#in fact one of my favorite characters in the star wars universe unironically

[grilledcheese-savage]

Unironically loved The Acolyte. Got some genuine questions on why so many Star Wars fans hate it though. As someone who knows a DEEP amount of lore from both the movies and the non canon books, I feel like I’m inclined to speak on this.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself

1. Do you hate the acting and the “plot holes” or do you just hate women and gay people?

2. Does it actually break the Star Wars lore? Or does it just add more to the general universe?

3. Have you ACTUALLY watched the show up to now? Or did you just assume it was going to suck as soon as you saw Disney made new Star Wars content?

Listen, if you hate that Disney keeps throwing away shows for money, I AGREE. I hate that they seem to put 3% of effort into my favorite universe. But some of the discourse I am hearing on this show is getting eerily close to a hate crime.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, and you can tell me a definitive answer on the first three, I’d love a could discussion on this show. Free from preemptive opinions.

Spoilers now

Here’s what I liked about this show:

- I liked that they showed someone else created by midichlorians. They insinuated in the prequels that it was how Anakin was born and some people are saying that makes him not special anymore. I disagree with this because palpatine was not the first sith, if you listen to the darth plagueis story, he says “He could even use the force to influence the midichlorians to create life.” They never said he was the only person. They just said “ITS A SITH LEGEND”. Don’t you think a cult of sith lesbians would know the story of darth plagueis the wise? I mean yeah, it makes for some grey area in terms of timeline but we have 300 year old Jedi masters and he’s a sith that gets a clone in the sequels it’s not that impossible.

- I love the idea of twins when it comes to Star Wars. One dark one light.

- The costumes!!! The costumes tell a story. For one, I actually love that they aren’t weathered because this was a time of peace for the Jedi, most Jedi wouldn’t have as much time in the field to weather their clothes, so they’re very bright and colorful.

- The settings were so beautiful, and gave me MAJORRR dark fantasy vibes. Especially the space suit, it was giving a different vibe for Star Wars yet still get very George Lucas to me.

- And of course, I have to talk about the fight scenes. They are so fast it really feels like these people know what they’re doing. You can understand their train of thought in every move. It’s fun to watch.

- The lightsabers. I love seeing more yellow lightsabers and more variety. I love seeing the lightsaber whip, I need more of it tho.

- I loved Jecki and Sol, they were pretty fun and original characters. I like how morally grey Sol is, and jecki is my fave type of character… rip.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

- why did that one chick have a purple lightsaber? I was fine with it at first but now it kinda messes with how I saw purple lightsabers. I know the colors don’t technically have a meaning, or at least a set one. Especially since Samuel Jackson just wanted a purple one. But I always saw it as someone who was morally grey and walked the line between the dark in the light. Someone who has a code, but will kill for their own obligations. Which would actually work for this character… it’s the fact that the color is supposed to be rare. I always thought Mace was the first and one of the only to have a purple lightsaber. I’m not against there being multiple purple lightsabers, I just wish they explained it a bit more. Idk. This one’s just me.

- The acting isn’t necessarily bad… it just isn’t great either? Idk, I got mixed feelings. Because there are some episodes where I think “Amandla’s doing pretty good this episode playing two people.” And then I see another scene and think “Damn… I wish they chose some different actors because this is just clunky.” ESPECIALLY the children. I thought there acting was rough, but I’m pretty lenient when it comes to that because they’re kids and they’ll grow with age. Plus, it’s hard to find twins who look like amandla who can act.

-the dialogue is not great a lot of the time. But I’m a Star Wars fan, so I know for a fact that’s never been just “The Acolyte”’s problem. I think we were spoiled Andor.

- I was kinda nervous about the addition of sith witches, but that’s again, just a personal opinion. It’s not that I’m against just sith witches, I just had to get used to the idea of people other than the Jedi, understanding the force but using it differently. Which, wasn’t just an acolyte problem for me. It was a Dave Filoni adding witches to sci fi problem. It’s just, when I think “witches” I don’t think “Star wars”. Because the force isn’t really magic. But I’ve gotten more used to it the more they developed all the different tribes, and especially after watching rebels and clone wars a while back. I’m actually pretty okay with it now, it just took some getting used to, which the live action only haven’t had to deal with until Ahsoka the series, which was less of a problem because they were focused on Hayden coming back. At least in my opinion that’s how I saw it.

- I didn’t like that jecki used ahsoka moves, despite it being the past, it being the first time they duel blade, and the fact that THEY DIE so they can’t even teach these moves to people who then show ahsoka etc. It leads to my next problem,

- it kinda seemed like they were too focused on references. Like they wanted to prove themselves, like “Hey, this isn’t breaking canon, see, I know a ton about Star Wars lore!” It felt like hand-holding. It was cute the first couple times, but it wasn’t spread out enough.

- Yoda is pretty old, and this show is only 100 years in the past, right? So where is he? In fact, where are most of the Jedi masters. I’m sure a lot of them would be babies, but isn’t Shaak ti like, 240? Huh??? Where is everyone? This is probably why I was so confused in the first episode, thinking it was like, 2000 years in the past.

- and lastly, they run into the problem many prequels run into, which is, not knowing what the past of a futuristic world would look like. It’s hard to come up with, old looking lightsabers when lightsabers are inherently futuristic. Etc.

Other than that, I didn’t actually notice it breaking any canon. It should be obvious to most viewers that it’s going to end with everyone who saw the Sith, dying with his secret. That would fix the “plot hole” that they are apparently making.

Also the number one complaint I’ve been seeing is that they have a black main character, who’s a women and they automatically assume that Disney is being woke. They haven’t done anything remotely woke about this. I’ve also seen people complain that two women had a child.

They’re Sith, wouldn’t that be the OPPOSITE of being woke??? Also this is the future, why do you think that a galaxy of aliens with all kinds of genders would be homophobic? That makes less sense than them moving a birthday around. Also please remember clones exist and Anakin’s mother was a Virgin Mary.

😭💀💀💀 Some of the haters are NOT Star Wars fans and get all of their points from Star Wars theory.

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews - May 2020 - The Cape Stuff

I read a lot of comics in May. Here’s what I thought of some of the superhero and superhero-adjacent comics I read.

Arms of the Octopus

A nostalgia pick, the collection of several annual issues containing a crossover between Superior Spider-Man, The Invincible Hulk, and the All-New X-Men. It is an artifact of a very specific and bizarre time in Marvel Comics, when Doc Ock was Spider-Man, the Hulk worked for SHIELD, and the original five teen X-Men were stranded in their own future. For a pure, relatively straightforward crossover romp, it's quite enjoyable. Spider-Man is a jerk, the Hulk fights a robot, the X-Men are befuddled by the present, all of the major beats for that particular moment in the Marvel Universe are there, and it's got some really great art. Jake Wyatt, during his regrettably short-lived stint with Marvel and the great Kris Anka unfortunately overshadow the other contributors, but it's all very good, if not the most accessible comic.

Maxwell's Demons

I came to Maxwell's Demons having heard a lot of critical buzz and with my expectations set rather high. I did not care for this book at all. Ambitious is the best word for this series, and that's not a bad thing. It's got ideas, about the craft, about the genre, about philosophy in general. It never quite manages to carry things off though; it's not as smart as it wants to be, and the high-minded ideas are never incorporated in particularly elegant ways. Three of the story's five chapters are essentially extended monologues in which the main character rambles on about some glorified shower thought for 20-plus pages. The first and second chapters are the exceptions to this pattern, and are quite solid as far as pointedly derivative superhero riffs go, even if the second chapter's riff on "What if Miracleman #17 was significantly less intelligent" is more than a little shameless in its lack of originality. The fourth chapter, by contrast, is the nadir of the series, easily the most embarrassing Manic Pixie Dream Girl tripe I've seen played straight in literal years. I'm reminded a lot of Translucid, another superhero pastiche, which essentially sought to do for Batman what Maxwell's Demons seeks to do for Lex Luthor. I warmed to Translucid significantly on my second read and I wonder if the same will end up being true for Maxwell's Demons, but I find that Translucid simply did a better job of incorporating original ideas and stating its themes in ways less stupefyingly clunky than Maxwell's Demon's ever manages. I hate to call a book pretentious, especially an ambitious one, but at present that's how I feel about this book.

Twilight

Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Howard Chaykin's Watchmen-for-mid-century-space-heroes epic. It's good. Fabulous art, some really interesting ideas and a great premise. It's also more than a little Chaykin-y, with most of the male characters having fraught but amiable relationships with their much-too-good-for-them-and-they-both-know-it ex-wives. It has this particular brand of low grade misogyny that idealizes women but in doing so denies them interiority and, ultimately, humanity. Leaving that aside, though it is a major point to leave aside, it’s story of humanity rotting over eons of immortality, mad space gods, and humanity’s proclivity towards colonialism and genocide, it's great. It’s not an altogether pleasant book, it can be nasty and strange, in ways both intentional and unintentional, but it’s original and engaging and decidedly well made. Something of an overlooked classic of that era’s DC output.    

Green Lantern: Earth One

Literally the only one of DC's Earth One graphic novels that's worth a damn. Where most of the other Earth One books choose to start things off in a world resembling our own, Green Lantern starts off in a scifi future resembling something along the lines of Ad Astra or The Expanse, with Earth controlled by an only alluded to totalitarian government, humanity colonizing and mining the solar system, and Hal Jordan as a spacefaring roughneck who dreads the prospect of returning to Earth. Earth One is the rare Green Lantern story that manages to make Earth as interesting as the rest of the universe. The bulk of the action leaves this behind to focus on unearth the lost legacy of the Green Lanterns and refits their mythology in a clean way which will be unsurprising for anyone with a passing familiarity with the original comics but is still satisfying ad fresh. Fabulous art, fun take on the mythology, I'm left both wanting more and being satisfied with what we got.

Spider-Man: Life Story

In a just world, Chip Zdarksy, one of Marvel’s best writers these days, would be writing both Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, instead of having been relegated to shortlived spinoffs. Because life just isn’t fair sometimes, instead he was given this admittedly ambitious project, his all-encompassing take on the Spider-Man story as played out in real time. In the end it’s bold and engaging, but more than a little clipped in execution. Each issue is a snippet of Peter Parker's life as we catch up to him in a new decade so readers only get a quick glimpse of the action and are left to fill in the substantial gaps by drawing on our knowledge of continuity. The obvious comparison is John Byrne's Superman/Batman: Generations, but where that story really only took the broad strokes of those characters' continuity into account in writing its decades spanning story, Spider-Man: Life Story is dedicated to the remixing of Spider-Man's publishing canon. So it can’t just take an archetypal view of Spider-Man and play that out to its logical conclusion, instead it’s stuck trying to incorporate version of prominent Spider-Man stories like Kraven's Last Hunt, Venom, and Civil War. The result means that there’s a ton of exposition in each issue, and frequent use of shorthand to gloss over things which have happened since the previous issue, and it never manages to explore the series’ original ideas in detail. Also, I'll die mad that Michel Fiffe, the genius behind COPRA and one of my favorite cartoonists, public pitched basically this exact story a year or so before this project was announced, and even if Marvel didn't actually steal the idea, I'll forever pine for Fiffe's take on this premise.

Star Wars: The Crimson Empire Saga

Long before the Disney's take on Star Wars, with their codified takes on the mythology and careful curation of the franchise, there was the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, where seemingly anyone could tell any story they wanted using the mythology of Star Wars. While it resulted in some good stuff, like Timothy Zahn's fondly remembered Thrawn books, the vast majority of it was workmanlike or even bad. Crimson Empire falls firmly into the category of bad, a dumber than dirt story about an extremely cool space guy and his code of honor. It's the kind of story where multiple characters say "He's just one man!" right before or right after seeing their legion of anonymous flunkies getting demolished by the hero. It's got an inexplicable and bad love story. In the three miniseries collected here it spends about two pages total dealing with the idea that maybe, just maybe, the fact that it's main character is dedicated to the lost honor of Emperor Palpatine, a space fascist, maybe his code of honor is completely fucked. Of those three miniseries, only the first story is anywhere near something that could be called good. I wouldn’t called Crimson Empire utterly abysmal, but it’s not unironically good. If the name Kyle Katarn means anything to you, you might get something out of this as a nostalgia trip, but otherwise it has no redeeming qualities.

Deathstroke: Legacy

The first of the New 52 Deathstroke stories, which was never well regarded until Christopher Priest took it over with Deathstroke: Rebirth, I was driven to read this by a conceptual fondness for this era's Deathstroke basically looking and acting like an action figure. Through that lens, it's quite enjoyable. It's not as obviously in on the joke in the way that the classic Taskmaster: Unthinkable is, but it's over the top, has fun designs and baddies, and Joe Bennett (years before his career best heights in Immortal Hulk) provides consistently good art. As a pure action comic, it's good.

Wolverine MAX: Permanent Rage

Here's the thing about Wolverine: There are very few good Wolverine solo stories. Wolverine is a genuinely good character, but most of his solo stories are dumb action affairs, and there's literally never been a Wolverine comic that's even halfway as good as the Logan movie. Permanent Rage, the first storyline from the Wolverine MAX series though, is actually pretty decent. It plays out a lot like you might imagine a Wolverine movie made around 2004, with no superheroes, a Japanese setting that allows for some distracting orientalism, unrelenting violence, and a noir-inspired storyline. The present day storyline is all well and good, not great, but solid and relatively low-key, but what makes the book is the presence of Sabretooth as the main villain. His relationship with Wolverine, fleshed out through flashbacks drawn by some really talented artists, is probably one of the best takes on that relationship that Marvel has ever put out. The casting of Wolverine and Sabretooth as two lonely immortals, bound together by hate and the knowledge that they are each other's only true companions, absolutely makes this book. Is it great? No, but it's got enough interesting things going on that fans of dark superheroes stories would probably find something to enjoy. Subsequent volumes of Wolverine MAX moved even further from the character’s superhero trappings and supporting characters, which is a pity, but this one remains readable and enjoyable on its own.

Marshal Law Omnibus

A collection all of the non-licensed and non-text-only Marshal Law stories. It's weird, it's punk, it's violent, it's sick of superheroes but self-aware about it own silliness in a way that Garth Ennis' work like The Boys has never been (Incidentally, the fifth story contained here, Super Babylon, is just every self-righteous complaint Ennis made about superheroes in The Boys but presented with a modicum of good humor). It's quite fun as a mean-spirited anti-superhero romp, but anyone who is particularly invested in the moral rectitude of, like, the Flash, might find it an unpleasant read so I would advise avoiding it if that's you. It's also not perfect, even for what it is: it's approach to sex work and kink is very dated, it relies on sexual violence a little too much, and by the time you get to the final story, Secret Tribunal, it's come to revel in its previously ironic fascist and misogynist imagery and characters just a little too much. The third installment, Kingdom of the Blind, is for my money, the strongest of the lot, featuring both the most straightforward premise and the most incisive satire the collection has to offer.