#i have increasing faith in tony gilroy and co but continue to have subzero faith in disney

[ruby-red-inky-blue]

gonna be a bit mean about these tags so i won’t reblog the actual post but

these tags. These tags are everything i hate about the writing of Disney era Star Wars and the fandom that has grown around it.

“Watch him just be Some Guy” yes that is in fact the point of the thing we are watching?? People be acting like The Jedi That Was Promised won the galaxy from the Empire in single combat, like it was down to blood and rank and special objects handed down over the generations. And looking at RotJ, I see how they came to that conclusion! Everyone thought the Jedi were gone, and then boom! Luke turns up! So he was special! And he had the super special magic sword handed down and hidden for decades! And nobody but a Skywalker could have defeated the Emperor because Anakin likely wouldn’t have switched sides for someone other than his child, right?

Except Luke wasn’t the guy with Force sensitivity, he was just a guy - a timely guy, sure - with Force sensitivity. And his super special lightsabre was lost on Bespin and he had to go and make a new one. And RotJ goes out of its way to make the point that there is, in fact, at least one other person who could have filled Luke’s position just fine - his sister. So yeah, he’s kinda special, but he’s not The Chosen One.

And, most importantly, without the Rebellion, Luke would have been a farmer. He was fantasising about joining (one of his friends did join!), he played with a model X-Wing, the Rebellion ship. And the Rebellion set his whole journey into motion, though not on purpose - if 3PO and R2 hadn’t crashed on Tatooine, nobody would have killed Luke’s family, and he’d have probably never left.

(OT) Star Wars isn’t about heroes giving “just Some Guys” a fighting chance. It isn’t about the special people that made the Rebellion. It’s about the Rebellion making “just Some Guy” into a hero, by drawing him into something much bigger than himself, and giving him a reason to turn himself into something special. If it had been about how special Luke was and about how he was the sole lynchpin, he would have stayed to complete his training in ESB, and RotJ would have ended with the death of the Emperor. Rogue One understood that. Andor understands that.

And yes, there are other sides to the story - the Jedi, the mysticism, the being mired in old traditions and fatally stuck in the past, the father/son dynamic of Luke and Vader, the mentor/mentee dynamic that is mirrored in the light and the dark side of the Force, the folklore aspect of the hero come to save the princess and the kingdom. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the fact that the Prequels and the Sequels chose to expand on that side instead of the other, even if I personally think it’s the less interesting one.

But over the years, it built up this weird, weird expectation we see in the tags above. And this isn’t just Star Wars, this is most mainstream YA lit, especially fantasy - think Harry Potter. (It’s also the MCU conditioning viewers to think that a movie serves mostly as a recepticle for as many cameos as the studio can pay for.) The people who do something important always have to be special. And, more importantly, our protagonists should always be the people who do something important, and, as per rule n°1, these people have to be special. They have to come with something to recommend them that the viewers already respect - a family name, a rare inherited ability at least, better still they should be someone they already know from a previous story. But it always has to be something about who they are. People want to know why they should care to follow this character before they even start the show/ the movie. They don’t want to watch “just Some Guy”, regardless of what that person will do over the course of the story. We saw this in TLJ, when that movie, clearly seeing this exact trend, went “you know what? Rey is just some girl. She’s just some rando who’s good with a stick and who is Force sensitive by sheer chance, and she’s here and she’s our hero. Live with it.” and people lost their minds over it.

This is what I’ve hated about the way people talk about R1. No matter if people were attacking or praising the movie, it was almost always some version of “it’s about the people who aren’t special!”. And like... have you seen movies? Have you read books? Do you think audiences in the Thirties were disappointed and raging in pubs because they read that whole book and then Bilbo turned out to be just Some Hobbit? Do you think people cared that Indiana Jones was just Some Professor while there appeared to be genuine magic in the world? The measure of a character isn’t their Degree of Specialness or the amount of stuff you know about them going in - the measure is are they interesting. Does what they do and say over the course of the narrative give your brain something to chew on. Did they grow on you as the narrative progressed. Did you care about the narrative they served - because characters are there to serve a narrative. They are tools to tell a story, damn it.

Because Luthen won’t be “just Some Guy” of no importance other than being “the guy who brought Cassian into the Rebellion”. He’ll be the guy who brought our protagonist into the Rebellion. There, you wanted to know who he is, and this is it. He’s the catalyst. He’s the character who sets Cassian on the path that will lead him to Scarif. And OP is clearly intrigued by the character, so Luthen is not only serving his narrative function perfectly, but he is interesting as he does it. Congratulations, OP, you’re enjoying an original character! I promise it’s not as disappointing as you’ve been lead to believe!

And also, it wouldn’t be as good if he were special. If he were a former Jedi or someone special’s ancestor, if he turned out to be some super special Rebel commander. Because the point of Andor so far has been that these people aren’t special. None of them. The characters are just people, and each of them tries to change the course of where things are going, only to find out that it’s nearly impossible, because they’re all cogs in a perfectly oiled machine (see: Cassian trying to get back to his semi-legal life instead of becoming a full-blown criminal, Dedra Meero trying to branch out into other people’s territory, Mothma trying to make her husband see that his friends are actual space fascists). They’re blocked in from all sides, not because someone actively considered them a threat, not because anyone was actively hindering them in particular, but just because the system is built so rigidly. You can almost look at Andor as a story about predetermination. Not just because we all know where Cassian’s headed, but because he and the other people in the story didn’t wake up one day in their adequate lives and decide to overthrow an empire. They’re outcasts, unfit to live in the Empire’s rigid society: Cassian is literally an illegal alien with some obscure knowledge of a government athrocity; Lt. Gorn fell in love with a person the Empire doesn’t consider a valid person, Skeen seems to have spent a lot of time in prison and is grieving someone the Empire trampled without a care in the world, and Mothma is seeing much clearer behind the facade of the pseudo-democracy than is good for her. And once you’re out, you can’t get back in. They’re being driven into active rebellion by circumstance more than by their own choices. So if Luthen were somehow “special”, it would destroy the narrative. Then it would suddenly turn into Cassian being touched by some higher force, being called to arms by a superior being. Then he’d be chosen. And his story doesn’t work as the story of a chosen one. Because the chosen one doesn’t get burnout, doesn’t find his calling in another person, and the chosen one doesn’t die before the movie is over. So yes, I fucking hope Luthen isn’t anyone “special”. Because that’s very much the point.

All of this to say I wish I knew how to teach the average Star Wars fan how to engage with a story the way one engages with a story instead of the way one engages with A Disney Product.