#someone sent me a link to a pirating site I'll see if it works and post the ask if it does

[nibeul]

Alright, I’ve had this sitting as a draft for a bit because I don’t. Have a lot of energy, but I’m posting this anyways and I continue to really encourage people look critically at the Bad Batch because there are a lot of issues. 

A lot of the discussion about the Bad Batch has been around the Batch themselves, but like.. there are other characters that were completely shafted. And I’ve talked about this briefly already, but I want to go more into depth with Kanan Jarrus’s appearance and why it’s so bad. 

First and foremost, we have the whitewashing. They made Caleb’s skin and hair way lighter than they should’ve been which a lot of people have thankfully recognized (thank you @screwthepurplegiraffe​ for the comparison screenshots), and Depa looks really washed out (can’t say I’m surprised by the latter though since TCW has proven that they cannot animate POC). Kanan’s model literally looks more like Padawan Obi Wan or Cal Kestis than he does Caleb Dune.

And before anyone says “it’s just the lighting”, first off, Caleb has a similar skin tone to Depa who is clearly darker, and second, I implore you to take a look at the Caleb Dume comics. Not to say that multiracial people/POC in general can’t have lighter skin, but he started off with darker skin. His base skin tone is brown. We have this:

vs this:

There’s obviously a big difference here and it’s not. A good one. That being said, whitewashing isn’t the only issue here. Like I said before, the Bad Batch is filled with lazy writing and weird at best, straight up offensive at worst, plot points (that’s completely ignoring the issues with the models, too). Brad Rau has stated that it was Filoni’s idea to bring in Kanan Jarrus for a Bad Batch cameo despite the fact that Kanan already had an existing backstory in canon. There are a couple of articles that talk about the decision, but here’s one (x) so people don’t think I’m pulling this out of nowhere. 

So why is this a problem? Things in Star Wars are retconned all the time, it can’t be that big of a deal, right?

Yeah, no. Kanan Jarrus is canonically a multi-racial character and one of the very few who received a fully fleshed out canon backstory thanks to the Last Padawan comics. The comics had been centered around him as a character, how he navigated the War as a Padawan, how he dealt with the betrayal of the clones and the loss of his Master, and how he ultimately went on to become the Kanan we see in Rebels. By putting Depa and Kanan into the Bad Batch, the writers butchered their original storylines. Not only that, but Kanan—once again let me emphasize, a canonly POC character—was used as a vehicle for Hunter’s development as a character. Kanan was basically broken down into a plot device, and mind you, this is retconning the fleshed out backstory he’d had before, so not only was the original creator’s work trampled on, but it was replaced with a one dimensional plot device for someone else’s development. 

That’s an issue. 

On that note, I started watching the show in order to critique it, but it’s honestly getting hard to continue looking at those models, not to mention the ableist connotations of the main cast’s characterizations and the overall lazy writing so :/ keep that in mind if you are someone who’s been following along with the show.