I won’t pretend it was a good series, but the incel review bombing was an unnecessary distraction. It had potential and I would have liked to see them correct course and continue the story for another season.
I am not sure there was any real “incel review bombing”. Looks more like an excuse of the show’s creators. The show was shockingly bad, even from a purely technical standpoint. It felt like a not very good fanfiction. The Kenobi show was the same.
Anecdotally, a right-wing chud I’m unfortunately acquainted with was pestering me for weeks about it — and he’s not even a Star Wars fan.
That entire article is based off coincidental reasoning, and does nothing to connect the review bombing (which did occur) to anything incel or right wing.
Yes, it’s absurd that the Acolyte’s audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes dropped to below the Holiday special or any other piece of Star Wars media faster than any other piece dropped, but that article itself calls out the most likely reason: people believing that the third episode was retconning the canon of Anakin’s “virgin birth” making him the chosen one by implying the twins were also “virgin birth” force babies.
That’s kind of a massive, setting breaking retcon, if that was in fact what the show was saying (which still seemed to be the implication as of the end of the series). I can understand why that would draw more ire from fans than any other new piece of Star Wars media under Disney. No outside agitators needed.
It started off very rough, but by the end I thought it was much better than the Bad Batch, the Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka. Not everything can be Andor, but this was better than most SW Disney has put out and almost all the Marvel shows they’ve tried to force feed their audience.