I’m sure we all know about the low audience scores given to The Acolyte. Rotten Tomatoes was sitting down at 14% since around the third episode, and was that low up until at least the last episode. Now that it’s nearly a week out from the season finale, I figured I’d take another look.
The Rotten Tomatoes score has gone up to 17% and other review platforms have gone up a bit also.
So I decided to read through a few of the recent ones. Here are two examples:
The showrunners accuse fans of “review bombing” but are apparently just fine with artificial review boosting. I saw a bunch of these double reviews and nearly every single one talked about things like diversity, a “fresh take”, production values, etc, all in that typical bland corporate-speech type of language.
Whereas the negative reviews are detailed and specific without ever getting into racism, bigotry, sexism, or other things fans are often accused of. If you read through the negative reviews they are often well thought out criticisms of the story itself and the quality of acting.
I just wanted to bring this fake review boosting to the community’s attention. If you enjoyed the show, that’s awesome. But it’s dishonest to dilute honest and fair criticisms of a show.
While shady behavior to manipulate reviews is not okay, I’m hesitant to engage with the discussion. The reason being that jumping down into this topic results in unproductive slapfights where everyone calls everyone else shills/trolls/whatever. Bringing that discussion to this community changes the tone from talking about Star Wars, to talking about people who are talking about people who are talking about Star Wars.
There should be a space on the Internet to enjoy Star Wars, and to discuss and critique Star Wars content itself without being sidetracked by talking about how other people have wrong opinions.
E-celebs whip up mobs of idiots. Corporations whip up mobs of idiots. I just don’t know if that’s something we really need to put a magnifying glass on here. This topic is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.
I agree that engaging is for the most part non-productive. It’s like trying to explain gravity to a flat earther. I just want people to be aware of the manipulation.
I’d prefer people ignore the noise. Star Wars fandom is always on the precipice of exploding into another fan on fan knifefight with the smallest provocation. I had hoped to have a space where people talk about what they enjoy, rather than fight over review scores and Twitter nonsense. But I am hesitant as well to strike down the discussion that people want to engage in.
There should be a space on the Internet to enjoy Star Wars, and to discuss and critique Star Wars content itself without being sidetracked by talking about how other people have wrong opinions.
Absolutely agree.
My favourite thing about lemmy, compared to the other place, is how with much smaller communities the discussions are much less vitriolic and antagonistic.
I’ve missed being able to have discussions about star wars based on media and literary analysis, instead of “the main character is a woman and thus BAD”.
I mean, I had the whole “She’s got a twin sister whose doing it” thing pegged from the moment we saw the ‘good’ sister working as a mechanic in illegal jobs or whatever.
I had shroom-guy pegged for being the Sith Master from the moment he warned her that “he would know”… or whatever that conversation was in the apothecary.
I joked about it because, that’d be too obvious, right? Nope.
The only thing going for the show is that it has some decent wushu glowbat combat. That’s about it.
I watched it. I enjoyed it in the same way that I enjoyed a lot of shitty scifi or fantasy- it was ‘okay’, it filled the silence; but it wasn’t something I was going to make a night out of.
I’m guessing that the score started low because the people that were going to be unhappy no matter what were the first ones to run to the website to leave bad reviews. I’m guessing most people that did enjoy it just moved on with their lives & wont bother to leave a review anywhere.
Yup, just pointing out that the low score doesn’t mean much. Those people leave behind criticism of everything, of course The Acolyte wasn’t excluded from their wrath. Edit: in other words, there’s no boosting. Those are just reviews from people that liked it coming in.
Those people leave behind criticism of everything, of course The Acolyte wasn’t excluded from their wrath.
I’ve never reviewed a single bit of Star Wars media in my life. The Acolyte was so bad that I felt like sharing my opinion. That’s what many other people have done also.
If you actually look through the reviews the majority of the positive reviews are bland copy/paste generic wording. A suspicious number of them start with “As a long time Star Wars fan” and then go on about the diversity of the cast.
Whereas the critical reviews are all unique with valid criticisms about the story or its execution.
And yet even with the artificial boosting the score is still incredibly low. So low that the other shows with the same rating are unrecognizable trash.
How is it that the people who are always contrary managed to tank this show’s rating far more than any other show out there?
The answer is that they didn’t. A sizable amount of people who genuinely did not like the show have shared their opinions. That’s it.
Disney just needs to pump more money into Andor, but something tells me it’s Antifascist themes caused some commotion behind closed doors, so they’re trying to capture the same revenue with more tame attempts like Acolyte. It’s not working.
Didn’t the lead of Andor not want to be on the show for too long? That’s why it’s two long seasons.
Oh yeah. I forgot about that…well more antifascist Star Wars please…or more specifically more scathing criticism of American fascism and American imperialism in Star Wars please.
At some point it is all just going to have diminishing returns and it always was, as soon as Disney acquired it. They’d like to make it a franchise in the pattern of Marvel, cranking out new TV and movies every few months for reliable cashflow. There is no way to pursue this model and have consistently good output.
I liked The Acolyte. It was not at the level of Andor or The Mandalorian, though it was dramatically better than The Book of Boba Fett. It was a solid enjoyable show and I particularly enjoyed how it expanded the canon universe by giving some love and attention to non-Jedi Force traditions (the Sith and the witches). Anecdotally that’s broadly what I hear from the Star Wars fans I know in real life too.
The attention people give to online ‘fan’ review scores always baffles me. Everyone knows these are meaningless. It’s a sad reality that most high-profile shows in our genre with prominent women, non-white and/or LGBT+ leads get review-bombed to death - we all know this. And I expect all shows will get review-boosted, because why on earth wouldn’t you do this if you were in charge of the marketing operation when it’s practically free marketing? So the ‘fan’ scores on Rotten Tomatoes etc are just the balance of a meaningless positive number against a meaningless negative number.
It’s a sad reality that most high-profile shows in our genre with prominent women, non-white and/or LGBT+ leads get review-bombed to death - we all know this.
Edit: ok, yes. I missed the part that said “genre”
I see you bought into the propaganda.
I’m sorry, were you under the impression that RuPaul’s Drag Race belongs to the sci-fi and fantasy genre…?
The reason I specified our genre is that sci-fi and fantasy audiences skew whiter and maler than the general public, and a vocal minority of online sci-fi and fantasy fans (who are deeply unrepresentative of the wider fanbases) make it their business to be vocally abusive about any online content that they consider not to be white and male enough for their liking.
were you under the impression that RuPaul’s Drag Race belongs to the sci-fi and fantasy genre…?
Ok, fair. I missed that part of your comment. I guess I really shouldn’t reply first thing in the morning before caffeine.
But I still think it isn’t a valid point. There will always be a minority that doesn’t like something. That’s a facet that exists in every aspect of reality. You could sneeze and someone somewhere will have something negative to say about it.
But the point about the “white and male” audience is irrelevant in my opinion. No one batted an eye when Rogue One came out because the story was solid and the characters well written. I never heard from anyone about the lead being a woman from a negative or positive angle. It just didn’t matter.
Same thing when TFA came out. No one cared that the lead was Daisy Ridley. Some people complained about her “wooden acting” and that the story was just a repeat from the OT, but that’s about it (and I disagree with both points). It was once TLJ came out that people started really complaining (and rightfully) about the story and how bad it was that Disney switched on the backlash machine and started accusing everyone of everything.
And that’s the thing about Disney, they will outright accuse their fans of hating diversity all the while shrinking John Boyega in the Chinese posters to be almost invisible, and putting the mask on Chadwick Boseman’s face in the Black Panther posters also for the Chinese market.
It’s at the point where as soon as Disney accuses fans of something you should immediately look to see what they’re deflecting from. Because Disney is nothing but hypocritical at this point.
