I’ve been using this Simpsons’s clip.https://youtu.be/Oqk_fN0NRgg?si=lVjAsGg7jN4qPTzm
I find some Critical Drinker stuff mildly entertaining, but he is so deep in the “anti-woke/anti-SJW” sphere that I don’t find his reviews particularly helpful in actually assessing a show or movie.
I’d assume for across the galaxy one Guild. I’d OTOH many worlds and cultures that have very unique cultures. I’m still not sure but it seems to me that on Dathomir itself there were more than one variant of witches with different practices. Elsbeth’s coven was massacred but the mountain clan that she was taken in by seemed to an independent group at least until then?
I’d expect a wide variety of groups across the galaxy had been using the Force in their own diverse ways, and that what we are seeing is the Jedi order claiming it as theirs alone, no children shall be learn their indigenous cultural connection to it, only their way and under their control is acceptable. Other Force using cultures are in the process of being destroyed.
Balance in the Force is essential. These Jedi enforcing only one way to use of the Force through their chosen few and through their lens only create the imbalance that is unsustainable.
We’ve seen a fair amount of non-Jedi force users (Sith, Dathomir witches, Bendu, Chirrut, those First Brother-Second Sister inquisitors, etc). But women magic users as a group must be witches and we’ll call them a coven and they’ll be evil or evil-adjacent. I hate that trope. Having two distinct groups now appear in live action this year is really pissing me off.
Like i said earlier, I think they were going more for a Gaia-Maenad thing. But I don’t have faith in them bringing that home or the meta ‘claim the word witch if they are going to call us witches’ thing.
But then don’t have purple be your color. Unless youre Sam Jackson or Prince, nerds just associate it with villainy
Blame the second Ewok movie for injecting witches into the SW universe.
You know the biggest Sacred Cow I want to see taken down that far as I know has not?:
All that SHIT about a “Chosen One and Balance to the Force”.
Any possible interp would be that killing all those Jedi is what brought Balance…and not at the very last second throwing an old man down a well…after Alderaan is kablooey, younglings are killed and 1000’s of Jedi are dead.
Like GoT, I’d like to see in show lip service that Chosen Ones and Prophecies are bullshit.
How can you have a Chosen One prophecy active when for 1000 years, the Jedi thought the Sith were gone?
How exactly is the Force 'Unbalanced"?
Also…I havent heard anyone voice this…wasn’t Sidious a Dark Side Alchemist? So how is the Acolyte “Alchemist” not Sidious then? I guess he could be the one to bring on Sidious.,
I think they did touch on this, “Who are they to control access to the Force?” thing.
But then they dropped the ball entirely by making the ‘witches’ even less sympathetic. The went from “Who made the Jedi the arbiters of all that is good?” to “You much become a witch, personal choices be damned, why are you such a brat about it?” Don’t go acting like you’re giving the kid a choice if you’re not willing to let them make the ‘wrong’ choice. Especially when it’s a lifetime commitment, and the kid is maybe 10 years old.
Maybe, I’m misunderstanding your point but…how is that less sympathetic than the Jedi? The covens relationship to the twins is familial (literally their parents) and this can be read as familial pressure…the Jedi are literally strangers representing the “state” doing the exact same thing.
Except they’re not really doing the exact same thing. They gave Osha a choice, but they didn’t pressure Mae into also joining the Jedi.
ETA: Also, clearly being a Jedi isn’t a locked-in lifetime choice, because when we first meet Osha, she’d left the Jedi order, and they weren’t trying to get her back under their control until they suspected she was murdering Jedi.
“Hi Osha, would you like to leave your family and join a religious order that is more or less going to do the same thing your mom is making you to do? But with the addtional responsibiliies of being a space cop without familial connections and taught to repress your emotions…what to do you say 10 year old child?”
And yes, we know Jedi can leave the order or get kicked out… I don’t get how that really matters here. I think the show is asking people to at least examine their prejudices within the contexrt of the overall narrative and the setting.
I heard it put an excellent way “I love the Jedi, but the show is saying ‘nobody likes it when the cops show up’ and the Jedi are cops.”
But you’re ignoring the fact that Osha wasn’t really interested in becoming a witch long before the Jedi showed up.
My point is, if you’re trying to make the Jedi look bad, you don’t do it by making the witches look even worse.
“Hello young child who has been raised in isolation for your entire life, with only your twin sister as a friend, who we are flat out telling “you’re not an individual, you’re part of this twin thing, and nothing more”, would you like to join our weird cult thingy, oh and by the way, once you say ‘yes’ you’re in it for life, and if you say ‘no’, we’ll start getting all abusive about it!”
That’s the disconnect. They don’t look worse. They look like a religion. Yes, the pressure put on Osha is unfair. That’s why I think the coven story is pretty great and relatable for some viewers.
But they’re not harming. They’re not torturing. There is no indication there’s anything nefarious going. Do you guys think the plan was to ritually sacrific the twins?
So describing them as worse than the Jedi–who it is canon take toddlers from their families to shape into space cop monk warriors… How is the coven worse?
Another thing people are disregarding: Once you become a Jedi…you are never supposed to see your family again.
That’s some harsh ass shit. So how do the Jedi get around that? Only draw from families with too many mouths to feed? Maybe that’s why they don’t speak out against slavery too harshly.
Why arn’t WE writing this show???
Well, that episode was 99% filler.
I have been making a conscious effort to not look at my phone while watching new episodes of shows but this one had me thumbing around reading stuff online after about five minutes.
For those wondering, The conehead Jedi from this episode is officially the conehead Jedi from the prequel era (though he is appearing like 50 years before his canon birthdate) but the bugeyed facemask Jedi is a different bugeyed facemask Jedi from the prequel era one.
We watched the first three episodes back-to-back. Overall, it’s fantastic. The show does a great job showing the Star Wars universe, with a variety of locations and great attention to the details on the set.
I thought they were going to do a mind-fuckery plot, similar to Moon Knight, but instead they went with the “evil” twin. Of course, it’s more like the “yin-yang twins”, who each reflects the other. I loved how Osha tries and fails to shoot Mae, just like Mae tried and failed to burn up Osha. They’re doing a good job of blurring the distinction between protagonist and antagonist.
I like how they portrayed the Force users. A lot of interesting personalities and motivations among the multiple Jedi and Night Sisters. Acting is excellent. I especially like the performances of Sol and the young twin actresses. I’m a little surprised they went with two actors for the young twins; it’s slightly breaks my suspension of disbelief going from two characters looking different when young to looking the same when older.
Random guesses about the future:
The Night Sisters aren’t dead. They used a feign death spell, when they awoke the twins were gone and apparently destroyed, so they picked up and restarted on another planet.
Mae’s fixer is the Sith master. But I don’t think this series will reveal it; they’re saving it for the second season.
I don’t think it was anywhere near that bad, although there was an awful lot of tromping around through the forest.
The thing that bugged me the most, actually, was the discussion of the justification for bringing Osha along. Doesn’t the Star Wars universe have tasers? Heck, didn’t we see stormtroopers “set to stun” and zap princess Leia within the first 10 minutes of Episode IV? I think there’s a plausible argument that Osha bring there might make it easier to get Mae to surrender peacefully, but it was very poorly articulated.
I’m usually someone who gets grumpy about contradictions and little details being wrong and whatnot but… what canon birthdate? Pretty sure at no point in any of the prequel trilogy was his age discussed. Was this just something that showed up in some EU character guide or something? If so, I can’t say I’m particularly upset if it’s being de-canon-ized. Or is there more to it then that?