#like it's so interesting to me the whole parallels of cassian and luthen and jyn and saw are sSOOOOO interesting to me

[rotzaprachim]

very interested in/turning over and chewing slowly the idea of cassian and jyn in some kind of the americans fx meet mr and mrs smith au moment where like. they’re /both/ working for rebellion, obviously, collecting information and acting as the deep cover agents the rebellion needs so badly, but it’s all a set up, cassian still (tenuously and with great friction) reports to luthen as his handler and jyn still reports to saw and their whole fake marriage is in many ways both truce-meeing point and stand-off between the luthen and saw schools of rebellion: if i sell you out, the whole cell falls with you. 

[thornfield13713]

There is something really interesting in the way that Jyn and Cassian are...they are at once parallels to each other's experiences, and they are their own role-reversal AU.

Like- we first met them as an apparently-apolitical rogue and a dedicated member of Rebel Intelligence. This is quickly complicated on Jyn's side, when we find out about her past with the Partisans, that line of Saw's about her being the most devoted member of his cadre, a true believer, before she was abandoned, allegedly to protect her from those who would use her as a bargaining chip against the Empire (apparently under the impression that Galen Erso had a lot more influence than he did.) Which- That sounds a heck of a lot like the sort of thing Luthen Rael would do to me, and we see him visiting Saw in S1 of Andor, which would be...roughly around the time Jyn was abandoned. Either it's going to happen very soon or it's already happened, and I'd lay money that it happened because Luthen found out that Saw had Galen Erso's daughter among his partisans. Cassian's narrative remains fairly straightforward throughout Rogue One, but is then complicated in Andor.

Jyn had a childhood on the run from the Empire, but not actively fighting it, until she was taken from her home by Saw. Cassian had a childhood fighting the Republic (which, as this show and others have made clear, was not so different from the Empire from the perspective of the outlying worlds) until he was taken from his home by the Andors. Even the circumstances of how they were taken are opposites - Saw was entrusted with Jyn by her parents, Cassian was abducted from his community by the Andors who...while well-meaning, still never gave him a choice and certainly never stopped to consider that he might have a family and community that they were tearing him away from. Saw encouraged Jyn to fight the Empire, trained her to do so, whereas what we see of Clem Andor is him urging Cassian and others not to make trouble. To keep his head down and not protest, because those who do will be killed.

In the same year, 5 BBY, Jyn is cut loose from the Partisans and becomes a much more self-interested criminal in order to survive, and Cassian joins up with the Rebellion, abandoning self-interest in order to dedicate himself to the cause. Notably, even during their more self-interested period, both of them are still fighting the Empire in smaller and more self-interested ways - Jyn's list of charges at the start of Rogue One makes that clear enough, and Cassian is, even before he is formally a rebel, still apparently stealing principally from the Empire. They've just both given up on any way of making any sort of large-scale difference. And, if my theory about who it was that wanted to use Jyn is correct, these decisions have a lot to do with one man, who indirectly brought one of them into the rebellion and drove the other away from it.

I just- This is the least of the ways in which Andor is fascinating, I know. But a lot of people have written a lot more eloquently and knowledgably than I could about the ways in which this show is very smart politically, and says a lot about the nature of fascism, radicalisation, police states, the prison industrial complex and the workings of colonialism. Much has also been written about where the show falls short (challenge: can we have a reasonably prominent black character who survives more than a couple of episodes, please?). I'm just bringing this one forward because it's an aspect I haven't seen discussed as much, and because character development and parallels are always interesting to poke at, particularly with two characters whose final fates are so closely intertwined. Their stories spiral around each other, never quite touching until the very end, but they've been on parallel roads this whole time even if neither of them can see it.