Andor Showing Imperial soldiers in a more nuanced way

There was something truly new conceptually in Andor 1.6. For the first time in SW (and we already had... how much? Roughly 40 hours of combined live action screen time?) for the first time we see a situation in which an imperial officer simply tries to save a kid's life, and he is immediately killed off by the rebels.

The issue of showing Imperials as POV characters, or making them sympathetic in any way, has been discussed in the past. I know that some people were skeptical, since it's like asking for us to care about fascists, or something like that. Still, I feel like it has been done pretty well in Andor so far, and this framework could open to new possibilities story-wise in the future.

Andor's Imperials are... different. There is a human component to them that I think I never saw before.

This framework could open to new possibilities in the future, regarding the way SW stories are told.

What do you think about the way Andor is showing Imperials?

 

Andor's depiction of Imperials is important because they're not caricatures, really. They're human. I think it's easy to dismiss fascism in the real world when those we see imposing it look more like our neighbors than Evil Dark Wizards, but that just requires more vigilance.

Andor is unflinching in its depiction of the evil they do, drawing more explicit parallels to real fascist/colonial regimes, while also showing that these horrors are committed by real people. And just because they may show compassion for children, or have a family back home, it doesn't mean they are any less guilty and deserving of being taken down.

 

I like them but I think they could use more thermal detonators to get what they want out of the Emperor.

 

JJ Abrams attempted this in TFA with Finn, but the project fell apart pretty quickly. After holding a dying comrade in his hands, blood marking his helmet and mind broken, Finn soon after starts blasting whole squads of them in a TIE Fighter and his character arc is resolved/cancelled in "one swift stroke."

It's not exactly unflinching, it's restrained if anything, but that may change - and I suspect it soon will. Compared to ANH and R1 we haven't seen any "atrocities" yet, not WMD strikes, not even much collateral damage on civilians really. What we have seen is "the banality of evil" as Arendt described it, the normal day-to-day civil society which enables terrible violence just beyond the public psyche. When we think about GFFA and the Galactic Civil War as a fictional historical artifact, this microcosm is very Imperial-friendly, because they simply haven’t inflicted much damage, at least not that we’ve seen. After 6 episodes there still hasn’t been any “call to action” moment for the heroes, this text is preaching to the choir, those (us) who already know Palpatine is an ultimate evil.

I’m assuming it’s all an effort to flesh out Cassian, to make is knee-jerk murders troubling and regret-inducing, before getting the righteous calling to make it all make sense. That seems to be his character arc rn, he’s looking for a cause to rations his unfortunate path in life.

 

I think it's a nice "character arc" to show how people get locked-in to fascism - as previous posters have said, the banality of evil.

The corrupt Corporate Sector security folk and idealistic Syril were early elements. The Imperial troops another, even if more loyal to the "cause".

The Imperial officers were yet another characterrisation of wilful disregard of others through their corruption and self-interest. In a way, they are even more off-hand and banal in their depiction of evil people.

I'm sure we will see a step-change in the degree of fascism and brutality of the Imperials, meaning they will become more one-dimensional in that regard. The appearance of the symbols of the Empire - stormtroopers and star destroyers will partly signify that.

But overall, this depiction does seem to show how the entire Empire becomes accustomed enough to this way of life that they are able to stand around and watch WMDs with excitement...in RO and beyond.

 

I guess by unflinching I meant more in how real and familiar their crimes are. It's hard to feel bad about a planet getting blown up by a giant laser because we have no frame of reference, but police officers shooting an unarmed bystander? The purposeful and systematic destruction of an indigenous culture? These things are much more familiar and their evil feels much more resonant as a result.

Edit: I guess we do have a frame of reference for the Death Star which is America's use of the nuclear bomb, but still the scale and how quickly the story moves on from it means it doesn't land the same way.

 

Reminds me of the time old question: “Was every German soldier a Nazi?”
And the answer is neither “Yes, they were all the same”, nor “No, the Wehrmacht and the SS were totally different”; the answer is, “It’s complicated”.

I’m really enjoying the time they are devoting to exploring different Imperial characters with different goals and principles and avoiding, as much as possible, the cartoon evil portrayals (nothing wrong with the latter btw, I love Palps, but more nuanced Imperial characters are very much welcomed at this point).

There certainly have been too many fired-up discussions regarding writers making Kylo Ren too sympathetic and how that was reflective of media reporting of white supremacy crime.

Andor, being a spin-off series with an alternative take on SW, and not a family-friendly saga movie where every statement by VIP characters is taken like the gospel, can afford to explore concepts that would otherwise feel out of place.
It also helps that the writing is pretty good here.

 

I get where you're coming from, and in an imaginative "fan framework" this makes sense, but let's read it at face value for a second: The police officers were not technically imperials, and the writers of the show go some ways to making their "victims" here less-than-innocent. Timm is a police informant, his death is tragic, but not quite arbitrary, he put himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is why he died but Cassian lives.

On the Aldhani front, we got some scurrilous villainy in the form of mustache-twirling, but nothing visceral. The rebels and the shepherds are certainly miserable, but their way of life seems to imply that constant condition before and after the Empire arrived. Star Wars is a visual medium imo, I'm not yet convinced it can work otherwise. More often than not in Andor, when you see somebody in pain of death - frequently by Cassian's hand - they tend to be on the "wrong side" of the moral equation. It feels kind of weird to say this, but in spite of its "grittiness", Andor feels less violent than almost any live-action SW feature I can think of, besides TPM. Angry, yes, but violent? Not really imo.

 

I just view Andor as the “reality” of the OT era, and the original trilogy is like a fairy tale lens where superpowered heroes can save the day.

 

I think they should apply this same to stormtroopers now.

 

Remember "Troops" the fan-made 90's spoof?

 

I remember going through Essential Guide to Warfare which puts the Imperial military in the context of the history of the Galactic Republic, and basically they're all the same institutions...and I like this depiction. So the Imperials are soldiers who think they're doing their jobs, providing security and order, and they think they're serving a legitimate government...even as that government becomes ever more corrupt and evil.

 

TROOPS is what first brought me to this site.

 

That little movie was so important to keeping SW alive..

 

Would love to see stormtroopers remove their helmets so we see the human side of them. They can't all be evil - I want to see what really motivates them, why they believe they are the good guys etc.

An Imperial-centric series would be great. Maybe base it between ANH and ESB where the destruction of Alderaan and the dissolution of the senate begins to sow seeds of doubt in the average imperial soldier.

 

Ideologies that view their social order and hierarchy as inevitable "right", or desirable, and enforced through authority is one that inevitably promotes inequalities and abusive dynamics within citizens' psychology and how they behave. The cycle gets perpetuated because those in power benefit from this mindset.

That's what, to me, the Imperials and the story of Andor are currently portraying. (Sure, there's other things too).

Anyway, some people are drawn to this kind of ideology and mindset/behaviour (Syril). Others are not (Andor). Some fight against it (Luthien/Mon). They have their different reasons which we are seeing in through the characters' eyes. For Syril some version of personal respect. For Andor, survival (let's face it, he oozes charisma so isn't doing it for that). For Mon, the interpersonal/inequality harm

So I think we are already receiving a more nuanced treatment of an Imperial mindset in Andor - seeing how folks turn to/away from it.

Andor and the Rebellion against the Empire? To me, that's what a good kind of reckoning sounds like. (Finn sort of continues the story).

Of course, this is a bit political so it's - humbly - only my viewpoint. I'm not wanting to cause heated debate.

 

It is very interesting IMO to use Star Wars or another fantasy/scifi-setting without clear connection to real world to examine different political attitudes and conflicts between them. There is certain freedom that is not often possible in historical setting without problems. In Star Wars there is of course Galactic Empire with clear parallels to Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, but also to British Empire and colonialism and all the way to ancient Roman empire.

While the Empire itself is very evil as system, combining the worst things in mentioned historical societies more or less, I think it makes a lot of sense to portray imperials as more nuanced. Not all imperials need to be evil in any way. System they are in doesn't show itself similarly to everyone. It doesn't reveal all it's most terrible sides to citizens, which is one of the most insidious part of these sort of totalitarian systems. They want to to focus on positive and hide the negative sides behind propaganda that portrays order and justice as the main objectives of the Empire. While it really serves only small minority and ultimately only one person (The Emperor) fully. There has never been so clearly evil country in the real world however, but many of the most horrible systems that have really existed also followed this logic, they try to get entire system to serve a very small elite.

Still not everyone is in position to see the system as whole, that is the main idea. Divide and conquer. So many imperials may actually want order and justice and erroneously believe the Empire actually aims to reach them. But it only aims for certain order, not real justice. Order that serves the Emperor best and this "justice" is not justice at all, while it is called "justice". High-ranking imperials want to reach position where they become indispensable for the Emperor. But it is a futile attempt for most of them.

Some of my thoughts about imperial system and philosophy and how it should be portrayed in Star Wars. Feel free to disagree.

 

A good time for sci-fi to reflect the bad time we have with current world issues.

Life and art imitating/reflecting one another and all that.

 

I mean I can imagine that a lot of the people would go along with it, after years of war and all those planets trying to break away causing chaos , and the Emperor comes along and says 'well we need order now, not all this bureacracy .'

 

It is not surprising at all. But when senate is ended and planets start blowing up it really is too much for many people to bear anymore. And they start see through this plan, that order means outright oppression after all. I think we should see more Star Wars material from between ANH and ESB. That is interesting 3 years not much explored in current canon.

 

Without getting too political, it's easy to imagine a situation in which a government (or even a private company, the idea is similar) does bad things, and those who live there, (or work for it) simply go along with it. Not because they're full on-board with it. They just don't care enough to rebel, they are too lazy to investigate, or maybe they just feel powerless in front of such a formidable machine, so they enter in the typical "it is what it is" mentality.
Now, Hollywood heroes are almost never like that ^, and the main characters, if they are supposed to be morally righteous, will always do their best to fight against all the injustice in the world, and there is rarely ambiguity about their good will. In real world, though, we all ignore injustice all the time, and when we don't ignore it, very often we still do nothing about it. It doesn't mean we're bad (what does "bad" even mean in absolute terms? "Bad" with respect to what standards?), we just live within the system in which we grew up.

 

I find many reasonings here quite interesting, but I have to admit the one thing I've never really gotten onboard with is this idea that the Empire are basically "space nazis". It gets comfortable enough to see the bad guys as something very far and removed from ourselves, but reality is based on perspective: to some people, the perfect equivalent of the Empire might be completely different to that nazi parallel. The idea behind the Empire that I find particularly interesting is exactly that: many behaviors and patterns in our society are, at least to someone else, abusive and morally wrong, but we have them completely normalized, to the point of being certain to be in the right in our perspective.

The intriguing part of it for me is seeing how different experiences shape up different realities: some Imperials, for sure, are arrogant and devoid of any real empathy, but others might truly think they are defending the defenseless and protecting people from chaos and violence; And then again, some Rebels don´t really care about circumstances: it's "too bad and you made your choices" to justify pointing a gun to a kid, but is life really so simple? When that kid is older and sees the Empire fall and the guys that held him and her mother at gunpoint (and killed his father) celebrate... will he be celebrating too?

 

It really is hard to really discuss about politics without getting "too political". And every story has political elements in it or can at least be interpreted that way since there are no clear-cut lines of political and non-political in real life and that also applies to fiction. Fiction is created by real people with real political views and every story has some basis in reality. Even Star Wars. Star Wars was created during the cold war so it is inspired by both nazis and the soviet union and clearly seen from american perspective.

But instead of focusing on only foreign evil it warns us about evil inside the democratic system, corruption, endless greed and maybe even dangers of unlimited capitalism.
George Lucas has never claimed Star Wars wouldn't be political. On the contrary it has been very political from the beginning. It's story about democracy turning into dictatorship. Making it clear dictatorship and totalitarianism is seen as evil in this context.

Disney's sequels were not really great in developing new themes or political commentary though. They just copied the original trilogy, added some vague anti-greed, anti-oppression message in Canto Bight sequence and forgot all about it then. I see Andor has already made more interesting points about why Empire is evil. It's not that all rebels are good though. Evil people fight each other as well. Darth Maul was against Sidious, but that didn't make him good. He was another evil.

Hitler and Stalin were both brutal dictators IRL while they waged was against each other as well. Evil is capable of fighting evil. Evil also wants to manipulate good people against each other. Unfortunately it often succeeds. That's why in war there may be heroes on both sides and more often than not there is.

Star Wars is fascinating to me on so many levels. It's pure fun and imagination but with a lot of interesting moral, philosophical and political themes as well.

Some of my opinions, feel free to disagree.