What I've seen of the new season is making my opinion of Mandalorian and the Halo show converge in my mind. Though I didn't even finish Halo and it had more interesting plot and character shit going on at least.

I may just wait for the Ahsoka show. That was the best episode of Mandalorian anyway. Mandalorian should have been a limited series not two much less three seasons.

I doubt anyone is failing to "get" this. Most people having not been born yesterday remember our last few elections being heavily influenced by China and Russia via American competitors to Tik Tok. Singling out Tik Tok does nothing for American citizens.

People are coming into any discussion about the show ready to fight against bigots. It was a huge problem with the fandom of the games just because they included non-hetero, non-white, non-cis characters.

Trying to discuss the games and any criticism of them was largely drown out by bigots and people screaming at bigots. If you're going to talk about this show critically just know that people will come at you with these assumptions whether they are warranted or not.

I really couldn't tell you why it's so heated with this franchise. Maybe it's because the games mash up the conservative fantasy of survivalism and murdering people to protect your "family" with token diversity and inclusivity.

I don't get why Nielsen doesn't just include a metric that's "minutes viewed" divided by "half hours blocks of content" released so far. It won't fully account for all the variable runtimes we have now without advertising blocks, but it's still much better than this if the whole idea is to compare shows against one another.

It was decent to good at times. Pacing issues were the big problem. Spent a lot of time with child characters in the first half of the season doing things that didn't really inform the adult storylines or characters in meaningful ways beyond things that could have been set up with much less time investment.

At the same time the back half of the season with our fully developed cast was rushed through leaving emotional impacts like the protagonist queen-to-be losing her lover and father of her children as well as one of her children as throwaway moments. And the fucked-up consummation/courtship of her relationship to her uncle-husband was just tossed in alongside some CGI spectacle as well.