What Toy The Batch Would Buy Omega For Her Birthday

What toy the Batch would buy Omega for her Birthday

(Does she have a birthday??? Whatever - what they would buy her for any occasion because I bet they would buy her presents all the time if they could)

Tech

He would try to buy her a set of books or her own datapad, but would be made fun of by the other members because "that's not a toy"

He would definitely find some sort of chemistry set and quietly observe her playing with it

He's not the type of guy to actually play with it and show her how to play with it, although he wants to step in when she "does it wrong"

He doesn't let Wrecker touch it even though he's intrigued by the chemical reactions

"Independent play and discovery are very important for children's development. I read it in (blah blah blah)"

Hunter

He would totally get her a little play set with dolls

A mini marauder-like ship and five little action figure clones with an extra little girl doll

He would definitely play house with her when he's not taking care of his other children he has the time

One time she got them all into the game and each of the members got to pretend to be the others

Echo

He would buy Omega some fidget toys because he thinks they're cool and will keep her busy

Hunter ends up finding them and showing Omega cool tricks with a yo-yo

Wrecker breaks about half of them

Crosshair sneakily steals one and uses it when he gets anxious

One of the batch sneaks one into Tech's hands when he's talking and he doesn't even notice. He keeps it.

Wrecker

He would buy her an easy-bake oven and "make snacks" and play chef with Omega

Tech boosted up the power so that it could actually cook - "if we have this thing we might as well be able to use it"

Crosshair puts something metal in it and it causes a fire

Hunter bans any sort of cookware that wasn't already built into the ship

Crosshair

He gets her a "build your own weapons kit."

Crosshair: "Don't show Hunter"

Wrecker: "Where'd you even find this?"

Echo: "This isn't for kids"

Tech: "It appears none of us can use it - the box says 'you must be 18 years or older to use'"

Hunter ends up finding it and making himself a weapon out of it

Bonus

Omega insists that Batcher needs her own toys, too

The batch gets Batcher lots of chew toys and fetch toys

Echo insists that Omega's new chore is to clean up the dog toys when Batcher leaves them all over

Tech insists that they do not play fetch in his ship, especially after the so called "fetch incident"

Counter-counterpoint: all four are The Bisexuals.

Everything thinks The Bisexual is crosshair but I think it’s Hunter. Historically there’s no straight explanation for the Straight Man look.

Tech Lives

Wow. I thought I’d be better by now, but no, I’m still not ready to interact with any media or opinion or art (fan and official) that assumes Tech isn’t coming back. That they lived out the rest of their days without him. That shit is too bleak for me.

I saw some art earlier that said “They all survived” with no inclusion of Tech, and I immediately had all the feels.

Yeah, I’m firmly “no body/no death” and we’re talking about Star Wars so I expect him to show up in a future show/comic/book with zero explanation for his survival. I mean, he’s Tech. We don’t think he had a number of scenarios cooked up while hanging there? Bitch, please.

I agree with all of this.

I understand that people are going to cope how they are going to cope, and trying to find meaning in the handling of Tech in season three is part of that, but it’s also okay to criticize the show.

I like a good character death. Tech’s departure was not that. My issue is not that he’s presumed dead, my issue is that it and the handling of it is nonsense. So (I once again get very negative about my favorite show under the cut):

1. When you kill off a main character, you really have to kill them off. How you do so can vary from story to story, but you really have to do four things:

One, you need a good reason to kill them off in the first place. (“Stakes” is not a good reason. A secondary character, sure, but not a main one. More on that in a minute.)

Two, you need to make it perfectly clear that the character is, in fact, dead.

Three, you need to show the other characters processing and accepting that death. This is important because doing so will allow the audience to do the same and let the character go. This is especially important if you’re writing for a young audience.

Four, you need to make it explicitly clear that the character cannot come back. This is especially true in sci fi or fantasy. Especially if you’re the Character Resurrection franchise.

And guess what the show didn’t do?

Any of that. Any of it. What it did instead was ambiguously remove Tech from the story (uniquely in a show that loves making us watch characters die on screen; last time we saw Tech for sure he was alive), never gave a good reason for doing so in or out of the show, never showed us any character working through the impact of his loss (even though there was ample opportunity for Omega, especially, to do so), and ripped the “could he come back?” box wide open by parading CX-2 in front of our faces. It is never, at any point, handled like an actual main character death. It’s handled as a plot point from which the narrative moves fairly quickly, and treated by all parties as an absence. By all the rules of storytelling, Tech isn’t dead. He’s just ambiguously gone. And that means the writing team did a terrible job if what they wanted to do was kill him off. We should not be debating this after the show has ended if he’s actually dead.

2. I understand why some fans are trying to find meaning in losing Tech. I am not, because that meaning is not offered by the text itself. And, if the plan was to never bring him back, it should have been.

We are not, for example, offered a lesson about how not everyone comes home from the war. In order for that to have been the case, we would have needed to see someone, probably Omega, working through that. We would have needed to see her refusing to accept that Tech is gone—like we do in Plan 99, by the way—and slowly coming to terms with the idea that her brother isn’t coming home. But we don’t get that, not even as subtext.

Something else we could have gotten that would have worked with all the little visual reminders of Tech, empty chairs, name-drops, and even the CX-2 leading? The batch being so haunted by losing Tech and not really knowing what happened to him for sure that they start seeing him everywhere. But for that to work we would have needed, again, to see that as an explicit subplot where someone, probably Omega, again, gets really invested in the signs that Tech is coming back and even starts assuming that CX-2 is him, only to realize that she’s seeing what she wants to see and having to accept that Tech isn’t coming back, but that she can still keep Tech’s memory alive by following in his footsteps. That’s something you can kind of project onto what we’re given in the epilogue, but you do have to project it, because it’s entirely absent from the rest of the show.

As is, Tech’s sacrifice isn’t given any weight. From a narrative perspective, it was an incredibly contrived set of circumstances that accomplished nothing except punting Tech off a train, and gave Tech no choice but to remove himself from the story—exit, stage down. Losing Tech doesn’t, even sub-textually, serve as anyone’s motivation. It does nothing to move the plot or anyone’s character development forward. The primary motivators of season three were Omega’s kidnapping, Crosshair’s PTSD, and Hemlock needing to get Omega back.

Tech’s absence does nothing to move anything forward and only really serves to slow the plot down and make the others struggle to do anything because he’s not there to carry the team like he did in the first two seasons—and nothing about that would have played out any differently if Tech spent the season in a coma in a bacta tank. The only part of Tech’s sacrifice that has meaning is that he loved his family enough to offer it. And that is profound, but that’s not something that would be negated by a return because the love and the offer remain. As for his presumed death? His return couldn’t have taken meaning away from that, because the show never gave it any meaning in the first place.

And no, Tech “dying” isn’t something I have to accept. Tech isn’t a real person, he’s an idea, and an idea that didn’t come to fruition. I can point out the ways the handling of his departure didn’t work all day if I want.

3. CX-Tech was not an overly online theory. I need people to understand this. It was an assumption made by most of the casual audience. My sister, who has no contact with the fandom and doesn’t like me discussing the show at all until she’s seen it, assumed he was Tech. My brother-in-law, who was a die-hard Tech-has-to-be-dead-shut-up guy for the entire hiatus and the first half of season three, was convinced he was Tech. Every kid I’ve spoken to who watched the show thought he was Tech and is deeply confused that he got speared like that. My brother, who doesn’t even watch the show but who does walk by when I’m watching it sometimes, thought he was Tech. You can’t get more casual and away from the fandom than that.

The thing is, the answer we get isn’t that he’s not Tech. It’s, “We’re not telling.” Which means that as it currently stands, a season-and-a-half of CX buildup amounted to a five minute boss fight and a non-answer. That’s…not something that works! That’s atrocious writing if that was the whole sum of their intent all along.

And you can say, well, that was a clever misdirect! Plot twist! Except, one, misdirects and twists only work if the real answer is more satisfying than the false one, otherwise it just falls flat. Two, if it was a misdirect, it’s not one the creative team is willing to own. No one will touch the Tech-CX-2 parallels with a twenty-foot pole, except the Kiners, who have incredibly meaningful explanations for every musical choice but then say shit like, “that chord just sounds good in brass” about Battle of the Snipers (…before going on to say that the four note lose motif from “Plan 99” is Tech’s leitmotif…which is also all over Battle of the Snipers…and is only there according because the batch is divided in that scene, a scene in which Crosshair’s leitmotif is entirely absent even though he’s just supposed to be fighting his own dark side represented by a guy who’s totally not Tech. Sure. I’m going to go eat drywall.) Because acknowledging that and saying that was supposed to be Tech will just make the audience angrier, and they may not even be allowed to do so, and saying that it is Tech—you can understand why they can’t do that, right? The implications are horrific. But that horrific implication is probably what at least some of the casual audience who will never interact with the fandom or a single interview is going to walk away with.

4. The thing that bothers me most about all of this is the combined toxicity of the fandom and the leading from the marketing and social media. Part of the fandom saying that there were never any signs Tech could have survived (in Star Wars, no less) is starting to feel like gaslighting; and while I don’t think there was any malice in the leading in the marketing and social media—I’m even willing to give a tiny bit of leeway for the creative team maybe knowing something we don’t yet—it was handled badly, expectations for this season should have been set early and clearly, and as of right now it all feels like an incredibly cruel prank at autistic fans expense, whatever the intent may have been or may still be.

5. And finally, here’s the thing: I’m willing to give the writers a bit of leeway on this. I’m willing to grant that some choices may have been out of their hands for unknown reasons. I’m even willing to say that maybe they’re not really done with this story yet, that The Bad Batch could just be the first chapter of a longer show that was split up for stupid business reasons, and that the finale is the way it is because they had to have an ending of sorts without actually resolving anything. I’m willing to grant a lot of grace there. In fact, I actually think there’s a very good chance we’ll still get Tech back alive in canon, and sooner than later, if only because no one (not even the voice actors) seems happy about this, most fans are coping but disappointed at best, the creative team got asked about Tech non-stop for a solid year and a half, and the writers don’t seem at all committed. We know from the rest of the show that they know how to definitively kill a guy, and, frankly, Tech in the first two seasons comes across as something of a writer favorite. They like using him!

But whatever I’m hoping or suspecting, and whatever leeway I’m willing to grant the creative team here, the final product is all we have right now. And I am going to criticize that final product for badly handling a (presumed) character death and straight up breaking the central conceit of the show in doing so.

Thank you so much @amalthiaph for this! I commissioned Tech meeting Batcher so that even if the show doesn't give us this, we still get to see it. Seems fitting to share this right before the finale and right after this piece is finished. I love them so much!!

I don’t even ship them but honestly it makes so much sense.

Crosshair is CANONICALLY obsessed with Hunter.

Another thing about "Aftermath" that I'm highly fixated on is that when the Batch get to Kaller, before Order 66 gets called, they're fighting the battle droids and at one point Hunter gives Crosshair an order and Crosshair over in his sniper's perch, gives a genuinely enthusiastic "Sir, yes sir!" with a slight purr. Man wants to be topped by his sergeant so bad