Originally Posted by Errorname
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Their pitch was reminding me of the "Screecher's Reach" short from the second season of Visions. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, that was probably my favourite one, but I would note that the reason that short works is because once you recognize "Oh, that's not a Jedi", the story requires no further elaboration because the audience knows exactly what's going to happen to that kid.
Exactly so.

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That was one of my favorites from that season, from the studio who gave us Song of the Sea, and both the animation and the emotion were outstanding. It goes from lightly adventurous to piercingly tragic, and leaves you with a lingering ache which few other entries in the franchise have ever come close to achieving.


Originally Posted by Errorname
That Andor is one of the best things the franchise put out doesn't help much either, because it's obviously a fluke that they aren't going to be able to replicate….
Not a fluke, but the consequence of top-tier actors (notably Fiona Shaw, Andy Serkis, Anton Lesser, and Stellan Skarsgård) and a superlative director with decades of experience at telling complex and emotionally powerful stories.

Contrast that with Dave Filoni, whose professional niche before Ahsoka was primarily childrens’ animation with a built-in audience, and who was clearly both out of his depth and allowed to indulge himself without meaningful oversight.

Originally Posted by Errorname
Eh, I would say that Mando 3, Kenobi and Boba were all bad.
I enjoyed Mando S3, but Book of Bobalorian was vapid and terrible (apart from a strangely excellent second episode) and Kenobi was pointless and tedious throughout. Neither of them added anything meaningful to the franchise, or even to their own stories. Book of Bobalorian barely had an impact on Tatooine, and Kenobi repeatedly undercut established canon for no real purpose. Neither of them needed to be made.

As noted earlier, the trajectory has definitely been on a steep nosedive, but it started earlier and the angle of descent has been sharper. It doesn’t help that Ahsoka was both one of the very worst (if not the worst) and the latest, which tends to color perceptions of D+ Star Wars as a whole.

I can’t see Acolyte correcting either the trajectory or the perceptions. Unlike Tony Gilroy, who is devoted to making excellent movies, Leslye Headland seems to have different priorities, and the themes she prefers to explore don’t seem to be well-suited to the Star Wars galaxy. The phrase “cultural vandalism” keeps coming up in relation to her work, and that doesn’t sound promising for a foray into a struggling franchise.