YMMV / A New Dawn

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• Complete Monster: Count Denetrius Vidian is a bureaucrat and manager in charge of overseeing the Empire's factories. Vidian demonstrates his authority by working his subordinates to death and beating a union boss to death when he protests. Vidian shows a penchant for torturing his enemies and plans to mine one moon for all the materials it has, even though the excessive mining will destroy the moon and its planet, thus killing all the beings there; Vidian simply plans to blame a rival noble for the disaster. His worst moment comes when an entirely competent factory manager protests that Vidian's demands are impossible. He proceeds to throw her into a vat of acid and angrily tells her to "dissolve quickly" so he can get back to work before beating her husband to death when he attempts to arrest Vidian.
• Cry for the Devil: While there's no excusing his actions throughout the story, Count Vidian not only lost faith in the effectiveness of safety inspectors, he spent two years in a hospital unable to do anything while he was eaten alive by a disease created from the various bio-hazards he was exposed to, not only turning him into the barely human-like cyborg he is at the time of the story, but also making him develop an aversion to uselessness and inefficiency. After that, it's no wonder he's so unhinged.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Vidian has cybernetic eyes and Zaluna goes blind as well. As of "Twilight of the Apprentice" in Rebels, Kanan himself has to adjust to his sudden blindness.
  • There's a passage alluding to Caleb's desire to heroically fight a Sith. In Rebels, he barely escapes Darth Vader twice and gets himself blinded by Darth Maul.
  • Kanan nearly makes a humorous quip about Hera "not being able to live without him." While she certainly always holds her own without Kanan, later Rebels episodes tap into her understated sorrow whenever Kanan has separate Jedi and Force-related missions that she cannot accompany him to (making her worry that she won't see him again) and his occasional distance from Rebellion matters. It gets even worse after Kanan's Heroic Sacrifice and death in Season 4, and Hera suffers from a Heroic BSoD and even briefly loses the will to continue the rebellion from her grief in losing him.
    • Adding to that, Okadiah jokingly tells Hera to marry Kanan. In season 4, Kanan tells Hera that he wants a real life and future with her, to which she eventually reciprocates. However, they don't get to have their desired post-Empire life together due to his death. Although, as it would turn out, Hera became pregnant with Kanan's child prior to his death and bears his son.
• Jerkass Woobie: Kanan's a bitter, abrasive drunkard, but he's been on the run from the Empire for 8 years after having his entire world collapse on him so it's hard to blame him. It helps that he gets better throughout the story.
• Moral Event Horizon: Count Denetrius Vidian has a few candidates for his crossing:
  • Pushing Lal Grallik into an Acid Pool just because thorilide production wasn't going fast enough for him and the Empire.
  • Trying to blow up Gorse's moon, Cynda, and deliberately not evacuating Moonglow's workers before triggering a mine collapse to prevent some unrest. This kills a lot of people, including Okadiah.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Lal Grallik's death. She spends a few seconds being dissolved alive in the xenoboric Acid Pool Vidian pushed her in, and he pushes her in deeper just because it isn't killing her fast enough.
  • Count Vidian's backstory: He spent two years in a hospital with a disease eating away his body, unable to communicate and feeling completely helpless. He even has a few aides who are cybernetically modified to his extremes, making you wonder just what he put them through. When he's got Kanan and Hera apprehended in his personal clinic on Calcoraan, he threatens to do the same to them (and for 10 years instead of 2!), wondering if it will "make [them] more interesting."
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: "Wasted" might be too extreme of a word as the character in question does get plenty of scenes, but the most consistent criticism for this story is that Hera Syndulla is the only main character who has a backstory that's barely touched upon. However, said critics acknowledge the justification in that her backstory is probably being saved either for the TV series or Lords of the Sith (which features her father, Cham Syndulla, as a character). Word of God confirms that Hera's history simply "wasn't his to reveal."
• Tear Jerker:
  • Plenty of the passages depicting Kanan trying to process how severely cut short his childhood was.
    • This passage sums up his trust issues with himself and others:
      Because looking at [Hera] in the pilot’s chair now, he determined that he’d follow her anywhere. If he didn’t get her killed first. Or if she didn’t do the same to him.

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