#voteformightyclocks

Okay so the title is a bit dramatic, but so is my spontaneous (and undoubtedly shortlived) return. And it's also a very bold claim. But I've been thinking a lot and frankly it makes sense.

Ever since watching the Stranger Things finale, I've been wanting to talk about it. I just...never had the words, I guess? But the other day Twenty One Pilots released a new version of their Breach Digital Remains exclusive Drag Path as a single and my thoughts are slowly coming together and I feel like what befell Stranger Things is a much larger epidemic within the creative community. Let me explain.

Last year in March I started getting into Twenty One Pilots. The lore of the "Story of Dema" is what pulled me in. The idea that lore and storytelling could be told over years of albums appealed to me. I think bits of pieces of the Story of Dema predates "Jumpsuit", but June of 2018 was the full release of the lore, and 2025 (7 years later) was when I got into it. Leading up to the release of the album Breach, I was getting excited. I knew Breach (specifically, the first song of Breach) would conclude the Story of Dema once and for all. The lore I spent months catching up on and researching was going to pay off in a final battle between Clancy and Nico, and I didn't know how but I knew Torchbearer would be involved too. September 12th 2025 was when the album released. I didn't stay up for it. My wife and I were traveling to the airport that day. I made her drive the first segment so I could watch the music video for "City Walls" and watch the finale.

It stung. The finale gave me all the feels. I had trouble accepting it initially but the more I thought about it the more natural it seemed. The more inevitable it seemed. My hopes had been high for the cycle to be broken, but to be fair, Tyler had previously explained in interviews that the Story of Dema isn't going to have a happy ending. Instead, it was going to reflect the fact that pain doesn't just end.

And yet, following City Walls being released I saw so many theories spread online about how the story wasn't over. And to their credit, Tyler has since said that the Story of Dema isn't the end of the narrative. But the theories that more lore was going to drop during the Breach concert! That Drag Path was secretly the final episode of the Story of Dema!

And with the finale of Stranger Things, I saw the same thing. People unsatisfied with the conclusion. Wanting more. And yet it was for two very different reasons. The Story of Dema was well crafted, designed to be a tragedy, with the hints of Clancy's betrayal. "If we can't defeat them, we must become them, and if we become them, we must be better." It was brilliant, really. The Story of Dema was everything it needed to be. Everything Tyler- and once I pondered it, everything I- wanted it to be. Stranger Things, in contrast, was a messy, rushed project that ran a mile and fell on its face. People wanted better.

What happened? Storytelling died. Or, more specifically, two opposing sides have destroyed the art of storytelling.

On one hand we have corporations allowing their greed to overrun their pride. We have seen this with AI and art over the last few years. There's been writer's strikes over AI usage in movies. This is not new.

On the other, we have consumers. In ye olden days, movies had target audiences. The Prince of Egypt is a fantastic movie, but it is not for everyone. Shrek is a great movie, but it is not for everyone. There are numerous examples. Die Hard is a great example; it's an absolute classic, but it's not for everyone. But video entertainment has become so mainstream that everyone watches everything and reviews everything. Everyone has a say in, say, "Here" from 2024, a movie that tried to be ambitious but failed because general audiences didn't like it. I distinctly remember "Tenet" releasing. I watched it in theaters and I absolutely loved it. Then I went online and everyone hated it and no one understood what was going on, until I went to the more niche threads where the people the movie was designed for were conversing and appreciating it.

By becoming mainstream, film has allowed itself to become strangled. Choked. Storytelling is dying because for a movie to be "good" and "successful", it needs to satisfy more than just the target audience. It needs to satisfy everyone.

And this isn't just a problem for film. Tabletop Roleplaying Games, Video Games, Art, even something as simple as Camping has become too mainstream, resulting in people uninterested in that area of entertainment influencing the activity and ruining it for others.

I know I started with the dramatic "Storytelling Is Dead" hook but it's much more than that. Niches and hobbies have become too mainstream to survive. There are obviously exceptions. The show "Dark" seems to be a successful project appealing to a specific target audience, for example. Pathfinder 2e is a successful TTRPG despite the roleplay craze. There are exceptions. But as a general whole, entertainment has become too safe to be specialized, and without that specialization, entertainment has fallen drastically in quality.

Now hear me out! I enjoyed it, for the most part. And I know many fans did enjoy love it. But objectively speaking, the show had a rough Seasons 1-2 while it tried to find it's footing, and then a horrible Season 3 due to bad writing. I could never really find the words to explain how I felt but recently I discovered an actual writing technique that was not implemented, which is the core of my problem. So let's talk about that!

The technique in question is setup/payoff. Ideally, everything in your story should have some sort of payoff. Think Boromir being tempted by the ring, and then later betraying the Fellowship. Or the dwarves and elves hating each other but later on Legolas and Gimli referring to each other as friends. The setup can be truly anything, and the payoff also can be. They don't need to be these massive moments that feel epic. But ideally, every notable moment and every lore drop should be building towards something.

While nothing has to build towards something, Tech's death should have. His death was a consequence to the Bad Batch's actions, however it wasn't properly built up or hinted at. The mission was treated the same as any other mission. There was no setup for Tech's death. You could replace his death with literally anyone else in the crew and the impact would have been exactly the same. So if Tech's death wasn't paying anything off, then it should be setup for something later down the line. It's a major event, it needed to be.

Fast forward to Season 3 and we have this assassin pursuing the Bad Batch. This assassin demonstrates Tech's abilities, as well as Crosshair's. Theories buzzed around the internet that this assassin was, in fact, Tech. This would have been awesome payoff. But instead the assassin was a faceless individual. I understand where the show was coming from: "This is what the Empire wanted to turn Task Force 99 into." But that's not satisfying. There was no buildup towards the Empire removing the identity of the clones, not truly. We could have seen that through Crosshair, but all we saw was the Empire trying to control Crosshair, not erase who he was. If we in contrast did have Tech return as the assassin, that would have been different. There would have been setup for that, and then slow buildup, and then finally, the reveal.

And this leads to a major thing that I'm going to talk about that Star Wars...has a history of ignoring. It's okay for the audience to be right. They knew we were saying "Tech could still be alive!" They knew we were going to theorize about the assassin the moment we saw him. I suspect that the whole Faceless Assassins twist was implemented to try to surprise us. It sucked. It had no setup. It wasn't paying anything off. It landed as flat as Tech's death. Yes if the main assassin was actually Tech, we would have guessed it and not been surprised, and granted that would have been a slightly cheesy part of the story, but we would have been excited. It would have been proper payoff to Tech's supposed death.

So TL;DR, The Bad Batch Season 3 sucked because it abandoned a writing principle in order to attempt to shock us, and instead left a major Season 2 event and the entirety of Season 3 dangling with emptiness.

To all you writers or aspiring writers out there, don't follow that path. Even if it means the readers are right, stick to your story and don't abandon writing techniques. There is so much power in writing a story that is purely yours, and no one else's.

In Season 1 Episode 10 (Path of the Jedi), Ezra has a conversation with Yoda E: "I just want to protect myself and my friends!" Y: "And this is why you must be Jedi?" E: "Yes, and not just them. Everyone. I'll protect everyone!"

In the very final episode, Ezra confronts his past, he has a chance to have his family back. But he destroys that path and confronts Thrawn. Hera orders him to retreat before the space whales go to hyperspace, and he replies with this line of dialogue: E: "I have to see this through to the end."

This is BEAUTIFUL storytelling. Again, I'll go in-depth when I finish Season 1, but I love watching Ezra go from a selfish street rat to someone willing to sacrifice everything he knows for the sake of protecting not only his friends, but the people of Lothal. People he doesn't know, some of whom have actively worked against the Ghost crew

SO I'M BACK! For who knows how long

Anyways, I've done some thinking, and Spiderman 4's story has ALREADY BEEN HINTED AT / REVEALED. And no, I'm not talking about Scorpion's post credits scene from Homecoming. I'm talking about bread crumbs located in Avengers: Infinity War, and it all begins with one exchange...

"Are you talking about Footloose?" "Yes! Is it still the greatest movie of all time?" "It never was."

In case it wasn't clear in Guardians Of The Galaxy and Infinity War, Footloose is a very, very important movie to Peter Quill. It governs a lot of his behavior, and in fact it's the reason he beat Ronan the Accuser in Guardians Of The Galaxy. And here, he faces the illusion shattering as he realizes it's not the greatest movie of all time. What do you do when your whole world shatters?

My theory is this: Peter Quill has lost everything now, and he's going to be confused as he suddenly has the free time to contemplate Footloose. He will rewatch it, and you know what? It is the greatest movie of all time!

And in Spiderman 4 he will hunt down Peter Quill to put an end to this madness. Spiderman 4's main villain is Peter Quill, AKA Star Lord, and Peter Parker will have to face his greatest challenge yet: fighting someone he ounce considered an ally, nay, a friend

So. You want to be a Jedi Master. Your first step is to be a Jedi Knight and then successfully train someone into Knighthood yourself, so how do you become a Jedi Knight? Apparently at least 2 decades, but no one wants to spend THAT much time training, so I'm going to boil down for you exactly what the Force is, how it works, and how you use it

This article is an analysis that takes into account many parts of canon, including the Original Trilogy, the Prequel Trilogy, the Nightsisters, and the Chiss. But first, let's cover what the Jedi, Sith, Dathomirians, and Chiss believe about the Force, and how this ties into how they use the Force

The Jedi The Jedi are an interesting case because everyone knows the Jedi. They believe in peace, defense, and faith. As such, they teach their students how to block out negative emotions, embrace the unknown, and lay down their lives for others. Their Force abilities include Telekinesis, Mind Tricks, Clairvoyance, Physical Vitality/Agility, and Healing. But those are just the most notable ones, there are many more abilities in canon

The Sith The Sith are the other faction pretty much everyone is very familiar with. They believe in embracing emotion, and using said emotion to strengthen their abilities and power. Their Force abilities tend to include stuff like Force Choke, Lightning, and Mind Probe

The Nightsisters Dathomirians (and specifically the Nightsisters) believed in the Force as a type of life essence, and broadly a power beyond the universe. While I don't know much about their specific beliefs, I know this manifests in their ability to raise the dead, teleport, and change the properties of objects around them

The Chiss The Chiss only really had access to two Force abilities: "Third Sight" (which acted as a form of Clairvoyance) and "Second Sight" (which acted as telepathy)

After reading all of that, I want you to try to draw some connections, dots, and patterns out of that mess. It all seems disconnected, but it's not. The Jedi Mind Trick, Sith Mind Probe, and Chiss Second Sight were all pretty similar, albeit with notable differences. Force Choke and Telekinesis share roots in the same ability, just focused differently. Healing and raising the dead could be considered similar (although that particular one is a stretch). And it's worth noting both the Jedi and the Chiss cultivated Clairvoyance in their cultures (a feature that even the Nightsisters and Sith take advantage of, even if they don't strictly speaking specialize in it)

Each faction takes on the same Living Force, and has their own system to what is essentially the same set of core abilities. Each expands on it differently. The Nightsisters and Chiss are pretty excluded, and the Chiss especially don't fully understand the Force, so neither of their cultures have incredible potency in the Force, not compared to the Jedi and Sith with thousands of years of history spread across the entire galaxy. What does this tell me?

The Force is an extension of the one who uses it. That is the ONLY restriction

Let's use Cal Kestis as an example. We see flashbacks of him getting training in various Jedi techniques: Force Push/Pull, Force Jump, using the Force to wall-run (Force Agility), but we never see him use Force Slow...or any Jedi use Force Slow, really, until Order 66 happens and Jaro Tapal is wounded. Only then does Cal unleash a burst of Force energy to freeze the clones and buy him and his master a chance to escape, and we know Cal doesn't use it again until Prauf begins falling to his death. Force Slow is Cal's signature move because Cal needed it. He unleashed the Force as an ability that worked for him and his needs, an ability that connected with who he was as a person and who he needed to become in the future

That explains why the Chiss only have clairvoyance and telepathy. They don't have need for all these fancy powers, they simply have a need for information. And their only two Force abilities are centered around information. The Nightsisters practice a form of magick that is honestly more powerful than any other culture's Force usage because they believe it to be a system greater than the universe, so the Force manifests as something capable of shaping the world around them. The Sith teach emotion, and their abilities are the result of letting one's emotions take control: violent outbursts of lightning, twisting the minds of others, and taking life. The Jedi teach peace and defense, and their most iconic ability is literally the ability to shove powerful enemies backwards without physical contact

The Force is what you shape it to be. It listens, it allows the user to guide it just as it guides those within the galaxy towards their eventual fates. So how do you manipulate the Force?

By manipulating midi-chlorians. Tiny, microscopic organisms that possess a direct connection to the Force, unlike any other species in existence. The higher your midi-chlorian count (number of the little critters inside of you), the stronger your own connection to the Living Force is. Think of it this way: you are a region, and the more building (midi-chlorians) are within your region, the more activity you are going to see

Beyond that impossible barrier, however, it's worth noting that all you really need is to know what you need, and what you believe about the Force

Let's start off with Rebels being an awesome show. It was a major part of my life ever since I was 14 (which was when Season 3 came out), and I remember actively checking the library website daily when Season 4 came out, desperate to reserve it or get on the waitlist for it as early as possible. It was the first show I was immensely invested in, and as such it holds a special place in my heart. So, I decided to (FINALLY) rewatch it after all these years, and wow am I not disappointed

I've always defended Season 1, saying it's not as bad as people say. Sure, it's got a lot of issues, and it's definitely not the best Rebels has to offer, but it's at least good. I think I underappreciated it last time I watched it though. The show is clumsy, but only because it fails to balance being a kids show with being a deep show with complex themes like the Clone Wars did. Each individual episode was good, everything built up to a satisfying finale, and characters were fleshed out really well. I can't really complain too much about it because quite frankly, it's only fault is experimenting and trying to be something amazing

But, there are two changes I would make to Season 1 if I got to redo it. And it's worth noting that neither would change the overarching plotline, and most episodes would remain as-is, they're more minor changes that would've had a much stronger impact

Ezra Isn't Kanan's First Padawan

This is the biggest change I would make. Kanan has renewed hope by the start of Season 1, and he's fighting hard, so it would've been cool if we had the show hinting at a former padawan prior to Ezra. In Episode 10 "Path of the Jedi" when Yoda and Kanan talk, have Kanan admit he's scared of failing Ezra like he failed his other padawan. Leave the other padawan's fate ambiguous of course, so you could potentially bring them back. Likely as an Inquisitor for the Ahsoka show so that you don't have to use an animated suit of Inquisitor armor. This would add so much depth to Kanan's pain and trauma, and it would add a lot of gravity to Ezra's training for older audiences, but for kids it would just be a cool fun fact about Kanan's past

2. Kanan Taps Into The Dark Side

In Episode 15, we get the finale, "Fire Across the Galaxy". Ezra saves Kanan, and the two end up facing off against the Grand Inquisitor. This is an epic Star Wars battle, and it shows off the Grand Inquisitor's power, as he defends against opponents on either side of him. He gives Ezra his iconic cheek scars and knocks him off the platform. Ezra's fine, of course, but Kanan (and maybe a couple of audience members? But that's a stretch lol) believes Ezra was killed.

K: "That was a mistake." GI: "Why? Because you have no one else to die for you?" K: "No, because I have nothing left to fear."

EPIC leadup to Kanan tapping into the Dark Side, but instead the show squanders their opportunity. Kanan is stronger than ever in the Light Side, and instead of the Grand Inquisitor being killed in a fair fight at his full power, he's killed by his own failure to recognize the flaw in his lightsaber design. It feels unsatisfying when rewatching it. I wish Kanan tapped into the Dark Side, calling upon it for power, and using it to destroy the Grand Inquisitor. I wish Ezra witnessed that, and saw the darkness within Kanan, yet still chose to learn from him. It could be a cautionary tale for Ezra, who now understands what the Dark Side is, and in early Season 3 when Ezra taps into the Dark Side himself, and when he talks to Kanan about it, have him say something like "I understand why you used it. It makes sense now" or something

Conclusion

Rebels Season 1 is amazing and heavily underrated, but it fails to balance it's themes efficiently, which pushes more mature audiences away and damages the show way more than it should