Pop Culture

i think there will be a faction of SW heads that come to hate Andor, because they can't really grasp what it did or how it did it, but they know it made nearly everything else look bad.

They are the people that fail to understand that Star Wars is only ever good when its stories are firmly depicting a leftist revolutionary story. Nothing the franchise creates lands properly without that grounding in reality. Even the prequels which were poorly executed land better than the slop Disney made until Andor because they're still built upon a foundation of leftist storytelling in which they're criticising how liberalism falls to fascism (and was shit before the fascism too).

The ultimate sin of Andor was that it wasn't StarWars^TM^ enough. It didn't revolve around space magic or reinstating a royal bloodline. The sacred and noble Republic was ineffectual and easily manipulated. It also didn't have dozens of widely known characters show up and be integral throughout the series. It had some Rogue One cameos, for obvious reasons, and then some prequel people but only because it made sense for them to be around. I can criticize Andor for being an attempt to get people to take Star Wars seriously as a setting and brand (we can do serious Game of Thrones style political intrigue too!). But I also think it completely undermined the Filoni/Favreau approach. Favreau's take was okay at the start, a simple (perhaps overly so) story about a backwater merc on an escort mission with a SW licensed Furby. But it too started to get bogged down with cameos and higher stakes.

Kennedy is a corpo through and through so I don't want to spend too much time defending her. To her, I think she saw SW as a brand and just wanted it to make money. She approved different attempts to that end but she wasn't ideological in terms of fanboyism. That's a big reason she was hated, outside of being a woman in charge of nerd IP. Filoni is definitely a SW zealot. It's a huge part of his life and career. He's never going to rightfully criticize the series or let it be criticized. Andor and TLJ were willing to put Star Wars in its place and try to build something from that.

I think, most of all, I just really hate how Star Wars has become integrated into the American mythos and it's become so large that it has its own political structure (in real life, not in-universe) with factions and shit.