Star Wars Black Series

Marvel's Venom.
That's it, right there.

Boba was popular with the 'it looks cool, so I want it to be a good guy' crowd. Just like Venom. Instead of having an actual spine, the relevant companies just say 'okay, he's a good guy now' to appease that crowd. It was a bad decision with Venom and it's a bad decision with Boba.
 
Right. Especially since they've proven with Maul that you can have a character remain pretty selfish and evil (all things considered) and still interesting. You can have him be the protagonist of a show- so the hero from the show's point of view, but still relatively evil when compared to most other characters. We already have a somewhat good guy bounty hunter in Hondo, maybe even Fennec, so keeping Boba as that "bad guy with a code" or "antihero who only serves themselves" is far more interesting and allows for far more meaty material, I think.
 
That's it, right there.

Boba was popular with the 'it looks cool, so I want it to be a good guy' crowd. Just like Venom. Instead of having an actual spine, the relevant companies just say 'okay, he's a good guy now' to appease that crowd. It was a bad decision with Venom and it's a bad decision with Boba.
It's particularly odd that in the era of Breaking Bad and so forth, they still felt the need to nerf his character in Book of Boba Fett. It's a Disney problem I suppose.

But by making him so much of an antihero they made it harder to differentiate him from Din Djarin, and rendered his role (and the series) so pointless that they stuck two Mandalorian episodes in there.
 
Especially when Sopranos kicked off a slew of shows starring bad guys as the main character. Book of Boba Fett could have been the Star Wars Sopranos.
So long as we get a scene where Boba complains that Fennec bought him the wrong blue milk, then I'm all for it. I've always thought they could do more with the shadowy, suggestive Twi'lek dancers we see so often in Clone Wars.
 
That's it, right there.

Boba was popular with the 'it looks cool, so I want it to be a good guy' crowd. Just like Venom. Instead of having an actual spine, the relevant companies just say 'okay, he's a good guy now' to appease that crowd. It was a bad decision with Venom and it's a bad decision with Boba.

Does that make Cade Bane Carnage?
 
Was Fett really a villain once he escaped into the EU? His books still played with the killer with a conscience, and then he trained Jaina. I just don't know if it's fair to put it on Disney.
 
So after being on that panel about media literacy on Friday I have a split mind on the Slave-1 change and it's caused by the fact that Star Wars is both an old property AND a living property and that doesn't happen too often.

Because the first questions you should ask when being media literate is who wrote this, why was it written, and WHEN was it written, because the when informs a lot about it (how often do we see babies on the internet trying to cancel book from 1937 or something instead of turning a critical eye about the state of the world when it was written). So on the one hand, Empire came out in 1980-ish. It was a different time. Boba was framed as an unrepentant villain. We had no other context for the character. Naming his ship Slave, when his entire job is capturing people who don't deserve it and dragging them back to people with money and power? That actually is some social commentary. 1980 Boba Fett is very likely a LITERAL SLAVE CATCHER.

But then if you have a critical eye to these things you can then go okay, the character is part of a living, breathing franchise that iterates a LOT of time. He's not the same character he was then. The storytellers still need that ship; IT WILL STILL BE A TOY IN TOY STORES. So to grow with social awareness, you change the name of the ship.

So I think it's a perfectly understandable, even smart decision to do so, but also I hate when we lose context because when we lose context we lose the opportunity to grow from reading about that context. But it's also a fucking Disney IP, so none of it really matters in the end, it's about Legos more than about social issues.

Does that make Cade Bane Carnage?
This is weirdly more accurate than I expected it to be, because while they have done Cad Bane's origin story and it gives him reasons for his actions, the writers have been far more effective at making sure Cad Bane is a fucking bastard and doesn't get a redemption arc. He gets glimmers of humanity that make him more interesting, but in the end he's ten times scarier than Boba Fett because they didn't swap him from villain to anti-hero. His Tales of... arc is so fucking dark.
 
But then if you have a critical eye to these things you can then go okay, the character is part of a living, breathing franchise that iterates a LOT of time. He's not the same character he was then. The storytellers still need that ship; IT WILL STILL BE A TOY IN TOY STORES. So to grow with social awareness, you change the name of the ship.


Couple years ago an old coworker got the LEGO Firespray. Not the adult expensive one. Just the cool new "affordable" set (hahaha). Sends me a picture because I'm the only adult he knows who is down with LEGO and toys.

I tell him it's cool.

He then goes on a tirade about the name and wokes, yadda.

"Are they holding a gun to your head? It's your toy. You can call it whatever you want when you throw it on your bookshelf. They never even named it in the movie."

But I guess he's one of those people where because Canon says so, because the TV show says so, because Disney says so, that makes it law and you're not allowed to do whatever you want with your toy.

I'm the kind of nerd where Mara and Jaina still live because it's my shelf and you can't take those books from my head.
 
You’d really think I’d be on the side of “don’t rehabilitate Boba Fett” since I’m almost always on that side when it comes to bad guys.

But not this time.
 
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