Spoilers Star Wars: Andor season 2

For those who liked the music from the wedding

Trump tariffs put pressure on Harris Tweed makers and luxury supply chain

Wont somebody think of the spiders!?

Herschel said:

Instead there's tons of rage posting because everything isn't aimed directly at them. I guess that's just the narcissism enhanced by social media.

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Whilst I would say Acolyte was aimed more at 18-30 year-olds than "kids", I'd agree this is a major issue, perhaps the major issue, with all SW criticism/discussion. It's particularly bad if a show isn't popular with the Gen X audience, because a small-but-incredibly-loud subsection of that audience gets very, very astonishingly angry if any SW exists that isn't aimed at them, and is at best churlish and dismissive, if not openly hateful and wishing ill on it. Luckily for Andor, its "Premium TV" approach to SW was popular with that age range among others.

Ruin Explorer said:

Whilst I would say Acolyte was aimed more at 18-30 year-olds than "kids"

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I would say it was aimed at people with an obsessive knowledge of Jedi lore, but are not locked into a”Jedi are always right” mentality. Two sets with a very small overlap. My partner couldn’t follow it because she wasn’t sufficiently well versed in the Jedi religion.

Paul Farquhar said:

I would say it was aimed at people with an obsessive knowledge of Jedi lore, but are not locked into a”Jedi are always right” mentality. Two sets with a very small overlap. My partner couldn’t follow it because she wasn’t sufficiently well versed in the Jedi religion.

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I think you're confusing a failure of storytelling with where it was aimed.

I don't they intentionally failed to explain the Jedi religion properly, but I think the fragmented way they told the story (which was intentional as a stylistic element) meant that you didn't get what was going on until incredibly late unless you were indeed, a Jedi religion "expert" (in which case you saw this coming miles out), and even when you did potentially get it, they'd fragmented things enough that it could still have been confusing.

There are definitely legitimate criticisms of The Acolyte and I think the most cutting ones revolve around the approach it took to storytelling. The same story told in a more straightforward way I think would have been significant more popular and accessible (and raised less ire from the Gen X crowd). What's particularly sad/funny it probably has the best lightsaber and Force combat that Star Wars has ever done outside a videogame (and even a lot of haters acknowledge that, oddly enough). Unfortunately many of the actual criticisms tended to involve the word "woke" (either literally or by implication) or were just rather silly (like calling out "bad acting" or "bad writing" as if that didn't also apply to The Mandalorian and Ahsoka to a perhaps greater extent, but many of the same people praised on those points).

I don't know if I agree that the overlap is "very small" though - but I do feel like there's a generational divide. People who were absolutely locked in on the OT and thought it was amazing do somewhat tend to have a "Jedi == good guy" viewpoint, which Lucas didn't even really have back then, but is the obvious reading on those movies, and was reflected in the first EU. Whereas people raised more on the PT tend to be like "Jedi == questionable".

(Of course we might not have seen the last of The Acolyte's story threads and characters - I'd be unsurprised to see some of them turn up in future decades, especially in animated shows.)

Paul Farquhar said:

I would say it was aimed at people with an obsessive knowledge of Jedi lore, but are not locked into a”Jedi are always right” mentality. Two sets with a very small overlap. My partner couldn’t follow it because she wasn’t sufficiently well versed in the Jedi religion.

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I think it might read that way because it was about a different era. This was their first video medium story for The High Republic Era. They were trying to build that Era, and have had several of the characters referenced during those novels and comics, including the incident that cut the planet off that they referred to.

I actually liked the way it was told, just not the way it was chopped up and edited. That, I think, was the major failure here- not that it was told Rashomon like.

Just while we're on this tangent, Acolyte always felt like a YA show to me.

Anyway, now back to the Andor memes...