I didn't watch it when it came out because I was already souring on Star Wars and I pretty much forgot about it, but I've been playing a Star Wars EU based custom DND style tabletop with some buddies for a few weeks and one of them gave me a thumb drive with Andor on it.
It was pretty fucking good. And that's what leads me to being disappointed. It's like having a glimpse of what could have been but wasn't. Even at its "height" of Mandalorian Season 1, Disney Star Wars tv shows were nothing more than normieslop, and got progressively worse from there. I stopped watching after season 2 and only dipped back in to watch Ahsoka because I liked Rebels, and it was the worst thing I've ever seen. All of this was on the high seas of course.
But the here's this relatively obscure show that most people didn't even watch ending up having the best writing out of anything Disney Star Wars produced. And of course it's ignored in favor of more DEI slop like Acolyte. Andor will probably never get a season 2, if it does they'll almost certainly fuck it up, and the entire Star Wars tv show experiment will be remembered like a wet fart during a job interview. All the while, Andor shows that there was at least at one point, a chance for it to have been more, but was deliberately steered away from that by malicious actors at the top.
I think it's the quality of writer. A truly exceptional writer can write a story about kicking an empty Coke can down the road for 10 minutes into something worth reading. But a shit writer who was only chosen for being fat, brown, and gay can be handed a universe capable of some of the most exciting and gripping stories imaginable and churn out something less appealing than a rotten cow carcass left in the sun for a week.
If the guy who wrote Andor were allowed to write a story about Jedi, it would probably be worth watching. But of course the story he would come up with wouldn't have enough faggots in it.
As far as DEI goes, I did notice there's one lesbian relationship in Andor, but it's hilariously accurate that one of them is a massive cunt to the other.
But other than that, the male characters never got shown up or made to be bumbling fools to pave the way for a girl boss. Andor and Luthan in particular are shown to be exceptionally capable the entire time. There's even that whole multi-episode prison arc where there are no female characters whatsoever. They also casted hot chicks for most of the female roles, and there were a surprising number of blacks casted as villains.
Also, the blasters in Andor actually seem like real dangerous guns. Like fuck, I don't know if it's the effects or the sound design or camera work or what. But every time someone shoots a blaster or especially gets hit by one, it seems like they are really getting fucked up with an angry mass of superheated plasma. Like more so than in any other Star Wars installment before, even more than the original trilogy honestly. A damn far cry from the Nerf lightsabers in Ahsoka.
It’s because they were using Space AKs aka RayK47s :
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/08/andor-ak47-weapon-99.jpg?quality=75&strip=all