Dear 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars fans, Dave Filoni is the chosen one. He’s here to save the franchise from that accursed sequel trilogy and bring it back to what it’s always been about—fighting fascism in the face of insurmountable odds! Wait, no. Cameos. I meant cameos. The Mandalorian was heralded for being a standalone series anyone could enjoy, but now it’s inextricably tied to seven seasons of The Clone Wars, four of Rebels, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Book of Boba Fett (which became The Mandalorian 2.5 out of nowhere, leaving ev🐼eryone confused), that unless you’re a die-hard fan, all of the ‘world building’ (read: nostalgia) will be lost on you.
An overreliance on cameos is becoming a Filoni staple. The Clone Wars got off to a rocky start but picked up steam the second he decided to dip into the toybox, resurrecting Darth Maul. Interestingly enough, we saw the exact same thing happen with Rebels, right down to using Darth Maul again. Of course, it didn’t end there. The Mandalorian had to throw in Ahsoka Tano, Bo-Katan Kryze, Zeb, and so many more (including 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a horrifying deepfake Luke Skywalker), paving the way for Force Ghost Qui-Gon Jinn in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Cad Bane i♌n The Book of Boba Fett.
These aren’t shows anymore—we’re watching someone with the keys to the kingdom bash a bunch of action figures tog𒊎ether, and for some reason, we&rꦏsquo;re eating it up.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that Disney is following the money and pushing further in this direction. The Mandalorian—as I said, which was heralded for being standalone—is now the beginning of the ‘Ma♏ndoVerse’. A universe within the Star Wars universe, because cinematic universes aren’t exhausting enough. To top it off, The Mandalorian and its adjacent Disney Plus shows will come to a head with a Dave Filoni-helmed movie, so if you think The Rise of Skywalker felt like a Reddit checklist run through an AI generator, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
I have no idea how all these shows will connect in any meaningful way other than it being a bunch of cool Star Wars characters we like saying ‘hello’ to each other. That’s what Filoni does best, and we’ve seen it happen in so many shows—with more underway—that it’s unlikely to change anytime soon. This is his whole thing now. And it’s why he’s so beloved by Star Wars fans because he will pull from the obscure and the popular to tell safe stories that are more dependent on you excitedly recognising a character than pushing boundaries. It’s why Andor was a fluke and why The Last Jedi is so hated—they did something different and ultimately told meaningful stories, but tꦫhat’s not what the fans want. T♊hey want familiarity.
Chasing what fans want ultimately leads to The Rise of Skywalker, by-the-numbers slop that tries to appease what everyone wants, failing to understand that everyone wants different things. And so many of these ideas are contingent on cameos that it’s impossible to make them feel organic. P🔯alpatine’s return is a meme because they struggled to explain it in a meaningful way without undermining Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader’s triumph against him in Return of the Jedi. It boiled down to, ‘We need a big bad, Snoke is dead, and the fans want Kylo Ren to be good’. Storytelling evidently didn’t come first, appeasing the masses and avoiding backlash again did.
Dave Filoni does the same, though because oꦯf the sequel trilogy, the fans can’t get enough of it. Luke Skywalker was a pitiful old man who had lost it all after he made a grave mistake, a powerful me💖ssage that even the best of us can falter and that nobody is infallible, but the fans wanted a walking action figure to take down the First Order by his lonesome. We never saw that in the original movies, but so many filled in the blanks with video games and comics that their warped vision became a reality, and the idea of anything else was deemed an insult to his legacy. So, of course, he’s an unstoppable machine when he appears in The Mandalorian. He becomes that action figure so many wanted.
That’s where the MandoVerse is leading. In five-to-seven years' time, when Filoni makes that movie bringing all these stories together, it’ll be meaningless IP soup. Characters are thrown together for the sake of throwing characters together, and if that’s all Star Wars is now, maybe it’s time to put it to bed. It used to be a powerful tale about how anyone, no matter how small or how much the odds may seem stacked against them, can overthrow their oppressors. Along the way, fans contorted that message into something so painfully simplistic—Star Wars is about the swishy swashy lightsabers and pew pews from faces we know and love.