#Kerri

[miko-mikke]

A Dream at Dawn

[quarantineddreamer]

Cassian dreaming about Kerri again right before walking into Rogue One…she’s calling his name; he will see her again soon—and I choose to believe when he opens his eyes at the end on Scarif it’s because she’s greeting him Kassa, Kassa

Update 05/20: Wrote a drabble for this head-canon

[rotzaprachim]

so the thing is that I’ve already vented a few of my thoughts on wheatfield force baby and how much I hate everything about it, but it really did draw my attention to some of the serious emotional potential around the issues of the children who already exist in the narrative, about parenthood and the emotional and physical responsibilities you have to your children, the “I’ll be worried all the time/that’s just love.” And it drew my eye in particular to the issue of “lost” girls, to the actually somewhat parallel shapes that Kerri and Leida cut in season 1, to something Lila says in the close out of the recently finished my brilliant friend tv series - io sto così perché ho perso mi figlia. Forse è viva, forse è morta, pero non riesco a sopportare nessuna delle due possibilitá. (Roughly: I am like this because I lost my daughter. Maybe she’s dead, maybe she’s alive, but I cannot survive either possibility.)

because that’s at the heart of the narrrative of both Kerri and Leida, in different ways - cassian who lost the younger sister who was implicitly forced on him to take care of, who was made his responsibility, for no fault of his own, and Mon who knowingly gives her daughter who in so many tiny ways has already been lost to the mere possibility of a rebellion, Mon who takes her daughter to her own living grave. The dual weight of cassian and mon’s very real Missing Daughter complexes could have been, if handled subtly, an absolutely fascinating and constantly quietly brutal through line to season 2 as they (cough the protagonists of this show cough not luthen cough) step into their roles as leaders of the rebel alliance and into not just killing but emotionally manipulating people and then being forced to live with the consequences of what they’ll do for the rebellion. How to handle the weight of his grief and his guilt Cassian has emotionally deluded himself into believing his sister is still alive or at least still findable and to handle the weight of hers Mon has deluded herself into believing her daughter is, on some level, already dead, or at least gone all along. But it can’t be survived, either option, like nothing else on this show can be survived. They never say this out loud, of course, either of them, but you could get the manipulative back and forth of cassian who believes for unstated Reasons that a man with a daughter is a great mark to manipulate because obviously he’d do anything to see her again, and Mon who thinks that’s a bad gamble to make because a lot of parents just don’t actually like their children that much. (There was also a lot to dig into the fact that Dedra meero is a girl who had been lost and had very much been found by the empire. She’s in this too. She’ll destroy them all.)

and then it made me realize how this is, actually, at the heart of the story, because in a very very real way mon mothma and cassian andor gamble the entire fate on the rebel alliance and the entire fate of the galaxy on the possibility that both saw gerrera and Galen erso would do absolutely anything to see their daughter again. Cassian may be all about hope but his hope is pragmatic - he, on some level, truly believes that both the leaders of a rival rebel cell his own isn’t on friendly terms with an an actual imperial officer will gamble their entire fates on the vague chance they might learn whether or not their adult daughter is alive. Both Galen and saw think she’s likely dead. But what if there’s a possibility they can survive that she isn’t? What if? What if?

and that’s what it’s all about, in the end. It’s about how no matter how much time has passed and how scarred and broken either of you is, you’ll do anything, anything at all, to see your daughter again. That’s what it’s about, tony gilroy, that’s the hope. If rogue one is about the woman that the girl who was lost became - and it is - then Andor is about two of the people who lost the girl. That’s the goddamn circle.

“i’m looking for a girl from kenari.”

“When was the last time you were in contact with your father?”

And the thing is. They gamble right.

[reyturnofbensolo]

Kerri!😭

[andorshitdaily]

Good news. There are only 31 days until Andor season two.

ONE MONTH BABES!!!! THEY LEFT US LIKE KASSA LEFT KERRI BUT IT'S COMING BACK FOR REAL!!!

[ruby-red-inky-blue]

One thing that most fans of the show do is leap into conclusions that are not really implied anywhere or make any sense whatsoever, just so they can justify how “genius” the storytelling is. I kid you not, in most social media spaces they’re are lots of viral posts of people saying they saw the Kerri scene as a foreshadowing to Rogue One in the sense that he found a sister in Jyn (not that she’s actually Kerri but she’s a “representation” of her role on his life) which is not only dumb but also cheapens the narrative from both the show and the movie - not to mention this weird idea that women are all interchangeable and replaceable. But they can all pat themselves on the back to say how smart they are for “figuring it out”, while calling everyone else “media illiterate” with their full chests.

Oh God, the Kerri thing is so frustrating. I'm actually not super shocked that people who are desperate to like the show are making up stuff in their head about it. Because uh, let's look at the facts here:

Kerri is central to the opening of the show. A lot of people who barely cared about Cassian in R1 are basically introduced to him as "the guy who is looking for his lost sister". In a brothel, of course, because this isn't your dad's Star Wars! We look at all the ways in which the world is real and that means mostly implying nonconsensual sex with Latina women, apparently. Anyway.

Cassian is really intense about finding out her whereabouts in that scene. We see how he has made himself extremely unsafe to follow up this lead. This must be really important to him! Next, even as we mostly deal with the fallout of the cop killings, the show gives us a whole scene to introduce us to who Kerri is and why Cassian feels so badly about not having found her. Again, this must be really important to him!

And it's not just in the moral or interpersonal implications, by the way. It's also that we as the audience are introduced to Kerri with a scene that took a considerable part of the budget to film. Most people will not think about that consciously, but this still lets you assume "oh, this scene looks important!". It's in a completely new setting (jungle/forest setting. expensive to film. you have to lug all your equipment and cast and crew to the location). It's all-new, child actors in elaborate costume (for real, this looks expensive. filming with kids is notoriously expensive because of work-hour constraints, they had to cast all these kids, and make all those costumes and put them in make-up etc.). The planet has wide-shots with fully animated landscapes (again, looks expensive!). And then the planet has its own language. And all the child actors are speaking it. Someone got paid to create that language, and all these kids had to be taught that language, which I assume is paid work-time for them?

So, again. Wow, this girl must be really important to the plot of the show I've just started watching! ...nope.

Halfway through the first season, we get that one really strange line from Maarva, telling Cassian without any prompting not to look for his sister anymore, because she's for sure dead. I think all this was is a lazy fix when they realised at the end of the season they had completely forgotten about that whole plot line. But because it's so weird and sudden and we have been so primed to keep an eye out for this plotline, I straight up assumed she knew something she wasn't telling him, and this was going to become plot relevant. But no, Maarva dies off-screen and we never look back at Kerri this season. Huh.

There was a way to spin dropping this storyline completely, and they were clearly trying to go that route: Since they're so dead-set on telling us that losing Cassian Andor was a tragedy to the galaxy and he sacrificed all his potential on the altar of being a Force-sent messenger (in the strangest read on Rogue One's message I could have ever imagined), I think they were going for making Kerri's fate part of his tragic loss. Implying that, if only he had survived Scarif, he could have found his sister!

The trouble with that is that with the exception of the literal first scene, the show completely fails to convince me that Cassian is even trying to find her, or thinking about her at all after the first arc of the show. When he meets Luthen, we learn he was out of prison and out of the fight in his late teens. And yet, he makes a complete fool of himself when trying to find out about Kerri a decade later. This is not a man who has spent the past ten years doggedly searching for his sister! This is an idiot who got a lead for the first time and is fumbling it! And they clearly knew how to do visual shorthand of "Cassian is haunted by his little sister" - show her in brief flashbacks intermittently! But they immediately stop bothering to do that, so she disappears from his narrative completely. The only time someone brings her up is when Bix refers to her during a fight, to pay lip service to how he maybe feels like he failed to protect Kerri and is projecting on Bix. But that's such a stretch, because he was taken away from his sister against his will - yes, he may feel, irrationally, that it was still somehow his fault. There is a way to read him remembering her asking him to take her with him as that. But when you've invested so little time into it, that's a pretty big stretch and lot of telling instead of showing going on. And he doesn't even react to it!! He seems completely uninterested in the topic of his sister!

And then, maybe in the attempt to somehow turn their dangling thread into a tragic missed opportunity for Cassian, they briefly splice a shot of her into the final episode montage. But it fell completely flat for me. We haven't heard about Kerri in half a season. We have not seen evidence that Cassian has wasted a single thought on her in literal years. Why is he thinking of her now? What are we supposed to connect this to? Maybe saving Kleya made him think, well, at least I saved that one? If so, I genuinely don't like that, because it makes the case that Cassian sees all women in his life as vulnerable, exchangeable damsels whose fate depends on him saving them. Which could be an interesting character trait! I've actually used that in my own fic! But you can't suggest that at the end of your show and then move on - unless you think that's a correct view of the world and you, the writer, have nothing to add to it... almost like... you don't think of women as complex three-dimensional people...

Also, "Jyn reminds him of his sister" is a wild take. This woman is presented to him in shackles with a laundry list of crimes and has just knocked his buddy out with a shovel. She steals a gun from him and says the mission is only fair if she has equal means to murder him as he does her. Impossible to distinguish this from his angelic little sister, who we know absolutely nothing about except that she was cute and tiny and is probably dead! Then he watches Jyn be competent in both defending herself from imperial violence and dealing with extremist - both things that Kerri emphatically couldn't because she was a child, which is why he may feel like he is at fault for not protecting her. Then they have a difference of political and philosophical opinions. Pretty unlikely this reminded him of his pre-school-age sister? Then he's clearly shown being flustered and elated and affected by her physical presence in a way that I would find deeply concerning re: "spiritual sister".

(Look, we all know why a certain group of people is so adamant to connect Kerri and Jyn. They're trying to put Jyn in some kind of sibling category so that it becomes "gross" and "out of character" to imagine Cassian having a thing for her, because they feel that possibility would threaten their read on the character and his relationship with his ex.)

But the thing that is the most frustrating about dropping Kerri completely is that, again, they primed us to believe she and Kenari were going to be extremely important. They leaned on it hard in the promotion, too, about Cassian being "a migrant" or "a refugee" and all that lipservice to Mexico-US relations... and it went nowhere. It wasn't important at all. It wasn't a main part of the plot and we never saw it being a motivator for Cassian. And, what's worse - finding Kerri was the only thing we've ever seen Cassian do because he chose to. In the whole show. (One could maybe count rekindling his relationship with Bix, except... he did that off camera. We didn't see it. And when he did try to choose her, she didn't let him.) It's the one stated goal he had, it's how we are introduced to the character, and the show fucking forgot about it. That is terrible writing.

[azertyrobaz]

Andor - 101 - "Kassa"

Andor - 212 - "Jedha, Kyber, Erso"

[colleybri]

The Andor finale connects Kerri (Cassian’s long lost sister), Bix and Maarva

I’ve only just noticed the visual parallels in episodes 1 and 12 between young Kassa with his sister Kerri and adult Cassian rescuing Bix.

Cassian and Bix head for Zorby’s ship yard where Brasso and the others are waiting to escape the Ferrix riot

Adria Arjona apparently asked Gilroy if her character could be made like a child as a result of her trauma (not just the torture but the huge impact of Timm’s betrayal). “I really wanted to turn her into this child… you meet her as this woman that is so empowered and has everything under control, who takes care of Cassian. And then towards the end she cannot even look after herself.” (https://www.starwars.com/news/adria-arjona-andor-interview)

Young Kassa hugs his little sister to comfort her from the noise of the exploding ship as it goes down. She leans against him and looks up for reassurance to the big brother who is really her entire remaining world.

Later he will run off to have an adventure with the big kids and never comes back, despite his promise to her at the end of the episode. (It’s in Kenari, but it’s hard to imagine it being anything other than his trademark “I’m coming back!”)

“No ! They’ll get angry!” Poor Bix. Cassian is horrified to see her reduced to a helpless child. He owes her so much.

In the finale, Bix is so infantilised by her experience that she has to be gently coaxed into being rescued at all as she’s so afraid of the Imperials. But she eventually puts her trust in Cassian and the roles of the sibling-like aspect of their long and close relationship are reversed at last - where previously she was a big sister to him he now protects and supports her as they make their way through the explosions and chaos - much in the way he did with Kerri all those years ago.

What a heartbreaking smile… “Maarva was here” 🥹

Kerri, Bix… and in between, Maarva. Just before he gets the hug and comforting words from Brasso, Cassian lets all his pent-up agony out:

“I wanted her to leave with me… I came to get her… I couldn’t get back… but the last time I saw her, we argued… I told her I was coming back! I never should have left that morning!”

This ‘fear of being someone who leaves people behind’ as Tony Gilroy puts it is the single most profound character trait of Cassian Andor and it carries right through into Rogue One (or more accurately, Gilroy takes the quality from the film and makes it part of the origin story). Guilt and regret about Kerri lies behind so much of Season 1 Cassian’s arc and undoubtedly has a hand in his radicalisation. “Everyone has their own rebellion” - and this particular part of it is personal. We saw it in the Aldhani and Narkina 5 arcs too, as Cassian’s circle of people he cares about expands. The coming together of this theme in the finale is another part of why it’s so emotionally hard-hitting. “We can’t just leave her there,” he says of Bix - and Brasso incredulously says “Are you going to take on a full garrison?”

He doesn’t answer but the look says it all. For Cassian, not “trying” is no longer an option.

It’s a hugely admirable heroic quality. But I do fear it might come back to bite him in some way. Yet as Gilroy understands so well: bravery and vulnerability often go hand in hand.

[andorerso]

ANDOR APPRECIATION WEEK 2023 | @andorappreciation

↳ Day 5: Underrated Characters/Hidden Details

[jyndor2]

cassian andor + jyn erso | enemy ships

[roseandgold137]

letting cafe.au!tim live his best life via pulling elder queer rank on his teen alt dyke coworker

[quarantineddreamer]

Long-Carried

Drabble based on some post-finale thoughts.

He is choking on star-fire, a world turned ash and dust burning his throat with every breath, a bitter meld of blood and sweat still thick on his tongue. 

All the people he’s seen die–the light vanishing from their eyes, the warmth slipping from their skin–and yet this Death he sees before him is a stranger. Unbearably bright, impossibly hot. For all the sleepless nights he has spent haunted by lives lost or taken; for all the time he has spent staring into nothing, contemplating the inevitability of his own fate, somehow, he never considered this.

It’s not pain that bothers him–he is well beyond its reach now–and it’s not quite fear either. No, it is a gentle, but persistent pull at the back of his mind–the voice of memory calling distantly through the roar of destruction all around him.

Jyn’s fingers tighten briefly around his own and the sensation rings like an echo through him, turning every beat of his heart into that of a drum, heralding the arrival of a destiny he has long-carried and only scarcely known. His eyes fall away from the too bright horizon and find instead their sand-feathered hands, cast in a golden glow by the approaching fire.

Suddenly, his tired, weary body comes alive again, his every movement a note, humming with purpose, as he reaches for Jyn–only releasing her hand once their arms are wrapped tight around one another. He wonders… Can she hear it too? When every molecule of their beings slides slowly into place and begins to sing? Can she feel it? How the threads of fate knot home in their embrace; turn to strings of a chord that resonates throughout the universe, in a tone meant only for their ears?

He hopes so. He hopes more than anything that she too can sense this moment where the fragments of stars in their blood align; a single perfect sliver of time in which they are exactly where they are meant to be.

He shuts his eyes against the blinding white blaze of it all; listens, content, to the crescendo of energy around them.

It ends quietly, no sound but that of a familiar voice, calling: Kassa… Kassa…

He opens his eyes and there is a single, searing flash of light that fades in an instant; a cool, breeze that kisses his face; soft, damp earth beneath his bare feet, and at the end of the path, waits the one he has borne in his mind for years like a scar–only now, Kerri smiles, as she runs to greet him.

[rotzaprachim]

”io sto così perché ho perso mi figlia…. forse è viva, forse è morta, ma non riesco a supportare nessuna delle due possibilitá.”

“I am like this because I lost my daughter… maybe she is alive and maybe she is dead, but I cannot survive either of the two possibilities.”

[adeptnenyim]

Nobody expects Spanish Inquisition. D:

And nobody should expect proper body proportions from me either. (yet)

[reyturnofbensolo]

Where’s Kerri?!😩

[andorshitdaily]

Andor Character of the Day: Kerri