PT Did R2-D2 try to murder C3PO in AOTC?

During the part where they were both in the droid factory on Geonosis, R2 deliberately pushes 3PO off the edge of that ledge, not knowing that 3PO was going to be caught by that large droid.

I've always wondered, why was R2 that cold-hearted? He clearly did not care if 3PO fell to his death!

 

I think we need to keep in mind that at this point, they had only just met for the first time in a decade. They haven’t had the time to develop the bond that we know exists in later movies. At this point, R2 was focused on the mission and 3-PO was just...standing there.

He probably wasn’t trying to kill him, but he definitely put the mission first over this bumbling droid the humans picked up from a desert planet.

 

Droids can't be murdered, can they? They're machines. I know that Disney films want to push the idea that droids can "die", but I'm very much unconvinced. If you can just keep the memory drives, you should be able to fix the rest of the stuff or transfer to a brand new body.
However, having a droid shut down someplace they can't be fixed does seem pretty.,,, terminal.

 

R2 also pushed 3PO off of Jabba's sail barge in ROTJ - at least this time he knew they would both be rescued immediately. But it occurs to me that it's kind of an ongoing thing between the two of them.

 

R2 was hoping 3PO would roll into the Sarlacc

 

Very cool recap of R2 and 3PO's roles in entire Skywalker Saga.

 

Everybody knows Sarlaacs don't eat metal

 

I think Artoo just figured he'd land somewhere and be fine. If Artoo didn't care about Threepio, he wouldn't have gone out of his way to re-attach his head to his body in the arena, would he?

 

Droid solidarity. He also helped to finish patching him together in ESB.

 

Not in the sense we humans can understand. Though droids are just machine, human attachments to them like with Rey with BB-8, or Luke/Anakin to Threepio makes the droids’ human’ enough that for all intents and purposes, if they’re destroyed by an enemy, they were murdered.

Though I agree that if you are able to keep the memory drives/whatever it is that makes the droid what it is intact, then they’re still alive. It’s implied in Solo when they uploaded Lando’s droid friend into the Falcon. For all intents and purposes, the Falcon and his droid friend are now one and the same. The ship is now the droid’s new body.

However, even that could be destroyed. If you’re unable to recover the drives necessary to basically ‘revive’ the droid, then yes the droid is considered basically ‘dead’.

 

*reaction from reading thread title*

 

Why wouldn't you just say that you lost some drives?

 

All I'll say is that I don't see droid memory erasure as being an act of "killing." I think C-3PO is the same entity in the prequels as he is in the originals. He has amnesia, but his identity and personality are intact.

 

I agree on that. We naturally forget lots of stuff, you can't remember everything. You're still the same person if you forget what you got up to get or don't remember what you did last week. Same with robots.

 

Correct. He’s still the same droid, only he has amnesia due to his memory wipe. The only way to ‘kill’ him would be to destroy the hardware that makes him who he is.

 

It's the other way around, the hardware merely houses the programming. It's like when you get a new iPhone or an iPad and you start it up and restore all your data from the cloud.

 

Oooh. So it’s more the programming chip?

 

I'm not even sure they have chips in AGFFA

 

They have Doritos

 

R2 knew exactly what he was doing. He was giving 3PO a much-needed adventure, full of bad jokes and not-getting-shot-somehow.