Getting A Read On The Book Of Boba Fett

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

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15 Responses

  1. Philip H says:

    Well spit, now I have to get Disney+ so I can watch it.

    Thanks a lot @Andrew Donaldson. I didn’t have this in my new years budget.Report

  2. Doctor Jay says:

    I like this piece a lot. I have one small quibble.

    Rey is in no wise any smidgen more of a Mary Sue than Luke was in A New Hope. Not one iota. There is a fundamental problem with “Chosen One” stories, and these films show it. But they can still be enjoyable.

    This is totally a minority opinion, but I loved The Last Jedi precisely because it throws mud all over Luke’s Mary Suedom. He’s old now, and he’s faced a lot of situations that he couldn’t conquer by “trust your feelings” In fact, his feelings betrayed him and he created a monster.

    I gotta tell ya, I loved that. And I loved Luke all the more for it.Report

    • Burt Likko in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      100% on this take on Luke in the Last Jedi, which I thought had immensely clever plot elements and great character development not just for Luke, but Leia and Kylo Ren/Ben Solo, and a kick-ass fight scene in the throne room, and a kick-ass final battle. It also had the casino planet escapade.Report

    • North in reply to Doctor Jay says:

      Sure, right with ya in your interpretation up to the Last Jedi… umm.. but The Rise of Skywalker happened and that pushed poor Rey wildly and horribly beyond the Mary Sue envelope in a way that never happened in Lukes worst nightmares. Holly banana’s that was a clusterfish of a movie.Report

      • Doctor Jay in reply to North says:

        You know, my issues with The Rise of Skywalker have less to do with Rey in her own right as it has with everything else. I mean, yeah, bringing back Palpatine and making her his granddaughter is the logical outcome of writing Chosen One stories, and it sucks.

        But the comparison with Luke is not a good look.

        And this movie was crippled by it’s intention to repudiate a lot of what happened in TLJ, since it got some fan hate. And it was further crippled by the untimely death of Carrie Fisher. I can sort of see how it was meant to go, and that would be a lot better. Of course, it would still have Palpatine, and that would be dumb.Report

        • North in reply to Doctor Jay says:

          Yes, just about everything went wrong with RoS but I just can’t find it in me to excuse it. The Last Jedi at least had some interesting ideas to pretty up the nonsense but RoS was a black hole vortex of suck.Report

  3. North says:

    I agree with this analysis down the line by and large. The only element that the BoBF had trouble on, for me, was the subject of personnel. Bobba Fett had, at the climactic showdown stage, enough people working for him to maybe fill a corner of Jabbas Throne room. Let’s count them. He had the two Gamorrean guards; he had Shand; he had (unwillingly) the Mayors assistant, he had somewhere from six to a dozen 80’s era cyberpunk mod Teenagers; he had Black Krrsantan. This is the force by which he was supposedly ruling the entire city of Mos Espa and its surrounding environs. Mos Espa, let’s be clear, is one of this planets major cities. Tatooine is not, to be sure, a densely populated world but surely we can assume that Mos Espa is around the size of, say, New Orleans? New Orleans, note, has a police force of around 1,271 officers.
    I know tv budgets, audience attention span etc etc but this was just utterly ludicrous.Report

    • Brent F in reply to North says:

      At first I thought that was the executive superstructure of a larger operation.

      Later on, it was clear that, nope, that’s all his direct reports.Report

      • North in reply to Brent F says:

        Yes! Exactly! I was right there with you until the final episode and then, nope! It was just two Gamorrean hanging out at the rail yard. Nope! It was just one wookie nailing down all of City Hall. Would it have killed the haus of maus to shell out for more minions or something? They had enough extras in the background.Report

        • Brent F in reply to North says:

          And its clear that he has at three bonafide all-galaxy hitters working for him. With that, you’d think he could scrap together a couple squads a worth of normies with rifles just on name recognition and rep from a wannabes that one a piece of their glory.Report

  4. I don’t think the new Canon replacing old Legends was as much about rights issues as it was about not having to summarize ~30 books in the Ep VII opening crawl to get the movie going audience up to speed with what happened to Luke, etc. since they were last onscreen.Report

  5. Jaybird says:

    I have seen exactly one episode of Boba Fett and it was the one where Boba did the Dances with Bantha storyline. It was a pretty good episode, all things considered, but I finished the episode thinking “I thought that the sensitivity people would have objected to this one.”Report

  6. the Star Wars money train runs on the dual rails of nostalgia and new content.

    And avoids the third rail of originality. See how TRoS backtracked from the suggestion that there might be an important force wielder who wasn’t a Skywalker, or how The Mandalorian needed to bring in yet another Skywalker.Report

  7. “we don’t want to waste time getting all the rights figured out so y’all go play over there while we do our own, fully owned intellectual property stuff over here. K. Thx.”

    Also, “We bought the right to publish, not the obligation to pay royalties.”

    https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/star-wars-author-royalties-disney-1234951422/Report