m'yeah, there is plenty about the Disney Star Wars that I'm not a big fan of but I would hate it if anything I said got love-bombed by the reactionary set. in retrospect, reading complaints of 'forced diversity' when TFA came out was the first sign of things to come.
for me, there are a lot of issues related to the new Star Wars that can be attributed to two things: one, long-term franchise fatigue and two, the fact that I am far too old to be in the target audience for these movies/TV shows.
I'm starting to think that franchise-fatigue is a coy way of not admitting (or not saying, or not realizing) that some stuff is just not really very good. A lot of people with SW-fatigue during the new trilogy suddenly didn't have it for S1 Mandalorian. Ya' know? I think the fatigue sets in very specifically when something isn't good enough on its own merits to not just be a nostalgia grab. The more the show makes you think about how you only like it because you've always liked this whatever it is, the more it feels like 'fatigue' of that thing, when really you just don't like crappy movies or TV shows.
Same for the target audience argument, which I've seen in a lot of places. I am not really the target audience for Teen Titans Go! I watched that show because my son liked it. And I will STILL watch it with him whenever there's a new episode, even if I don't really need to be in the room at the time, because it's a fucking hilarious show most of the time. Things can be good or not good. I don't think there's legitimately a specific target audience for 'a good time.'
The obvious exception being stuff written and filmed very specifically for extremely young children. Totally valid that adults aren't going to have a good time watching someone teach you how you count or what colors and shapes are. But if you can't get into a kids' cartoon, for example, it might just be BAD rather than 'not made for adults.'
To be fair, I wouldn't necessarily say any of Star Wars, at least the ones written by George, are exactly "well-written".
I've banged this drum for YEARS. George is absolutely terrible at writing. You can feel the lack of oversight and free-thinking creative input in the Prequel Trilogy. It's painful how obvious it is that these were films made after the period where George had become so rich, famous, and powerful that no one could, or was willing to, tell him how fucking stupid all of his writing was. Terrible.
Everything in the Prequels is bad writing, bad dialogue, and plot holes. TPM is one of my favorite pieces of Star Wars media - but it's actually pretty awful and I would argue it gets significantly worse across AotC and RotS. I won't even dignify George's complete lack of talent by calling this subjective. If you don't know the prequels are brimming with terrible dialogue, incredibly stupid writing, and obvious plot holes, then I would argue you simply aren't watching them -before- you pop 3 Ambien.
I won't apologize for not liking Andor. I want to like it, but i found the pace just glacially slow.
I wasn't that interested in *another* telling of the founding of the Rebellion to start with, and I was really put off by how Cassian was introduced as already having done some work against the Empire since I thought this was his origin story. Especially so since the back half of Season 1 was about him being randomly arrested and sentenced to a labor prison specifically for no reason. Why wasn't *that* his origin story and then he gets recruited by Skarsgard for the pay heist?
All that aside, though, what really tired me out is spending three episodes just getting ready for the heist. People tell me that the slow burn and steady buildup is part of its mature story telling, but I guess at only 53 years old, I'm just not ready for that level of maturity yet.
I get this. Famously (because I am actually very famous), I called Andor a total snoozefest and said I hated it after not even 2 full episodes. I didn't go back to it for maybe two months? I don't even know why I finally did. I think my wife really wanted to try to finish it because people had convinced her it gets better.
And sure enough, I went out of it being a big fan of the show. But it ABSOLUTELY has a problem with pacing. Particularly in the early episodes. Detrimentally so. And I don't blame you if you got bored and decided to just not go back to it.
