Below are posts associated with the “Star Wars” franchise.
📚 bookblog: Victory's Price (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I tend to overthink media, and one thing I’ve been overthinking recently is whether books and radio are more ethical media than television and film, because I understand the former (perhaps naïvely) as involving less waste of resources for the sake of entertainment.
I bring this up not because I’m convinced by the argument (which I haven’t really thought through) but because the second season of Andor had me back on the side of television, because how else could you tell such a great story as that?
📚 bookblog: Shadow Fall (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
This took a while to get through for a book I enjoyed so much. It has Andor-level grittiness and complex characters and narratives that make it better than a lot of Star Wars stuff. The audiobook’s use of Star Wars music and sound effects is also a big plus. I’ve already checked out the final book in the trilogy so that it’s not another two years before I wrap it up!
🍿 movieblog: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
Had to watch this after finishing Andor, and I spent the first half of it being disappointed??? I thought I remembered this being one of my favorite Star Wars movies, but after the depth and maturity of its tv prequel, it feels kind of superficial.
The last few sequences won me back, though. Andor is the superior story, but this is a fine action movie and a marvelous piece of fanservice.
📺 tvblog: Andor Season 2 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
This was Star Wars at its best, and there is (unfortunately) no better time than now for it to come out.
I’ve wrestled a lot recently with the tension between my love for Star Wars and my aspiration toward non-violence. I don’t know that I agree with this series’s implicit argument that sometimes ugly things are necessary to make a better world, but I appreciate that it deals with that ugliness rather than just letting Luke blow up the Death Star without counting how many people that act of self-defense killed.
🎙️ radioblog: Star Wars: The Original Radio Drama (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
I think I got this in an NPR Humble Bundle, and I’ve been meaning to relisten to it for a while. It’s a real mix of good and bad: Thanks to John Williams and Ben Burtt, it’s got some great audio to work with; however, it does a lot of awkward “tell since we can’t show.” It sometimes feels like it’s reaching to fill in an extra four hours, but also it maybe demonstrates that Star Wars could maybe be a miniseries with some better writing?
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Acolyte
This was good! Not perfect: there were some rough edges, it’s hard to take some scenes seriously if you’ve watched The Good Place, and there’s a bad case of the Force working as the plot needs it to. Despite all that, though, I love the franchise leaning into a “actually, the Jedi kind of suck” story, and there were some interesting fight scenes and compelling story elements. Happy to see Star Wars experimenting like this… though, of course, it should be moving into the public domain so that everyone (not just Disney) can do that experimentation.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Ahsoka (Season 1)
The show started off strong, and there are lots of individual details that I liked (including a compelling dark Jedi who made lightsaber duels interesting again). However, by the end, it felt like a mishmash of fanservice, addressing plot threads from a show I haven’t seen, but then setting them up for a future movie instead of actually resolving them. So many decisions seemed to happen for the sake of plot or convenience, and it was kind of a slog to finish the dang thing.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️🖤🖤🖤 for The Mandalorian (Season 3)
I don’t even remember when this season ended, but it took a while to convince myself to get through it. The first season of this show was near-perfect, but it’s gotten dumber over time, and this season was particularly disappointing. It felt stuffed with fanservice and worldbuilding I didn’t care about, indecisive and self-contradictory, and like everything proceeded on the logic of plot. Makes me miss Andor.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron, by Alexander Freed
This book took me a while to get into. I gave up on the print version a year or three ago, and even the audiobook wasn’t doing great at capturing my attention for a while—I had to rush to finish this before it was due back to Libby. I’m glad that I stuck it out, though, because I liked what I got. I never read the X-Wing novels from the old EU, but I wanted something like what I imagined they were.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Star Wars: Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn
This book is one of the mainstays of the old Star Wars EU. I hadn’t read it in years, but after exploring some of the new canon and hearing the news about a likely remixing of it into a Dave Filoni movie, it seemed like a good time to revisit. The audiobook production was great, and even if I’m not planning to finish the trilogy, I enjoyed checking this title out again.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Star Wars: Bloodline, by Claudia Gray
I read (and listened to) a lot in the early months of this year and have hit a wall recently. This audiobook was a nice way to get back into reading; I’ve felt a hunger for Star Wars media recently, and this book came recommended on a podcast I’ve sampled. It’s fun to get more into the new canon: I thought this did a good job of setting up some of the Episode VII worldbuilding, and it reminded me of the fun I had reading through the old EU growing up.