Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve talked about this cartoon, and the last time I left off, I was still in the middle of the third season, but I’m finally all caught up now. I take this time to now say that many of my criticisms for the show as a whole were given a little premature. Sure, I still don’t like the personifications of the Force and I maintain that the first two seasons were pretty mediocre, and I also maintain that being Star Wars, there is a little bit of sexism going on. Furthermore, characters like Asajj Ventress and Lux Bonteri have made reappearances. Despite my critiques of the third season, that’s where the show started to pick up. I was not a huge fan of the following season, but it had some amazing episodes, such as reintroducing Darth Maul into canon. The fifth season is possibly one of the best seasons of any cartoon. It’s not perfect, but it is enough to make me almost want to take back anything bad I ever said about the show.
Spoilers after the jump.
First of all, this picture was used as an advertisement for this season.
Though I was well aware that Clone Wars is a violent cartoon—the previous seasons didn’t shy away from killing anyone—I didn’t realize how violent this show was willing to become. It knows its intended audience consists of children, but it doesn’t shy away from the fact that people die in war. This really dawned on me in the fourth season’s opening, in which the villain Riff Tamson dies via explosion and his severed head is clearly visible raining down with all the other debris in the background.
So right away, looking at the above picture, I knew to worry for each and every one of these characters. The one Jedi, Adi Gallia, second from the left, gets offed the very first episode. She hadn’t been a big character. In fact, she’s not even a secondary character. I have a feeling that she was added into this in order for George Lucas or whoever to prove that they weren’t fucking around when he had a poster released that proclaimed the violent death of beloved cartoon characters. And Adi’s death is pretty violent. Normally in Star Wars, there’s little to no blood, because lightsabers, and that can make the violence seem less violent. That was not the case with Adi. She got stabbed to death with a bunch of horns, and then she was stabbed with a lightsaber.
Pre Vizsla, the leftmost character, gets decapitated by Darth Maul, who then later strangles and stabs Satine, the rightmost character, to death in order to hurt Obi-Wan. Following that, Darth Sidious does the exact same thing to Maul by murdering Maul’s Brother Savage, center right, and capturing and torturing Maul. Maul’s fate is currently unknown.
And you see, this really made me worry, because I am cursed. My curse is that my favorite character dies in everything. So I almost died from panic when I saw both Ahsoka and Ventress in that pic.
Spoilers again: they live.
It would take a lot of guts for them to kill off Ahsoka, since she’s so well loved by the fans, and to be honest, Ahsoka and Ventress are the two female characters that sort of try to negate the sexism in the show. Sure, we have bad female characters like Padmé, but for being in a show where I saw a lot of sexism, Ahsoka and Ventress are two of the strongest characters, and the fifth season was great in female representation. Even Satine, a character I completely loathe as being boring and pointless, had a moment to shine in this season. I was not expecting to care about her, or to even be upset when she died.
Not only that, but the series, and this season especially, justifies so much of Revenge of the Sith. It’s really bad that the prequel movies need a cartoon to justify what happens in them, but they do, so thankfully Clone Wars exists. For example, the show’s been setting up discontent between the public and the Jedi, which makes the acceptance of Order 66 by the Republic all the more believable.
I don’t want to give too much of this season away. Everyone should go watch it right now.
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 