffy [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Are they correct to argue this, in your opinion?

          Hell no! They duuuuumb. Lol. My point is that even if you were going to canonically "answer" that question you have to deal with the fact that you're talking about a fictional universe and you will still have fans and writers who disagree and wind up stretching that to its breaking point. Them coming out and authoritatively stating "R2-D2 isn't a real boy" solves as much as Rowling authoritatively stating the house elves really enjoyed slavery. It's just gonna piss people off.

          Conceivably in our future and in SW’s past these debates will be / were solved civilizationally. SW is very inconsistent but presumably they landed on ‘chatGPT3PO is only a sophisticated mimicry of life’, and the prejudice against them might be more to do with them being used as powerful genocidal weapons a generation prior than a class anxiety because of droid labor

          Sure, but that doesn't mean it's a universally adopted perspective and/or that it's even true. I personally think that star wars as a fantasy setting is far more interesting if the sentience of the droids is left ambiguous and inconsistent.

  • Redbolshevik2 [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    You can definitely read it that way, but I saw the way all that played out as "class of slaves are aware they could be eradicated at any point and would prefer capitulation." The way that B2 fled was giving strong escaping slave vibes, too.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      “class of slaves are aware they could be eradicated at any point and would prefer capitulation.”

      I thought about that too, but it doesn't make it better for me.

  • ComradeCorvid [none/use name]
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    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Yeah, the brainworms about 'hyperloop' and 'chain codes' (blockchain) were really glaring. Not to mention the huge miss of building up to a droid rights storyline, complete with the droids having their own bar and subculture out of nowhere, while one of the main characters expresses prejudice against them, to "Oh never mind, it was just the sinister virus making them throw fits!"

    The Mandalorian has been a pleasant surprise up until now, but that episode felt kinda gross. I feel like there is a lot more to dig into, but I don't want to.

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Chain codes are a pretty well established thing in Star Wars now tho. They’re just IDs. In Bad Batch they show them first being implemented by the Empire

      With you on the rest of that

  • plinky [he/him]
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    1 year ago

    I’m mildly interested in mandalorians shit, with cult and all, but latest episode feels completely out of nowhere visually and thematically :(

    Also, considering sequels exist, prolly didn’t work out so well for them

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
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    1 year ago

    I'm glad I drifted away from it when it was still somewhat bearable. :gigachad:

  • Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]
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    1 year ago

    In 2018, Avengers: Infinity War and Solo: A Star Wars Story were due to be released. Now at this point I'd been a long-time Star Wars fan, but I'd never really been a MCU fan (or a superhero fan more broadly). I'd been extremely disappointed in the two Star Wars sequels for being bland corporate pap, but I was anxious about that. I still wanted to be part of the hype. Same with the MCU, I was feeling left out. So I decided I'd give Solo a chance, and I decided I'd try to become a Marvel guy by watching all the Marvel movies (I'd already seen most of them anyway at that point, but I decided I'd rewatch them all in order). I quickly discovered that, no, I really don't like the Marvel movies. Though I found Infinity War enjoyable enough, I didn't think it was an especially good or memorable movie, certainly not worth all the hype. And then Solo was just awful. And I had to make my peace that I just wasn't going to enjoy what Marvel or Star Wars put out from there on. And I haven't bothered. Gave in for Andor, and glad that I did because it's a great show, but the few clips I've seen of the other Disney+ shows just look like dogshit.

    I swear every time Star Wars comes up on this site I write (or think about writing) this post about how I got fed up and gave up on Star Wars. Like I'm an ex-Mormon or Jehovah's Witness or something. Get over yourself! It's a children's entertainment property that you didn't stop watching until your late twenties. The Ewoks were doing their dumb teddy bear antics in 1983 once Lucas gave up on artistic integrity and kicked out Gary Kurtz, writing was on the wall with this one before I was even born.

  • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I did find the “Law and Order but it’s droids” scenes fucking hilarious

    Going into the warehouse and questioning the battle droid foreman before the suspect runs and Benson Bo Katan and Statler Din have to chase the super battle droid suspect who’s throwing boxes in front of them, fantastic.

    Pulling out the drawer in the morgue and on the slab is a super battle droid? Fucking hilarious.