#like pretty much the entire experience even though it's just mostly 'all aboard a shitty sky bus'

[vaguely-concerned]

The Mandalorian Chapter 13 reactions

Well, that was... well. in short I quite enjoyed some of what happened while din was there and I didn’t really care about what happened while he wasn’t there lol. I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that I just don’t care for the episodes dave filoni writes for this show, which is simply a matter of taste I guess. 

(if you loved this episode wholeheartedly -- probably look away now, I’m going to be a bit of a downer about it and I don’t want to shit on your joy haha)

- let’s just get this out of the way first: there’s a lot of stuff around rosaria dawson and transphobia in real life and yeah, of course that affects how I watch the show. I don’t even want to talk that much about ahsoka in this because of it. she was not that good in the role, after seeing how it played out I don’t think the character needed to be in this show at all, and she should never have gotten the role in the first place and that’s about it for what I’ve got to say. 

- dave filoni consistently does things with din’s characterization that feels off and weird to me, subtly out of place with what we see in other episodes (he’s... ruder? more short tempered/cocky/actively or aggressively interpersonal? more prone to express himself directly than he is usually? idk how to describe it but filoni!din always feels one step to the left of what he should be and I’m so hyper-attuned to this character that when something’s a bit iffy with him it throws everything else off haha. it feels like a shallower, more convenient read on him and I don’t like it)  

I also think filoni is almost too familiar with and in love with the source material sometimes? “A Mandalorian and a Jedi? They’ll never see it coming” is undeniably a great line that echoes in decades of deep lore and so on, but dave my good man din had no real idea what a jedi even is until literally this morning. we, the audience, know about this long and storied history, but unless ahsoka spent the afternoon explaining it to him din still only knows the faint outlines of it, he has no personal experience of or attachment to it. it’s not bad, as such, it just rings false to the character based tone of the show for me personally 

- positivity break: baby sitting perched on the dashboard to be close to papa while they’re in hyperspace........sd sdfskdjhfdsakjksdhfkasjd  

also this is some full on madonna and child in the manger shit and I am LIVING for it (odds he’s crying quietly behind the helmet here? pretty damn good if you ask me). the mundanity of what’s essentially the shitty spartan bathroom of the razor crest on one side contrasted with the light and tenderness and love on the other? amazing, a perfect microcosm of what this show does with combining the grittier everyday down to earth stuff in the star wars universe with myth and wonder and magic and through it elevating both

 - the idea of having an iconique samurai/sword duel standoff and a western standoff going on simultaneously is genuinely inspired, but in action it didn’t really work for me. (the sword duel stuff needs these moments of stillness with sudden outbursts of violence and then stillness again, the western standoff needs mounting tension until it’s nearly unbearable, and cutting between them the way they did you sort of didn’t get either to its full potential. again it’s a cool idea, though, I hope someone picks it up and does it better at some point)

- seeing a jedi and a mandalorian wander together through a burned out wasteland left desolate by greed and warfare should have hit me harder than it did but for some reason it didn’t, idk. thematically sound, though, I like it a lot on the metaphor level

- I LOVE that pure beskar makes a specific sound, and that it’s an almost ethereal noise like the high clear chime of a distant bell. also now din has something to fight light sabers with that isn’t the dark saber which makes me so happy because you guys I do not want him to be the mand’alor. keep that funky laser sword away from my dad, apart from killing him at the end that is literally the most boring way to end his arc pls do NOt 

- wow they really went in hard on the samurai stuff in this one huh! there is a part of my mchanzo-loving heart that thrives on seeing a space cowboy and a space samurai team up, *wild otp-fuelled whisper* they’re twin genres inextricably entwined okay they belong together if you see this spreadsheet I’ve made over here -- 

- even knowing it was just a trick I felt such intense distress seeing the signet pauldron away from din. like the attachment I have to these pieces of metal because That Armour Means Dad... wild  

- they really chose the dumbest name possible for the baby huh fsajdfhsaj I agree with din his name is ‘kid’ now (eh just give me a while to get used to it probably I’ll come around)

also... you know what I’ve said before about shrinking the big unknowable galaxy ‘the mandalorian’ has been setting up? wow did they do that big time in this one, and it makes me feel decidedly :/. why does the baby have to come from the jedi temple, is there truly no other tradition of force users in the entire galaxy he could be from? WHY do you have to pull thrawn into this when most people watching this show won’t even know why he’s such a big deal? is this a stealth tease for a rebels sequel? if so why spend an entire episode of this show that only gets eight precious episodes a season on it??   

- on a more fun positive note: baby’s clothes are clean again, so it’s confirmed that din does wash them (and I guess that he does have some means of washing clothes aboard the razor crest!). I loved... most of the dad and baby stuff in this one, but then don’t I always I’m easy to please that way haha (the ‘playing catch’ sequence felt a bit off to me but I don’t know why. din being like ‘he’s so stubborn’ wasn’t... eh. didn’t land right. “that would be a first” was fun tho lol) 

- having ahsoka state the baby’s feelings out loud like that felt... weird? and also kind of unnecessary in parts, like yeah he’s a baby who’s been passed along to different groups of strangers and experimented on by empire scientists, you don’t need to spell it out for me that he’s been scared and lonely, or at least spell it out more interestingly? it’s such blunt force storytelling where it didn’t need to be? there are more elegant ways to get the same things across, I am absolutely convinced 

- ...wow while I was watching the episode I was mostly like ‘okay this is Fine I can go along with it’ but seeing what I’m thinking about in hindsight... yeah probably my least favourite episode of this show full stop haha, it took the spot from chapter 5 which was also a filoni ep

- I did 100% genuinely adore the whole part of din approaching the town and meeting the magistrate. consistently hiding the baby behind his cape and his arm? being deliberately, teeth-grindingly dispassionate with everyone, just giving them nothing? getting to see a bit of professional bounty hunter din again? wonderful in every way, I love this man  

- lots of meaningful shots of baby in the middle with a mando on one side and a jedi on the other, it’s almost like they’re setting up some Themes here lol 

- ...do you think din told ahsoka about either the rhino-levitating or the force choking. because girl I don’t think not training him is going to make this just go away haha, he just won’t know what he’s doing  

- it makes me so sad that baby connects his force powers with being abused :( (also a heartbreaking sign of just how much he cared about din from the very beginning, since he used it on the mudhorn to save him anyway ;________; was that like. literally the first time he sensed kindness and affection in anyone in like twenty five years or... ) 

- I understand why ahsoka would feel this way because of her past and specific traumas, but tbh attachment in a baby? probably a good thing, he doesn’t really have the higher brain functions to cultivate non-attachment yet and needs a safe figure because again. he is a baby. 

good on her for realizing it’s not a task she can take on both for the baby’s sake and her own, and also that din is that baby’s Dad though. the way she smiled at the end watching them leave seemed vaguely hopeful/had a little bit of wonder in it, like maybe she felt the potential for something good there, something she couldn’t conceptualize from her background but could sense the tentative outlines of anyway?  

(also so much pressure on a lil bb to decide his path... his dilemmas should be limited to what colour socks he wants to wear today not the course of his entire life :( I know he’s a magic baby but.......) 

- idk maybe I’ll find more affection of this episode through rewatches, you never know

#star wars #the mandalorian #the mandalorian spoilers #the mandalorian meta

[ask-the-dancing-demon]

Alright, time for an explanation

Or as best of an explanation I can give at this point.

So, yeah I’ve been pretty much absent from this blog for like what? 2 years? 2 and a half?? I’m not sure of the exact time frame, but needless to say, it’s been a hot minute.

So, where to start?

Well, I should probably say why I got so sluggish with this whole thing.

So, one reason is that I had started working as I had some tuition I needed to pay off and just to get some income in general. The hours , though supposed to be part-time, got weird. Like, work 8-10 hours one day and an hour and a half the next. This not only made my pay really fucked up, but also (and more importantly) had me just too dead to do anything else once I got home.

In fact, even my days off were just me resting and not really wanting to do any big art projects. Which brings me to my next reason:

If all of you who’ve been here remember where we left off, I was working my way up to revealing a very important character. And how I wanted to do it, was I wanted to have this entire comic laid out to introduce him the way I wanted to, drop some exposition, and set up future character arcs.

However, the little project balloon up a little too much. And by a little too much, I mean it took ages just for one strip of panels. Like a couple of weeks for like 5 panels-which there were 5 panels for each part, and there ended up being more 20 parts- I also had very little skill/experience with making anything in a comic structure (I still do, but I’m branching out and am better at it) so everything is in a top-down format and it added to how time-consuming it all was.

So, with everything moving at a snail’s pace, and the number of people coming aboard to see what this blog had to offer I started getting anxious about doing anything on here knowing that the more time I stalled, the more I was just disappointing everyone here. And then, the project ended up needing more panels than I was anticipating, therefore extending my workload tenfold. At some point, that anxiety spread to what I was working on and I could barely focus on what I was doing and kept worrying about how much I wasn’t getting done, how I wasn’t able to do anything else, all the details I was trying to put in that weren’t going well , etc., etc.

Eventually I just kinda sat around worrying about what I was gonna do about this whole thing while simultaneously getting absolutely nothing done.

And then that, combined with my shitty work situation making me practically depressed basically had me sitting on the whole project barely touching tumblr at all. for like two years. I mostly just kept to DeviantArt for a lot of my stuff.

Of course, during those two years, Bendy and the Ink Machine continued, ended, and is getting another game. And through all that time with the progression of the plot and such, I kept getting more and more headcanons and ideas that all tied into this blog’s AU

But I couldn’t show them, because they would be spoilers and would take place after what I was doing. Which meant I’d have to do that first. Which brought back the problems I mentioned before.

Now, even my DeviantArt content is starting to dry up, because of all the things I have to withhold until the stuff is finished.

Finally, I just go fed up with putting the ideas on hold and not getting shit done. And I finally came to the conclusion that I had been too inexperienced to try taking on a project that fricking big and honestly shame on me for that

So, here’s what I’ve decided.

I went ahead and decided to condense the project down to something that I could accomplish. I was originally going to have this character exit at the end, and only sometimes be available to for asks, but the amount of work that entail, if I wanted to get the points I wanted across, would basically put me back to square one. So, instead of doing that, everyone will get to ask him all the stuff they want in order to further this story.

Also, the way I’ll be doing answers will be slightly different; in that it’ll be a bit less of just answering questions with a bit of lore thrown in, and more of asks helping to guide the story. I’ll still give you guys a lot of fun input, though don’t worry! ;)

Next, the characters won’t be quite the same as we left of. You know, having a thousand and two ideas bouncing around your head for a while tends to lead to a few changes in how you do these characters. There’s been a good deal of character development, and a few dynamics have changed, so these characters may act a bit differently than expected.(how many times can i say characters in one paragraph???)

Next, fair warning about how the comic will look. I did have a few parts of it finished before trimming it down. Some parts had all the shading and dialogue and stuff finished, while some parts just had some lineart done (i did lineart for the fudkigng background why did i do that that was such a bad idea D:) Some panels will have the original lineart from 2 years ago-that i did not touch outside of cleaning- and others will be my recent style, so it might look kinda wonky with my old art and current skill right next to each other so just bear with me on it.

And finally, the last thing I need to say is that the amount I had condensed everything down to is almost finished- like, ready to go up within the next week finished. Hell, it could maybe even be finished within the next few days(but probably not because i nitpick like a mofo so it’ll probably be next week)

Sorry for the wait, all this time guys, I promise your patience will be rewarded

I might open the asks for anyone who has anymore questions for me, about this, or about the blog. What do you guys think?

#mun speaks #shut up grem #thats a lot of words 0.0