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Talked to the guy at work who loves WH40K and he said “You know that show made me switch from rooting for the Rebels to rooting for the Empire. Because you see in Andor they don’t have it that bad.”
And I said “haha yeah” because what can you even say to a statement so baldly wrongheaded.
they don’t have it that bad
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Did he somehow miss the first movie where an entire planet of civilians was blown up just to get a confession from one person?! Or are we so far down the prequel dodecahedron we’ve lost all sense of tension.
I love this show but it kind of bothers me that it’s technically made by a capitalist corporation. It feels as if stories of real struggles are being used as just entertainment.
Yeah, but this has literally always been the case. Radical media that challenges the status quo has always been produced using the system that it’s challenging. You think the Communist Manifesto was never published by capitalists? You think Bakunin or Proudhon never used presses owned by monarchists or capitalists? Of course they did. You use the tools available to you.
The fact Andor was made by people working for Disney doesn’t make it any less radical or challenging to the status quo.
If a large portion of your audience is rooting for your empire, you simply have not portrayed imperialism vividly enough.
Frankly, alot of the “hype” can be boiled down to the fact the Rebel’s aesthetics just aren’t as interesting or dynamic as the Empire or the Grand Army during the Clone Wars
Shiny space armor simply looks cooler than fatigues and orange jumpsuits, the X-wing starfighters are pretty much all the Rebels have going for them in terms of “neat sci fi tech” it’s shallow, but casuals respond to the ‘rule of cool’
The portrayals are accurate IMO. Fascists have always valued aesthetics over function (and communists the inverse). That’s why Hitler’s wonderwaffles lost to the T-34 (not directly but you know what I mean).
This is one of my major criticisms of Star Wars: Lucas relied way more on aesthetics and narrative tension to simply designate the Empire as cartoon antagonists for his fluffy space opera samurai western about the Vietnam war. The whole tone is outlandish and unreal, and the Empire you see is just a sort of sinister and mustache twirling threat to the protagonists while all their arbitrary violence happens offscreen to characters that generally don’t even have screentime.
And I mean media doesn’t have to be deep and thorough or contain harrowing explorations of just why the villains should in fact be considered ontologically evil, but Star Wars is this cultural juggernaut yet is almost entirely just this shallow, light and fluffy slop where aesthetics are everything and the villains’ evil is just implied or kept somewhere in the background. Then this intersects with a broader sort of “villains are cool and have agency while heroes are just dumb nerds fighting to preserve someone else’s status quo” zeitgeist that finds fertile ground in the brain dirt of American treat lads because of how it’s the natural conclusion to draw when looking at how in slop media antagonists are the primary agents of change while heroes must be reluctant and selfless agents of the status quo, not to mention how the powerful and self-actualized villain is an ideal power fantasy for some amoral libertine treat lad.
Just to add to this, and to be fair to George, I don’t know what it was like to make commercial movies during the cold war. Seems like they were very careful, especially since the empire was the US in George’s head. They may have had good reason to be as careful with the messaging and symbolism as they were.
I just realized I’d gotten sidetracked and left out part of what I wanted to say, which was to tie it into how satire isn’t something that changes minds so much as it is entertainment and reinforcement for people who already understand and agree with it, and how in that lens Star Wars communicates its point clearly: the Fascist-coded genocidal maniac Empire are obviously intrinsically bad and alluding to several real-world powers, which is clear to anyone who’s the least bit politically literate. But it’s also fun, accessible slop for everyone who’s not, which is most people, and its general themes and style have been further copied by more incoherent and vapid works (including within the Star Wars franchise itself) to the point that people don’t really think about it beyond a sort of “the Sith/Empire wears the designated villain sign, the Jedi/Republic/Rebels wear the designated good guy sign, and which one you stan is a silly aesthetic sportsball choice of strawberry or blue-raspberry flavored lightsaber shaped gummies” level.
This is why the best stories have the villains be the status quo.
Tbf, that is the case in star wars. At least the ot
This is by design so they can sell more Storm Trooper plushies at Disneyland.
It’s always so strange and off putting how Disneyland does live Imperial rallies with the aesthetics of Triumph of the Will for audiences of kids
Reminds me of this
CRACKER SLAUGHTER RAY 3000
Ima firin’ my Moo Deng!
inserts clip from Clerks on why Death Star contractors deserved it
This is just like Squid Game
WE PUT ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE IN NARKINA FIVE
