Boba Fett is clearly an antihero. He's only associated with evil because he works for the highest bidder and Evil Pays Better.
Boba is The Don of blind happenstance. He makes the most ass-backwards logical decisions possible but it works out for him because the writers like him and want him to succeed. Even the main setpiece of the climax, the Rancor, was a result the Twins inexplicably casually deciding to give Boba a weapon of mass destruction no strings attached. Boba's greatest weapon was just handed to him by the narrative with 0 struggle (to the point he even got a trainer to go along it) and he mastered it with 0 effort.
Boba could point a blaster directly to his head and pull the trigger (after Fennec tells him "you shouldn't do that"), and rather than killing himself a freak incident would cause the blaster to malfunction and release a blast that would ricochet all over Tattooine, in the process killing every mafia don who ever sought to challenge him. Then Boba would turn to Fennec and say "I rule not by fear, but with respect" as if that has anything to do with the preceding events.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Really the issue seemed like they had half an idea for a series and then they added Mando season 3 in and I guess hoped the rest would fall in place
Cad inclusion feels more GOD WE NEED NAME BRAND VILLAIN
since as Unknown noted Pykes didn't have anyone unique to stand out and be the Face or Heavy
The Pykes are just the Pykes
Hell that was the reason why I was banking on a big villain reveal 'I mean I was somewhat right but wrong with the intent'
This is an outrage against Luminara!Couldn't they have just used a leader of the Pykes if they wanted a central bad guy?
Yeah but he seems legit confused about what a crime lord is? The whole protecting the town and taking out the spice trade is more Sherrif stuff. Which tbh night have made a better plot of Bobba retiring to be a good guy after meeting Din.
Edited by miraculous on Feb 10th 2022 at 7:10:53 AM
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."Cad Bane really should have shown up waaaay earlier. The Pykes are so boring and have no presence at all, and when Bane finally showed up... too little, too late.
This is something I have noticed with the Disney's Marvel shows as well, in that they seem to be fond of the following formula. Fucking around with the plot for 80-90% of the runtime, then near the very end, introduce a Twist/Villain Reveal, in order to build up hype for the final act. As a result, we never get to spend much time with what is supposed to be the main antagonist of the story.
Please, for the love of the Force, no more Surprise Villain. What's wrong with introducing your villain early on so you can properly set up the stakes and character dynamics?
Edited by Nightwire on Feb 10th 2022 at 7:36:43 AM
Tbh I took that as him realizing that he should stay with his father and that taking him away from him is the worst thing he could have done? Maybe in year's time after he's had a good life growing up he can try again.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."Regarding the "crime lord who does no crime" thing, it feels to me like they were shooting for a morally gray depiction of the character but overshot and landed squarely in pearly white. Like they were so busy subverting the expectation that he'd be a jet black villain or dark grey antihero, that they forgot to have him ever do anything that's morally ambiguous.
Like they went in thinking audiences would expect a Villain Protagonist and wanted to surprise them with a dangerous Jerk with a Heart of Gold antihero, but wound up writing a moral paragon hero instead. Resulting in the central premise of the show making absolutely zero sense whatsoever.
I guess they thought the rest of Boba's appearances throughout the franchise would fill in the details of his darker, more sinister traits. Which is, itself, symptomatic of the main problem with the show: Favreau relied too heavily on the audience's pre-existing familiarity with the characters, setting, and concepts to tell the story for him instead of actually writing a story.
(Including familiarity with story elements pulled from fucking unfinished drafts of all things.)
Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 10th 2022 at 8:20:07 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Mind you, he's terrible at even the relatively morally unambiguous "sheriff" parts of the job. BK going to the bar and maiming patrons to his heart's delight is the exact sort of thing you pay protection money for but Boba really does jack shit about it (and in fact seems to offer BK a job for entirely unrelated reasons). The Pyke Syndicate just walking up and exploding the bar is just rubbing salt on the wound. The bar paid protection money to Boba functionally for nothing, as he never meaningfully protected the establishment from either threat.
It gets to the point Boba Fett, legendary bounty hunter, has to be told by Fennec Shand he could simply hire additional muscle (despite Boba having that one scene he mentions Tattooine is set to be bounty hunter Outer Haven, he doesn't even bring this up afterwards), and even then he decides his "plenty of credit" can pay a grand total of one additional guy. Mando goes to recruit Freetown and it doesn't even cross Boba's mind to let Mando take a incentive of a few thousand credits to sweeten the deal, he just sort of shrugs and hopes Mando will have enough of a silver tongue to convince this battered frontier town to go to war with the highly dangerous Pyke Syndicate with 0 additional incentive. If it wasn't for Cad Bane being a complete idiot and showing up to let Cobb Vanth live he'd pretty much be fucked.
It's a spell-binding level of incompetence. It just has 0 consequence.
Edited by Gaon on Feb 10th 2022 at 8:37:26 AM
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Yeah, but the show went out of its way to show us that the biker gang was a bunch of murderers who roamed the wilderness killing and raiding. The reason pinning the massacre on them was plausible in the first place was because inflicting violence on people is all they seem to do. Favreau made sure that even though they weren't guilty of this one massacre, their wholesale slaughter would still feel like a net good for Tattooine.
It's honestly kind of funny. The show dedicated multiple episodes to going, "Tuskens aren't the mindless orcs you've been led to believe." And in those same episodes, they were like, "These biker guys? Yeah, they're mindless orcs." It's carefully crafted so that when you learn the truth, you still don't feel bad about Boba's actions because fuck those guys.
Favreau kept the reveal fixed on "Boba has yet to achieve his revenge" and sidestepped any possible baggage from "Boba killed the wrong guys".
Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 10th 2022 at 8:42:07 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.The difference between paying protection money to a crime boss and paying taxes to support a police department is honestly negligible. In any given civilization, everybody pays someone for a promise of goons to rough up people who start shit.
And if you think the difference is what happens to you when you stop paying, I dare you to stop paying taxes and see what happens.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 10th 2022 at 8:49:35 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Tattooine has functionally no government authority so this is basically a new government with taxes as far as the universe is concerned. The main problem is actually that he runs a protection racket without the protection part and the show doesn't seem to realize it.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Indeed. Boba will protect the businesses of Mos Espa from small-time criminals unaffiliated with him from muscling in on his turf. At least, now he will, since he's essentially in full control now since the crime families have had their leadership wiped out.
Edited by theLibrarian on Feb 10th 2022 at 10:51:55 AM
Considering that Krrsantan can destroy entire armies with his bare hands, it's not wise to upset a Wookie and this seems to be another Tuesday at the bar.
As for the bomb, that's catch-22. The Sanctuary is supposed to be a neutral-zone. Anyone can go in and out to have a drink. If Boba has his goons protecting that neutral place, it would be seen as pro-Boba and thus the first to be targeted by the Pykes. Boba intended for Mos Espa as a whole to be a neutral zone so he can deal with the Pykes on more contained ground (which is why he seeks aid far from Mos Espa). But the Pykes don't respect the neutrality of the Sanctuary. They want everyone to pick a side and sent a message to the neutral parties with a bomb.
That point would be more meaningful if anything ever came of it. A lot of people were anticipating that bombing the neutral zone would result in previously neutral people coming out in force.
And they did. Previously neutral people did, in fact, come out with weapons to join the fighting. On the side of the Pykes. Apparently bombing the neutral ground and making people pick a side was the best idea the Pykes ever had, because it resulted in a flood of new troops for them.
Meanwhile, the Mods made a fuss about not abandoning the bar position because Boba needs to be a man of his people, and then the story did fuck-all with that concept. It wound up just being a narrative means to force Boba into defending a much harder position to defend, for the sake of mildly handicapping him and Din.
So that's two separate advantages that the Pykes gained from the bombing. People should massacre neutral grounds more often; It works out great!
Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 10th 2022 at 8:55:55 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
The whole Krrsantan thing seems odd in retrospect. No one hassles him. What sets him off is the existence of Trandoshans in the same space as him. That's it.
ETA: Also, was it neutral? She pays off Boba and I don't remember any claim that it was neutral between the gangs as opposed to just not a violent place.
Exactly, I thought they were going to have the town turn out to support them, but then that doesn't happen. Which is fine, it would have been unearned, but it means the whole 'let's have this fight in town, with lots of room for civilians to be killed, rather than out in the desert without them' just was to have a cool location for the battle.
Edited by ECD on Feb 10th 2022 at 9:02:03 AM
BK is a bad boy, too bad for Boba, he's the one claiming to be protector of Mos Espa. It doesn't matter if satan made flesh showed up to burn the bar to a crisp, Boba is supposed to be protecting it if he wants to take his job seriously. Besides, for such a unstoppabble force of nature, Boba and the Mods took him out with trivial ease, I'm sure they can do it again. Just station one of the mods nearby or something.
The bar is subject to Boba's authority, they pay him tribute (and no one else, as far as we see it). If Boba won't protect it, then there's no incentive for it or anybody else to pay him tribute. In a show that made sense, the bar being continuously attacked and Boba failing to do anything about it would be a plot beat explaining and exploring why nobody won't stick with Boba in the end, because a crime lord who can't guarantee the safety of his tributaries is no crime lord at all. We see him trying to protect exactly one tributary, the water merchant, and he ends up throwing him under the bus with 0 consequence.
It's a recurring pattern of this show to have a very bizarre understanding of its own world. The first two episodes really hammer on the idea that Boba's position is precarious and to rule Tattooine Boba will need to travel through a labyrinthian set of alliances and interests, really flex his diplomatic muscles, but across the show he just...doesn't (and we're not really shown the complex criminal hierarchy of Tattoine, we're just told it's somewhere). Freetown is brought to the fold by reasons functionally unrelated to his actions and the bar, the one faction that sided with him from day one, gets exploded for its trouble and no one gives a shit.
But it doesn't matter because Boba was inexplicably gifted a ace-in-the-hole of a Rancor, the Pykes are laughably inept, Boba's bullet-proof and Fennec Shan could have taken out the entire criminal hierarchy of their enemies any time she wanted. It's a show very fixed on undermining its own stakes at every turn.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."![]()
And it ended with the crime families massacred and the heads assassinated. And that's after the Pykes made it clear they will abandon their "allies" to their doom.
Neutrality was the best option. Only greedy individuals with short-sighted reasoning would think it was wise to side with the Pykes. The response to the Pykes demanding they pick a side should be "If you're so powerful, why don't you do it yourself? Boba is willing to fight you alone and leave us out of it."
Yeah, but the Pykes would have been even more massacred if the crime families hadn't stood with them. Twisting the crime families' arms into supporting them with troops gave the Pykes more of a fighting chance than they'd had otherwise.
The fact that they ultimately lost doesn't change the fact that bombing the bar ultimately increased their advantages and pinned Boba down into trying to defend a much less defensible position than he would have otherwise.
The crime families being Stupid Evil was, well, stupid. But in the story as written, the Pykes made an objectively correct decision in attacking the neutral territory.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 10th 2022 at 9:10:13 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.

At least Kiryu is supposed to be a good guy who fights evil. Here I don't think that what the show intended for Bobba.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."