Lando Calrissian’s Return in EP-IX should about Lando
Since even before Lando was confirmed to be in IX, and his return was just a rumor, I’ve been watching people make his return about almost everyone else but himself. The worse offenders of this have been Reylo shippers who make Lando’s return all about Kylo’s redemption to the ge of saying Maz would chew Lando out for wanting to hurt Benny Boy with the threat of Han Solo haunting him.
With this Fuckery I thought I should go over some canon facts about Lando for everyone.
Canon Facts
Han and Lando loved each other and were as close as brothers. They shared decades of adventures together.
Lando cared about Leia and Luke deeply and became like family to them. They had years of adventures fighting.
Lando and his people were almost killed by the Empire and he was given the horrible choice of selling out his friends or Cloud City, the city he was in charge of, would have been punished by the Empire.
Lando and Chewie were just as close as Lando and Han. They had even spent a year looking for a Han was Boba Fett captured him.
Shara Bey and Kes Dameron, Poe Dameron’s parents both served and fight along side Lando, Han, Leia and Luke throughout the last war. They were family.
Kylo murder Han Solo
Kylo led the attack that almost killed Leia
Kylo tried to kill Luke and indirectly did
Kylo led another attack that would have killed Leia
Lando would be furious about Maz’s castle being destroyed by Kylo and the First Order.
Lando would be furious about the torture Poe had gone through by Kylo and the First Order.
Lando would hate Kylo and the First Order for killing his friends and allies in the New Republic and the Resistance.
Lando would hate Kylo for almost murdering Leia twice and leaving her for dead.
Lando would hate Kylo for indirectly killing Luke.
Lando would hate Kylo for murdering Han in cold blood.
I have watched this one wretched part of the fandom to so much shit.
Post TFA they demonized Han and Leia, calling them abusive, neglectful, fear mongering parents while making Rey and Luke’s entire purpose to be redeeming Kylo Ren.
Post TLJ they demonized Luke, Han, Leia and the entire Skywalker name, and blamed them for everything wrong and bad about Kylo while making Rey’s sole purpose to be Kylo’s redemption baby factory fuck toy.
Now Pre-IX they are demonizing Han and Luke, and making Leia’s exit from the movie and Lando’s return all about redeeming Kylo.
How about no.
Lando’s return is about Lando. It’s about him continuing the fight against people that have killed his friends and family. Lando won’t be trying to save Kylo, he’s going to fight him.
Lando will finish what he started 30 years ago and end those fascist bastards. Stop making Lando’s return about Kylo.
Lando knew that thousands of deaths weren’t just a statistic, unlike this fandom, Kylo’s mass murdering life isn’t worth more than the Galaxy. stop ignoring a character’s pain.
Who do y’all wanna use and slander next?
Poe probably knew Benny Boy his whole since their families were so close. Should Poe save Benny Boy next?
Finn and Kylo were both apart of the FO. Should Finn save him?
Or should Kylo be held accountable for his actions and people should stop treating these characters like they’re from some crap romance movie.
For all that canon Reylow and canon ReySky are diametrically opposed ideas (for much of the audience, anyway), I’ve been increasingly noticing similarities in the underlying thinking and reasoning of the people who are in diehard support these options. The key word here is “diehard”–I have nothing against people who simply enjoy one or the other, or possibly both, as fanon speculation. What I’m talking about is people who think Reylow/ReySky HAS to happen in EpIX or it would be a TERRIBLE story and DESTROY Star Wars and so on.
I mean, I do give ReySkys marginally more credit here, in that they do recognize that Kylo Ren is a fascist tyrant and that it’s perfectly valid for Rey to carry on the Skywalker legacy. It’s not a terribly high bar, but credit where it’s due. Nevertheless, here are some similarities I’ve noticed in the reasoning or implications of these fan theories:
Episode IX needs to do over and, this time, get “right” the ideas that were played with and then debunked in TLJ. This means that the limited screen time in IX needs to be spent on Kylo Ren and/or Rey.
By implication, Episode IX needs to focus on the young white characters and, as a result, the leads of color will have that much less screen time. This is not only acceptable but demanded for story integrity.
The bloodline, even without meaningful emotional ties, is an indispensable part of the Skywalker legacy. Even major characters who do not have Skywalker blood–who happen to be mainly characters of color–cannot carry the legacy forward, and are therefore less important.
Kylo Ren’s actions cannot have lasting and final consequences for the Skywalker legacy, and Rey must be the one to clean up and undo what he has done, whether by falling in love with him or turning out to be the other Skywalker scion.
Rey’s feelings in this do not matter. She must either fall in love and have children with a man who mistreated and manipulated her, or accept the burden of carrying on a very tainted family name even though she had few familial and positive interactions with that family.
These are the major reasons I dislike both theories, though to different degrees. If the Star Wars franchise takes the democratization of the Force put forward in TLJ through Rey Random and Broom Boy at all seriously, then it shouldn’t be about Skywalkers-by-blood anymore. It shouldn’t validate Kylo Ren’s repulsive elitism, as large sections of the fandom currently do.
Let the Skywalker blood die out with a patricidal mass murderer, and let the best parts of the Skywalker legacy–the love they had for each other, the sacrifices they made, their dedication to antifascist struggle and democracy–be carried on by Finn, Rey, and Poe. They are the ones who have proven themselves worthy of those values, unlike the blood scion who has spat on them time and time again.
Sure! I had trouble pinnig down her character for a long time, but after writing a big meta about her (link), which is something I always wanted to do, I think I have a much better idea of what makes her tick and find her story enjoyable. Her story has not always been handled well and I find fandom’s default reading of her as a sweet all-good angel boring as hell, but it is possible to find a more interesting character in the text and that’s who I like.
There are a lot of weird arguments made against FinnRey but I think the weirdest is the idea that their obvious close friendship precludes a romance. Leaving aside the real world fact that a friendship is one of the most solid possible foundations for love, this argument suggests it doesn’t work in fiction for two reasons:
Firstly, that friends-to-lovers isn’t a popular romance trope unlike, say, enemies-to-lovers. Which is honestly such bollocks I don’t know where to start. Best friends falling in love is the entire plot of When Harry Met Sally, which is one of the most successful and influencial romcoms of all time. Not to mention Mulder and Scully – the ship that literally launched shipping.
And then there’s the argument that friends-to-lovers romances are dull and lacking in drama. To which I can only say, have you ever fallen in love with a close friend? Omg, it’s agonising!
There’s SO MUCH dramatic potential in friends who fall in love, each believing it’s unrequited. Because how do you know what’s love and what’s friendship?
When Rey hugs Finn and she holds it just a little longer and he so much wants to believe it means that she feels the same as him, but he knows he’s just kidding himself because isn’t that the way she’s always hugged him.
When Poe teases Rey about Finn holding her hand and she blushes and for fuck’s sake it’s blindingly obvious to everyone that they’re head over heels for each other. But Rey just brushes it off as Finn being Finn.
And then they *stop* hugging and holding hands and touching because they just can’t bear longing for it to be what they’re convinced it isn’t. But then they start wondering why the other one is suddenly so distant and oh, oh, what if they’ve fallen in love with someone else?
Falling for an enemy would be a physical risk, yeah . Kylo Ren could hurt Rey – he already has and no doubt will again .
But falling in love with Finn is much much more dangerous. If she messes up, if she tells him how she feels and he doesn’t return it, she hasn’t just lost the love of her life – she’s lost her best friend too.
If that isn’t drama, I don’t know what is.
Not only do they have potential for relationship drama, they each have their own traumas and fears to work through, too. They’re honestly one of the best relationships, romantic or platonic, I have seen in fiction.
I kind of subscribe to the idea that Rey is the reincarnation of Anakin. By this I don’t mean she’s a Skywalker or is Anakin himself, only that she has Anakin’s spirit returning to take care of unfinished business–and boy does that fucker have lots of it.
Maybe it’s my cultural background, but I was always confused when reincarnation was called a “parentage theory.” Reincarnated people, at least in the popularized version of Buddhism I grew up with, have their own parents and are not usually related by blood to their previous incarnation.
Heck, in this worldview reincarnation doesn’t even make Rey special, it’s just something everyone does until they throw off all worldly attachments and leave the cycle altogether. I would argue that Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, Yoda, and now Luke achieved this state but Anakin did not, for all his spirit appeared briefly next to Obi-Wan. I think Anakin still has too much to make up for, and this was a brief pit stop before he moved on. Between his death and rebirth as Rey I imagine he was reincarnated hundreds of times as, like, worms and lice that were painfully killed as a very small portion of the punishment he deserved for his actions as Anakin/Vader. Now that his spirit has advanced through these incarnations he was brought back as a human again because the galaxy needs his power and he can try and begin to make up for the harm he did.
Rey as Anakin’s reincarnation would explain a lot of things, like how she is so powerful in the Force and grasps new powers so quickly. It would also explain Kylo’s fascination with her, because as a Force user he can sense people’s souls and she is his actual idol brought back to life. Also like, her being forced to live for most of her life on a desert planet. If that’s not the universe playing a cosmic joke on Anakin Skywalker, noted sand-hater, idk what is.
On the same note, I imagine Finn as the reincarnation of Padmé. She probably had much better reincarnations between her death and being born as Finn, maybe she even took a break from corporeal life for a few decades or lived as a succession of beautiful flowering plants and beloved sad-eyed dogs while she tried to recover from the grief still in her soul. Maybe she was someone’s much-loved and short-lived child for a while because I have an evil imagination. When she was ready to come back as a sentient being she willingly took on more suffering than she deserved to try and make up for Anakin’s sins and her own perceived faults, and thus Finn’s kidnapping and long period of enslavement.
Like Padmé, Finn is a natural leader with firm conviction and unshakeable principles. He is a mean shot with a blaster, loyal to his friends, and inspires devotion in people. He was so sure that the galaxy would rise up against the First Order’s tyranny and rally around Leia, he was willing to give his life for that belief. It wasn’t just Leia that he so strongly believed in and supported–he also wanted to run out and help Luke against an entire army despite never having laid eyes on the man before in his life. Maybe not in his own life, but a previous one?
Much as Anakin’s soul seeks Padmé out, her spirit seeks him–and that’s why, in addition to Finn’s own goodness, he was drawn to help Rey at first sight, and why they hit it off so quickly despite a rocky start. The idea of being separated was unbearable to them after knowing each other only for a few hours, and when Finn saw Rey being carried off by a Dark Lord to face torture and a possible fall to the Dark Side, it shattered him and he moved heaven and earth to be by her side again.
Together they must succeed where their previous incarnations failed and save the galaxy from the fascist threat. They must also resolve what went wrong between them last time, and Rey already passed the first test by resisting Kylo’s temptation where Anakin had fallen to Palpatine’s wiles. Finn and Rey’s souls will always pull each other, yearning to find happiness together where they could not the last time around.
I’m not saying any of this is going to be some big dramatic reveal, it’s how I understand the dramatic motifs and characters. Stories of reincarnated romance are common in the culture I grew up in, and I find the idea of Finnrey as reincarnated Anidala terribly romantic and compelling.
Moses and Tzipporah’s relationship as portrayed in the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt is
one of my favorites of all time. While romantic, it is not a
relationship focused solely on romance. Rather the story of their love
is told through the stories of their families and spirituality, making for a well-rounded and satisfying narrative.
Moses and
Tzipporah first meet as captives in Egypt. Yes, Moses was a captive in
Egypt, I will fight you on this, he just did not know it yet. Her bonds
were imposed by physical force and visible; his were imposed by
secrecy and deceit, and came in the form of the attachments he was made
to develop to a family that had enslaved and slaughtered his people.
The
characters’ first interactions take place within full view of Moses’s
Egyptian royal family, from Ramses “giving” Tzipporah to his brother to
their mother Batya’s disappointment at the way Moses humiliated the
captive Tzipporah.
Although there is
love in this family, it has become deeply sickened by the violence and
subjugation that its power is built upon. We see the how the
overwhelming desire to uphold that power drives a wedge between Ramses
and his father, how the rape and humiliation of a captive woman becomes a
game between brothers, and how a mother is made to keep silent at the
mistreatment of a woman she feels sympathy for. Then there is the fact
that Moses’s love for this family is built on a monstrous lie, as
discussed above.
The Egyptian royal family, whose closest
family interactions have become warped and poisoned by slavery, is a
place both Tzipporah and Moses eventually escape at their separate
times. Tzipporah’s escape and Moses’s facilitation of it is their first
positive interaction, a major reason for her and her people’s acceptance
of Moses later on. It is also a direct precursor to and catalyst for Moses’s
own departure. Helping Tzipporah escape is how he found out about his
enslaved Hebrew family, after all.
After their escape from
Egypt Tzipporah rejoins, and Moses later joins, her family and tribe.
This is where they start to heal from the trauma inflicted by their very
different periods of imprisonment, and this is also where they fall in
love.
The choice of music is significant here; the couple’s
Falling-in-Love Montage takes place entirely within a song, but it’s not
a song about romantic love. There is no award-bait ode to romance in
this movie, your “Tale as Old as Time,” “Part of Your World,” “Whole New
World” and so forth. Rather Moses and Tzipporah’s courtship takes place
within the song “Through Heaven’s Eyes,” a song about family and faith,
and about Moses finding belonging with the Midians.
Certainly Moses and Tzipporah have no shortage of intimate moments, like this…
…or thiiiis… (girl you have it bad)
…yet
their interactions always take place within the larger context of the
tribe, whether taking care of the herd or at one of the tribe’s
celebartions in full view of their loved ones. In this sense “Through
Heaven’s Eyes” could be analogous to “Fixer-Upper” from Frozen
where Kristoff’s troll family (as in actual trolls, not internet
nasties) advise him and Anna about having a relationship despite
personal imperfections, or “Something There” from Beauty and the Beast where the Beast’s servants talk about his and Belle’s growing feelings for each other.
“Through Heaven’s Eyes,” however, still differs from these third-party observations of romance in that it’s not a song about
romance–it’s about spirituality and community, and Moses and
Tzipporah’s relationship is an organic part of Moses’s integration into
the tribe. It showed him letting go of his old life as an Egyptian
prince and coming to love the deep sense of family and faith the Midians
embodied, to the extent that when he later convinced Tzipporah of his
mission from God he looked to her family as an example of the life he
wanted his people to have.
Though the story mostly focuses on
Moses healing and finding belonging, in an understated way I can see
Tzipporah healing, too. Not only does she get a neat payback in the form
of dropping him on his ass into water…
…she
also gets to process and reclaim her traumatic experiences in Egypt
through her growing friendship and later romance with Moses. She sees
his deep sense of shame and remorse at ever having been part of the
Egyptian ruling family, and she gets to know the man who helped her and
came to her with open hands holding nothing, having discarded every
trapping of power and wealth; not the man who mocked her from a place of
power, not the man who was expected to sexually enslave her, but the
good man he chose to be, the man she falls in love with.
The
intertwining of love, faith, and personal healing in their relationship
is brought home, literally, in a later scene when Moses runs straight to
Tzipporah after he had the visitation from God. Though we don’t hear
any lines here, we don’t need words–the way he talked so animatedly was
enough. We could tell how the vision had filled him with new purpose
and changed his life, and we sensed the closeness between him and
Tzipporah in the way he could talk to her about this momentous occasion,
holding back nothing because he knew he would be heard and believed. In turn, when Tzipporah expresed her own fears after hearing him out, he listened respectfully and made his case.
This
scene reminded me of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, and how the first
person he went to after being being visited by the angel Gabriel was his
wife Khadijah. Mohammed, of course, unlike Moses as envisioned in the
show, was afraid and wanted Khadijah to cover him and comfort him.
Whether the initial reaction was elation or fear, though, you can tell
that for both these men their wives were their closest confidantes and
best friends. They shared in all things including matters of faith and
life-changing decisions.
Again, though the focus was on Moses, I
loved how Tzipporah’s decision to come with him was an enormous act of
courage in the events of the show. She was in captivity in Egypt
herself, where she would have been raped and kept in servitude, unable
to see her family ever again, if she had not managed to escape and had
Moses not helped her. To go back into the heart of that trauma could not
have been easy for her. She still did, and that alone speaks to the strength of their bond.
So far Moses and Tzipporah had been captives in
Egypt and had learned to be free again with Tzipporah’s Midianite family. Now, in their
return to Egypt, healed and transformed by family and faith, they were
ready to not only be free themselves but to bring freedom to others.
Thus their story becomes a story of the journey from captivity to
personal freedom, then from there to liberating others. It is the story
of true freedom realized, because Moses could not be truly free while
his family was in bondage–and because Moses was a part of Tzipporah and
her family, she could not be truly free either. That made the
Israelites’ freedom worth facing down their fears and trauma for.
The
song at the finale, “When You Believe,” not only ties off the story and
theme as a whole but also brings Moses and Tzipporah’s story full
circle. Where “Through Heaven’s Eyes” was about Moses integrating into
Tzipporah’s family, “When You Believe” is about Tzipporah becoming a
member of Moses’s family by joining and supporting them in their quest
for freedom, enduring the dangers and uncertainty alongside them. The way
Tzipporah and Miriam lead the singing harkens back to Jocheved’s lullaby
at the beginning of the movie, her fear and grief at having to send
baby Moses away and her prayer that they will reunite in freedom.
Jocheved’s sacrifice and courage are brought to culmination by her
daughter Miriam and daughter-in-law Tzipporah, showing that Tzipporah
along with Miriam is a successor to Jocheved’s legacy. The way female
characters lead these songs of yearning and joy for freedom also squarely
centers women in the struggle for liberation.
In this way we see Tzipporah and
Moses’s journey through their three families–as captives of Moses’s
Egyptian family, recovering from trauma through love and faith in the safety of
Tzipporah’s Midianite tribe, and finally fighting for the freedom of
Moses’s Hebrew family and people. They had to know both the pain of
captivity and the process of healing from that trauma in order to stand
for others’ freedom, and that liberation in turn was key to their recovery. Moses and Tzipporah’s story as individuals and as a
couple is also a story of family, faith, and freedom, and that’s what makes theirs
such a powerful love story.
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.
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
If you continue to allow this war to be fought on the Empire’s terms, not yours, you’re going to lose.
It should be noted for those unfamiliar, that in this scene Saw Garrera is criticizing Mon Mothma for her refusal to allow the Rebellion to intentionally inflict civilian casualties.
And it should also be noted for those unfamiliar that Mon Mothma was part of the Republic Senate that refused to show full support to the Onderon rebels, whose cause was legitimate, refusing to send troops which invariably caused Steela Gerrera’s, Saw’s sister, death.
It should also be noted she was part of the same Republic senate who turned a blind eye to the slavery in the Outer Rim because the Hutts controlled space routes used to ship resources to the Core, and they’d not jeopardize the Republic’s access to those resources.
It should also be noted, as per Rebel Rising, the Alliance (henceforth Mon Mothma included) refused to take direct action when the Empire colonised and enslaved worlds and people, because that would affect the morality of their cause in the eyes of the Senate. Interesting that the morality of people dying and being enslaved at the hands of the Empire wasn’t taken into account, but alas.
Oh, not to mention, despite having the resources and the means, the Alliance officials refused to take direct action and declare war on the Empire because that would get the rebels branded as terrorists, yet, Saw reminded the Alliance the Empire was already branding them terrorists as well as whomever chose to oppose their regime. Those people ensalved and killed by the Empire for standing their ground and fighting for their homes, with no aid from any one, were not those civilian casualties of the Alliance refusal to take action?
But yeah, let’s demonize the black character.
@lj-writes saw was criminally underused in rouge one.
Yup, the way they mishandled him was one of the weak points of the movie. I have written before about how Jyn’s arc and the story as a whole would have been much stronger if Saw were better utilized. And now this fandom just adds insult to injury by demonizing him while letting Mothma off scot-free smh.
Do you know why Rey had such conviction that Kylo Ren would turn?
Because she knew firsthand that people raised to evil could be good.
She thought Kylo could be like Finn, and she learned the hard way that even people with good family and good parents, who had every opportunity to turn away from evil, could still choose to be violent and cruel.
Meanwhile someone like Finn, who was torn away from his family and had no positive influences in his life, who had everything to lose including life itself by escaping, could still choose mercy and freedom.
TLJ was a continuation of Kylo and Finn’s foil relationship, and the whole ordeal confirmed to Rey how special Finn is in his goodness and courage. She might have trusted the wrong person in Ren, but she knew there was always one person she could trust and rely on–and that’s Finn.
L.J.'s Obsessions 