I firmly believe that it ought to be able to stand up on its own without that background knowledge
Oh definitely. This is the same argument going on in other fandoms, some of them book adaptations but others just poorly written screenplays (Rise of Skywalker). If you have to rely on outside sources, especially things like director or actor interviews as well as tie-in books, then you haven't done your job right.
I mean Leckie's pre-deployment scenes mostly amounted to explaining who Vera was and how repressed his father was. (Given the whole thing with the tire, I was 80% sure that his father was going to have a car wreck on the way home and die as a way of highlighting how no one was safe, whether they were going to war or not).
Yes, the map shots definitely helped, though even there they start at a distance and zoom in, whereas after the first time locating the island regionally, I thought they'd do better focusing just on the island, maybe with dashed lines showing the movement of the different groups.
I know when I was in college across the country from my hometown and met someone from that area there was always that innate drive to chat about the differences between "there" and "here," respectively.
Yes, that makes me think of the scene in Episode 2 of BoB where two soldiers on opposite sides came who from his same hometown.
Re: Part One [SPOILER FREE]
Oh definitely. This is the same argument going on in other fandoms, some of them book adaptations but others just poorly written screenplays (Rise of Skywalker). If you have to rely on outside sources, especially things like director or actor interviews as well as tie-in books, then you haven't done your job right.
I mean Leckie's pre-deployment scenes mostly amounted to explaining who Vera was and how repressed his father was. (Given the whole thing with the tire, I was 80% sure that his father was going to have a car wreck on the way home and die as a way of highlighting how no one was safe, whether they were going to war or not).
Yes, the map shots definitely helped, though even there they start at a distance and zoom in, whereas after the first time locating the island regionally, I thought they'd do better focusing just on the island, maybe with dashed lines showing the movement of the different groups.
I know when I was in college across the country from my hometown and met someone from that area there was always that innate drive to chat about the differences between "there" and "here," respectively.
Yes, that makes me think of the scene in Episode 2 of BoB where two soldiers on opposite sides came who from his same hometown.