Finally, this blog is Osha-compliant!

OK, that's a groaner. But, if you go through the year-end totals, you probably notice I still buy a few Star Wars Black figures, even if they don't show up in homemade strips. Usually. The Emilia Clark figure from Solo showed up in a few; but I haven't done a full-on Star Wars strip in, woof, over ten years? But, they still turn up: I have a fairly good batch of Mandalorians! And I would love to assemble a proper cantina one day, and fill it with characters that belong there, and whoever else I deem fit. Then there's also some that I buy for fear of missing out, or because they were cheaper than dirt; the latter may apply today, I'm afraid. 

Counter-intuitively, I liked the Acolyte show, even though I'm in that subset of Star Wars fans for whom Jedi, lightsaber stuff, isn't the most interesting part of the universe? If you have Force-powers, your choices seem limited to either getting abducted as a child and forced into Jedi school/bureaucracy/space cops to live as a weird sexless monk; or becoming a full-on sociopath. No middle ground, although there may be one outlier in Skeleton Crew: the pirate Jod, played by Jude Law, appears to have Force powers, although he could just be tricksy; we've seen fake Jedi before on the Obi-Wan show. By the way, that's how I think they should be titled: "The Mandalorian Show," "The Ahsoka Show," etc. Anyway, there were more than a few figures made for the Acolyte, but spoiler alert: most of them get chopped. Up. If you remember Episode III, when Palpatine reveals himself as Darth Sidious, he wrecks up like three Jedi in as many seconds. (Including, noooo! Kit Fisto.) Light-side Jedi can block blaster shots all day long, steamroll droids, but the average rank-and-file guys were just sad in lightsaber fights against an equal opponent. (Well, for certain values of 'equal,' the bad guy in Acolyte has sneaky tricks as well.) I don't think Star Wars can do what the Alien movies sometimes do: here's a character that's cool as hell!...now they're dead as hell. Still, memorable! Although, that could be a time-limitation as well: I swear in the Darth Vader comics, the Jedi librarian, who looks about as formidable as old-school Aunt May, gets to put up a solid final battle. That's partly inverting expectations, sure; but a TV series usually wouldn't have time for that nowadays. (Eight episodes isn't a "season." Get back to work!) 

 I was just checking if the figure for Jedi Tracker Bazil was on sale: no dice yet. He's a proud Star Wars tradition of "weird little guy" that also doesn't speak English/"Basic," but there were a couple points where he seems to make choices, that are just baffling? They weren't even "idiot ball" decisions, to keep the plot moving in a certain direction; but more like from his point of view, ethically this was the way to go. Or not, he doesn't talk, so you don't really know! And the show does drop the ball on what should've been a slam dunk: finally, a Wookie Jedi!...who's dead and we'll only see in flashback. I don't think Kelnacca even got a big set-piece fight to go out on; but narratively maybe you don't show that if you want to maintain ambiguity and don't want the audience to double-extra-hate the bad guy. You try to build up that maybe the Jedi Order wasn't the perfect shining island of virtue it was made out to be, but it's tough to defend a Wookie-killer...

Yeah, I probably think about Star Wars a normal amount. Here's to that cantina, someday.