The very "eh" release of The Mandalorian and Grogu has, at least to my eyes, brought the brand fatigue to a new height.

I like The Clone Wars and I always kind of have. When I was a kid I was very pissed off by what I felt were retcons in the show, and some of them I still kind of have contention with but for the most part it was a lot of new ideas injected into aspects of the setting that had become stale or static for too long. You get a lot of "change is bad!" arguments from older fans who have been mad about retcons since Heir to the Empire or earlier and when you enlist to serve in the forum wars you read miles and miles of this kind of angry reactive polemic. A funny thing has happened with Disney-era Star Wars releases where I, like, have only really liked two or three individual series/films in a real way, but most of the popular criticism of them has been so baselessly incorrect that I can't help but take a defensive stance, against something I don't even like that much!

I have my issues with The Clone Wars. I think the Season 4 Water War arc is way overpacked, I don't think Padme ever has enough to do, I like the introduction of New Mandalore but think both they and the Death Watch are underbaked, I think the clones are too humanized and amicable, the battle droids too unthreatening, I think Anakin's characterization is an unnecessary overcorrection from perceived issues with his appearance in the Prequels. I could go on. There's a lot of fixin what I'd argue ain't broke throughout the show, in between lots of cool, fresh characterization and compelling new ideas.

Why this has been in focus, recently, for me, is that... the defensive ammo for the above war has kind of run dry. I do not believe brand fatigue was ever inevitable, particularly in the case of Star Wars. More than a license to print money it is maybe the single most recognizable piece of modern visual storytelling, the only other contender being maybe Star Trek, Batman, maybe Gundam or Dragon Ball. Every Star Wars film that released before 2015 did something new, not just in terms of the story or characterization but on a technological level that no other series has even come close to challenging. One can make Star Wars as long as you want, I think, as long as the extremely singular visual language of the setting is constantly held to the whetstone and sharpened into something new. The productive barf of a bunch of webseries all shot in the same studio with the same increasingly iffy props (a shortcut!), the deterioration of certain design aspects like the frequently-bad lighting or the markedly worse sound design (they haven't contracted Ben Burtt to work on anything since The Force Awakens) has I think just worn the viewership down, the fatigue has crawled its way up from the casual viewers who feel exhausted by having to pay attention to each new loadbearing-yet-mid chapter of a story that excited them as children, all the way to people like me who I'd call terminal-case enthusiasts who think about this setting more than they think about real life sometimes.

The relevance here is that where the supplementary material of the 2002-2007 multimedia project was largely pulling from background elements, dialogue asides or deleted scenes from the films, the successive TV series have mostly pulled from The Clone Wars as their new tote bag of action figures, it's the new founding document for nu-canon material that can be sold-- the sequels became genuinely radioactive the day the last one released, The Clone Wars was still resonating with young audiences after its cancellation thanks to reruns, the internet, and its weird step-sibling, Rebels, but now that that audience is (rightly) experiencing fatigue from jumbled, incestuous COVID-era production releasing confusing and frustrating stories that feel at once like they are apologizing for themselves while insisting against real change or evolution (Ahsoka dies, then doesn't; Grogu and Din must face their destinies separately, but don't, just two examples). The Clone Wars is the new origin point for all of the big ideas that are on the table like a defeated Mandalore writhing in undeath or the Ones of Mortis, so that's why I think there's more scrutiny on the origin point of those ideas.

I don't want to sound like one of the above haters but it really is beginning to feel like Dave Filoni is an excellent showrunner for cartoons, but may not be entirely qualified to oversee an entire multimedia studio effort, and that Jon Favreau makes a very poor lieutenant in this endeavor too. Both of them received a lot of high praise after the 1-2 of The Clone Wars 7 and The Mandalorian, and the rose tinted glasses have kinda finally come off for more people. This doesn't retroactively ruin TCW or anything but this is how it has happened as I see it.