autumn

writer (derogatory)

  • they/them

• • •

unfortunately, they keep paying me to play games and watch anime

• • •

  • 🧑‍💻 Freelance writer, editor

  • 📰 Columnist @unwinnable

• • •



This has 0 specifics on the contents of Ahsoka series itself. All discourse baby.

I'm gonna regret this in like three weeks I'm sure but from the outset, I wanted to kind of add on to Joshua Rivera's non-review of Ahsoka at Polygon and touch on the discourse around Ahsoka (the discourse besides the WGA and SAG strikes, but I'm not getting paid to write a blog post so...). It's kind of a recovering fan girls' reactions to Ahsoka in the context of Disney's bullshit and where the beloved franchise is at in this moment.


So like I was the target audience for the Clone Wars movie, grew up following TCW and Rebels on TV, knew when new episodes were out. In college I read the Ahsoka novel and new Thrawn trilogy as it came out (some great stuff for TCW fans in one of those books!!). It would feel disingenuous to say I wasn't a fan girl, because for a time I was (re: the Women of the Galaxy book on the shelf...sigh). But I've been so burned on Star Wars save Andor that I had accepted it would just be another disappointment the way The Book of Boba Fett or Obi-Wan Kenobi or The Mandalorian season 3 were. But consider, reader: a sequel to Rebels hits a different.

The crux of what I want to get across is that this presumed audience everyone's mentioning hasn't gotten anything from most of Star Wars like the rest of you and Ahsoka is finally doing some Star Wars ass Star Wars. After watching the likes of the prestige Obi-Wan show try to appeal to the mainstream without saying anything of note (and leaving people who know who Satine is absolutely mad), Ahsoka is an indulgence that is finally doing something for Star Wars fans with the years and years of storytelling and relationships and character growth it has ignored so much of recently. In a sea of reactions about who this is for from people it is not, and after several series that aren't for anyone at all, at least Ahsoka is for someone.

I know, you're thinking this cinematic universe-esque lore continuity is exactly the problem. Sure, it's tied up in character appearances in a few other shows, but the stakes were all established in the final season of Rebels. You could simialrly compare Ahsoka to Mando s3, which also ignores Satine while pulling on TCW/Rebels lore in a much more Whedonistic/MCU way. And sure, across TCW and Rebels there are cameos of famous characters that show up and say, "I'm Leia Star Wars," and there's exploration of lore that goes on for so long it starts to reach for the very ontology of the fictional world itself, but it's also just a couple of (long) stories measured not in years on a timeline but in character development/arcs that have been threaded together as successors to each other. I'm reading people that say it's a sequel to Rebels that doesn't stand alone as if we've not had umpteen terrible sequel shows from Disney and that by virtue of being one it may as well be more Mandalorian, when Ahsoka stands really strong as a sequel behind a lot of animation. Terry Terrones' review for Paste and Rafael Motamayor's write-ups at Vulture get a bit more into the specifics of how Ahsoka does that so well.

But of course, Andor shows that you absolutely can manage to cut it both ways (and may only moreso the closer we approach the Catalyst novel). And there's a definite disservice in Disney pitching this as a great place to start following Ahsoka's journey (the way Marvel does anything it makes, or the way any long JRPG series' marketing will straight up lie about). Andor and Bad Batch are so good, but Andor is (to its great benefit) self-contained from these histories and feelings, while Bad Batch's cast lacks the heart or time to really make me feel for anyone the way I can for Ahsoka or Rex.

I am the jaded fan girl with the heart strings there to tug on and like I gotta say as the person this is for...I feel like Filoni does a great job in this introduction indulging in it. I amm worried how this will play out in the Thrawn movie Filoni is making after this. I am so worried it's gonna be an Avengers assemble moment and lean back into cinematic universe storytelling the way TRoS and BoBF did -- but the TLJ isn't worse for TRoS. And seeing that the culmination of those years of stories is just the second series in the franchise that's all about women and non-white people (and not just the non-human kind that Star Wars is loathe to conflate) makes it all feel like TCW and Rebels built up to something. Not that Disney wants to pay those actors, the original voice actors and animators, or the scores of writers at all fairly for the work.


You must log in to comment.