Okay, I promised I would discuss my thoughts on the Bad Batch season 2 finale. It has been 5-7 business days and I feel like I can form coherent thoughts about this now. So here it is.
The Bad Batch season 2 finale: my thoughts
To begin with, the Bad Batch means so incredibly much to me, it is difficult to put into words. As someone who has always lived with one foot outside of the group, I felt like I must have been from a bad batch myself. When I was young, I was the strange girl with huge glasses, a weird name, a big belly and a strange younger brother. When I got older I was the weirdo who played that one sport that nobody ever heard about, I still had huge glasses and I wasnât skinny. Now that Iâm 18 years old, I am the strangely quiet guy in the corner of the classroom with three different names that people call me, still huge glasses, piercings, tattoos and I am still not skinny.
I have always been weird, foreign, different.
When I first saw the Bad Batchâs arc in the Clone Wars, I immediately felt at home. I had only been a Star Wars fan for a short while when I reached the end of the Clone Wars, and the moment when the Marauder first opened and showed these four clones was when I knew I had finally found my place.
When I had gotten through six seasons of a show where the greatest and most powerful soldiers all look the same, sure they have different characteristics but it doesnât matter which squad theyâre with, they could be mixed and matched and they would always be a unit. The clones were like all of the people I never truly fit in with, I shared traits with them, but I was never one of them. And then, all of a sudden at the very end of the show, there are clones that look completely different, sound completely different, act different, and even then they are the most efficient unit in the GAR. This Bad Batch is the best even though they are different. I can actually remember tearign up when I saw them fight the first time.
From the very beginning, Tech was very fascinating to me. Here was a clone trooper, a soldier, who was all skinny and scrawny, he wore a helmet that didnât completely cover his face, he had bad posture, he wore glasses; and even with all of these things he was extremely efficient and a very valuable part of his team. This guy was so different from not only the clones but generally he wasnât what anyone would call soldier material. The biggest thing for me was that he wore glasses.
It sounds silly, I know, but I have always been and still am very insecure of my glasses and my bad eyesight. Because of this, whenever there is a character that wears glasses not because they look good or because they donât have the energy to put contacts in, but purely because they canât fucking see, I am immediately hooked. Especially with a character like Tech. I realise now, two years since I first saw the Bad Batch, that I also felt a connection to Tech because of his autism. I didnât realise I had autism until very recently, and so to have a character, and a main character nonetheless, that is autistic means a lot to me.
Now, when season two started airing, and I noticed how much screen time Tech got, I was immediately terrified. It was clear very quickly that something was going to happen and I was not going to like it. We were being spoiled with as much Tech as possible, simply to make the loss all the worse for us. He got his own episode, he got character development, he got to bond with Omega for real and he got to get a glimpse of what his life without war could look like. And then he was ripped from us, all because he wanted to save his brother.
Not only was Tech, the now developed and interesting character, ripped from us. Tech, the first character in Star Wars that truly made me feel at home, the character who made me feel like there was a place for me too in this fandom, like I wasnât going to jump out because I was not a cute skinny girl, was ripped from me. I lost so much more than even I think I understand. I had formed such a deep connection and comfort in this character, and the fact that he was taken away just as he was starting to really flourish made me feel physically and mentally sick for days.
The day after the finale aired, I had to push myself to get out of my bed in the morning so that I could get to school and do my tests. I had cried so much for so long that I had literally no feelings left. I was completely numb. I have never felt such emotional drainage before, and it was because of losing Tech.
My mom told me âItâs just a character, heâs not real, you canât actually mourn himâ but the thing is that with the bond I formed between myself and this character, the extreme emotional ties I had to him, they made him real. The pain was real, the loss was real, and I had no idea what to do with myself.
So yeah, these are my thoughts, and I know itâs not just on the finale, but it ties together.
I still donât reallt have any idea what to do with myself, I actually teared up when I wrote his name the first time in this post. So yeah, Iâm doing just fine:)
Anyway, livea-action Zeb was really cool, I loved that.
