Seto Kaiba

Beautiful work... the care and attention to detail you've put into this is truly impressive.  👍

This week's The Irregular at Magic High School is not quite as interesting as the previous episodes.  There's definitely more tension since Tatsuya isn't around for the fight in this one, so the former Course 2 students have to deal with professional assassins on their own.  (Though it begs the question why so many people seem to want to murder a group of high school students.)

HIGHSPEED Etoile's penultimate episode seems to have gotten a bit of an animation bump.  The crowd actually have faces now instead of being literally faceless masses.  Sadly, the quality of the writing has not improved.  Rin Rindo is still an unlikeable little stain on the upholstery with no personality beyond being an airhead.  I have to wonder if the writers understand that an underdog character has to be talented but underestimated... there's nothing satisfying about a loser getting an unearned win.  They're even changing the rules just to try and inject some unearned drama into this story which is already freighted with the prospect of the protagonist being fired for failing to win any races.

10 hours ago, kajnrig said:

If this were the case, I - again - would have liked that to be conveyed. This was my very assumption when no explicit reason was given, but as it is, it IS just an assumption and not corroborated by the show itself.

It is conveyed. 

In the meeting of the witches inner circle after the Jedi crashed the ascension ceremony, one of the witches replying to Mother Koril's proposal rules out violence by stating that if they were to spill even one drop of Jedi blood the Republic would destroy them. Another member of the inner circle does question whether the lives of four Jedi would really earn such a disproportionate response from the Republic, but the point stands and violence is ruled out. None of them seem to question that the possibility of military retaliation from the Republic is on the table, only how much it would take to provoke it.

Even if they're incorrect, that enough of them believe that the Jedi have enough backing from the Republic that going against the Jedi could result in their destruction effectively means the Jedi can strongarm the witches with near impunity with the implicit threat of force.

10 hours ago, kajnrig said:

See, if there were an implied "shared best practices" type thing between these Force-believing religions that would compel the Witches to allow the Jedi to test them, I would find that extraordinarily interesting. Like, perhaps they both strongly emphasize the importance of developing Force sensitivity as children, and the Jedi invoke that similar belief to the Witches as something of an olive branch to convince them to allow the Jedi to test them.

There would be practical reasons for that. After all, we've seen that it's possible to exercise force powers unconsciously and that could make an untrained user actually kind of dangerous in the wrong circumstances. Mild future sight like Anakin had is one thing, but imagine the kind of harm that could be caused if a panicky kid accidentally starts to use telekinesis. This is a galaxy full of architects who love sheer drops with little to nothing in the way of handrails after all.

Mind you, the impression I got was that it was more of a "ok officer, we're cooperating so don't shoot" sort of situation. Especially considering the discussion they have afterwards about the retaliation they might face if they took up arms against the Jedi.

10 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I mean, yeeeah, but that was an old Jedi Knight reminiscing nostalgically. He speaks of the Jedi Knights the way, say, Sam Seaborn talks about the US of A (first thing that came to mind, dunno why):

True, but then George Lucas ran with it literally and now we're stuck with it because that's what he built the prequels and their various spin-off media around and Disney is a little bit gunshy after having the fans rip them several new orifices of indeterminate purpose over the last couple years.

10 hours ago, kajnrig said:

EDIT: Yes, let's make this wall of text wallier.

That's my job. 😅😝

An Archdemon's Dilemma: How to Love Your Elf Bride has limped to its predictable but mildly enjoyable ending.  The last episode kind of feels tacked-on like an afterthought, since it doesn't really feel like part of the story arc in progress up to that point, but it's still fun.

The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases managed to be so utterly generic and unremarkable as a fantasy series halfheartedly playing with isekai tropes that I've just finished watching it and I can barely remember anything that happened in it.  It's the narrative equivalent of white noise.

Mysterious Disappearances feels like the right title for the wrong reason.  Little to nothing actually disappears mysteriously in this series, except perhaps the money that must have been allocated for hiring a writer.  Perhaps Studio Zero-G should look into that.  This series is still basically unwatchable after ten episodes unless you are really creepily into large breasts because even the show's OP seems to think that's the only reason to watch.

BARTENDER: Glass of God decided to go for a tearjerker in the home stretch with Ryu's mentor being let out of hospital for a brief period before going to hospice care.  It tries real hard to be deep and emotional, but it's undermined by how incredibly pretentious it is about bartending.  Its obsession with making everything faux profound gets in the way of its efforts to evoke genuine emotion, and that's a shame because if you cut some of that out you'd have a fairly touching story about an unsure young man reuniting with his mentor one final time.

A Condition Called Love is one episode from its end and it never really stops being unintentionally creepy.  Hananoi is so incredibly eager - even desperate - to please that he goes to unsettling lengths to make Hotaru happy.  If he had an emotion besides dissonant serenity he'd feel like he should be full yandere... and this is supposed to be a romcom!

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics just kind of completely lost the plot near the end when the cult leader became a recurring character obsessing over making lewd anime figures based on the homeless knight.  It's gone so far into the land of BS that the original and engaging premise has been all but lost.

I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I Can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability is drunkenly stumbling to a finish.  They've tried so hard to make the final fight of the series engaging and action-packed, but it's critically lacking in stakes because both participants are functionally invincible and even the characters fighting that fight are getting bored of it.  If anything, this is a magnificent case study on why an invincible protagonist is a bad idea in almost any context.  If the story's conflict never has any stakes, what's the point of fighting at all?  

Vampire Dormitory has gone to a very strange place... they've somehow cloned the protagonist AND given one of them the gender bender treatment.  Worse, that development is something that came out of left field with zero foreshadowing at the behest of a character who was just introduced and whose motivations are borderline nonsense.  It feels like the kind of thing you'd normally expect to be a character's fever dream, like that extended Alice in Wonderland reference in Ouran High School Host Club.

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

Mae's wishes are irrelevant (Osha's too) since they are minors their parents are the ones that should make that decision.

Even if Star Wars's setting followed the same rules as the real world (it doesn't), Mother Aniseya also agreed to let them go based on their wishes for the future... 

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

The witches living outside of the jurisdiction of the Republic should not be under any of the Republic's laws or enforcement by any agents of the Republic.  That "outlawed" religion is only outlawed in the Republic. 

We don't actually know that other governments haven't outlawed it.  After all, Dark Side-users tend to be... disruptive societal influences.

(If the few episodes set on the witches homeworld in The Clone Wars and Tales of are any indication, their light side-aligned neighbors don't seem to like them much either.)

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I mean slavery is not considered worth stamping out outside the borders of the Republic.

I agree enforcement is spotty, but it's not always the case that they don't go outside their borders to stamp out slavery.

The Clone Wars introduced an alien species, the Zygerrians, who aligned themselves with the Separatists because the Republic and the Jedi overthrew their once-prosperous empire because of its slavery-based economy.  One of the padawans in The Acolyte, Tasi Lowa, is a Zygerrian Jedi... which must be pretty awkward for her considering that her people are still holding that grudge with downright homicidal fury more than a century after The Acolyte.)

55 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Yup.  You can trust them to purposely bring children into a war zone, heck to even be commanders in that war.

As noted above, Star Wars has some very strange standards when it comes to age and adulthood.

A little Google-fu says that different worlds in the Galaxy Far Far Away set their own standards and traditions for when a person is considered an adult, with some human worlds putting that as low as 13 or as high as 21.  Padme's home planet Naboo seems to be on the low end, considering she entered government service as a noble at age 13 and was elected Queen at age 14.  Mon Mothma claims in Andor that she was married at age 15 and a senator by 16.  Leia joined the Rebellion at around age 15 and became an Imperial senator at age 18.  Quite a few of those kids may be kids by our standards, but adults by the standards of their culture and the Republic.

55 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Anyway, the main sin of this show is that it is boring.  Other stuff is forgivable if the characters were at all interesting, but they are not.  

Yup... like I said a few pages back, this show is really intended for the Star Wars superfans to dig into every little reference and continuity nod.

It almost feels like they're hoping Star Wars fans will be so caught up in that that they won't notice the barely-there plot, nonexistent character development, cringeworthy dialog, or that none of the characters are relatable or interesting because Force users are hardstuck in specific inflexible character archetypes that actively prevent the actors from acting so every performance comes off as flat and lifeless.

4 hours ago, Thom said:

Also, there was mention of their low numbers, so perhaps they were taking a 'pause' in their evil objectives in order to rebuild the ranks, and were then just playing nice.

I don't recall seeing any men, and Mae and Osha mention they are the only children in the fortress.

This would track with past depictions of Witches as keeping male slaves for the purpose of reproduction and sale.

The lack of men, and therefore children, would seem to be tied to them mentioning they're living in exile and are persecuted for their beliefs... and why they resorted to a forbidden and unnatural technique to conceive Osha and Mae.

4 hours ago, Thom said:

Although, making mention they were outside the Republic for the very reason of nullifying Republic law about testing, means the Jedi were outside their jurisdiction and thus had no power. Of course, that could go either way, either the Jedi conceding that they had no grounds, or using that to go outside their restrictions. Outside the law is outside the law for both sides, so maybe the Witches were conceding for fear the Jedi would push the issue, regardless? Even if they defeated the Jedi there, they could find themselves being hunted pretty quickly.

They picked a world outside of Republic space to hide out on because Republic law prohibits them from teaching their witchcraft to children.  That's why the subject of children in the coven is such a sensitive topic when the Republic's Jedi show up, before the subject of the Jedi wanting to test them is ever raised.

The Jedi might've been outside their normal jurisdiction, but they had the weight of the Republic behind them while the witches had nothing.  If they drove the Jedi away or killed them, it would just prompt a more substantial response from the Republic.  The Jedi can, essentially, do whatever the hell they want with that kind of backing because there aren't any near-peer interstellar states to rival the Republic's power.

2 hours ago, Dynaman said:

To be fair to the witches in this show.  They were absolutely spot on 100% correct to think the Jedi were going to take the kids away.  The Jedi habit of taking kids from their legal guardians makes them the evil ones.  It should not matter what the kids think about it, there is a reason we have age of consent laws or customs across the entire world.

It doesn't seem that way, for a couple reasons.  One being that they were apparently prepared to honor Mae's wish to be left with her family and only took Osha because she made her wish to come with them explicitly clear.

Given that the witches are living in exile because they follow a outlawed Religion of Evil and that teaching their craft to children is itself a crime, odds are the Jedi removing those kids from the coven would've been seen in-story like protective services removing children from a criminal's home.

15 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Which is exactly my point. If Star Wars can get away with not having "bad writing" associated with it despite its "choicest cuts" being of iffy quality, then so too can fanfiction writ large. Or from the other way around, if fanfiction is synonymous with poor writing because the vast majority of it is poorly written, then so too should Star Wars be synonymous with poor writing because the vast majority of it is poorly written.

I don't think it works that way, TBH... in part because perception of Star Wars is propped up by the cultural significance of the original trilogy.

Mind you, there does seem to be a definite trend towards Star Wars - or at least Disney Star Wars - being seen as synonymous with poor writing thanks to the sequel trilogy, Solo: a Star Wars Story, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Book of Boba Fett, and most recently The Acolyte.  Of course, a significant portion of that seems to also be based on the fanbase's particular grievances over Disney having made hamburger of their sacred cows.

15 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I agree it's to do with the source material, I disagree that it's out of fear of losing the audience.

I think there's a pretty sound case to be made for practically everything Disney has done since acquiring LucasFilm having been done out of fear of losing the audience.

Doubly so since The Last Jedi and Solo: a Star Wars Story bombed.

15 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Or rather, I don't think the two are necessarily so closely linked as the creators of The Acolyte fear think it is. The Jedi were a completely different beast before Lucas started his work on the prequels. The "source material" of Star Wars didn't include a literal Chosen One prophecy until he just decided to add it in alongside a tortured Jesus analogue. Fans have been open to more change to Star Wars canon than these creators seem to think they are, sometimes accepting even objectively bad changes. I get the feeling this show's creators write more out of fear of upsetting an imagined status quo rather than out of a desire to tell a compelling story.

I've had the same feeling that Leslye Headland et. al. are more than a little afraid of upsetting the status quo...

However, I'm not sure I would say that status quo is imagined nor the fear of upsetting the audience by transgressing it unfounded.

After all, George Lucas was able to get away with making sweeping changes to the beloved franchise because he was its equally-beloved creator.  He'd already managed to sell his audience on the idea that "I always meant to do X" when he was doing the Special Editions of the original trilogy movies, so the Star Wars fans seem to have been willing to take his sweeping and often ill-advised changes in stride.  (There was still at some complaining, e.g. "Han shot first".)

I doubt that die-hard Star Wars fans would have ever given Disney the same latitude because Disney didn't create Star Wars.  They just the evil corporation that bought it.  They lost whatever goodwill they might have inherited from George Lucas's stewardship of the franchise when they announced their intention to do a soft reboot of the franchise.  Even then they probably could've recovered if they'd managed to blow everyone away with Episode 7, but it turned out to be a lazy rehash of A New Hope.  Then came the one-two punch that was the backlash against Solo and The Last Jedi.  So yeah, Disney as a whole are afraid of upsetting the status quo further... and they have reason to be, because nobody wants to be known as the one who made gooseburgers out of the goose that laid the golden eggs.

15 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I will say, and this is starting to veer outside of The Acolyte specifically and into the Star Wars canon more broadly, I hate that the Jedi have become synonymous with The Republic. The show treats the Jedi's values as being one and the same as the Republic's values, which... no. No, religious dedication to a life of celibacy and worldly detachments(?) is not synonymous with dedication to running society via rules developed from the assent and often compromise of a variety of perspectives, no matter how much the Prequels might assert otherwise. The Jedi are (or should be, at any rate) like the monks of European monasteries, or the ninja clans of the Japanese warring states, or indeed the Shaolin monks across the breadth of Chinese history; unique, generally isolated communities whose interests occasionally align with their respective governing states but more often are merely inoffensive to them, and indeed occasionally are at odds or even threaten them. That last bit was clearly an idea Lucas was trying to express in his prequel depiction of the Republic and the Jedi Order. He just wasn't fully up to the task of it.

It's still applicable to The Acolyte, IMO.

The Jedi being synonymous with the Republic was unavoidable.  One of the very first things we learn about the Jedi and the Old Republic in A New Hope is that "for over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic."  Everything else we've got built on that, which made the Jedi out to be fundamentally and intrinsically intertwined with the Republic.  The prequels took that idea and ran with it, and from what I can find on a quick search the old Star Wars Expanded Universe was already running with that idea for years before the prequels did.

What you're proposing would probably make substantially more sense than relying on a monastic order with significantly different priorities than the government's to serve as the Republic's de facto federal police force, but it wouldn't mesh with the idea from A New Hope. 

As a result, the depiction of the Jedi we're stuck with is the one that started in A New Hope and was established as literal truth in the prequels... that the Jedi were enmeshed into the actual government of the Republic as a sort of police force with almost comically broad powers.

15 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I've heard vaguely of Force Witches before, but being the Star Wars plebeian that I am, I don't know anything beyond that they exist. I can't say I'm too surprised that their previous depictions have been as straight forward as they were.

I too am a casual here, the only reason I know about them is I was told Ahsoka makes more sense if you've seen The Clone Wars and started watching that recently.

I've heard that the witches came out of the Expanded Universe novels originally, but haven't delved into that.  The ones in The Clone Wars suffer from the same tendency that every character in The Clone Wars has of polarizing into either Sainthood or Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain, and ended up deep in the latter camp.  Putting aside Mother Talzin having facial makeup/tattoos worthy of a fan of the Insane Clown Posse, she dressed and talked the part of a standard Wicked Witch, her coven worshipped the Dark Side of the Force, and their main role in the story was basically being a Dark Side staffing service selling prospective Sith apprentices to the likes of Darth Sideous and Count Dooku.  (Darth Maul is one such sale, having been Mother Talzin's own son.)  They get massacred by General Grievous in Tales of the Empire and one survivor (Morgan Elsbeth) aligns with the Empire to become a villain in The Mandalorian and Ahsoka, responsible for things like stormtrooper zombies.

So, yeah... THAT'S the image that The Acolyte is trying to soften here.  They're as far in the Evil camp as Darth Sideous and even less subtle about it.

15 hours ago, kajnrig said:

One more gripe I had with this Episode 3, kind of related to the others I've had: I would have liked to spend more time on Brendok and see the events play out over a longer period. Obviously there's more going on and my opinion might change as more is revealed, but with regards to the gripes I have so far, an extended time period of Witch-Jedi interaction could have settled many of them.

The Acolyte is only going to have eight episodes in its first (and likely only) season, so there's a limit to how much time they can invest in flashbacks.

1 hour ago, Big s said:

That’s basically what I said above.

I think I added a bit of pertinent detail.

Stand Alone Complex character designer Hajime Shimomura discusses the design process in Stand Alone Complex Official Log 01 and mentions he used Man-Machine Interface's designs as his starting point for anime's, and that was Ghost in the Shell at its most exploitative.  (His draft character studies use her appearance and wildly impractical dress from MMI's first chapter.)

1 hour ago, Big s said:

The weird thing is that the show is so tame in most things, yet they tried that kinky no pants outfit in a world that still keeps their kink in the after hours mostly hidden away from a standard conservative society. But she just walks in no pants and nobody notices as though she’s just doing things as usual.

Yeah, it definitely stands out more in the less overtly 90's cyberpunk-y setting of Stand Alone Complex, though we do see a couple background characters on her level like Ran and Kurutan when they had a cameo in Ep5, the high-performance cyborgs the yakuza use as bodyguards in Ep7, and a number of background androids in various fetish-y outfits.  I've often wondered if her being mistaken for a sex droid in 2nd Gig's Ep3 was a joke at their own expense there.  (Ironically after she started dressing more reasonably.)

10 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Poor writing and fanfiction aren't synonymous. Some of the best - heck, arguably THE best - parts of Star Wars are for all intents and purposes just "elevated" fanfiction.

Poor writing and fanfiction aren't completely synonymous... but the vast majority of fanfiction is badly written, and poor-quality professional writing has enough in common with it for it to pass as a synonym in common use. 

Having been directed to some of what I'm told are the "choicest cuts" of Star Wars material by friends who are fans, I'm not sure that's a good thing and IMO it says more about the iffy quality of a lot of Star Wars's first-party offerings than anything.

10 hours ago, kajnrig said:

It IS poorly-written, though, that much is true. Or at the very least, it's muddled writing. Unclear. Imprecise. It seems to want to depict the Jedi as well-doing sages... but more often than not it shows them imposing themselves on others. It seems to want us to empathize with the witch coven... but it shows them being antagonistic and collectively a bit overquick on the figurative draw. It seems to want us to think of the personal drama between Osha et al as just that: dramatic... but more often than not it shows everyone kind of just talking past each other.

I agree with your general point, though my take as to the cause is reversed.

To me, it feels like The Acolyte's writers are trying to write a more mature story than Star Wars's usual fare by injecting some complexity and some shades of grey into the normally rigid and inflexible Good vs Evil dynamic that accompanies any story involving the Jedi.  They're just going about it in a very halfhearted and desultory way because there's only so far they can go with it before they lose the audience.

The Jedi in The Acolyte are still the wise, noble, selfless, heroic defenders of truth, justice, and the Republic way™️ they are in prior works.  All that's really been done to make them less saintly in this story is that their characterization is slightly more grounded, so they come off as officious and arrogant.  The Witches are still very much depicted like the dark side-worshipping cults of previous stories.  They're still paranoid and aggressive while espousing a "Dark is not Evil" philosophy at odds with how the Force actually works and a "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!" worldview.  All that's been done to soften their evilness is that they're shown to love their children and their leader outsources maniacal laughter to another witch.  The result is that neither performance comes off as convincing because they're trying to add nuance to factions that are normally one-dimensional by nature of the Force's inclination to moral absolutes.

10 hours ago, kajnrig said:

The acting feels wooden, and I can only suspect that this was a result of the directing... or show-running... or something beyond the ability of the actors themselves to change, because I've seen better from all of them. (Or at least all of them that I recognize.)

IMO, it's more a limitation of the source material.

The Jedi are expected to be serene and collected warrior monks.  That means a "good" Jedi performance is nevertheless a flat one, like playing a Vulcan on Star Trek.  

Dark Side-aligned groups like the Sith or Witches are the opposite extreme.  They're expected to be emotionally volatile and quick to anger.  Classic uncomplicated melodramatic villains.  That still makes for a stilted performance because they can't exhibit a believable emotional range.

10 hours ago, kajnrig said:

The sisterly relationship doesn't have any of the wrinkles, nuances, etc. that you see from real siblings, much less twins. I see that the actresses who played Young Mae and Osha are actual twins, and it would have been nice to see them maybe inject some of their real-life experience as such into the roles. Or tweak the script here and there to show as much. Have them be extra empathetic to each other. Have them able to predict the other's behaviors. Have them be increasingly perturbed by their lack of unity over their future. Let the actors chew the scenery a bit more than not at all. On the other hand, I suppose The Acolyte is again only following the lead of the prequel movies. Still doesn't make it okay, though.

On this, I am not sure I agree.  If anything, Osha's desire to be her own person with an identity separate from that of her identical twin sister Mae's is pretty standard identical twin behavior.

2 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

Actually, just a bit more grounded version. F knows what they we're thinking in season 1 with this. 

That would be Shirow Masamune's own personal tastes showing through in an adaptation of his work.

Motoko's outfit from Stand Alone Complex season one is a slightly modified version of one of the tamer outfits she wears in his sequel to the original manga Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface.  Though that version came with a sleeved crop top-like jacket similar to what she wears in season two instead of a leather jacket.

I'm not sure if you've read the original Ghost in the Shell manga or its sequels, but Shirow Masamune's work started out on the "sexy" side with a fair amount of fanservice and that aspect of his work only got more pronounced with time.  Once he quit doing serialized work to focus on being an illustrator his self-published work became increasingly salacious until it crossed the line into literal hardcore pornography... though even Ghost in the Shell and Man-Machine Interface had explicit sex scenes that were removed from the western releases and reprintings.

2 minutes ago, jvmacross said:

As you insinuated in a previous post, the Jedi would be able to detect deception....If so, then why would they go through with testing Mae to begin with if they could sense she wanted nothing to do with them?  Or does that ability just manifests itself when the plot requires it to? 

The Jedi forget they have superpowers with monotonous regularity... I even noted that the reason...

... is because Sol seemingly forgot he can use the Force to levitate things.

Mind you, I think the answer is right there in the series.  They assumed (correctly) that the girls had been instructed by their parents to try to fail the test, and asked them what they truly wanted.  Osha wanted to be a Jedi, Mae didn't.  If Mae had actually managed to fool the Jedi into thinking she didn't have Force powers, Sol would probably have rejected the idea that Mae could be the assassin once Osha was exonerated.  (The lie was never going to work anyway, because we see the Jedi take blood samples for midichlorian testing.)

2 minutes ago, jvmacross said:

When you said that you were not seeing the series abandoing logic, you could not have possibly typed that with a straight face...lol 

I believe my exact words were...

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

at least not any more than Star Wars usually does when the spacemagic of the Force is involved. 

😉 

Dumb sh*t - often plot-convenient dumb sh*t - happens constantly when Force users are involved.  What happened with Qimir is way less egregious than the prequel trilogy's Jedi Council spending so much time around Palpatine and never realizing he was the Sith Lord they were looking for, or even that he could use the Force... something that the prequels established could be tested for objectively and scientifically with minimal effort.

At least what happened with Qimir fits the idea of the Jedi as arrogant and sloppy in this era.  They were about to start rifling around in his brains to find answers and stopped just because he started volunteering information.  (I even commented on how stupid it was that Sol offered to let him off with a warning when his crime was, at the very least, being an accomplice to the very murder they were there to investigate.)

... the hell?

So it's not a business decision?  It's some kind of contractual limitation preventing them from releasing the OVA in a standalone form?  That's weird.

56 minutes ago, jvmacross said:

You just said a few posts above that they 'detected' Ohsa's weariness during her 'test'....yet are not powerful enough to detect the same 'deception' from Mae...an elementary-aged kid with no apparent mastery of the Force...errr...Thread?...unless you are saying only those on the Jedi Council have that 'deception' detecting ability? 

Considering how... vocal... Mae is in this episode when it came to her disapproval of the Jedi and her sister's desire to join then, what makes you assume the Jedi had to be fooled into not recruiting Mae?

When we see Osha being tested, Indara and Sol can tell right away that she's deliberately trying to fail because her family doesn't want to be separated from her.  Sol then directly asks her what she wants, and after a brief discussion she says "I want to be a Jedi".  They almost certainly put Mae through the same thing and almost certainly got the opposite answer, that Mae didn't want to leave her family and become a Jedi.

56 minutes ago, jvmacross said:

It may not be wise to try and apply logic to a show that is seemingly abandoning it at a faster pace than other Disney+ Star Wars shows so far...

So far, I'm not seeing the series abandoning logic... at least not any more than Star Wars usually does when the spacemagic of the Force is involved.  

It is undeniably poorly written though.  Like others have said, it has that definite fanfic vibe.

1 hour ago, jvmacross said:

It's funny because I had just made a post saying that this show was going to be another entry in the Star Wars franchise that will require external 'reading' to get the whole picture straight.....feel free to keep doing your 'research' so the rest of us don't have to...I certainly do not want to waste my time again...it's among the worst things to have happened during the Disney Star Wars era...

The funny thing is I wasn't even looking for it... ever since I watched The Acolyte trailer my YouTube recommendations have been full of Star Wars lore videos for some reason.

Prerequisite-wise, it's definitely less onerous than Ahsoka requiring me to watch seven seasons of a mediocre cartoon and read three novels from the 80's to figure out why anyone would be insane enough to give Anakin an apprentice and why Elon Musk joined the Blue Man Group and violated a space whale in order to make stormtroopers even less effective by zombifying them.

Like I said a while back, it's real easy to tell that The Acolyte was written for fans not for casual audiences.  The reference density just does not support casual viewing.  The two Tales of titles were the same way.

1 hour ago, jvmacross said:

Dunno....I thought no one other than the 4 of them know about what happened on Brendock?  Osha clearly does not know and she would have been the only surviving witness

Master Indara's group of Jedi were on Brendok surveiling a coven of witches, apparently for an extended period of time.  Long enough for the witches to have noticed them in turn and been monitoring their whereabouts.  Sol also makes a remark that suggests they were surveiling specific people on suspicion of criminal activity.  That's official investigation territory, meaning they were almost certainly sent there by the Jedi Council and would be expected to report their findings. 

Trying to lie to a committee made up of telepaths who can sense deception is not a winning strategy to begin with, and pointed questions will surely be asked about where Sol came by that freshly traumatized child he's calling his new apprentice and why the child is traumatized.

Osha might not know what specifically happened, but she knows she saw the aftermath of a mass casualty event and that's not the kind of news you can keep a lid on.

51 minutes ago, jvmacross said:

Another thing is that these Jedi are apparently at their prime of arrogance...who knows what sort of things they are willing to turn a blind eye to in the name of keeping their reputation as the pinnacle of infallability and righteousness...I am still under the assumption that whatever happened on Brendock is some dark secret only the four of them have kept to themselves....and that they may have agreed among each other to hide that truth and stick to some other narrative....I think meditating and not speaking for 10 years while floating 3 feet in the air would go a long way at keeping the secret from coming out, especially from the Jedi who was likely the weakest link on that day...the padawan...also, Jedi Chewbacca's seemingly self-imposed exile seems odd to me....shouldn't he be out 'Jedi'ing' for the masses?

Why do I have a feeling buying into some comic books and novels will be required to get all the answers?

Fair, though it doesn't quite track with how the Jedi in The Acolyte started this series explicitly on a mission to apprehend Indara's killer specifically so the Jedi Order could make an example of her because the killer was (wrongly) believed to be an ex-Jedi.

The Jedi seem to want to show the galaxy that their all-powerful unsupervised magic lawmen are self-policing... which may or may not have something to do with the Republic's having built a prison specifically to hold renegade Force users a few hundred years earlier.

I watched a lore video earlier that explained the vow that Torbin took, and if his goal was to cover up that he participated in something horrid that is the wrong way to do it.  That vow he took is apparently a penitent's vow that a Jedi only takes if they've screwed up so epically that they believe they are incapable of functioning as a member of the Order.  If his fellow residents of the temple know he's taken that vow (and they do) then they know he's done something particularly heinous.  It's basically the Jedi version of a nobleman being forced to take holy orders and become a cloistered monk to escape some public dishonor.

9 minutes ago, jvmacross said:

The crime committed...at least by the hippie Jedi...must have been so heinous and shameful as to make him decide to take his life rather than stain the order....this can go anywhere....

Whatever it is that happened on Brendok sixteen years before The Acolyte's present day, it can't have been that bad.

After all, none of the four Jedi who visited Brendok were tried by the council and sent to The Citadel for incarceration.  None of the four were expelled from the Jedi Order either... like what happened to Ahsoka Tano and Bariss Offee.  Indara was already a Master, but both Sol and Torbin were subsequently promoted.  Torbin was promoted twice.  He was a padawan sixteen years ago and he's been a Master for something like ten years by the show's present day.  Sol was promoted from knight to Master and is allowed to teach the children in the main temple on Coruscant.  That's probably not something you do if you're guilty of the kind of heinous criminal act that only suicide can atone for.

My guess is they're feeling guilty for something which probably isn't actually their fault, because Star Wars requires the Jedi to be the embodiment of Lawful Good.  

9 minutes ago, jvmacross said:

Also....why did Sol and Trinity focus only on Osha?  Based on what we saw of the "test" they had to have known Mae was also lying....why did they not call her out on it?  Wonder if the "mission" was to exterminate the coven and only recover the kids that could be "turned" into Jedi....

Probably because Mae was very clear about not wanting to go, and there's probably some law against straight-up kidnapping as a form of recruitment.

14 minutes ago, spacemanspiff said:

Was there ever an English Dub of the Macross Plus Movie with Bryan Cranston?

The movie was subs-only, AFAIK, when it was released in the west.

Only the OVA version was dubbed.

9 hours ago, Big s said:

There’s definitely more to it going on. Yeah, she’s terrible, but for a Jedi to just commit suicide over things is a bit of a hint that things were more messed up. Horny Mom might’ve also had something to do with things as well

Eh... when all is said and done, The Acolyte is still Star Wars.  Its cosmos is underpinned by a higher power that maintains and rigidly enforces a simplistic Light is Good vs. Dark is Evil dichotomy on its adherants.  The Jedi are on the side of Light and therefore Good, and their opponents are on the side of Dark and therefore Evil.

For that reason, I suspect we won't be seeing any real shades of grey from The Acolyte.  The worst the Jedi are likely to get up to will likely not go beyond "Good is not Nice", while Dark Side users like Mae and her master remain the familiar overdramatic card-carrying villains we've already seen they are.

5 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

Your feedback on this series has kept me from re-subscribing to Disney+ 🤣

Value for money, yeah... it's not worth it.  Unless you have small children.

21 minutes ago, MisaForever said:

Can anyone enlighten me as to what's going on here? Looks interesting but have no idea what it is. 😄

 

If I'm reading this correctly, and as it is in Chinese there is a possibility that I am not, this looks to be an advertisement for a Macross convention or other gathering at a shopping complex in the Tianhe district of Guangzhou, China.

1 hour ago, Big s said:

That wasn’t as jarring as it’s shaved head

I was so thrown by the fact that the Wookiee was wearing clothes that I completely missed that he also had a shaved head and a topknot.

1 hour ago, Big s said:

They also don’t have walkway rails since OSHA hadn’t set her standards yet

That part is normal for Star Wars. 

Bottomless pits without any kind of safety rails seems to be a galaxy-wide engineering tradition.

New episode just dropped... and the title's the overused word I loathe the most in all of Star Wars: "Destiny".

Looks like the writers were in a mood to get all that pesky exposition out of the way so Mae can get back to posing like an idiot and talking like an edgelord.

I know this is an incredibly trivial nit to pick, but why does every character who appears in a flashback always have to have exactly the same haircut as a child that they do as an adult?  I don't know anyone who kept the same haircut for their entire life.

Can I just say how unnatural a clothed Wookiee looks?  For real.  I guess I'm so used to seeing Chewbacca go around letting it all hang out that seeing a Wookie wearing more than just a bandolier and a smile just feels weird.

I suppose it's a nice bit of continuity that we see the Jedi use the same testing methods here that they used on Anakin in The Phantom Menace.

All in all, it's a backstory dump an entire episode long and yet it doesn't feel like it added anything substantial to the story.  

It confirmed Mae has always been at least a little bit of a psychopath and why Sol and the twins all believed one of them had died, but that's about it.  This is the TV episode version of the meeting that could've been an email.

23 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

I guess this show updates on Tuesdays then? For some reason I was thinking Wednesdays. Maybe because of X-Men 97.

Tuesdays at 9pm Eastern (6pm Pacific).

29 minutes ago, Knight26 said:

Warhammer fans have kids?  LOL JK

Very cool build though.

Kid tested, Commissariat approved!

20 minutes ago, JB0 said:

And no lie, the only reason I was interested in the show was the character art, so I'm sad it's a trainwreck. 

Well, you're likely to get some character figures out of it at the very least... Good Smile seems to be one of the sponsors.

(Also, we just sleeping on that pun I threw in there?  Racy figures for a racing series?)

20 minutes ago, JB0 said:

At least we know she stands firmly in the "less than useless" category.

That we do... though that was also never in any doubt considering her very first race saw her disqualified for a rules violation and something like 1/3 of her total career has been some form of disqualification.  Now that they've gone and said that the AIs that've been outperforming her all series are technically not even competent racers, the win that they'll hand Rin at the end of the series is going to feel extra unearned... like how her only prior decent placement was because she was blindly following the instructions of the AI.

Caught the latest episodes of Re:Monster, Chillin' in Another World, and I was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince while I was picking up a car...

Chillin' in Another World is still cute but substance-less.

The other two are just unapologetic trashfires... it says a lot about I was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince that even the protagonist is bored with the direction the story has taken.

1 hour ago, JB0 said:

KITT instead of KARR. They've made the right choice.

Let's be honest, there was no right choice there because either choice had terrible implications for the story as a whole.

HIGHSPEED Etoile's writers had to choose between:

• Revealing that V-ZEN's AI "Ami" no longer needed Rin Rindo and that AI drivers could be developed to the point of being competitive against top-tier living drivers, making the show's protagonist completely unnecessary.
• Revealing that V-ZEN's AI "Ami" was inherently limited in ways that mean it can never be a truly competitive driver outside of solo time trials, keeping Rin Rindo in the car and in the story by shooting several huge holes in other parts of the story.

They went with the latter because it's transparently obvious they're hoping to sell racy figures of the predominantly female cast.  By revealing that AIs are limited in ways that mean they can never truly be competitive against living drivers, it raises some awkward questions as to why several teams are relying on AI drivers that have no chance of winning.  That also kind of kills the idea that Rin isn't blindingly incompetent, since she has consistently placed below AI-driven cars throughout the series and an AI almost certainly wouldn't be racking up disqualifications for rules violations and failing to start/finish races (never mind totaling a car).

Basically, they established that AI drivers are incompetent... but that they still would've been a better choice than Rin Rindo.

22 hours ago, JB0 said:

So what I'm hearing is she's training the race AI by showing it what not to do?

They went with a "Yes, except no." answer... Team V-ZEN's AI system "Ami" is using both her driving and the driving of her competitors as training data. The story then comes up with an excuse for why it can't simply take her job, which basically boils down to the AI system being limited by its programming to avoid taking actions that would put human safety at risk. So they can absolutely crush it at time trials, but their safety first attitude towards strategic driving means they will lose the race every time.