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Notes -
I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
I don’t disagree that New Star Wars is pretty bad, but is it any worse than Marvel garbage, than Amazon’s Lord of the Rings, than the awful three Fantastic Beasts / Harry Potter movies, or than countless other recent bad genre fiction media? I don’t really think so.
And I’ll say something - Andor was one of the best shows I watched last year, and that was ‘Kathleen Kennedy Disney Star Wars’. As for the garbage, well, I don’t have to watch it. Andor’s existence is good enough.
I've got to be honest, I was fully expecting this to be yet another "trust me bro, it's good I swear", but that was actually great.
I might actually give this show a watch now and I watch damn little TV.
Be prepared to give it a little investment; IMHO it doesn't get good until episode 3 and it doesn't get consistently good until episode 6. But the whole back half of the season makes the uneven start worth it.
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The first couple episodes start a little slow but it definitely ramps into a very emotionally intense show, where on one hand the stakes are very low for a Star Wars series(no planets getting blown up, no last surviving Jedi is on the run), but on the other hand the stakes feel the highest they've ever been because the viewers know the later success of the Rebellion depends entirely on what happens with these early Rebels.
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