#bedlam watches the bad batch

[bedlamsbard]

everyone else: wow I can’t believe they retconned the feelings me: wow I can’t believe they retconned the violence

#bedlam watches the bad batch #bb aftermath #bad batch spoilers #longer post coming later #this is honestly the worse sin to me

[bedlamsbard]

as far as I can tell Bad Batch’s MO is to retcon one piece of existing canon every episode until its demands are met.

(the Lawquane thing -- which is one line from Aftermath (the novel, not the episode) -- is very minor compared to the Kanan debacle, but uh.)

#bedlam watches the bad batch #bad batch spoilers #bb cut and run

[bedlamsbard]

The Bad Batch should have a different team member get captured and re-brainwashed/chipped every few weeks until it’s just Echo out there with Omega being chased by his entire team.

(This is almost definitely not going to happen and if it did it would probably be Hunter because he’s more the main character, but my logic is that the Techno Union probably disabled it entirely with Echo and also, let the “reg” be the lucky one here for a change so that it’s not all “oh they’re SPECIAL they have GENETIC MODIFICATIONS they don’t get affected by THE DOOM CHIP OF MURDER AND BULLYING.”)

#bedlam watches the bad batch #it's been...so long...since I was able to do spec for anything...in star wars... #(mando was awful for me because I genuinely couldn't predict where they were going because they were so all over the place) #(which is really upsetting if you're used to being able to make educated speculation that's right some of the time) #(but I could just NEVER predict mando and I don't mean that in a good 'keeps you on your toes!' way)

[bedlamsbard]

there is ONE acceptable retcon for Kanan - The Last Padawan and it is the White Loth-wolf appearing out of thin air and picking Caleb up by the neck of his robes like a pup and then disappearing into thin air again

which honestly would have also explained how the Loth-wolf knew him in Rebels S4! also I just love Loth-wolves.

#bedlam watches rebels #bedlam watches the bad batch #bad batch spoilers #in the sense that this did not happen #bb aftermath #oh I should get back to the 'white loth-wolf was caleb's childhood ~imaginary friend' stories

[bedlamsbard]

ha ha ha oh god

love Star Wars

love having to fall screaming into the void when Star Wars pulls some fresh new bullshit

#WAS I NOT ALREADY HAVING A BAD ENOUGH WEEK #bedlam watches the bad batch #bad batch spoilers #(not actually but if you are like me and avoiding even vague reactions)

[bedlamsbard]

happy for everyone who’s tried to tell me about new Bad Batch but my immediate reaction was “I’M OUT I’M FREE I DON’T CARE ANYMORE” and the sheer relief I felt about that was both overwhelming and a little disconcerting.

#I'm so so burned out on sw guys #bedlam watches the bad batch

[bedlamsbard]

Bad Batch spoilers below the cut (not positive, more baffled)

Bad Batch really is doing its plotting by going “this week we’re going *spins wheel* make a statement about *spins wheel* slavery by *spins wheel* rescuing the *spins wheel* adolescent *spins wheel* rancor from RotJ from *spins wheel* Zygerrians and *spins wheel* make our heroes look *spins wheel* mostly incompetent and *spins wheel* include a cameo by *spins wheel* Bib Fortuna while *spins wheel* retconning something from *spins wheel* Legends and also *spins wheel* ignore that *spins wheel* THE RANCOR IS GOING TO BE USED TO EAT SLAVES AND LIKE JABBA THE HUTT IS THE PEAK SLAVER IN THE STAR WARS CANON? and also *spins wheel* engage in some outdated alpha/omega bullshit by having *spins wheel* Wrecker beat up *spins wheel* the rancor.”

apparently this is actually a different rancor than the one in RotJ, which you can tell by the fact that this one is a girl and cute and the one in RotJ is a boy and eats people but I don’t think the average viewer is going to know that (I didn’t realize until I went to Wook to check Malakili’s name) and also I doubt Jabba really distinguishes between which rancor is being used to eat people at any given point in time.

also like the Bad Batch is supposed to be COMPETENT, right?

#bedlam watches the bad batch #bb rampage #I WANT TO LIKE YOU STAR WARS #bad batch spoilers

[bedlamsbard]

a random thought --

the framing of the Bad Batch (Hunter particularly) as having a paternal relationship with Omega sits oddly with me, not just because we’re once again straying into “is this a parental relationship?” butterfly meme territory, but also because if we’re still sticking with the assumption that Omega is a Fett clone, then this should be a sibling relationship?  how do the clones deal with having a sister when they always call each other “brother”?  obvs there is going to be a certain amount of crossover, but.  *hands*

not to mention that there are two options: Omega is a rapid-aged clone like all of the others, and thus could be LITERALLY ANY NUMBER OF YEARS OLD (possibly created after the last time the Bad Batch was on Kamino, about six months earlier, which seems unlikely even with what we know about clone aging), or she’s like Boba and ages normally, in which case she has, what, been being hidden by the Kaminoans until recently? but is being treated normally and allowed to wander in the main facility? also feels unlikely? but would likely make her the exact same age or older as the Bad Batch themselves, who themselves cannot be older than thirteen and are likely actually younger than normal clones like Rex and Cody.  (This is a guess that isn’t based on anything in-text, but I’d think the Kaminoans wouldn’t start experimenting with enhancements until after they were sure they had the “base model” down.)

#'why are they fighting in the cafeteria like they're high schoolers' #because they're the same as middle schoolers guys keep up #bedlam watches the bad batch #bad batch spoilers

[bedlamsbard]

Bad Batch spec (potentially spoilery?) below the break

lol they’re really going to do it, they’re going to re-retcon the Ahsoka novel again, they really are on a mission to retcon something every other week, frankly incredible.

(I mean, I am willing to be proven wrong here, but I really don’t think I’m going to be. again, lol.)

#bedlam watches the bad batch #bb decommissioned #bad batch spoilers #(probably not really)

[bedlamsbard]

ugh I guess you’ll get a post from me about That Thing in Bad Batch because I’m mad on like every level, but not tonight.

#bedlam watches the bad batch #bad batch spoilers #obviously...not but for anyone who doesn't want to know Bed is Big Mad

[bedlamsbard]

I know Bad Batch just ended (for season 1) and I suppose I’ll eventually catch up with it when I can bear to think about Star Wars again, but right now I still think of it as the show that was so infuriating in its mediocrity that it succeeded in doing what the Star Wars stuff I actually hated failed at and made me leave the fandom.  And like, I was clearly still capable of having strong emotions, given that I immediately turned around and flung myself headfirst into Loki and the rest of the MCU, so it’s not even that I couldn’t have emotions anymore, which was about the place I was at just then.  It’s just...really hard to get past the fact that BB was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, something that both Mando and the ST (both of which I profoundly disliked) or the various announcements and rumors about other SW things (like the Ahsoka show) failed at doing.

#and that's not even getting into how completely screwed up my entire sense of fandom got because of sw #like I'm still entangling it and will probably be doing so for a good long while yet #*disentangling it even #kablob was telling me for YEARS that I needed to get out of sw because I was so profoundly miserable #like it's really hard for me to articulate the ways I got messed up from this fandom but...they're there #I'm self-aware enough to realize that given my preferences the mcu was the only logical fannish direction for me #but man I managed to get into the only other disney fandom that's LESS ethical than sw? #whatever like I genuinely didn't realize I was still capable of feeling fannish joy and excitement so I'll take it #your girl #bedlam watches the bad batch

[bedlamsbard]

I just realized that given the likely timeline of The Bad Batch there’s a non-zero chance that we might get very early Inquisitors, since the timeline probably crosses over with the Soule Darth Vader comics, which take up immediately post-RotS, and we know the Inquisitorius is already a thing within a year of the Empire.

PLEASE I WANT TO SEE MY GUY THE GRAND INQUISITOR AGAIN.

like, I don’t think it’s super likely...but it’s also not not a possibility.

#also this is probably the most likely occasion to see barriss #OH GOD LUMINARA'S CAPTURE? #sorry I love double negatives #bedlam watches star wars #actually thematically throwing barriss in with the bad batch would be a good match #kablob is going to read these tags in the morning and come for my throat lol

[bedlamsbard]

So, I get the distaste for Rebels and The Bad Batch (definitely that last one), and I can certainly suggest @agoddamn's series of watching Clone Wars (because wow, I'd forgotten how poor that series could be), but with The Mandalorian, the most I can understand of your dislike of it is how it handles previous characters. Which, yeah, Filoni and his Precious OCs, but other than that, what about it? I mean, the plot/theme seemed simple to me: focusing on the relationship between Din and Grogu.

Ack, I didn't realize that out of context of my past ten years of fannishness and fannish engagement the takeaway from recent critical posts would be "Bedlam hates Star Wars," let alone "Bedlam hates Rebels"!

Look, I love Star Wars -- I genuinely do love Rebels and TCW, I'm very fond of Resistance and most of the films, and there are other parts of the ancillaries (books, comics, games) that I love, like, and/or enjoy. There are other parts of the saga that I dislike, a lot of it that I'm pretty neutral on because I just don't care; there's very little that I outright hate. (There are things that I avoid because I know I would hate them; I won't read Dark Disciple because the old EU Republic/Clone Wars comics from Dark Horse were formative for me and I'm not really over how Quinlan Vos's story line got retconned for TCW and thus the novel, so I don't feel the need to rub my face in it.)

I think, especially with Star Wars, there's a tendency to think that people only complain because they dislike or hate whatever it is they're complaining about it. I don't talk about the parts of Star Wars I actually hate because I frankly don't see the point in talking about the stuff I have no emotional investment in, or where my emotional investment only is distaste -- that's why I'll almost never talk about the ST. (And why I've only talked about the back half of Rebels S4, which I do genuinely hate, a handful of times over the years: I don't want to think about the thing I actually hate.) I talk about Rebels and TCW because those are the parts of Star Wars that I love and because I occasionally want to dig into why there are parts of them that just don't work for me. (And I do realize that if anyone pays attention to what I reblog and don't it may come off as me not liking them particularly; 99% of the time I only reblog TCW or Rebels gifsets immediately after I've rewatched episodes, and I haven't been doing rewatches lately for various reasons.) Critique doesn't mean "I hate it," it means "I want to think about this more on a critical level." It means "I love the puzzle pieces, why does the way they were put together not work for me? How could they have been done differently so that it would have worked for me?" Like I said a few weeks ago, while I don't want to actively add negativity to the fandom, I also don't really want to sit down and shut up if something isn't doing it for me if otherwise I love the thing; I want to figure out why it doesn't work. This is the flip side of "if you can't say anything positive, don't say anything at all" -- I'm not talking to Dave Filoni or the other showrunners (and I would never say any of this to the face of anyone at Lucasfilm), I'm sitting here talking to myself and to my friends about why the puzzle pieces don't quite come together for me. (And the bonus of me putting it on Tumblr is that I can actually find it again, because sometimes I do want to go back and see what I said about XYZ.)

If I'm not actively talking about all the things I love about Rebels or TCW it's because I don't particularly feel the need to justify why Thing works for me, because I already know it works for me. Or because I spent the first two years or so of Rebels and big chunks of TCW doing episode liveblogs, which are on the back end of my "Bedlam watches Rebels" and "Bedlam watches TCW" tags, and I don't feel the need to come back and say "I love the way XYZ happened" six or seven times. Or because I think it would be obvious because I've written something around a million words of fanfic about the two of them. Or because I have three Rebels tattoos and am a Rebels cosplayer, which obviously I don't really talk about on Tumblr but is something that I personally know. I mostly have not talked about The Bad Batch publicly (and only a little privately) because mostly it's not doing much that triggers strong feelings in me one way or another, though I do have the whole "why are these puzzle pieces not working for me, how would I have put them together differently" feel about parts of it.

As for Mando specifically -- look, Mando's fine. I understand why it appeals to a lot of people, even if I am not one of those people. I don't particularly find Grogu appealing either on a character or an aesthetic level. I find that for me personally the show varies wildly in quality from episode to episode; I find it to be a little too clever about itself in how it deals with both the world, its plot, its place in the saga, and its characters in a way drives me up the wall. It hits a couple of really specific things that are huge do not wants for me and some of that is on a shallow note of "I don't like how they do their Twi'lek prosthetics" and some of it is "I don't particularly like the aesthetics" and some of it is a weightier "I'm confused about what the thematic points of the show are because they're all over the map" and yes, some of it is, "I don't like how Mando intersects or does not intersect with other parts of the saga." Or the way that it gets valorized for being live action rather than animated by a lot of the fandom and then gets elevated over the other parts of the saga that I care about the most (TCW and Rebels). I've talked in the past about how Mando genuinely made me feel gaslit, even if that was no one's intention and thus was not actually gaslighting; it just managed to hit on my specific issues. I don't talk about Mando that much because mostly I just don't care and when I do talk about it it's because it managed to trip into something I do care about.

And if I sound particularly cranky right now, it's because every time I say something critical and it starts making tracks out of my usual circles, someone comes in to go "wow! you must hate Star Wars!" or "wow! you care a lot about [aesthetic choice]! why would you care about that!" or "wow! you're an idiot for thinking XYZ would happen/not happen!" or variations thereof. I've been in fandom for twenty years. I've been in this fandom since George W. Bush was president. I know how it goes. I'm going to reiterate the post I made after the Mando finale:

in any expanded canon, people are going to have different deal-breakers on where they can suspend their disbelief and it’s not a judgment on you and yours if theirs is different than yours. nor does it automatically say something bad about them! it just means y’all have different priorities and that’s fine! neither one of you should be jumping down each other’s throat because their line in the sand is “this contradicts something in previous canon” and yours is “the CGI is unconvincing.”

I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of condescension (rather than hostility, which tbh is par for the course in SW so I just tune it out) recently and like…people can have different priorities. it’s fine. they’re not stupid for having their priority be “I don’t like the prosthetics” when your priority is “character A was mean to character B.” don’t worry, Lucasfilm isn’t listening to any of us.

#this was the first thing I saw when I turned my computer on for Sunday zoom #so I am perhaps a LITTLE crankier than I would have been otherwise #sorry about that #bedlam replies

[bedlamsbard]

finally watched Friday’s Bad Batch episode and I just...aggressively do not care anymore. we’re at Mando levels of me not caring. like, I’ll keep watching, I just...don’t. care.

#I cannot be convinced these people are competent AT ALL #'we helped the padawan escape' YOU CHASED A TERRIFIED TEENAGER INTO THE WOODS #also you stole his character development but that's on the writers #bedlam watches the bad batch #bb battle scars #also I'm tired of seeing galaxy's edge tie-ins lol #unfortunately the thing I suddenly decided to get fanatical about is disney's other big mega-property lol