Everyone knows how rabidly reactionary and shitheaded the SW fandom became after the Disney acquisition but I'm finally at my breaking point with this latest wave of chud whining. The Acolyte got review bombed before it even aired because the showrunner is a lesbian and the leading actress is a gay enby. Also a clip of Stenberg from like 6 years ago made the rounds where she says the goal of a completely different project she was working on was to make white men cry and chuds who get all their news from youtubers thought she was talking about the Acolyte.
Fast forward to the show's release, the chuds continue to whine about woke Star Wars despite the show's first several episodes being pretty bland and mid in every regard. To disguise their actual reasons for hating the show (diverse cast and queer showrunner) they pull out the absolute most ridiculous reasons to bash it, including but not limited to:
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"The writing is awful and the story sucks!" (the dialogue is genuinely quite bad at times but no worse than 95% of star wars projects. The general story is a mystery-thriller that's compelling enough. Also these same people turn around and say the prequels are incredible so )
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"The show contracts and ruins the prequels!" alright time to put on my nerd cap because the media literacy of these fucking shitbags is nonexistent. "Dark side user" =/= Sith, Red-lightsaber-user =/= Sith, there are tons of darkside users in the galaxy but the Sith area very specific order that the jedi warred with for thousands of years before they were almost completely wiped out. Also half the point of the prequels was to show the Jedi are blinded by their hubris and waning connection to the force, the Sith were right under their nose the entire time and they were just too arrogant to see it, silly Darth Teeth man doesn't ruin shit in your dog ass shit fuck childrens movies.
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"The show RETCONS CANON in an UNACCEPTABLE WAY" this is because a prequel side character's DOB was retconned and he's a lot older now and appears in the show. These worthless fucks are sending death threats to Wookiepedia editors who change the character's DOB and screaming that it's vile yes that's right it's VILE to change a fictional background character's birthday. Just take a look at the replies on that post, yes I know it's the bird hellsite filled with ragebait but the responses like "oh well I thought that GATEKEEPING was a BAD THING " are just so bleak. Art and media mean nothing to these people, their hobby is not watching Star Wars, its watching ragebait youtubers and getting violently angry about mundane things in shows they've never watched and aren't interested in Also these screaming manbabies keep referencing non-canon books and shit as "proof" of the show retconning things
The discourse around TLJ was bad but I think I'm finally done engaging with the SW fandom in any way shape or form. My brain has finally been broken by the chuds. I don't think I'll even tell people I like SW anymore because these shitbrains have just ruined it. And yes I know I need to but if you don't spend a decent amount of time in these SW fandom circles I promise you don't know how bad it actually is
/rant
What is up with Americans and treating movie canon like it is sacrosanct. For Fuck's sake.
We (cracker-americans) have no culture so Disney slop is the next closest thing
It shows. I loved the Iranian burn about not having any heroes, who could they kill in retaliation for General Soleimani, spongebob?
that’s what happens when you live in a massively isolated and alienated society and your life is utterly devoid of meaning
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sigmarxism/comments/11wt3kp/the_plague_of_diegetic_essentialism_or_how_i/
I think Star Wars kinda sucked after Disney takeover. They are bland, unoriginal, and all the Disney + shows, including the beloved Mando S1 and S2 look terrible. There is certainly some gaslighting from the media class about Star Wars being good, and it creates a backlash and establishment of incel to chud pipelines via youtube. Picking Leslie Headland who is assistant of Harvey Weinstein, who wrote a play that is suspiciously similar to Weinstein's abuses (essentially like OJ's what if I did it) doesn't help. As you said, they blame the state of the show on wokeness and diversity, instead of capital (i.e., Disney) making bad consoomer products. The OT was clearly a Vietnam war allegory. Empire fascist, bad. Rebel, good. It is about something. The Disney products are not about anything other than expanding the "lore" and milking the fandom. They have no coherent message to tell other than making products for people to consoom and be excited about next product. That's why the Disney Star Wars are bad. One cannot tell the overarching themes of any of their shows and movies except for maybe Andor.
It is about something. The Disney products are not about anything other than expanding the "lore" and milking the fandom
This is the greatest flaw of the Disney Era more than anything imo, and arguably all franchise media right now. That's part of why, in addition to just pure nostalgia, the prequels have been reevaluated. They at least were going for something. The OT was also meant as a throwback to an older era in Hollywood. The Disney Era is a throwback to Star Wars, just with a sleeker coat of paint.
Disney's non-tv/movie content has actually been decent (highlights are Doctor Aphra comics, multiple Vader comics, lots of the High Republic Era books/comics are good), but that isn't something I expect most people to engage with. Don't get me wrong they're absolutely slop, but they at least move beyond just being strictly nostalgia re-writes of existing content like the sequel trilogy was.
The biggest thing imo is that there's no central direction on which way to take the franchise. This is how you end up with a major film trilogy with not even basic story notes worked out in advance being given to three different directors all with radically different ideas (then reduced back to two). On the other hand, I guess it lets an Andor slip through the cracks every once in a while.
The fact that they did not plan out a coherent 3 movie plot was so bewildering. The fact they resurrected Palpatine for the last movie made me groan in theaters.
I have the same problem with Endgame. They killed 1/2 of the Universe and then they made a TIME TRAVEL movie. I have mostly sworn off this slop since. I will catch a show here and there but I have zero expectations with these shows. Andor was good tho, in fact, almost accidentally so.
They killed 1/2 of the Universe
Which is extremely silly. Thanos' goal is supposed to be to save the universe from 'overpopulation', and instead of conjuring infinite energy, he just moves the point of overpopulation that he thinks is there back by a single doubling period.
Writers should learn at least a little bit of math. At least up to the middle school stuff.
Well he was a classic Malthusian villain. Nobody also interrogated the alternatives. Honestly the MCU Thanos is less interesting than “make personified Death my girlfriend”.
Well he was a classic Malthusian villain
Yeah, which is bad, as he makes no sense, considering the world he exists in. A middle schooler would be smarter than him.
Can we just abandon star wars? I get it, chuds hate it for the wrong reasons, it is bad though. Everyone on twitter has to be all 'well ackshually' about the space fire, and how star wars has always had space explosions so its fine, but level with me: it does look a bit shit right? The fire on the outside of the ship.
Its tough how bad The Last Jedi broke their brains. I came out of that theatre feeling electric, I loved that movie, but its been bottom of the barrel Disney schlock since.
I don't know why people have to hold Star Wars so sacred, and I say this holding a pretty embarrassingly large love for it. Star Wars has always been kinda mid, and that's especially true for all of the expanded content for it.
Overall, the Acolyte is fine? It's not particularly bad in an unusual way - like, it's comparably bad to the Mandalorian. My only engagement with Star Wars discourse is listening to A More Civilized Age religiously - I outright refuse to engage with the broader fandom (same goes for anime - I avoid discussing it with anyone that isn't a big ol commie).
Based AMCA enjoyer. I don't get the hate for the acolyte either and I agree that fine is the way to describe it. Much like a lot of star wars, there are a lot of interesting things floating around in the background that will not get the show's focus like I would want. Meanwhile, the main mystery could be alright depending on how it casts the Jedi at the end of it all, but I'm expecting they'll fumble it. (I haven't seen the most recent episode yet, so it may have already gone off the rails for all I know)
AMCA is helping me pretend like I enjoyed Rebels much more than I actually did
All the uncle magic making you retroactively like the show
There was literally nothing like Star Wars before Star Wars.
As someone who was alive in the 70's, there really was nothing like it. Not that was any good and not in the main stream.
I don't mean there wasn't science fiction or fantasy or whatever. I mean, it generally sucked and was low budget schlock.
Lucas took that shit so seriously he practically had a heart attack making the first one. It shows, for audiences at the time, it was a game changer.
It was a blockbuster where people were waiting in line for DAYS to see it.
You look at it now and I can see how it'd look mid. But, it pretty much launched science fiction/fantasy movies as a mainstream thing.
And it tool a good long while for it to be bettered too. Those effects still looked moden in the 90s
We've lost so much in the move away from model work and practical effects 😔
AMCA goes hard and I actually clicked on this thread to figure out if I should watch acolyte for their premium ep on it
If you listen to their premium eps, you should probably just watch the new show like the rest of us dorks lol
look... correct argument, but I like the show a lot more than I like star wars
Give me another season or two of Andor so I can forget about this shit forever
I want the full 5 seasons of Andor originally planned, but just make it animated so we don't have to deal with the harsh realities of Diego Luna aging throughout the process of producing multiple seasons of TV show.
If there's anything Star Wars loves it's an excuse to rerelease something - they can do the New Digitally Remastered Rogue One, with frame-by-frame AI-aging effects added on.
...it won't look great though.
The only genuinely good film was ESB. Everything else is just slop executed with various degrees of competence. Virtually everything people argue about why the prequels or sequels suck could apply to ROTJ as well, but you don't see people shitting on Death Star 2.0 being creatively bankrupt or Luke being a Mary Sue which he 100% was. Even the very first film could be nitpicked to death.
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Why didn't the Death Star shoot its laser through Yavin, a planet made out of mostly gas, in order to blow up Yavin 4?
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What was the point of Obi-Wan dying if it was established in ESB that Jedi can telepathically communicate with Force-sensitive individuals meaning Obi-Wan didn't have to die in order to tell Luke to "use the Force?"
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How was Han able to pilot the Millennium Falcon, a noticeably bigger and more conspicuous ship compared with an X-wing, through the defenses of the Death Star with nary a scratch?
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How was Luke able to miraculously survive the Death Star exploding despite having less than 10 seconds to pilot his X-wing out of the explosion radius?
This is why I checked out of Star Wars "discourse." Ultimately, people nitpick because they have various issues with whatever movie they want to nitpick, but because they can't say the real reason why they hate that particular movie, they have to come up with some pointless nitpick instead. If they love the movie, suddenly whatever nitpick they apply for the movie they hate is completely irrelevant. This is why some ship ramming at hyperspeed gets nitpicked but the Death Star not shooting through a gas planet gets a pass.
That was honestly what I thought as well. I knew he thought Star Wars was worthless slop.
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Yeah if these peoples' attitude was "fuck star wars because its corporate slop" that'd be 1000% fine but they don't care about that as long as the slop suits their tastes.
it does look a bit shit right? The fire on the outside of the ship.
I forgot that was a thing tbh. It didn't register anything for me
Every day that passes makes my proposal of a plotless lightsaber tournament that much more appealing by contrast.
Fuck it! Anakin vs Luke, Quai Gon Jin vs Rei, Obi Wan vs Akosha, Darth Maul vs Yoda, Mace Windu vs General Greivis, Duku vs Palpetine
And you know what? Sora from Kingdom Hearts vs Kylo Ren. Just send my Emmy in the mail
Every day that passes makes my proposal of a plotless
lightsaberpodracing tournament that much more appealing by contrast.FTFY
Why wouldn't it work
It just wouldn't
Tell me why, you stupid bastard
That would be a wonderful limited series like Kobra Kai. I would straight up go Disney adult for that show.
Add a dozen or two identical anime swordguys and you'd have a solid Smash sequel on your hands.
A lightsaber tourney would be amazing, but I wouldn't make it about a cast we already kniw.
Fill it with martial artists and stunt workers. Theres no plot so no need for acting ability.
But heres the hard part almost anybody in hollywood would fail at: Make the action 70-80% middle shots and keep the camera on the action through more than a single action beat. Keep the camera steady and let the dancers show off their skills.
If they can't do this, then I'd rather the keep the soapy formula they've been on
That would be beautiful, but when it comes to star wars, I am such a sucker for magic-enhanced martial arts. I write about it because it's how my imagination has developed as I started doing BJJ, striking, etc. I need them to have choreography and LARPing in addition to their real skills. I need someone to be about to get sliced and force push their opponent back. I need someone to throw a giant rock and their opponent torpedos through it spinning saber first only to get force lightning-d out of the air. I need someone to demonstrate force choking not working against another force user to characterize Vader as a bully. They need to lose a saber and have to wrestle each other over the single lightsaber left. I NEED TWO YOUNG YODAS
Yes, naturally. What would be the point of making it star wars if it didnt have all that wacky force business?
I feel like the Acolyte was advertised as a magic martial arts show, and it had me hyped, but so far there's just been the opening scene which is disappointing. Here's hoping we get more if that later because itherwise this show is super dull
back when the force awakens came out me and my friends were on the hype train and got together to watch the originals and the prequels and man after like three of those films i was so over it (star wars being literally everywhere back then didn't help matters either). I really have no idea how anyone can get excited for more and more and more of this shit.
Not to argue more, but to argue more, TLJ wasn't bad because of 'unrealistic physics' or whatever. It was bad because it couldn't hold a conflict or dramatic tension for longer than 3 seconds, which meant even when bad things were happening I felt no level of stakes for the main characters. I mean, even the prequels, for how bad and cheesy they were, still managed to hold dramatic tension. Even VII held dramatic tension. VIII felt more like... idk what the right analogy is, the closest I can think of is a bad season of Buffy. Like the writers know that conflict has to happen because stories need conflict, but that doesn't mean the conflict should actually affect the characters and their choices in any meaningful way.
Like the big things were clear, they wanted to hit the same beats as V, so they needed a Hoth, Cloud City and everything needed to look desperate but hopeful at the end, so they just decided to mix it up alittle. The issue was they don't seem to understand why those story beats work, and why they work in the order they were originally presented. Like, Vader and Luke's fight leads to his isolation, but after he is rescued, he knows the allies he does have he can count on. But it still ends with just him, Leia, C3PO and R2, with Chewbacca and Lando leaving them behind for Luke to recover. Having nearly every named character with Rey at the end, especially in the final shots undercuts the mood we are supposed to be feeling (the utter loss of an entire rebel base and the death of Luke Skywalker) and is a fundamental misunderstanding of the language of cinematography. The last scenes with the broom kid itself weren't bad cinematography, but there is no actual payoff to it, so it is mostly meaningless.
A pretty easy change to make it meaningful would be Rey being nearly alone now or completely isolated from the crew, distraught and hopeless, then Leia comes to her, talks to her of the despair she felt seeing Alderraan be blown up, but tells her that as long as there are people, they will fight for freedom, Rey looks off into a space window or something and then we cut down to the broom-kid scene. All those people can still survive, but the focus is on the main character, what the main character is feeling, how the world appears within that feeling and the previous actions of the main character that inspired hope in a much cleaner way cinematically. But these kinds of problems are all through the movie, just very strange choices with pretty easy fixes, like it was rushed out of the writers room.
The issue with the Star Wars franchise is that they could create a communist, feminist, man-hating miniseries and the haters still wouldn't leave.
Uea but if they did that the haters would have a point.
Instead the dame people who complain now there non white characters turn around and try to tell you then prequels aren't as bad as people make them out to be.
The show isn't good, but not for the reason the reactionaries believe, and it's not offensively bad.
Why shouldn't there be an interpretive dance scene in some random little star wars show? Have we crossed some threshold here? None of the people criticizing the witch dance scene have even left their stinky gamer chairs in the last 10 years.
The costume work on this show is incredibly mid. I really dislike the mass-produced white Jedi order robes that they wear at the temple, they look maybe one step above a Jedi Halloween costume. We're supposed to believe this is the Jedi Order at its zenith and the robes are just so drab without any character.
spoiler
There could have been an interesting show here if some different choices were made. I would have liked it better if the Jedi didn't immediately know about the witch coven and what they were up to. They had the perfect opportunity for a classic twin-mixup plotline where the bad twin could be the one saved from the destruction and has to keep it secret from the Jedi that they are an inducted witch and force-wielder in order to survive.
The robes are mass produced so you can buy identical ones at Disney brand experiences
Starwars was a pioneer in the merch game. This is just them returning to form
It has a lot of the same issues as the other SW shows: it looks kinda cheap, it was clearly shot inside of a cupboard, etc.
I don't think Disney gets why Jedi dress the way they do. That's in large part the fault of George Lucas who definitely didn't understand why Jedi dress the way they do.
We meet Obi-wan, a former warrior monk, living in exile on Tatooine, he's wearing this threadbare brown robe. Clearly, a lot of inspiration was taken from desert nomadic and ascetic religious traditions. Then what is Obi-wan wearing in Episode 3 at the height of the Republic era? The robes he was wearing for his 20-year desert exile on Tatooine!
Now a hundred years before obi-wan is born all the Jedi are wearing the same brown robes?!
I'm looking at the Acolyte costumes now and all the leather bits look totally fresh, no creases or signs of use. Are the jedi ascetics with a utilitarian dress code? How come they all dress like a desert nomad while they have their base of operations on a megalopolis city world? I don't fucking know.
I mean the last bit is on track for a cult run by politically powerful quasi-billionaires.
A cupboard
Not sure if this was an intentional or accidental reference to The Volume, but for folks who don't follow this stuff, this is a somewhat accurate description of the way many star wars scenes are filmed.
The volume is a giant chamber encircled by LED screens that display CG backgrounds that respond to camera positioning. The cameras have positioning units that communicate their position to The Volume in realtime, with one of the big benefits being that the camera and the actors can move more freely than they could on a standard green screen. If a camera shifts left, the BG can shift in parallax with it, making it relatively seamless. Because the LED screens emit light, they also provide the scene with much more natural lighting (This is one reason why the Mandalorian can wear shiny armor -- It's reflecting a series of very good displays)
Kne drawback is that that the bgs must be CG.
This also limits the scope of a scene, as the BG can't occlude the actors. Foreground and scene elements must still be added to sets, and if someone wants to, say, enter another room in a house, that doorway must be built in the volume, or the scene must be cut during a transition.
It's a fascinating piece of technology, and useful for specific things, but because it's cheaper than building sets, we see it used when it's not the best tool for the job too.
Even so, Andor didn't use the volume for much, which is why the scenes feel so solid and interactive.
was clearly shot inside of a cupboard
That’s literally everything now
I have a grindr profile and in my about-me I explain that I'm happy to help people cheat discreetly by hosting at my apartment, and "no Star Wars fans".
Guess which of the two gets me more unhinged hateful diatribes.
The first was originally for comedy value. I wanted to see what sort of hatemail I'd get. It turns out that there's a ridiculous number of men in my area who took it as an invitation to chat about their cuckolding fantasies. Being bi, it's been... stimulating.
The second was because it seemed an easy way to filter out both reactionaries and people who make their corporate media consumption the basis of their personalities, but has turned out to be unexpectedly hilarious.
the best thing about the review bombing is that other random movies with "Acolyte" in the name also caught strays from chuds not looking at what they were rating
Those people on Twitter who are making death threats political LMAO
IM SORRY, I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA!
The people who are throwing a tantrum about whether the Acolyte is canon to make death threats in the first place are something else, comrade. Holy shit. I struggle to feel anything but disgusted. I try to find empathy, but I run it through my internal empathy calculator and it spits back an error.
the dialogue is genuinely quite bad at times but no worse than 95% of star wars projects.
Lol...I mean to be fair The Star Wars fan base (myself included) seems to complain incessantly about 95% of Star Wars media in general (dialogue included).
I know how fucking reactionary most of the prominent star wars fandom is and TBF I haven't watched the acolyte yet but: just on a surface level I do kinda dislike how many red lightsaber wielding dark side force users keep popping up in the pre-prequal era just as much as I dislike how many Jedi Keep getting retconned in as survivors of the purge.
The more "Not Sith" they keep introducing...the less significant the "Sith Proper" revealing themselves actually starts to feel. "Dark Jedi" is basically just a loophole to get around the problem.
I always loved the idea of the massive, galaxy-spanning Jedi Order being reduced to just Yoda and Obi Wan, and with both of them dead by the end of the trilogy, Luke is their only hope to rebuild it.
All these Jedi survivors that keep getting introduced in the shows really cheapened Luke's character arc IMO. What's the point of acting like Luke is the only one to continue the Jedi legacy if there are about 5 dozen Jedi bopping around elsewhere? (Although I'm sure they could retcon it and say Luke is the only one who can unite them all.)
If Disney wanted more movies and shows with more lightsaber shit, they could have easily made something that takes place a couple hundred years in the past (the Jedi have supposedly been around thousand of years). Why cram all of the new storylines within a ~30 year time span and have them all include or revolve around the Skywalkers in some way?
They could easily do something in the Old Republic era, but I think there's resistance to that because all the source material is from video games. Also a LOT of the marketing of SW is in nostalgia-bait eg x-wings, at-sts, tie fighters, the same characters, etc.
The Acolyte and Young Jedi Adventures is part of the high republic stuff - they've been doing novels and comics for this for a little while now
The high republic is specifically set after the old republic. I'm sure they'll dig up and repurpose stuff from all the old republic comics and games soon enough lol
The Old Republic is referenced in official materials. It just precedes everything that's been published under Disney so far. But it is there on the webpage
Because Disney completely murdered the post OT era. There's nowhere to go from where they left it and nobody is interested in seeing it.
So they just keep going back to the well in and around the OT.
I think the Acolyte is fine, but bland. It's on par with most of what they're doing in general. It's ok and it's silly to get mad about.
All in all, Disney has zero imagination and little understanding of what made the original SW special and different. That's fine, it is what it is.
Nothing like star wars nerds trying to pretend that their problem with the show is the writing, dialog and characters and then turn around and DEFEND THE FUCKING PREQUALS.
Weird how some of the absolute fucking worst writing ever put to screen is fine when it's a bunch of white people and racial stereotypes ... I mean different aliens... delivering them but if it's a women or, God forbid, a women who isn't hot and straight, suddenly it's not living up to the incredibly high bar of star wars fans.
It was the first time they ran out of ideas so just did the same thing again.
Something they would go on to do several more times.
Honestly I'm just fucking tired with media discourse in general. I made the mistake of logging back on my Facebook and the amount of chud screeching over 'woke' in this, that, and the other thing is ridiculous.
"The show contracts and ruins the prequels!" alright time to put on my nerd cap because the media literacy of these fucking shitbags is nonexistent. "Dark side user" =/= Sith, Red-lightsaber-user =/= Sith, there are tons of darkside users in the galaxy but the Sith area very specific order that the jedi warred with for thousands of years before they were almost completely wiped out. Also half the point of the prequels was to show the Jedi are blinded by their hubris and waning connection to the force, the Sith were right under their nose the entire time and they were just too arrogant to see it, silly Darth Teeth man doesn't ruin shit in your dog ass shit fuck childrens movies.
I feel like a bunch of the crybabies haven't even actually seen much of Star Wars beyond the big movies, maybe some of the live action stuff, and the content. The rest is them reading wiki articles about books and comics that nobody seriously cares about that much. Just media consumed second-and-third hand in the most embarrassing way.
Big personal flaw of mine: I'm a star wars enjoyer. I've not really liked much of the Disney material but quite enjoyed Rogue One, Andor, and Mando S1. Real talk, is the Acolyte worth a watch in any way? It's fucking impossible to get a vibe based on internet criticism with Star Wars nowadays because of culture war bullshit review bombing chuds and constant discourse, I swear
It sounds like the queerest star war yet (in cast anyway, idk about content), and I do enjoy some force mysticism
Hello. My single allowed bad leftist take is that I still enjoy star wars. While I think Andor and the last 3rd of Rogue One are easily the best Star Wars post Disney acquisition (Andor is probably the best Star Wars period) The Acolyte is currently in my top half. The dialogue writing is weak (which I think holds true for about every piece of star wars ever created that's not Andor), but the story itself is still currently intriguing and as someone who has read most of the High Republic Era works I'm invested in seeing how they manage the transitional period towards the prequels and specifically a character in the show who is now radically different from how we've seen her in print works (that said her show form is ~60-80years older than her last novel appearance).
In short- unless you're absolutely strapped for time try it. I'm not saying you couldn't fill that time with better non-SW media (you absolutely could), but I think it's worth watching up to this point if you just want to stay in the Star Wars universe.
Also don't engage in Star Wars conversation with anyone who isn't an anarchist or commie because they're the only ones you'll get decent takes from.
Having written all this I accept that I probably need to go to the gulag. I'm sorry to all of you who I've failed by coming out as still finding enjoyment in Star Wars.
Having written all this I accept that I probably need to go to the gulag. I'm sorry to all of you who I've failed by coming out as still finding enjoyment in Star Wars.
thanks for the rec then!
I will now go willingly to the reeducation camps for veterans of the star wars
First 2 episodes haven't really grabbed me, but its got potential for some good fights.