I finished watching The Acolyte last week. Not the week I wrote this, but the week prior. Pretty much two weeks prior to the day this went up. I was watching it in chunks to match up with the Patreon episodes of A More Civilized Age, so I watched shortly after episode 5 came out and then the Friday after episode 8 came out. I’ll admit I struggled a bit with the show initially, but one of the things Austin Walker said in the first episode of AMCA’s covered of the show reframed the entire thing for me in a way that made it much easier to enjoy: The Acolyte is a YA show. Once I started treating it with the same level of seriousness and mindset as I treated most of the CW-type YA shows I’ve seen in my life (which is not many, to be honest), the whole thing felt way more enjoyable (which even applied in retrospect, given that I started listening to the podcast episode minutes after I finished episode 4 of The Acolyte). Once you stop expecting deep character motivations for every decision and can silence the voice in your head comparing the show to Andor, it’s actually quite enjoyable. I’d call it a good show, even, in the way that chips are a good food. It’s not the most substantive thing out there and you can easily find issues to pick at if you want to, but it’s mostly fun enough that none of that really matters. To once again paraphrase Austin Walker from multiple episodes of AMCA, there was enough interesting stuff going on most of the time that I didn’t really care about the stuff that didn’t work (with a few notable exceptions). All-in-all, I’d definitely recommend the show to anyone who likes Star Wars and especially to those interested in stories about how the Jedi (individually) aren’t always good people and how the institution as whole is pretty rotten.
Continue readingTV Show
The Rising Stakes In Star Wars: Rebels Season 2
Last night, a few episodes ahead of where I’m at in the podcast A More Civilized Age, I finished Season 2 of Star Wars: Rebels. At this point, I’ve finally caught up to the latest episode of AMCA and will now need to slow down my watching speed to match the podcast’s pace. Which is incredibly tough given where Season 2 ends and how badly I want to immediately stop writing this blog post so I can watch another few episodes at least. Maybe a whole season. Wouldn’t be the first time I sat down to dip my toe into something and wound up watching the whole season instead. I can’t really afford to do that, in terms of my need for sleep and mental, emotional, and physical rest, so it’s probably a good thing that I have something preventing me from diving into season 3. Even though I really want to just turn the show on and keep watching until I’m out of seasons to watch. Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stay strong and pace myself alongside AMCA like I originally planned to. I haven’t been this invested in a show in ages, not with the same level of emotional investment and burning curiosity, anyway. I mean, I’ve watched plenty of anime over the last couple years by sitting down each week to watch the newest episodes as each of them was released, but I was mostly just enjoying the ride. This time, with Star Wars: Rebels, I’m dying to know what happens next. Waiting is a genuine struggle and that’s saying something because I rarely struggle with impatience.
Continue readingStar Wars Rebels Is Exceeding My Expectations
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.
Continue readingWatching Star Wars: The Clone Wars Grow Up Was A Nice Experience
I finished the original six season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars just the other day. I’ve been watching along as I listen to A More Civilized Age and I finally hit the point where, for a few years, this show had come to an end. It would eventually get a seventh season to help wrap up a show that absolutely should not have been cut off at the knees like this one was (the last few arcs of the show were some of the best Star Wars I’d ever seen and might have held the top position if not for Andor), but no one knew that at the time. This was just where the show ended, somewhat abruptly and in a bit of a lackluster manner. Now, I’ve yet to listen to the AMCA episodes covering the end of season 6, so I might change my mind once I hear someone else’s opinion on it, but I wasn’t super interested in the final Yoda arc. I feel like that time could have been better spent on wrapping up some other unanswered questions beyond “why did Yoda turn into a little, isolated gremlin on Dagobah” and “how did Yoda learn to become a Force Ghost,” which didn’t really need answers. Or at least I feel like they didn’t need answers. That said, this sort of lack-luster end to the show feels very “Clone Wars” as a whole, given its rather inconsistent quality and the more extreme peaks and valleys it developed in its later seasons. I’ve gotta give it point for consistency in that regard. And, you know, acknowledge that I don’t regret spending all this time watching five and a half full seasons of an increasingly well-made cartoon.
Continue readingGetting Emotional With Andor
One of my favorite parts of Andor, besides being able to watch it all in one sitting so that the only anxiety I had to deal with involved the actual episodes unfolding on my TV, is the range of emotion shown by all the characters. We get people who are angry, sad, happy, and so on. We get the whole range of human emotion. Which is remarkable because Star Wars typically isn’t interesting in the emotional lives of its characters beyond the broad arcs that’re involved in the stories being told and the few emotions allowed to them by their dark/light alignment. Anger for the dark side, giving way to fear on occasion with a few other moments mixed in throughout the whole series, and hope for the light side, occasionally giving way to sadness and a few other spikes that are quickly tamped down or moved past in the series at large. Sure, some of this can be chalked up to the time limit set by big films and the heroic or villainous depictions of the characters in the movies, but these limits extend to the shows as well. Even when we do see an unaligned emotion in most of the shows, it is usually something a character must overcome or some foreshadowing that a character is destined for the light or the dark. So, when we got to see all of the characters in Andor in their feelings, acting out because of their feelings, and existing outside of the usual dark/light feelings assignments, I couldn’t help but get caught up in them as well.
Continue readingI Watched All Of Andor In A Single Sitting
This past weekend, instead of playing a ton of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, I decided to bank some more episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, got wrecked by the end of the fifth season, realized the podcast I’m listening to as I watch along (as separate activities) pivots immediately after those episodes to watching Andor, and then wound up binging all of Andor until 1 in the morning on a work night. This was not a great choice, to be honest, but my “a couple episodes” turned into “I NEED to watch another episode” and that was pretty much it for me. My initial plan for an uninterrupted Sunday (since two players of my usual Sunday TTRPG were out, I cancelled our session) was to spend most of it making some advancements in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth so I’d have more to write about this week, but I got carried away by how amazing Andor is. This shouldn’t be news to most people, given how much everyone raved about it back in the fall of 2022 when it came out, but even I was surprised by how good it was and I had a front seat to everyone raving about it. I had high expectations going in, expectations that had been raised when I saw that A More Civilized Age (a podcast about Star Wars media that I’ve grown to love dearly) pivoted away from their plans to focus entirely on Andor, and they were exceeded in almost every single way.
Continue readingBIGTOP BURGER Serves A Hefty Meal Of Absurd Humor, Plot Twists, And Foreshadowing
One of my favorite YouTube treats is watching the BIGTOP BURGER series by Ian Worthington (aka Worthikids on YouTube). There’s no real schedule for releases, so it’s always a delightful surprise to see one of my YouTube notifications telling me there’s a new video to watch. And while I enjoy all of Worthikids’ animations, the slow-rolling BIGTOP BURGER series is my favorite. This YouTube show features Worthikid’s incredibly stylized art, expressive animation, made-to-order music, and combined visual and spoken humor, making the entire show an incredible feat given that he does everything but the voice acting himself (and he even does some of that himself). While the story might seem incredibly basic, perhaps even looking like a mere formality required to create a platform on which the jokes of Season 1 are built, the recently completed (and even more recently compiled) Season 2 reveals a slowly building narrative that has been foreshadowed from the very beginning. I won’t say much about it right now, because I think you should absolutely take thirty-two minutes out of your day to watch both seasons before coming back here (because there will absolutely be spoilers below this paragraph), but I was completely caught off guard by how well-crafted the narrative is now that we have more of it revealed to us.
Continue readingLife, Survival, and A Strange New World In Scavengers Reign
Every so often, I find some new bit of media that feels so unlike everything else I’ve seen that it fills me with wonder. When I was a kid, it was Lord of the Rings and Narnia. The Legend of Zelda. Halo. Nowadays, now that I’ve read more and seen more, it happens less frequently. Since I studied literature and storytelling, it is very easy to draw lines between things, to find the parallels and the threads that bind it all together since even the most original works still draw their ideas from a well of experiences and past media exposure. Once you know how to look, it gets easy to see echoes of the past in the stories of the present. Which isn’t a bad thing, mind you. All storytellers take the things they’ve seen, heard, or experienced and use them as fuel to power their creativity, taking it all and turning it into something new that still reverberates with their past influences. That is true of all stories, no matter what. Sometimes, though, the story being told brings in new things that inspire wonder if only because they’re just so different. Reading the first novel in The Stormlight Archive was one such experience like this. It was a fantasy world filled with creatures and basic worldbuilding conceits that were entirely unlike anything I’d seen before. An entire world that seemed to have developed from crustaceans’ and shelled creatures. Reading my first Discworld book had a similar effect, but for the method of storytelling rather than the worldbuilding. And now I’ve experienced it again, with the show Scavengers Reign.
Continue readingVox Machina Season 2 Is As Violently Messy As This Post Is Meandering
After many months of waiting (I promised to watch with a friend and I do my best to keep my word when I’ve got the choice), I finally watched Season 2 of Vox Machina. These twelve episodes, clearly broken into three-episode chunks with particularly hefty cliffhangers meant to hook the viewer at the end of each weekly chunk of episodes (at least, you know, when the episodes where initially released), cover the beginning of the longest arc of the streamed Critical Role Campaing 1 tabletop game, from the arrival of the Chroma Conclave (an alliance of Ancient Dragons) to the climatic battle against the the first of the four Ancient Dragons that has conquered the kingdom the heroes called home. While much of the first season’s changes were made to adapt the show from a streamed tabletop game to a cartoon, much of the second season’s changes were made to make the story as a whole flow better (on top of continuing the changes required to adapt the story). It even mixes up a lot of the individual story beats from the streamed game of Dungeons and Dragons 5e, but it tells a much cleaner story in doing so. Over all, I have to say I like the cartoon more than the streamed show. Sure, watching a bunch of professional actors play dungeons and dragons is fun, but it is also super time-consuming. They really belabor the various plots, big and small, of a tabletop game in a way that is fun to watch as an on-going streamed game, but not really something that would make an interesting or particularly engaging story in any other medium. While I do hold a special place in my heart for the 100 episodes of Critical Roles Campaign 1 that I watched, I think that adapting the story to a cartoon has allowed it to become the interesting and engaging story I remember rather than the somewhat long and belabored story I have been unwilling to watch a second time and unable to push myself to finish.
Continue readingI Am Glad I Watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunner, Even If I’m Still Dead On My Feet Days Later.
I watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners with some friends last weekend and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I feel like I should have something to say about it now, days later, beyond what my friend and I talked about after the show ended, but I’m not sure I do. So far, all that’s really changed since 1am Saturday morning when the final end-credits bit played is the intensity of my feelings about the show, and those haven’t changed in a uniform way. They’ve grown less and more intense seemingly at random, maybe following my ability to give my attention to reflecting on the show. Which is something I haven’t had much of a chance to do between all of my weekend plans, the ceaseless exhaustion following several busy weeks, and the recognition that I have at least two more busy weeks before my first chance to relax for a whole weekend. Now, as I do my best to parcel out my attention and spoons through a work day, I find my mind returning to the show and how I felt about it any time I’m not pushing thoughts of it away. Despite my desire to just focus on stuff like blogging, working on the next Infrared Isolation chapter or just paying attention in meetings.
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