Honestly I agree with the theory that Kyle’s birth name is Ben Organa and that Han took Leia’s last name but I disagree that it’s just because Alderaan is matriarchal, like, A. you’d better believe Han would’ve taken Leia’s last name no matter how patriarchal her culture was, and 2. Solo is the name of a notorious criminal with all sorts of bounties on his head, but Organa is a name associated with royalty, meaning Han could show up in sweatpants at any restaurant in the republic and get a table for Han and Chewie Organa without a reservation
“rogue one forces us to ask: are the rebels really the good guys?”
YES
THE BAD GUYS ARE SUPER INTO GENOCIDE
THE REBELS ARE /AGAINST/ GENOCIDE
IT’S NOT A DIFFICULT QUESTION
ALSO… HOW DID IT MAKE YOU ASK THIS???? IF ANYTHING RO MAKES IT CLEARER THAN EVER
SO MUCH GENOCIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FOR NO REASON! TARKIN JUST GETS OFF ON GENOCIDE! HIS OLD MAN CGI SPERM LOVES THAT GENOCIDE! GOD! WHAT IS /WRONG/ WITH MALE MOVIE CRITICS???? AND MOVIE-WATCHERS??? AND IN GENERAL????
I hate fucking Imperial apologists.
What the fuck movie were they watching?!
Sadly, we know exactly how this works. “This guy killed one person, this guy killed 4 million. Which is worse? Before you answer, let me point out we knew the name AND the actor of the victim of the certified hero first guy and the 4 million victims of the certified villain second guy were non-speakers all played by extras.”
It’s one of those god-damned “the movie is too smart for its audience” things.
The point of Saw Gerrera being a piece of shit and Cassian murdering that one dude in cold blood and General Not-Rieekan lying to a teenage girl to put a hit out on her enslaved father isn’t to make us question if the Alliance are not the good guys and the Imperials are not the bad guys. The Imperials are, clearly, the bad guys. It isn’t even try to make us think “maybe they’re BOTH bad guys.”
The point of it is to highlight how war dehumanizes and tarnishes us all, and that even the putative good guys end up doing evil shit in the name of peace and sanity, and that the true test of character is how people conduct themselves in those difficult circumstances.
There’s room for works of fiction where the regime is shit, and the resistance opposing them is simply a different kind of shit, and everything is shit. Those works can have value. Star Wars is not and has never been one of those works. The Alliance are both the good guys in principle and in action; the Empire are the bad guys in the same way.
(Sidebar: the Empire isn’t even very competent at being bad guys. Tarkin does, in fact, simply get off on genocide, and Krennic likes killing people for no good goddamn reason. This is not best practice even for a brutal fascist regime that places no value on individual human life, because competent fascists recognize that they need to provide the populace with a blueprint for survival that will work in a consistent fashion. “Obey or die” produces results. “Obey AND die” does not; it produces opponents. The Empire is actually clownishly evil, across all media types! THAT’S how committed the writers are to making sure we know that they’re evil!)
Thing is, it’s not NEW to Star Wars. There’s a point about it in ESB, where Leia closes the doors on Han and Luke int he freezing cold on Hoth. The point is Leia’s been dehumanized by her years in the war (which is also why she’s not outwardly grieving the loss of her homeworld like Luke outwardly grieved Obi-Wan), Han and Luke haven’t been. And her whole growth arc is finding that humanity again during the romance in ESB.
Cassian, Draven, all the Rebels who’ve done horrible things for the cause are like Leia. Jyn’s like Han or Luke, coming from the outside to revitalize their idealistic impulses.
And well, the Clone Wars CARTOON which is for children, is all about how the Jedi are being dehumanized by war. No way are the prequel Jedi Order meant to be villains, but fans still take away the idea that they are and argue it.
It’s NOT that the movie’s too smart for the audience. It’s that certain assholes in fandom are too dumb to realize that “Maybe the good guys… are the bad guys” is actually not a clever observation.
C-3PO makes me laugh because you have to remember he was assembled by a child out of things from a scrap heap. Everything about him makes sense if you bear that in mind. Anakin wanted a droid who could help his mother, but the only AI package he could find was one somebody threw out for being too fussy. The combination of tweaking to give him a worried/caring personality makes him constantly anxious. A protocol droid comes with a fair amount of language packages, but why stop there? Somebody threw out like, three different galactic language dictionaries because they weren’t the recent edition. Just load ‘em all up. all of them, even the packs that contain things like ewok and a thousand variants of different manufacturers’ droid codecs. don’t add half the other requirements most legal protocol droids have included at the factory like emergency wipe protocols or shutdown failsafes, or programmed obsolescence. Build that sucker out of non-commercial materials that are already over a hundred years old and still good, tweak it to withstand tatooine of all places.
so now you have this droid that is over thirty years old and it could never be obsolete because it was never manufactured by anybody but a kid on a sand ball somewhere, it’s never running down because it was built to last on tatooine and there’s nothing programmed in to try and urge you to buy the latest model because there is no latest model. 3P0 is simultaneously totally useless yet hyper functional because he was not made according to any specs except “the best most toughest things possible to help my mom for a long long time on a hot desert planet”
Invincible multilingual anxiety bot here to wreck your capitalist droid ideals
sparksoffandommagic 