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Comment by poisonarena | Hacker News Reader

> It's smart and subtle and insanely entertaining

I disagree, I feel like its the same as all the rest but the writers in the board meetings are like.. We need to make Star Wars for 25-40 year old men to feel like adults watching it.

> slow burn

planned that way not because it is a slow burn high pay off scenario. But because it is planned to drag on so you just keep watching it consistently. Most of these garbage shows in the last 5 years or so have embraced this 'pseudo-slowburn' style to make baby men feel more sophisticated while hooking them into consistently watching.

I feel like the writers and decision makers saw all the funko pop marvel watching 30 year open mouth beard consumers and wanted to 'blow their minds' with 'slowburn' to remind them that consuming childrens movies are actually sophisticated and adult

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>30 year open mouth beard consumers and wanted to 'blow their minds' with

No one said anything about blowing minds.

>But because it is planned to drag on

Unfortunately all shows are infected with this garbage. You end up grading this stuff relatively on a spectrum (“don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” etc) . This the “ads” of the streaming era. It is so ubiquitous people either build a tolerance, tune-out during the interval, or stop watching tv all together in protest.

>to make baby men feel more sophisticated while hooking them into consistently watching

A more sophisticated show with better writing and actors would indeed make people feel more sophisticated…yes. If, to take another example, somebody pitched me “Better Call Saul, but in space,” I’d probably watch that as well. Frankly, Dune is more a children’s movie than Andor, so you might as well say that 25-40 year olds have no business amusing themselves with science fantasy or sci-fi at all.

The litmus test for this seems to be: Make the exact same scifi show (space etc) but without the Star Wars branding. Will it be considered a children’s move? My answer in this case, no. Will it still be decent? Yes it would.

Mandalorian, Boba Fett, Obi-Wan are all magnitudes more juvenile than this attempt.

A quasi-spoiler perhaps, but I personally find it hilarious that a subplot involves a workers revolt in what could be a Tesla gigafactory 20 years from now…in a tv show produced by Disney.

I like watching all this garbage sometimes so I am not putting anyone down without putting myself down but it is what it is and the latest Dune movie might as well been a star wars or marvel movie, and that was the point when they watered down the smart parts, cleaned the politically dubious parts/swapped characters for representation, and added all the CGI summersault action

> The litmus test for this seems to be: Make the exact same scifi show (space etc) but without the Star Wars branding. Will it be considered a children’s move? My answer in this case, no. Will it still be decent? Yes it would.

The thing about Andor is that the Star Wars setting is entirely unnecessary. That series could be set anywhere; the setting is just a cash grab.

What you call a cash grab an executive would call “target market”. You are not going to get funding to make a sci fi show (100+ million I assume) without integrating it into some kind of pre set market that will eat it up. In that sense it’s just product market fit.

There’s nothing sci-fi in that story. It could have been set in Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, Qing China, or anywhere else.

Except it would need to compete on a different field, and wouldn’t fare as well.

Lol yeah getting people to see it is part of the point, I guess?

I thought this at first, but it's arguably that Rogue One and Andor are the only Disney properties that deeply tie in to the universe. They really set up the events for the original trilogy and make them feel more filled out and real. The tone is one of sacrifice and hope, and intentionally plays as a counterpoint to the powerful space wizards in the films. It feels like the creators respect the narrative.

I have a particular distaste for rogue one, because it took a story that didn't need to be officially told, and gave it an official movie that was stupidly boring, uninteresting characters, no real value in the grand scheme of things, and generic as all hell.

"A bunch of bothans died to bring us this intel" is literally a more compelling story than rogue one.

Did you like The Last Jedi?

Have you watched it?

1.5 episodes

Definitely need to watch a bit more! It gets a lot better post episode 3, but your complaint still holds true in general with the series about the slow-burn. It's written well enough that you are engaged with each episode, excited about where the show is going. But then each episode ends, and for most of them, you do a recap of what happened during the hour you watched and the actual plot and character development is thin. It feels like it was written in 3 episode arcs, where small stuff happens for the first two episodes and then in the third episode the plot really advances.

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