Okay, so it's been a dog's age since I last posted here. To be honest, been pretty busy with a number of different things, ranging from work to playtesting gigs (now completed) to playing in various RPG campaigns to planning out my next Star Wars campaign.
So the Siege of Lothal has dropped, giving us a taste of what's to come for Season 2 of Star Wars Rebels. Now I've already been enjoying the show since I first saw Spark of Rebellion last year, and while Season 1 had a couple of rough spots I enjoyed that as well. Where the first season ended on a fairly bright note for the titular Rebels, Siege of Lothal undoes all of that.
If you've not seen Siege of Lothal, then fair warning that ahead there be spoilers.
Season 1's "Fire Across The Galaxy" ended the episode with the introduction of Darth Vader, suggesting that if Grand Moff Tarkin showing up was bad news for Lothal, then things were due to get a lot worse.
And what may well be the first time for the more casual breed of Star Wars fan, we get to see Lord Vader earn his rep as one of the most dangerous and perhaps frightening individuals in service to the Emperor. While the EU/Legends did much to build up Vader's rep, going by the movies we really don't see him do a whole lot in the films to truly establish his bad guy cred. Siege of Lothal changes that, as he pretty much masterminds the schemes to ruin what good will the crew of the Ghost had with the Lothal populace by placing the blame for the minister's death squarely on their heads, and then dealing with
rag-tag Rebel fleet that had amassed since Season 1 had ended. He utterly dominated Kanan in their battle, and as the Jedi-turned-Rebel accurately said, they were indeed lucky to have survived that; I suspect that if Vader didn't need them to lead him to the Rebel fleet, none of the Ghost's crew would have survived that encounter. Instead, he pretty much made it clear that he was several magnitudes more dangerous than the Inquisitor ever was. And then there was his near-surgical destruction of Phoenix Squadron and crippling of the Rebel's command ship with nothing more than his personal TIE Advanced and the fact that he's one of the best fighter pilots in the galaxy. In a way, the whole movie felt like Vader was out-and-out trolling the Rebels simply because he could, merely to underscore just how badly outclassed they were in comparison to the might of a Sith Lord.
In ANH, Ben Kenobi called the period of years between the Empire's founding and the Battle of Yavin as "the dark times," and Vader's appearance pretty much highlights that times are going to be very dark for the Rebels. While I doubt we'll see Vader as a constantly recurring adversary (after all, James Earl Jones can't be cheap, even he is the iconic voice of the Sith Lord), his actions in Siege of Lothal are undoubtedly going to be felt throughout the rest of the season.
Well, that's enough gushing about Siege of Lothal and Vader's badassery, though I will admit that it's going to be a long wait for the rest of Season 2.
Back in March, I'd said that I'd start posting stuff that I'd written either for the defunct GSA, as well as things I'd been planning to incorporate into the next Unofficial Species Menagerie. So it's probably about high time I start doing that. Things have settled down a little bit for me, at least for this week, so time to start posting some crunch.
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