I'm having some Thoughts about fandom discourse. There seems to be a clear divide of people who like RepComm and hate TCW, and those who love TCW and hate RepComm. I have something to say to all y'all:
Stop it.
The Clone Wars by Dave Filoni is a children's show. It is written very, very well as exactly that and makes deliberate choices about exemplifying values and relationships clearly so that younger audiences can be eased into learning about complex life events and moral situations. It does what it does ON PURPOSE. War is a hard subject, and the intended audience of this show has never been in a war. It is meant to slowly and carefully broach topics that kids will get more information and context on later. The audience for this series is still living in an adult-regulated world and won't grow into their independence or autonomy for a while, but they are old enough to start drawing parallels between the fiction they consume and things they learn about in school, like the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement. YOU MAY NOTICE that the series grows in maturity and nuance as it goes on, literally growing with the viewer. That is deliberate!
Republic Commandos by Karen Traviss is an adult book series. It has unreliable narrators, tragic circumstances, unfair situations, and toxic relationships because it is intended for a mature audience capable of digesting and conversing with that level of nuance. What characters say and do is not a statement by the author of what YOU should say and do, but rather a reflection of the character's own beliefs, biases, and experiences that we the audience are expected to be wise enough to pick up on. Republic Commandos covers the personal feelings and convictions of individual people and asks hard questions about slavery, justice, government systems, and the greater good that reflect real-world conflicts that we experience in the news like the Iraq war or the war on terror. The Republic Commandos series is intended for an audience old enough to go to college and vote, so they're ready to be having these serious conversations and to be dealing with people who might vehemently disagree with them politically or religiously.
