aimmyarrowshigh:

queerly-tony:

aimmyarrowshigh:

aimmyarrowshigh:

star wars episode i: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”

star wars episode ii: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”

star wars episode iii: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders; also, beware angsty white boys”

rogue one: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”

star wars episode iv: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”

star wars episode v: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”

star wars episode vi: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders”

star wars episode vii: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders; also, we fucking warned you about angsty white boys”

star wars episode viii: “um, doing anything besides following direct orders is in fact the true evil? (unless those direct orders were to an angsty white boy to commit genocide in which case let’s spend two hours finding shades of gray.) but anyone else? how dare??? you not follow direct orders??? don’t you know star wars has always been about rigidly adhering to regimes???”

UPDATE

solo, a star wars story:
star wars episode vi: “sometimes the only way to protect the galaxy and serve the common good is to go against direct orders” 

so we’re 9 for 10 on this, for everyone keeping score. and the only person fandom-at-large decided to court martial and send to a penal colony for ten years was NOT, as might be logical, either of the angsty white boys who committed fucking genocide. no, it was the brown guy who, by the rules of every other star wars movie, would be (aka, IS) an unquestioned valiant hero.

thank you for coming to my ted talk, we’ll reconvene with more stats after episode ix.

As someone who was actually in the military, who knew pilots irl and who identifies with Poe… Leia and Holdo were fucking idiots, sort of. It’s complicated.

The message of Episode 8 is weird and kinda obscured by the whole “follow our orders without question” subplot. 

The lesson is supposed to be “people matter, individual lives matter, MORE than the mission”. 

Poe violets the order to withdraw at the start of the movie because he believes taking down the Dreadnaught ship is more important than human lives. The thing is, this blow means very little to the Order. They can build more ships; you can’t resurrect a life. So the lesson Poe was meant to learn is “don’t sacrifice lives”.

However, this gets all twisted up into “don’t violate orders” when Leia and Holdo – for absolutely no reason whatsoever – decide not to tell Poe about their plans. There is no reason given for this in the movie. It COULD have been justified with “we think the Order is listening to our conversation so we can’t tell you anything”, but no reasoning is given. Leia and Holdo hold back the information purely out of pettiness, that’s the only reason I can see.

So Poe does exactly what he was raised to do, AND to uphold the lesson he’d been taught earlier: he violates orders to save lives. He thinks they’re hopelessly running away with no chance of survival, so he throws chance to the wind in an attempt to save everyone. He was taught in the first act of the movie “lives matter”, so of course he gets Finn and Rose off the ship. 

In extended (but no less real) canon, he goes up against the Dreadnought as a solo suicude mission. He has no command over the bomber squadron and, anyway, thought they were across the Galaxy on another mission. The only order POE defied was his OWN return.

Tallie (the actual officer of authority over the bomber squadron) and the other bombadiers were who were unauthorized for the Dreadnought mission. We just saw Leia slap him and not Tallie Lintra bc slapping a brown guy was “funny” but slapping a white woman would have betrayed Rilo Jon’s fauxminism.

Plus, Rilo really wanted to kill a bunch of women in silent non-speaking roles and holding Poe accountable for Tallie’s actions (including Paige’s death, natch) cleared the way for his masturbatory killing-off-silent-women-in-the-name-of-equality-shut-up orgasm.

I actually really like your interpretation of the link between the Dreadnought mission (which I really wish wider fandom would acknowledge he HAD authorization for!!! Also, why didn’t Leia, the General, recall the bombadiers when she outranked both Poe and Tallie?? So many questions, so much deus ex machina to the writing…) and the later mutiny and plot with Finn and Rose! That makes so much more sense than the loosey-goosey tangent that comes across in the movie.