#ashowka negativity

[hailperseusjackson]

the way that, if you took away her armor and the two or three lines referencing it, you would literally never know that sabine was a mandalorian in the ahsoka show. filoni completely stripped her of her culture (and personality) and never gave her a meaningful scene talking about the destruction of mandalore or her family. all in favor of giving her a bad and poorly executed padawan storyline, because apparently a character can’t be interesting unless they’re a jedi

[bisexualbeckett]

the fact that the Ahsoka show is bad and came out on my birthday is a hate crime against me personally

[hailperseusjackson]

i think i pinpointed one of my issues with the interactions between hera and sabine so far (and with the rebels characters currently not present). there’s no feeling of that shared history between them. everything they all went through and everything we saw in rebels, it just didn’t feel like it was there or like it ever happened.

filoni and others involved w the show are trying to make it accessible to average viewers who may not have seen all of clone wars or rebels. (which if you haven’t seen rebels, please I’m begging you, please go watch it). Which, it’s good to cater to a more general audience! stories should stand on their own! but even if i was watching as a casual viewer, i would walk away from these first two eps thinking that sabine and hera had WAY more history with ahsoka than they do with each other.

we see the mural sabine painted of the ghost crew, see the holo of ezra, have dialogue where hera suggests ahsoka go get sabine’s help, but there’s not a lot there to suggest that hera and sabine have a deeper relationship. we don’t even get kanan or zeb’s names mentioned! so casual viewers will be like ‘huh wonder who those other people in the painting are.’

by not talking about the absent ghost crew members or their shared history, hera and sabine feel like strangers. hera’s best scene so far was with chopper, and that’s bc her dialogue suggests that she has history with his shenanigans. even with sabine’s personal history, there was exactly one (1)!!!! mention of her being mandalorian. the rest of the focus has been on this ridiculous jedi padawan arc, once again suggesting more history with ahsoka. all sabine and hera’s mentions and talk of jedi all revolve around ahsoka (except for a tiny bit of ezra), even though the two jedi they spent the most time around and knew well were kanan and ezra.

i’m not saying they needed to infodump about rebels to the wider audience, but completely brushing over the events that happened in their original media makes these characters feel stiff, it’s not fair to them, and it’s an insult to the animated rebels show.

[hailperseusjackson]

i’ve seen a few arguments now in support of the sabine padawan/jedi storyline that talk about her reaching her full potential, or ‘of course it makes sense bc she’s been working towards this the whole time,’ things akin to ‘isn’t it great that her story is complete now that she’s a jedi.’ now look. I’m not a fan of the sabine jedi storyline regardless, but i could have (maybe) been swayed by a well written sabine padawan plot.

but i think what’s irking me about this is that sabine was ALREADY a complete character!!!!! she’s a competent and formidable mandalorian warrior! she’s an artist! she’s really smart and handy and uses those skills for good but also used them to build terrible mandalorian-killing weapons for the empire because she was prideful and ambitious when she was younger! she butts heads with kanan many times bc of his jedi ideologies! she has a complicated relationship with her mandalorian family but she loves them and she loves her planet and culture! sabine didn’t need a jedi storyline to be a complete character. if it had been well done, it could’ve added another layer to her character. but we never dig into her motivations, why she wants this, so it didn’t add anything to her at all, and the way it was executed ultimately stripped her of everything that made her her.

[hailperseusjackson]

ok ok no. in what world would hera use the example of “i bet your master found you difficult at times” when talking to ahsoka about her tough relationship with sabine, instead of saying something like “i know kanan found it difficult to train ezra at times”. Like??? the centering of the rebels dialogue around ahsoka is so frustrating.

I understand it’s the ahsoka show, so of course there’s going to be callbacks to ahsoka’s past. but not allowing the rebels characters to also talk about each other and their pasts isn’t fair and feels out of character. again, i get trying to cater to general audiences, but people aren’t going to suddenly lose the plot if you mention something specific to rebels

[hailperseusjackson]

real talk though, the culmination of ezra’s character arc in the rebels finale is one of the most heartachingly beautiful and fulfilling things i’ve ever seen, it never fails to make me cry.

rebels fans have been waiting five years! to find ezra and see him reunite with his family. in-universe, ezra himself has been waiting a whole decade to be found and return home. and to have it FINALLY happen, only to give us the most lackluster, anticlimactic, emotionless reunions? and then to not even show him meeting kanan’s son either? it’s cheap and lazy writing/directing, and it’s just so disrespectful to fans who have waited so long for it.

[hailperseusjackson]

“I never really thought about how much I missed”…. I’m sorry. what???????? you’re telling me ezra was missing for TEN FUCKING YEARS and never ONCE thought about all that he was missing? or what his family was up to?? absolutely fake and ooc.

[hailperseusjackson]

making sabine force sensitive is one, a stupid writing choice, and two, SO fucking disrespectful to kanan’s character, who would’ve absolutely noticed if sabine was force sensitive

[hailperseusjackson]

filoni really deserves jail for what he’s done to Sabine. the padawan storyline has done nothing for her character and on top of that he’s made her incompetent and taken away so much of her fighting ability it’s infuriating

[hailperseusjackson]

maybe it’ll get better but right now, hera feels SO flat and it’s so fucking upsetting. i don’t think mary elizabeth winstead is doing a terrible job, but she’s also not blowing me out of the water. and part of that i think is the dialogue she’s been given so far, it just feels meh. but also the scene where ahsoka tells her she thinks that ezra might be alive?? i know hera is generally a reserved person but we should’ve gotten more of a reaction than that. i think her best interactions so far we’re with chopper. which is important, but he’s also a droid. Not the best look when her main conversation with sabine so far just felt really lacking. they felt like strangers, like there’s no shared history.

[hailperseusjackson]

i think i would be slightly (only very slightly tho) less bothered by the sabine jedi storyline if they actually talked about her being mandalorian more, and what it means for her, as a mandalorian, to continue training as a jedi.

like huyang did mention in this ep that there have been very few mandalorian jedi in their history. to emphasize that more and lay that groundwork more, wouldn’t it make sense to actually talk about the history sabine has with those two worlds colliding? not only have they not mentioned the training she did with kanan, they also haven’t mentioned the darksaber (which is VERY present in the mandalorian, so other just-live-action fans would be familiar with the sword at least) and sabine’s complicated history with all that.

it feels like filoni is foreshadowing sabine being one of those few mandalorian jedi (and also foreshadowing her being able to use the force later) and yet they’ve barely addressed the fact that she IS mandalorian. erasing her culture makes this whole sabine padawan thing make even less sense bc where is the motivation? where’s her history with the jedi? it’s not there bc we won’t talk about it

[hailperseusjackson]

“i don’t need sabine to be a Jedi. i need her to be herself.”

well herself is a MANDALORIAN!!! WHY does she have to learn to wield the force or use a lightsaber or be a padawan at all???

[hailperseusjackson]

i so badly want baylan and shin to have an interesting compelling storyline, but dave is giving them absolutely fucking nothing which is such a shame. the actors have a good presence about them and if they had actual good writing and clear motives for their characters, i think they would have such an interesting storyline! but even them being set up as foils for ahsoka and sabine is starting to fall flat. and i feel like they’re just gonna get killed off in an anticlimactic way and that’ll be it.

[hailperseusjackson]

welp! time to rewatch rebels and pretend this show never existed!!!

[hailperseusjackson]

you know. probably part of the reason filoni kept saying that you don’t have to watch rebels to understand the ahsoka show is bc he knew that if people watched rebels they would realize it’s so much better than the ahsoka show

[hailperseusjackson]

i rewatched episode 4 of ahsoka (bc i wasn’t super focused the first time) so here’s a little review in bullet point form!

(this got kinda long i’m so sorry. i love complaining lol)

starting with things i liked:

-finally seeing sabine actually fighting in her mandalorian armor! it felt like the sabine we know and love

-the ghost!!!!!! THE GHOST MY BELOVED!!!!!!! prettiest ship in star wars fr

-seeing jacen again! literally he is my baby boy 💚 (also the “mom…I’ve got a bad feeling” like yeah 😭)

-ahsoka pulling the ‘obiwan dealing the killing blow to maul a la twin suns’ move on marrok was good and the fight choreography with baylan was solid i thought. you could feel the weight behind him and ahsoka’s moves

-baylan and shin’s outfits are so cool

-i like sabine’s move to go with baylan and shin a lot

-the wbw looks quite pretty in live action, i will admit. like how the path glitters like stars and that fade in shot from the water to the stars? very good

-anakin!!!!!! HAYDEN ANAKIN HI BESTIE HELLO HI! also hearing hayden anakin say “snips” 😭😭😭

things that i didn’t like and am here to complain about:

-ahsoka telling sabine that if they can’t get the map back they should destroy it, and thus destroy the chance at finding Ezra ever. Now. This is practical, and I don’t really dislike it for that reason. And I think as far as it goes for Ahsoka’s character, trying to fall back on old jedi ideals of not choosing attachments, choosing the greater good, this also makes sense. it just, idk. there’s something about it that is irking me

-the absolutely terrible writing for hera’s role as general. there was that whole line about “i’m a general, nothing’s classified to me” in ep2, and now with the disobeying orders and telling that lieutenant to cover for her and telling jacen that when he’s a general he can disobey orders too. that would literally just not fly in a military organization. and character-wise, hera is all about protocol and setting a good example in the rebellion, this is NOT hera and it just makes her look bad.

-baylan’s random “witchcraft” comment towards morgan. a) wouldn’t it have made more sense to put a line like that in ep2 when she first showed him the sphere? and b) just felt like a weird comment in general? the nightsisters have a relationship to the force too, and baylan is old enough and seems old school and sentimental enough to respect that, not look down on it. Just odd.

-the dialogue in general this ep just felt so clunky and shallow to me. There was no depth to hardly any of the conversations, even ones that should’ve had depth. I thought ep3 improved on the dialogue slightly, actually putting emotion into, and making it feel like the characters had relationships with one another. and in this ep it just felt so rehearsed again.

-relatedly, sabine kept saying things in her dialogue that gave away key information (“go get the map”, hera’s name, etc.) and it was so frustrating! on a character level, sabine is smarter than that. on a technical/craft level, the dialogue is just not thought out.

-also related to the lack of emotion, it was written in a way that we get almost no reaction from sabine when ahsoka says that they may have to leave ezra behind for good (despite the fact that we find out later in the ep that ahsoka let sabine down in some capacity when it came to sabine helping her family). And when it came to sabine’s family, almost no reaction there either! absolutely no shade to natasha, i think she’s doing a fine job. i just don’t think filoni knows how to write sabine. Or women in general.

-not sure how i feel about the rest of baylan and ahsoka’s confrontation. i feel like we’re supposed to feel more, especially with the “anakin spoke highly of you” / “everyone in the Order knew anakin skywalker” and baylan mentioning ahsoka “abandoning” anakin (which, starting to beat the dead horse with that one filoni. that theme has come up before and been done better, ie when it was done in rebels!). like maybe if baylan and ahsoka had talked more about being masters themselves or the end of the clone war (since they’re both survivors), something! we could maybe establish more of a connection, since it seems like they’re supposed to be fools (like sabine and shin are being set up to be).

-marrok. The move ahsoka pulled on him was cool, but otherwise, why was he here? Also reanimated nightsister or some other dathomir ghost?? I’m guessing that’s what the green smoke was? weird. fine, i guess. But just like what was the point of having marrok around when we already have baylan and shin and morgan?

-“your legacy, like your master’s, is one of death and destruction.” ???? i’m not sure exactly what this is supposed to mean????? any harm ahsoka has caused (intentionally or unintentionally) in her lifetime is nowhere near, oh idk, the fucking child murder???? and murder of all the jedi???

-the dialogue in this ep is just SO baffling.

-ahsoka automatically assuming sabine was dead when she saw shin (like girl can’t you sense that sabine isn’t dead??) and then getting all angry when she fought back at baylan again. it’s giving copy-pasted kanan (briefly) thinking ezra was dead in fire across the galaxy, but the worse version. kanan did it better <333

-called this before the show even came out, but i fucking knew filoni was just going to write off Sabine’s family as dead (if he mentioned them at all, which tbh i’m a little surprised he didn’t forget about them entirely). i knew it was coming and YET. still disappointing bc i know they’re not going to address the deaths of her family or Sabine’s trauma in a meaningful, well-written way 🙃🥲

-hera being told that the enemy has a giant hyperspace ring and then flying right in its path and then not moving or telling her pilots to take evasive action when it was powering up. fucking ooc she’s a better pilot than that