Chat corner 37: The Book of Boba Fett

[annathecrow]

Welcome to the new year! Feels like the old year. Still, may 2022 be a better year for you than 2021 was.

Optional prompt

This week’s topic should be from the non-movie canon content category, so I’ll bite the bullet and make it The Book of Boba Fett. I’d say make it non-spoilery, since the first episode came out on 29th, but it is a first episode, so…??? (Wookieepedia article here.)

 

Comments

[annathecrow]

"not willing" -- ouch, feeling like a TV show is a chore sucks. Do you have some specific hangups, or is it just a lack of interest?

[kaasknot]

Lack of interest, but specifically because it seems like Disney's using it to cram in as many cameos as possible. Like they got their fingers burned on the hot stove of overconfidence, and now they're playing it overcautious. "Hey, watch this show where the stakes are extremely low and there's lots of fandom nods!" Which is a disservice to the genuinely good worldbuilding going on, but y'know.

Also I'm burnt out on keeping up with Disney's neverending content mill.

[lif61]

I agree! Though I thought the first few minutes were cinematically interesting, for sure.

[kaasknot]

I'll probably give it a watch at some point, I am curious

[lif61]

I think part of me is only watching it because I know my dad will be disappointed if I don't.

[kaasknot]

Oh that's a mood. I watched the last clutch of Disney Star Wars movies for my mom's sake, not mine

I'm a rabid clone stan, so by rights I should be interested in Boba Fett (and I am, to a degree). It's less the character tho, and more my deep-seated suspicion of Disney that's holding me back

[annathecrow]

I almost gave up on The Mandalorian because the constant "hey look it's X!" felt weird. Then I got hooked on the "badass + cute kid" combo so I stopped paying attention to it, but yeah, there's a lot of it.

"burnt out on keeping up with Disney's neverending content mill" -- ugh, MOOD. When there was that last big future SW media line-up reveal last year, I felt honestly almost sick. I mean, I guess it's good to get more things, but at the same time I haven't felt that much like a product - The Audience (TM) - since my MCU days. With that number of shows/movies/wtf, it's suddenly glaringly obvious how much strategy and audience targeting is involved.

[kaasknot]

Lol I went from the MCU to Clone Wars to Disney Wars, I'm so burnt and crispified and tired. I skipped out entirely on the Bad Batch, I'm a clone stan but I like my headcanons more than Disney's. It's funny, tumblr actually helped exacerbate it, I think. Constant, unrelenting exposure.

Idk, I'm just staying in my quiet little corner, every now and then I'll poke my head out to test the weather.

[annathecrow]

"clone stan but I like my headcanons more than Disney's" -- and again, MOOD. I have gotten into TCW fandom ass-end first, i.e. through fanfic, and so I'm in this weird position where I'm a clone stan in theory but permanently eye-rolling at what actually happens on-screen. (The fact that I'm an anti-military mil-SF fan does NOT help.)

"staying in my quiet little corner" -- that's a good way to be a SW fan, IMO. Just... pick out a few toys out of the heap and play. If nothing else, SW is its own proof that the things in the heap will still be there, even if you pick them out one, five, ten years later.

[kaasknot]

i'm also deeply anti-military, and the show can be such a tire-fire, but for me the clone wars fandom has been a really excellent place to explore anti-military sentiment. it's SUCH an unbelievably shitty lot the clones have, they don't deserve ANY of it, and basically it's begging for all the soap boxes and anvil-dropping :P. i've got a plot bunny based on the attack of the dead men in wwi, which squarely places the clones as the hobnailed boot of the republic coming down on ppl who have a legitimate political grievance. but then like, the clones are also victims of the regime, far moreso than, eg, your average american enlistee is of US imperialism. it's such a fun mess of moral complexity and it drives me N U T S that the show never finds the courage to properly explore it.

man i've been playing with my little clone GI joes for going on six... seven? years now. for all its faults SW is uniquely timeless. *insert essay about modern mythology here*

[annathecrow]

the fandom being better than the show -- I know what you mean. Even the fluffy kind of fic I gravitate towards manages to somehow acknowledge that uh, maybe manufacturing millions of sentient beings, training them to fight from childhood, then using them to wage a war maybe isn't a very okay thing to do. Whereas the show either ignores it or gets distressingly ambiguous. I'm not even asking for that much! It's not like every story about a serious topic has to be a bleak conceptual piece, just look at M.A.S.H., or every other Pixar movie. It's just... there are two separate storylines where a character says "this is not okay", and then ends up being a traitor and extremist who harms people (Slick and Bariss).

*takes a deep breath* yeah. Thoughts, I have them. I mean, maybe I'm too harsh and seeing only the weak parts, I know I do that sometimes. And I don't know the show as much as I ought to for this kind of criticism. IDK. Anyway, if you've been playing in this sandbox for that long, you've probably heard all of this a million times :D

One day I'd maybe like to go through some famous (and not so famous) war movies and compare their way of portraying the war and the soldiers to the way TCW does it (or maybe even RepComm as well). I know George Lucas based a lot of OT on WWII war movies and I've always liked that connection.

[kaasknot]

ohhh god my absolute least favorite thing the show does is put legitimate critique in the mouths of villains. Barriss and Slick, obvs, but also, like, Zygerrians and Trandoshans and, I'm really annoyed how they write the Separatists as these moustache-twirling villains? they could have discussed general grievous's backstory, and gone into how like. maybe. just maybe. the Separatists have a point. Sure they're sith puppets, but the actual people supporting the movement aren't blowing hot air!

i've heard it all a million times but i'm also always ready to kick it around some more :P

the really famous wwii movies tend to be extremely jingoistic, which is fitting for the tone TCW sets. GL might have applied them visually to the OT, but politically he was def going with the Viet Cong vs the US empire.

[annathecrow]

Separatists as a villain are... whow. Such a mess.

First, the Sith (and Sith-adjacent, i.e. Asajj). Okay, Zomg Evul, a valid narrative choice, moving on.

Second, the Evils of Capitalism (Trade Federation, TechnoUnion, etc). Which get mentioned in Ep II and then almost never brought up again. And like, TCW predates the Disney acquisition, but I still find it intensely hilarious that the Disney is EXACTLY the kind of sprawling organization the Prequels half-assedly claimed as The Bad Guys.

Third, the droids. Which would be so convenient as a villain in a war story! They're the "emotionless, mindless horde" that our heroes can mercilessly cut down without any pesky moral questions attached! ...only by playing the "rogers" for laughs as much as TCW does, they become neither emotionless nor mindless (dumb or not, they do think). Combine that with having actual droid protagonists and it's uhhhhhhhhhhh uncomfortable. Slightly.

The show did touch on "Separatists are people"! For half an episode. Then Mina Bonteri got killed off for plot reasons, and we never get back to that again.

For the WWII movies, I was thinking the more about modern ones, like Saving Private Ryan, which on one hand play the "War Is Hell" card, but on the other portray the war as a good and just cause. That would fit the TCW tone as well.

OT being like Vietcong vs US military -- oooh, that's a cool comparison and yeah, I can see it.

[kaasknot]

oh, i think i skipped over the mina bonteri episode—it dealt with characters/plots i didn't care about. i keep telling myself i'll go back and rewatch the whole thing through, but we're coming up on seven years now and i've still only watched the show once. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i've been in the "band of brothers"/"the pacific" fandom on the side for a while now, and it's *really interesting* watching The War Movie^TM evolve. like "saving private ryan" and "band of brothers" came out before 9/11: the cold war was a decade in the ground and full scale "hot" war hadn't been seen in thirty years, and the US war machine was at its lowest ebb. those films had their dose of rose-colored, heroic nostalgia, but there was also a sense that 1) war was not great, and 2) the enemy were not a monolith. whereas i watched "we were soldiers" recently, which came out after 9/11 (2003, i think), and was set in vietnam, and it was just... straight propaganda. little respect or attention given to enemy soldiers, US soldiers (and The US Cause) was implied to always be just regardless of actual historical circumstances, nuance in characterization was sacrificed in favor of shots that pump the blood and make (young white male) people enlist. i was rolling my eyes the whole way through. and then finally "the pacific" came out in 2010. the war in iraq was dragging on, and there was a strong sense of "nope, no more rose colored glasses, war is hell and we're gonna show you exactly how." ("generation kill" set the stage for that, i think. "okay the war in iraq is really not great, please enlist but also don't.")

i just find it super fascinating.

[annathecrow]

...thanks, you make me feel better about my spotty "TCW episodes watched" checklist XD (I have been avoiding a few of the Big Plot Drama arcs for months. I know what happens! I don't want to see it!)

the Mina Bonteri episode is good in the politics sense, and Mina has kickass tattoos, but if you're not watching for Padmé or Ahsoka you're gonna be bored.

the development of the war movie IS super fascinating! And so is the portrayal of war, armies and soldiers in SFF movies, because it reflects the same attitudes through different lenses. I mean I don't have any deep thoughts or unifying theories but it's just a very chewy topic.

Like for example, how the US army loans their equipment to Hollywood but in return has an input on how it is portrayed in the movies? MCU is a typical example. That's wild.

[fleurviolette]

D+ never ending content mill? I guess?? They announce a list of shows but they slowly draw it out with one episode of a show a week, rather than doing the Netflix model of streaming all the episodes in a season at once.