As part of my on-going quest to listen to all of A More Civilized Age, I finally started watching Star Wars Rebels and I gotta say that I’m hooked. I’ve actually been watching episodes of the show to unwind in the evenings rather than just to keep ahead of where I’m at in the podcast. I’ve still got my problems with the show, sure, but it currently sounds a lot more fun to me than more endlessly working through repetitive open-world stuff in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which isn’t saying much because that stuff is so boring that I fell asleep five minutes into trying to play through the open-world portions of the ninth chapter and haven’t been able to convince myself to go back since then. I know my runway is just about to disappear since AMCA only made it through the first season before they shifted to playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic so they would stay compliant with the various union rules about struck productions, companies, and media from last year. I’ve got the three-part season finale left to watch and I’m probably going to watch it tonight since I’m way too tired to force myself to work through more boring desert-y open world junk in Rebirth. I’d just immediately fall asleep if I tried that and I need to make it until at least ten or eleven tonight before I give up on staying awake.

The only complaint I’ve got so far is that the weird texturing on the animation sometimes brings me up short. The biggest example of this is the young protagonist’s gloves. Every time we see Ezra’s hands, my brain immediately tells me he is wearing fingerless gloves because of the shift in texture from the palm and back of the gloves to the fingers makes it look that way. The color, however, doesn’t match his skin tone at all, and his fingers don’t have any kind of markings or nails that would show them to be actual fingers, so he must be wearing gloves with fingers that are either beneath his fingerless gloves or still a part of the gloves but done in such a way as to purposefully make them look like a separate glove. Neither of these answers are particularly satisfying, unfortunately, and my reaction to seeing them is always enough to break my focus on what is happening on the screen. Thankfully, the show doesn’t really zoom in on Ezra’s hands all that often, so I’m able to ignore it most of the time. The rest of the time, though, they zoom in on his hands during dramatic moments and I’m so distracted by the weird rubbery texture of the entire show (and his hands especially) that I immediately lose my focus.

Other than that and some weird characterization that seems to be written intentionally (which is why I’m not complaining about it and am instead reserving judgment until I’ve seen the protagonist either grow out of it or fail to grow out of it), the show’s fun to watch. The droid, Chopper, has huge gremlin energy and that’s a fun characterization to watch, given that he’s way more adversarial than R2-D2 ever is. The entire cast’s family dynamic is on-point, especially as a found family with some inter-family tension that slowly shifts as everyone grows more and more comfortable with each other. Since Rebels stays focused on this little crew so far, we’re able to get a lot more focused characterization than we ever really got in Clone Wars, where we’d rarely see the same characters on screen for more than an arc or two in a row. Plus, Rebels isn’t trapped with a fixed end already laid out, so the characters in Rebels can grow and change in a way that Clone Wars never seemed to manage, despite one of the main characters not being present in Revenge of the Sith at all. I mean, sure, Ahsoka changed over the course of the show, but the show wasn’t about that the way that Rebels (season 1, at least) is about the characters we see it and how they change based on their experiences as a group.

I’m incredibly excited to watch more. I’ve just got to replay Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and listen to all the related episodes of AMCA first, before I can return to it, and then I’m eventually going to catch up to where the podcast is now and be forced to slow down so I don’t get too far ahead. Which can be excruciating at times, since all I really want to do right now is settle down on the couch and binge something for a few hours so I can give my exhausted mind some rest. And give it something fun and interesting to watch so long as I strategically look away from the screen any time we get a close-up shot of Ezra’s glove-fingers. Looking at them is, to me, the visual form of fingernails scraping down a blackboard. It makes my eyeballs uncomfortable in a deep, deep part of my brain that I can’t really do anything about other than shudder and try to pull my eyes away. So hopefully they either give Ezra an outfit change in season 2 or at least stop zooming in on his hands in tense or dramatic moments. That’s all I need to properly relax and enjoy this show.