I'm a big Star Wars fan. There's tons of anti imperialism and I love the visual aesthetic, but I always felt we should see the empire doing some actual imperialism, with actual atrocities and the effects of financial imperialism like america does today. I wanted to try my hand at world building so I began writing a story that I felt scratched that itch with a 21st century understanding of technology. So andor comes out and I'm three episodes in and it's exactly what I wanted from the franchise so far.
I hardly felt like my story was going anywhere in terms of publishing or anything. I'm not a great writer, my allegories aren't elegant, and I'm sure it's unintentionally full of liberalism. Plus, like I said, it's almost Star Wars fanfiction. But I'm enjoying writing it and I would like to try to publish it since it's kind of written for bazinga brained libs to try to get them to look this stuff in the face, but I fear it's just going to be called derivative or compared to Andor.
I don't know, I'm going to keep at it. Worst case scenario I'll post it online. This was mostly a vent about losing my inspiration in a way.
Edit: I should be clear, it is not set in the star wars cannon, I'm just worried about it being compared to star wars and losing my own ambition.
All art is derivative. I guarantee you the writers of Andor read some other book or watched some other show which did the concept “better” and then used it as inspiration for Andor. Don’t always worry about originality, because in it’s purest form it can only be lackluster. From my own perspective as an orchestral musician, there’s a lot of a avant-garde music that tries to be original and go against the grain, and almost all of it sounds like shit. Cliches exist for a reason; they work. So don’t worry if you find that someone else got to your idea before you, I guarantee you it would still be true even if you didn’t know. Just write what you want to write and the winds of time will decide the rest.