themandalorianwolf:

lj-writes:

jewishcomeradebot:

I honestly can’t take it seriously when people claim Cardinal is a good person. Being less vile than Phasma and Hux is such a fucking low bar it doesn’t count. And the fact that people ship Vi with him is just, yeah no. 

By all means, let’s ship a Black woman with the white man who captures and tortures her. /s

I haven’t been able to get through the entire book tbh, because I find Delilah’s promoting of Cardinal as a Good Person™ very disturbing. The whole thing reeks of the Good Nazi trope.

DID YOU HACK INTO MY DRAFTS FOLDER because I have this exact rant in there, but you put it much more succinctly than I could. Also I didn’t know this ship was a thing and how about a big No.

If anything the Cardinal gets worse at the end of the book. He lets Vi hobble out of the torture chamber, big whoop, on her own to sneak out of a Star Destroyer while still weak from the hours of torture he inflicted. Then, after the evidence on Hux the Elder’s murder he gathered at the expense of Vi’s agony gets him predictably laughed out of Hux the Younger’s room, he pretty much seeks suicide by Phasma out of despair. Guess who’s there to save his stupid dying ass after Phasma leaves him for dead? Yeah. Vi, having bounced right back from torture, wheels her torturer away to safety for the grand finale. I almost threw my ebook reader across the room for all I had been expecting/dreading this.

Also, while the Cardinal has some principles and scruples, they’re the sort of principles that allow him to torture someone potentially to death. Comparing him to Finn in terms of morality is just insulting. The Cardinal’s principles are the principles of loyalty and patronage–he wants to bring Brendol Hux’s murderer to justice because he owes the ginger turd everything, and he fools himself into thinking ginger turd jr. is going to give a shit, or indeed wasn’t in on it himself (spoiler: he was. Oh the shock). There’s also a big dollop of personal grudge here because Phasma was promoted ahead of him. I’m hard pressed to think of a more useless lump of bootlicking, self-deception, sanctimonious hypocrisy, and futility. And it looks like Vi has taken on the task of “fixing” him. Yay. Oh God there are reylows out there saying this is “foreshadowing” for their ship, aren’t there

I find that the only morally grey characters in the FO are either dead, deflected, or missing. Rae Sloane is probably the closet to morally grey, but…ya know….still works for the FO as of last reported.

Every character in the FO could have been a Finn, but chose to be a Phasma. Cardinal in a sense is a good metaphor of poor children that are recruited into gangs or terrorist groups, but turn out to grow into monsters.

I found the book ending to be a good one and fits into the narrative that the Resistance is just morally better than the FO. Plus I agree with Vi saving Cardinal just because it would be a waste to not interrogate him.

I like the Phasma novel because it reinforced the fact that any good the First Order might do, is still out if self serving pragmatic reasons and they are in fact wrong in every shade. I like Cardinal because he’s an interesting Anti-Villain on what Finn could have become if he had a weaker resolve.

Yeah, I think the Phasma novel was very good about showing that the FO has no morality whatsoever, only enough pretensions of morality to draw in people who are not completely evil and self-serving–but that the people with any semblance of morality are kicked out or leave. We don’t know what’s become of Rae Sloane; Cardinal, much as I despise him, at least had some standards of behavior; and Finn of course defected once the true nature of the organization became clear to him.

What irritates me about the Cardinal is not that he’s a monster, but that he’s a pathetic, self-deceiving hypocrite. At least villains like Hux and Ren proudly own their own villainy. The Cardinal tries to pretend he’s a good guy while doing monstrous shit. Worse, the narrative partially backs him up.

Don’t get me wrong, the novel is an unqualified triumph for Vi. She successfully played the torturer’s game in a situation where she was made completely helpless, and gained a valuable source of information for the Resistance in the process. Maybe the intel on the FO they gained from him has been or will be of use. He also knows more about the Stormtroopers’ early education than anyone, which will hopefully be of use in deprogramming children in particular and maybe adults as well. So yes, Vi was incredible, I’m just irritated that the man who tortured her is portrayed as somehow deserving her help in any way and particularly at fandom’s lionization of him.

I’m pretty sure the Cardinal can be brought around, mostly because he’s such a pathetically ingratiating turd who will latch on to those more powerful than he is. That’s about as much good as I can say about him. That, and he does genuinely seem to love the children in his care within the constraints of his environment, so he’d better get to work turning around any liberated children whom he helped indoctrinate and train for a fascist organization.

I mean he’s a realistic view of the kind of people who work for places like the FO, in a way–not everyone can be a hero like Finn, and if a Stormtrooper uprising happens I’m sure its ranks will have more Cardinals and Slips than Finns.