Day of the Andor

I was pleased to see yesterday that Andor topped the Nielson streaming chart during its final week (for some reason Nielson ratings are delayed a couple weeks so this was only released yesterday). Even a lot of fans of the show have called it niche, something that could only appeal to a small segment of hardcore Star Wars fans but that's plainly untrue. I believe this is the first truly successful Star Wars media since the first season of The Mandalorian. You can see the difference in the way it's being talked about; it's not just a bunch of shills. Even RedLetterMedia mumbled approval for the first season.

The most interesting thing to me about the reactions to the show is that it's touching both political extremes in our notoriously politicised current era. On YouTube, the popular right-wing critic called The Critical Drinker praised the series and a left-wing YouTuber called Jessie Gender recorded a four hour analysis. Both are fairly weak as far as analyses go but, as is often the case with weak but confident analyses, they say a lot about the analysts. I continue to think Syril and Dedra are the best part of the series which has many other fine qualities and it's fascinating how both Critical Drinker and Jessie Gender discuss Syril. Critical Drinker is rapturous over the shot of Syril nearly strangling a woman for rather fishy reasons while Jessie Gender takes Syril's initial behaviour with Dedra, even long before that scene, as a sign of the fundamental need to dominate women in all men. Both reactions seemed wild extrapolations to me and I would've assumed they'd seem that way to the average viewer in saner times. But in any case, it's fascinating that the show provokes such passionate and opposite interpretations.

Maybe it's worth remembering that we all hate fascism, even as we disagree on who the fascists are.

It's hard not to see Andor's relevance to current events. How many people are recalling the Ghorman Massacre when they watch news about National Guard being called in to quell protesters in Los Angeles? And just as with the prequels, it comes from a writer not making the story an allegory of any political event, or chaining himself to a particular ideology, but simply expressing the patterns he saw presented by a study of historical events. It turns out Andor's great and popular. It's a uniquely useful piece of art.