Andor and its relevance to today.

Let's talk about Andor, which wrapped up its two-season arc this week. 

Public Domain, according to Wikipedia. Don't @ me.

The series is a prequel to the 2016 movie Rogue One, which itself is a prequel to Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI. Anakin has already become Darth Vader, Luke and Leia are teenagers, and the Empire is charge of the galaxy -- for now. But the imperial government is committing atrocities in Emperor Palpatine's name, and people on multiple planets are beginning to rebel. Cassian Andor gets swept up in the nascent Rebel Alliance; his backstory is what the show is all about.

If you're not a Star Wars fan, I've already lost you, so I won't go into many more details. What I want to focus on is the reaction to the show and how it maybe dovetails with what's going on in our world right now.

I've heard several people say that Andor is the best entry in the Star Wars universe, or at least the best since the original film trilogy. I personally think Andor is very good, if not the best; the writing and direction are smart, and the actors all do good work. It's hard for me to call this show the absolute best of them all because I haven't seen all of them and because the shows are all doing different things. I very much liked Obi-Wan Kenobi for sentimental reasons; I loved The Mandalorian, but it feels like a Western with starships instead of horses (and let's be honest, Boba Fett was season 1.5 of Mando). 

I think what sets Andor apart is that it's meant to be an adult show from the get-go. The whizbang technology is all stuff we've seen before. There's no Grogu to lighten the mood. There's hardly any mention of the Force until the very end of the second season. It's all just people put in untenable situations and how they react to their lives being torn apart by brutality.

Which leads me to today. It's possible that this is the best possible time for this show to appear. Here in the US, we are in the beginning stages of an authoritarian takeover of our government. We are hearing about more instances of brutality every day. The modern-day resistance is taking its time to gel -- pushing back around the edges and seemingly not making much of a dent. A large-scale uprising like the Rebel Alliance may have to happen before we can beat back our modern-day Palpatine and his minions.

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I had only seen Rogue One once before Andor started airing. Once the show was over, I went back and watched the movie again. And yeah, the show is much better than the movie. Disney was hoping that Rogue One would be the same kind of hit as the original Star Wars movies -- but Jyn's character is lacking both the gravitas to pull off a serious film and the pals that made A New Hope so much fun. This time around, I found myself waiting impatiently for Captain Andor to show up so we could get on with things.

I'm not sure whether I'll ever watch Andor again, but twice is definitely enough Rogue One for me.

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One quick thing related to last week's post about the new pope: I need to say something about this YouTube video that made the rounds right after the announcement. As soon as the first guy said, "ope," I was like, "My dudes, he's not that kind of Midwesterner. You are thinking too far north." Chicagoland is not the land of Fargo, A Prairie Home Companion, hotdish, and yah-you-bet. Not even the accent is the same. If you want to hear the difference, listen first to the folks in the movie Fargo -- here's the trailer -- and then to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. If you can't tell the difference, I don't know what to tell you. Except maybe "Aw, jeez."

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These moments of bigger-than-life blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Yah, you bet!

Beltane: Coping in a time of trouble.

 

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

The turning of the Wheel of the Year has been on my mind for the past week or so, ever since I (foolishly) volunteered to give a presentation on the Wheel to a Pagan group later this month. (Right after I opened my mouth, I thought, "Two hours! How will I ever fill two hours on the Wheel of the Year?" And then after some brief consideration, I thought, "How am I going to cram everything I need to say into two hours?" I'll let you know how I get on.)

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Beltane is coming up this Thursday. It's supposed to be a lighthearted celebration of spring; all around us, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, things are blooming, creating, procreating. It makes you want to skip and shout.

And then you check the headlines. Every day -- sometimes multiple times a day -- there's another outrage from the Trump administration. It's foreign students, legally in this country, being snatched off the street by masked people in unmarked vans; it's kids who were born in the United States being deported, including a child who was undergoing treatment for cancer; it's federal judges ordering the administration to stop any number of illegal actions and watching the Justice Department lawyers dance around those orders without outright refusing to comply; it's a judge being arrested for showing an undocumented individual another way out of her courtroom than the one where ICE was waiting to arrest him.

To say nothing of what Trump is doing with his on-again, off-again tariffs. No sane business owner can plan anything when they have no idea what the government's economic policies will be tomorrow, let alone five years from now.

And the Buffoon in Chief wears a bright blue suit to the pope's funeral and falls asleep during the service. 

Here we are, in the light half of the year now that the spring equinox is past, but it feels like we're still in darkness.

Are we under a dictatorship yet? Are we in a recession yet?

Would knowing the answers make any difference?

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The first three episodes of season two of Andor dropped this past week. At the end of the third episode, with a major Rebel Alliance offensive in shambles and Mon Mothma's financing of the rebels under threat of exposure, the senator deliberately gets drunk at her daughter's wedding reception and dances the night away.

I wouldn't recommend it as a healthy coping mechanism, but it's a way to get through a moment when everything is going to hell around you. 

And like Andor, which has nine episodes to go, it's not over for us yet.

A blessed Beltane to you all. 

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These moments of bloggy screaming at the darkness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

Women with agency and the fanboys whom they make uncomfortable.

First, a show of hands: Has everybody who intends to see The Last Jedi seen it already? It's been out now for several weeks, and...

Oh, fine.

***Warning: Spoilers! Turn back now if they would upset you.***

Are we good now? Okay.

There's been a fair bit of, um, consternation in the fandom over this movie, as there was over The Force Awakens. Certain male fans were dismissive of the plot of Episode VII -- it was derivative, they said. Too much like Episode IV (a.k.a. Star Wars for those of us who are old enough to have seen it when it was first released), in which a nobody, overly endowed with sensitivity to the Force, is dubbed the One Who Can Save Us All and is dragged into a galactic war. Except this time our savior is female.

So when The Last Jedi kept Rey as its protagonist and brought along a cast of multicolor and preponderantly female Good Guys, the True Fanboys (tm) complained even louder. The problem, though, as this post at Bitter Gertrude points out, is that the complaints about this movie are all over the block. "Derivative" makes a comeback, but a myriad of other criticisms tag along, many of which cancel each other out. The film wasn't funny, or it was too funny, or it was funny in the wrong ways. The plot is terrible, or the acting is terrible (really? Have these people not seen Episodes I-III?), or the pacing is terrible, or... something.

And Leia! How could she have saved herself from certain death in deep space? It's not like she could wield the Force herself or...anything... Oh, right. "There is another," Yoda says in Return of the Jedi -- another strong wielder of the Force than Luke, he means, and he ain't referring to Chewie.

But never mind that. Something is wrong with this movie. The True Fanboys (tm) are sure of it. They just can't quite put their finger on what it is.

It occurred to me while reading that Bitter Gertrude post that I've heard this song before. In fact, I've been hearing it since 2004 -- the year The Runes of the Earth, the first book in the Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, was released.

As this third series opens, Covenant himself -- who has headlined the past six books -- is dead. He can't be the main character. Well, okay, he could be, but not plausibly. Not yet, anyway. Some other stuff has to happen first. So the author chooses Linden Avery, MD -- Covenant's lover in the Second Chronicles -- as the protagonist for the Last Chronicles.

Copyright by zorm | DeviantArt.com

That's Linden, in the crook of Frostheart Grueburn's elbow, helping the Giant fight off a skurj attack by wielding the Staff of Law.

Predictably, the fanboys didn't like it. Linden is whiny and indecisive. (Never mind that Covenant spent six books being cranky and indecisive. I guess cranky beats whiny?) She's too focused on her adoptive son (who's -- hello! -- missing). The book moves too slowly. It's too late in the series to bring in a whole new magical race that we've never met before. And so on. Some fans of the author even went so far as to start a conversation about how they would have written the book differently. (My response: You want to write a novel? Knock yourselves out. Let me know how it works out for you.)

But everything always came back to Linden. They just didn't like her. They wanted Covenant back.

Sure, part of it was that they'd grown to love Covenant. But just like with Rey and Leia and Rose Tico in The Last Jedi, part of it was that Linden wasn't male. And just like with today's True Star Wars Fanboys (tm), male fans of the Chronicles got really testy when I suggested to them that their reaction to Linden was gender-based.

My point, I guess, is that this discomfort with women in lead roles has been going on for a long time, and I think the only way it's going to change is if it keeps happening. At some point, women protagonists in traditionally-male roles in fantasy and sci-fi will become so commonplace that nobody will question it anymore. So kudos to Disney and the team behind this series of Star Wars movies. Keep doing what you're doing -- and may the Force be with you.

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These moments of bloggy Resistance have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.