The Revolutionary Spirit of Star Wars Andor

Hey, have you watched Andor? Have you watched Endor? Now, have you watched Andor? Now, look, y'all, I know if you're a nerd like me, or have been on Twitter at the moment, which, why would you? But if you have been, you've probably heard some, maybe even me, gushing about Star Wars: Andor, how great it is, how smart it is. Yet, given its overall impact on social media and the discussion around it outside of online spaces, it does appear that Star Wars: Andor is actually one of the least watched live-action Star Wars shows since Disney Plus began releasing them.

And to be fair, I get why. I mean, we've all felt it, right? Disney Star Wars feels empty and hollow. Sure, Star Wars is a fun space time with your favorite space wizards and, you know, evil fascists, but it doesn't really feel like vital storytelling anymore. It's a franchise that once captured our imagination, but has now just become a vehicle for selling more and more toys. And while I do enjoy these toys, and I will always watch a TV show just to see my boy Ewan McGregor say, "Hello there," once again. "Hello there." Gotta love the nostalgia.

But Andor, though, is a spin-off show of a spin-off movie, and it feels like it's the most cynical of Star Wars stuff. Yet, what if I told you that it's precisely because Andor is a side project of a side project, a show without the need to tie into big Star Wars brands or sell merchandise and be Star Wars all over it, it's actually become the most Star Wars property that Disney has made, and one of the best shows of the year? Star Wars: Andor feels like the first Disney Star Wars installment that isn't trying to sell you something, but tell you something. And it does so by doing something none of us expected, by not making it about Jedi or Sith or shriveled Nazi raisins, but by making it about real people and how we not only survive, but fight back. And it's that, that fight back, and what it means to fight back and to choose to do so, that makes Andor feel so vital. Not only is Star Wars, but his art. I want this video to explain why Andor feels so important, because it captures what Star Wars has lost. How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out. All of that is now up to us. And I have a rather die, try to take them down, and giving them what they want. Oh, and also, it's an excuse for me to finally have bought this Padme cosplay. Little pre-out transgender me is screaming right now. This was the dream. This was the dream. I wanted to wear this ever since I saw Todorovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars. And this is actually kind of nice. Anyways, I'm with the essay. Um, well, uh, guess I'm wearing Lord of the Rings now. Um, see, it says, it says the Shire. But I wanted to wear this because before we got to a galaxy far, far away. I know that if you're watching this video and are ready to settle into a hyper-obsessive trans woman talking for over an hour about a Star Wars show, then you must like watching videos about incredibly nerdy and niche topics. So I wanted to mention that the reason I'm able to make videos like this and still be able to, you know, pay my bills is through number one, my amazing patrons, who I absolutely adore and will thank at the end of this video. And two, the amazing folks over at Nebula. If you haven't heard, Nebula is a Streamy Award-nominated curated streaming platform that allows me and some of my other hyper-obsessive YouTube creators, like Philosophy Tube, ContraPoints, FD Signifier, and numerous others, to have a place to make videos away from the algorithm worries. And I release my videos on there and my Patreon early, and sometimes have exclusive content on there as well. And there's also cool exclusive series on Nebula, including Lindsay Ellis's recent return and video on adapting Lord of the Rings movies. See, I made it relevant. Now I get to write off the sweater on my taxes. Merry Christmas to me. You get to write off taxes. Anywho, if you want to learn even more while getting two streaming services for the price of one, one of the main, major ways Nebula is supported is through its partnership with the amazing CuriosityStream. CuriosityStream loves independent creators and wants to help us grow our platform. So they're offering all of you, yes, yes, you, you specifically, just you, I mean, everyone, but also you, free access to Nebula when you sign up at curiositystream.com/JessieGender. By signing up for CuriosityStream there, you get a 26% discount on an annual plan for just $14.79. And by signing up for CuriosityStream, you'll be getting access to thousands of documentaries, including tons of ones about space and science, because, you know, I know you like all that stuff because look at what we're talking about in this video here. And by using that link, you'll not only be helping me out, but you'll be helping the entire educational video essay community over at Nebula and supporting your own nerdy pursuits. So thank you to Nebula and CuriosityStream for helping support this video. And most especially, thank you to all of you watching this. And especially, how many times can I say especially? Even more especially, my Patreon supporters. But with all that said, don't forget to subscribe. And on with my latest hyper-obsession. And back to the wonderful Padme outfit. Gotta live the dream.

So, to figure out how Andor has recaptured Star Wars' potent messaging, we first need to talk about what was lost. Star Wars, from its inception, has always been political. I mean, all art is political, but in this case, it's quite literally in the name. Star Wars. War is inherently a violent conflict caused by opposing forces, primarily political, and thus art about war always carries political weight. Let me repeat that for the Call of Duty, "Keep politics out of my entertainment" crowd. All art about war is intrinsically political. Yeah, well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man. Art is not about some other reality, a time long, long ago. It is made in the context of when that art was created, and thus is about when it was made, even if it might be timeless beyond that.

But then the question becomes, what was the political context of Star Wars when it first came out? For that, we can turn to George Lucas's quote about how the Empire vs. Rebel story was intentionally about the guerrilla war of the Vietnam War. "When I did it, they were Viet Cong." Exactly. So, were you thinking of that at the time? So, it was a very anti-authoritarian, very kind of '60s against the man kind of thing, you know? We're fighting the largest empire in the world, right? The English Empire, or the American Empire? Lost. Yeah, that was the whole point. This is the quote that all of us, all know when we talk about Star Wars as politics. This allegory casts the rebels as the anti-imperial fighters, and even the Ewoks, the fuzzy, adorable bears from Return of the Jedi, as being inspired by the Viet Cong, locals who knew about the local terrain, and despite their lack of superior war machinery, were able to push back against the odds and stop the imperialist power from expanding into their home. And this is the parallel that many of us like to point out to say, "See, Star Wars was always political. I told you so." I told you so. I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.

And this implication goes all the way back to Lucas's early drafts of Star Wars when it was about a planet called Aquila. "Aquila is a small independent country, like North Vietnam, threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion instigated by gangsters aided by the Empire. Fight to get rightful planet back. Half of the system has been lost against us. The Empire is like America 10 years from now. We are at a turning point. Fascism or Revolution." By the way, this is a random aside, but if you've ever read any of George Lucas's early drafts about Star Wars, it's an incomprehensible mess. But that's a topic for another video that I am actually making. We'll get there in a few months. But even when we make this comparison, a lot of us tend to leave out the more significant implication of it. By focusing solely on Star Wars as a story about Vietnam, the Vietnamese, Americans tend to leave out how that allegory implicates us. We cast the story and its heroes as other without recognizing that in this allegory, the fascist totalitarian Empire is meant to be America from the start. Star Wars conceptually was about the American establishment at the time falling further and further into fascism, something that Lucas saw was a path that we were on. Palpatine was a politician. Richard M. Nixon was his name. He subverted the Senate and finally took over and became an imperial guy. And he was really evil, but he pretended to be a really nice guy. And certainly, while it hasn't gone exactly as he thought, it certainly wasn't too far off the mark. That being said, the Empire was not meant as a one-for-one allegory of a future America. It drew upon numerous authoritarian and totalitarian regimes to inspire the world we see in Star Wars. For example, Star Wars concept artist Ralph McQuarrie drew up Nazi imagery to create Vader's iconic look. The word Stormtrooper drew upon the Nazi Sterling look. I, I can't speak German, so Stormtrooper came from this word. German friends, you pronounce that word for me? I can barely pronounce words in English. The Empire also drew upon Rome for inspiration, having an emperor and being a former Republic that fell into an imperialist totalitarian state. We didn't even see this more directly in the prequel films with places like Naboo. Places like Naboo. I don't know why suddenly that became the accent. With places like Naboo featuring Roman architecture.

All of this is to say that Lucas's intended critique of American imperialism is all vibes-based fascism and sometimes loses target in directly critiquing and equating American imperialism with fascist rhetoric. Professor Chris Hedges, an expert on popular representations of history in modern media, who wrote a book about Star Wars and its political context, discusses how this comes down to Lucas's more pop culture understanding of history. Because he's not a historian, Lucas is under no obligation to produce a piece of academically rigorous history in the guise of a science fiction franchise. To expect that is to miss the point both of what he attempted to undertake. And when Lucas interacts with ideas about the past, even one he references himself, it is often a version of pop history, which can have debatable or flawed understandings and preference the feeling of historical movements rather than the accuracy of the events themselves. Throughout the lifespan of the Star Wars franchise, the Empire has been a composite of various aspects of a myriad of totalitarian regimes or military states. As a result, the Empire has embodied aspects of Imperial Rome, the Nazi Reich, the Soviet Union, the British Empire, and the United States of America. The notion that the Empire is intrinsically fascist emerges both through its visual depictions and the intellectual consideration that sculpted its creation. But this is something that needs to be historically framed, because at times Lucas and others interchange their conceptions of fascism, totalitarian dictatorships, and authoritarian regimes in ways that complicate rather than simplify the eventual depiction on screen. Yet, this nebulous nature of the political allegory of the empire, higher, it's not a bug, but a feature of Star Wars' potency as a discussion for totalitarianism. And it's essential for recognizing Star Wars' power as a political critique. In his seminal essay, "On Fascism," which attempted to discuss critical elements of what makes fascist regimes fascist, Umberto Eco pointed out how fascist regimes do not all come in the form of German Nazis. There was only one Nazism, but the fascist game can be played in many forms. And the name of the game does not change. Fascism became an all-purpose term because one couldn't eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. The way Eco highlights this is through this sequence. He shows us these four groups and asks us to think about how they are similar and how they are different. For example, group two has two similarities to group one, having both B and C in it. Group three is similar to one in that they both have C, which has D and E of group four. But group four has none of the same elements of group one. But due to the series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there is a family resemblance in these four groups. Thus, while one and four are superficially different, they have similarities, and we can recognize those similarities through the transitive association that this sequence highlights. This is the same way that Star Wars holds power with its political intent. The Empire is not a one-for-one of America, but viewers, both American and not, can recognize overlapping elements of a family resemblance to other totalitarian governments elsewhere within Star Wars' narrative that it draws upon, allowing us as viewers to acknowledge the fascist tendencies within America itself through this transitive association. We can recognize elements of the totalitarianism of America in the Empire, and we can also recognize elements of totalitarianism elsewhere in the Empire. Thus, we can recognize that America has similar tendencies, and we can see the similarities between them.

And this is something that, despite all their many, many, many faults, one of which was not Padme's outfits, the prequels managed to be incredibly good at, intentional or not. The fall of democracy by the Republic turning into the Empire through Palpatine's push for furthering executive power had a lot of contemporary links and similar behavior to George Bush's institution of the Patriot Act and everything else that he did after 9/11, including invading Afghanistan and the Iraq War. "This is a crisis. The Senate must vote. The Chancellor emergency powers. He can then approve the creation of an army in order to ensure the security and continuing stability of the Republic. The Republic will be reorganized into the first Empire for a safe and secure society." "The bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists. It will help law enforcement to identify, to dismantle, to disrupt, and to punish terrorists before they strike." But, and this is important, to, to do this, to have this understanding, it, as viewers, to be aware of the implication of America specifically within the critique that is the Empire, it requires us to be self-reflective. Sadly, though, Disney acquiring Star Wars pushed for intentionally downplaying any modern cultural connection. Like that, when we arrive at The Force Awakens, what is the First Order but a repeat of the Empire as it appeared in the 1970s? In fact, when coming up with the idea for the First Order, all J.J. Abrams, the director of that movie, could think of was repeating the past, equating the First Order to just the Nazis and nothing else. All that came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina, but then started working together again. What could be born of that? Could the First Order exist as a group that actually admired the Empire? Could the work of the Empire be seen as unfulfilled? And could Vader be a martyr? Could there be a need to see through what didn't get done? And this is where that inherent nebulousness of what the Empire stood for becomes an issue. Instead of wrecking Empire for self-critique of America, Abrams cast the First Order as not only an enemy of the past, the Nazis of the 1940s Germany, but an external enemy to America, and thus not allowing us to turn our criticism that this franchise is always about inwards, instead creating a fantasy look at the past that implicates no one today and generates a veneer of true escapism without realizing that Star Wars has always been political. You can't make a movie about Star Wars without it being in some way political or related to the modern day.

And you can see this most in Disney's film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Rogue One was undoubtedly pitched and sold on a nostalgia-driven impulse as a prequel to the original film about how the rebels got the Death Star plans that were crucial to that story's plot. But there was something more here. The movie was not about the mythical Jedi or Sith, but everyday people fighting for democracy. We had a disillusioned rebel cell leader, by many lost battles against the Empire, that he'd become a shell of his former self. We had a woman living on the outskirts of society, trying her best just to survive, and pulled further and further into the conflict by mere association with somebody. We have an imperial middle manager who helps create the galaxy's worst murder machine, who is just doing so to impress his boss, and is seen as so disposable, he gets killed by his own creation without care. And we have a spy named Andor, who is a true believer in the fight and will even coldly kill for the cause. Rogue One director Gareth Edwards stated that it would be a war film. "It's the reality of war. Good guys are bad, bad guys are good. It's complicated, layered, a very rich scenario in which to set a movie." Rogue One was a film that intended to have teeth, so much so that the film ends with everyone dying, good and bad alike. All their struggles and hopes and dreams are lost in the fight against an Empire, with their deaths only made meaningful by the actions they took to change the galaxy, even if it was just a small thing, just getting plans out to the people who could use it. It's a political movie to its core, and the writers knew it. A few weeks before Rogue One aired in theaters, one of the film's writers, Chris Weitz, posted a series of anti-President Trump tweets, who was the president of the United States at the time, online, including one that explicitly connected his Star Wars film to the day's politics. "Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist human organization." Whites. In doing so, he was directly pointing to the white supremacy of the Trump presidency and equating it to what was going on in Rogue One, again creating that transitive association that made Star Wars so powerful. His co-writer, Gary Whitta, on the film, added that the Empire in the film was "opposed by a multicultural group led by brave women." In doing this, Gary Whitta was equating the coalition of communities that fought the fascistic empire in his story and equated it to the opposing real-life rising tide of anti-authoritarianism against the rhetoric exemplified by Trump. You had movements like the Women's March, the George Floyd protests, that were vocal in their pushing back against the treatment of specific groups within the United States, and how many of these injustices were baked into the American system, but underscored even more so during Trump's time in office. "To authentic Star Wars tradition, Rogue One is a political film. What chance do we have?" "The question is, what choice?" "Run! Hi! Plead for mercy! Scatter your forces! You give way to an enemy this evil with this much power, and you condemn the galaxy to an eternity of submission." And yet, interestingly, Disney at the time denied it. When responding to questions about Weitz's tweets, former Disney CEO Bob Iger, and now, I guess, current CEO of Disney, because somehow Bob Iger returned, he stated, "I have no reaction to this story at all. Frankly, this is a film that the world should enjoy. It is not a film that is in any way a political film. There are no political statements in it at all." Okay, I know this [ __ ] can't be talking about Star Wars, whoever he is. Even though Rogue One was written and directed as about the reality of war and with the intention to equate it to modern-day politics, Disney wished to downplay that and promote Rogue One as just another escapist sci-fi fantasy meant to appeal to the broadest possible audience, including specific toxic spaces and fandoms complaining about woke politics destroying Star Wars. These spaces, which would later brand themselves without introspection and nostalgically, the Phantom Menace generated discourse around how Rogue One and The Last Jedi touted a "political agenda" that somehow ruined Star Wars. "With this, we're gonna talk more about Disney and their feminist agenda and why they can't keep shoving this garbage into Star Wars. Unbelievable. And what's really bad is that you can't see this obvious agenda-driven nonsense that has destroyed Star Wars."

The reason we see toxic spaces like this grow within fandom spaces that have always been about politics is pretty simple. With any franchise that has existed for so long, the initial political intentions of the original work tend to grow outdated and less directly prescient. The original Star Wars trilogy's focus on the Vietnam War is not as directly relevant to current history. Not to mention that when discussing politics, Star Wars or otherwise, Westerners, especially toxic spaces, don't like to implicate themselves or have to reflect and see themselves in how they might actually be the baddies. So when Star Wars movies directly tackle today's problems in a way reflective of how Star Wars of old did it, it seems far more targeted in a way that re-watching the old movies through a nostalgic lens no longer does, despite having been so at the time that it was made. Now, there are many more factors around toxic spaces, and again, this is a video I'm intending to do within the next few months, so be on the lookout for that. But this is for what we're talking about today. The most relevant piece for this discussion: all Americans, but especially these toxic spaces, don't like to recognize that, hey, we might be the baddies. And as such, try to push back against it, saying that they don't like politics in their Star Wars, they just want escapist fantasy. And as a result, they push back in very vitriolic and disgusting ways. Writer Chris Weitz was bullied so much by these toxic fans that he was forced to delete his tweets and apologize. And he wasn't the only one. Beyond that, though, marginalized people are also a target for many toxic subsets of fandoms in long-term franchises because the mere presence of marginalized identities and diversity in media has become politicized. Our bodies are seen as inherently political. The overly diverse casting, something that's been painstakingly present in all three of the new Star Wars movies made under Disney. "Things are so diverse and multicultural now, it's kind of distracting, to be honest." And you saw this happen in Star Wars with Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega getting harassed while working on the series. Even more recently, Moses Ingram, a star of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney Plus, received so much backlash that Ewan McGregor himself, and Anson Mount, who is a captain in a totally other franchise, who I love, themselves had to call it out after Moses herself pointed out how much racism she was getting. "There's nothing anybody can do about this. There's nothing anybody can do to stop this hate." And so I question my purpose, and even being here in front of you, saying that this is happening. I don't really know. I don't really know. But I think the thing that bothers me is that, like, sort of this feeling that I've had inside of myself, which no one has told me, but this feeling of like, I just gotta shut up and take it, you know? I just kind of gotta bear it. Um, and I'm not built like that. So I really just wanted to come on, I think, and say thank you to the people who show up for me in the comments and the places that I'm not gonna put myself. And, um, to the rest of y'all, y'all weird. And all these backlashers ultimately uphold and reflect a larger fascistic rhetoric of things like a white replacement theory and more. But enough to not ostracize The Phantom Menace, as well as the overall sentiment that many people saw of politics ruining Star Wars and wishing to sell their brand to the widest possible audience, Disney attempted to strip Star Wars of any directly modern political messaging. "When you're trying to get a big movie out, you want to be as agnostic as possible. You want to be able to appeal to everyone, irrespective of their political beliefs. If it's a Michael Moore movie, go for it. Or Dinesh D'Souza, then your currency is controversy. But if you're producing something for the masses, your currency is not controversial. It gets the movie out to the broadest possible audience." But like I said, you can't really do that with a thing called Star Wars. So what is the best way to downplay these political intentions? Well, the way that Disney did this was by focusing on becoming self-intertextual. Intertextuality is about how art reflects on and interacts with other types of art and references other types of art within its own text. Intertextuality shapes the meaning of a work of art by its relationship to other works of art and its relationship to culture at large. Intertextuality is necessary for any piece of art because, well, without context, art has no inherent meaning. But as Star Wars continued under Disney, and I'm leaving out The Last Jedi, by the way, specifically here, because again, I'm going to be doing a whole other video on it next year, this intertextual relationship began to be less about outside sources from Star Wars and instead became more about sources from within the Star Wars franchise itself. Instead of reflecting on culture and history and politics as a whole, we got retroactively generated meanings solely through nostalgic references to previously established characters, locations, and storylines until Star Wars began and to stop having relevance to anything outside of its self-intertextual bubble. Take Solo getting his blaster in Solo: A Star Wars Story. That scene was given a big importance in the film, yet that blaster only has meaning and importance because we know that it's his blaster that appears in future Star Wars films. That blaster itself has no greater meaning in its relationship to anything outside of Star Wars, and therefore, it doesn't mean anything outside of, "Hey, look, it's the blaster." And this gets even worse with stuff that was given even more importance throughout these Star Wars films at the time, like the freaking dice, which were given extra significant weight across three films, yet mean nothing beyond having existed in the original Star Wars Trilogy as a bit of background flavor. And this is something that we see over and over and over again, more and more so with Star Wars. It's all becoming more self-reflective, trying to strip away the inherent meaning within the work by referencing past things instead of other things outside of it that could possibly bring politics and weakness into the story. This is what capitalism does. It attempts to strip meaning from things by removing them from their initial context in order to sell them as a product, simply and only. And this is what Disney was trying to do with the use of self-intertextuality in Star Wars, remove any potentially alienating political messaging from its film that may keep it from the broadest possible audience, even if that audience would include fascists who would be implicated in a much more politically didactic Star Wars. Thus, ultimately, by attempting to strip Star Wars of anything deemed political, Disney ultimately feeds a more fascistic leaning, as what is deemed political is often what has been politicized by those othering people's identities. For example, take how The Rise of Skywalker downplayed Rose Tico and John Boyega, as well as LGBTQ characters in the film. This was done, especially in the case of Rose Tico, because these characters were hit with heavy backlash from certain spaces after The Last Jedi. Yet, by listening to this, it allowed the representation of the films to be downplayed and less focus on, ultimately creating a more service-level, less meaningful representation that it was tokenistic. Yet, even the brief LGBTQ kiss that appeared in the film was vilified as woke, despite it being completely shallow and meaningless. Ultimately, even the appearance of diversity is vilified, regardless of how well done it is or not. Yet Disney will downplay these representations and attempt to seem less political while also trying to give the superficial appearance of being progressive. And this isn't just about Star Wars, but about how all of capitalism enables a fall into fascism. I have videos on this coming. It's almost as if this video is like a minor taste tester for many other videos that I'm trying to do. Or Andor might be hitting along a lot of things that we need to talk about as a society today. Or maybe it's both. Anyways, by doing so, Disney robs Star Wars of its potency and power. And it's why we began to see a veining sense of interest in Star Wars projects as of late from multiple sides. Vitriol grew against things like The Rise of Skywalker and its greatest hits album of Star Wars. And while things like Obi-Wan Kenobi, Book of Boba Fett, and The Mandalorian have gotten some critical acclaim and appeal, they often feel like a chance to pull out our favorite action figures and just bash them together. This isn't to say those shows are entirely devoid of meaning or power. In fact, there are many things that I like in all of those shows. Yet, those moments often seem at odds with the larger brand intent of Star Wars as a franchise attempting to just sell more toys and action figures and more shows. And this has caused a mass cultural disinterest in Star Wars due to its progressive loss of pertinence to a cultural conversation. It's still a vast franchise that sells. I'm not saying that Star Wars doesn't make a lot of money or that people are interested in it. But when was the last time you felt that Star Wars spoke to something profound or relevant to what we were all feeling today? It really has felt like it's just becoming more and more and more just sci-fi escapist fantasy, which goes against what Star Wars was always about.

Tony Gilroy, the writer of the Bourne movies, initially stepped into Rogue One to aid in rewrites of the film during reshoots, with him having sort of a one-and-done attitude around working on the franchise. He was a self-proclaimed Star Wars agnostic who had minimal desire to maintain consistent work with this series. But in 2017, after the success of Rogue One, at least critically, Disney announced a Rogue One spin-off focused on characters K-2SO and Andor from the film. And Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy reached out to Gilroy for thoughts on how to do the show. After seeing their initial plans of "two heroes going out and doing adventures every week," and believing that that would "run out of road instantly," Gilroy instead offered up his own manifesto. "It was insane and wildly expensive and crazy and all my dark [ __ ] and then they tried to do an upgrade of the other version that they had. And I think that in the end, they just kind of ran into the same problem. They just ran out of road. And they came back and they looked at this memo and they were like, 'Oh, now we have the money to make these kind of shows and we really want to do this.' And then we danced forward for six months, kept testing each other all the way through as we got closer and closer. But that's the evolution." Eventually, the show's crew, after attempting for many years to try to do the K-2SO and Andor adventure show, found Gilroy's original pitch and said, "Actually, let's do that." And thus, the show that became Star Wars: Andor began. And Gilroy, as showrunner, managed to make Andor the most potent Star Wars by directly addressing the issues of Disney's Star Wars era and making the show incredibly powerful as a self-reflective critique on fascism, revolution, and our current place within all of it.

First and foremost, Andor is the least self-intertextual of all the Star Wars series under Disney. There is no big crossover or huge references to other Star Wars media within its text, other than the characters that it's inherently about, like Andor. Unlike something like The Mandalorian or Book of Boba Fett, you don't expect a Luke or Ahsoka appearance in the show, nor will it suddenly become a season of The Mandalorian out of the blue, like certain other series. This all comes down to the self-proclaimed Star Wars agnostic attitude of Tony Gilroy, which allowed him to pull out of the self-reflexivity of previous installments in the franchise and instead draw from other historical sources to pull into Andor for meaning and context. Like the original Star Wars trilogy, the Empire of Andor is an amalgamation of different historical analogies for totalitarianism and authoritarianism, as well as the revolutionaries who rise to fight against it. For example, episodes 4 through 6 of the series focus on a heist storyline where Andor works with a cell of rebels to steal money from the Empire that ultimately will be used to help fund the revolution. And the direct inspiration for that storyline was Joseph Stalin. "There's an amazing book called Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore. The opening chapter is this incredible potential movie sequence where Stalin is part of staging a major bank robbery in a Georgian town in 1907. It involves 15 people and hookers and teamsters and all these things. Stalin was Lenin's financier. He was a thief. And the reason Lenin loved him so much was he kept bringing the money they needed. Money, [ __ ] all costs. Money. People gotta eat, they gotta get guns, you gotta get stuff." This, on its face, seems to be a problematic political comparison, given Stalin's eventual history of committing genocide. You know, not exactly a great guy, especially if you want to equate him to the people that were supposed to view positively within the story, the revolutionaries fighting against a fascistic Empire. But Gilroy is not using his character of Andor to emulate Stalin exactly as a person in his context within our history. Instead, he equates the specific situation of Stalin and Russia's revolutionary origins to the revolution that is going on within Andor and the characters within the Empire. In fact, Gilroy would even later pull from totalitarianism under Stalin's dictatorship for the Empire within Andor. The show features a prison storyline in one arc that directly relates to the Soviet Gulag under Stalin. The Gulag was the agency in charge of Soviet forced labor camps, which were used to house political prisoners and petty criminals alike, sentencing them as enemies of the state. In the Gulag, they were forced into labor and often forced to work 14-hour days, exhausting physical work that led to the death of 1.5 million prisoners. Natalie Frankel, one of the masterminds behind some of the Gulag labor camps, stated, "You have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months. After that, we don't need them anymore." After three months, prisoners were called "goners," not expected to live much longer due to their extreme workload. Narkina 5, the prison from Andor, functions much the same, forcing Andor and other prisoners to work endlessly, even counting their times to release in shifts. "Right, uh, this will be cleaned every day. That is your tab." We even see a man who believes so hard in the work and that he will eventually one day be free, that he eventually has a stroke and dies just a few days before his last few shifts. "Is that a massive stroke?" All of this is deeply anxiety-inducing as a viewer to realize how oppressive and claustrophobic this entire storyline is, especially as you know its relationship to real-life totalitarian institutions like the Gulag. "I need a bag and a trolley." "I said it's coming." Prisons are systems of control and machines for dehumanization. The people inside of them are made into literal cogs, forced to build. And that's what we see when we watch the storyline. To the Empire, these prisoners are just cogs making cogs, which is ultimately how states and governments view people, simply utilitarian function, reduced to input and output. In James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State," he describes how states ultimately view people and human society like a map. Maps don't represent every aspect of a terrain; they only represent symbolically the area the map represents. But even more tellingly, they only showcase on that map what the person using the map will find useful and ignores all the rest, basically making invisible anything that the map viewer doesn't wish to see or care about. Similarly, states do the same to people, only seeing them in terms of their usefulness to the state's function. For example, this is illustrated in the end of episode 8, where we see a shot focusing on the workers in prison, endlessly forced to work to death, making cogs. And this is mirrored by the end of episode 7, where we see Cyril Karn forced to work in a government job, as we pull out to see him sitting as one person in an endless bay of people doing the same exact job, a dehumanized cog in direct relationship to the oppressive nature of state's control, as well as our modern-day corporate culture. These two shots, in conjunction with each other, as bookends of two juxtaposing episodes, managed to underscore civil ideas at once. First, it highlights how both Karn and his Empire government job is ultimately just as much a cog as the prisoners working within the prison that Andor is in. While Andor is technically a prisoner, incarn is "quote unquote" free, they are both seen as simply dehumanized tools within the state of the Imperial Empire. The state does not view them as humans, but just as functions able to bring about the state's grander sense of purpose. The state is not working to better human life, but human life is instead being used to service a function within the state. This is what all states view you people as. But as this is a totalitarian fascist state, it has the ability to press people into these molds and force them into these systems. This is something that James C. Scott spoke about in his book, "Seeing Like a State," where the danger of states seeing people this way comes when a totalitarian and authoritarian government has the ability to press people into these molds and force them to work in this system. Even further, though, by underscoring Karn's job being similar to corporate jobs that we have today in the United States, within corporate culture, as he is working in a cubicle, it highlights how when Andor is working in a prison that functions like a factory floor, that the show is linking how both factory workers and corporate workers, which we often view in our modern current day society as blue collar versus white collar, are still both pressed into dehumanization within these systems. Certainly, there is a level of class difference, but Karn and Andor ultimately are more similar than they would initially think or wish to discuss, as they are both dehumanized for the state system that is pressing them into these functions. Through these two shots, we can see the dehumanization of prisons and the relation to the totalitarian Gulag, as well as related to how we all feel in our current day society in capitalism, in our current culture that venerates the idea of endlessly working. We are told to work ourselves to death, and that is how we are considered "quote unquote" useful in state and capitalist eyes. People think we're kidding when we say it, but it's true. "There are no small jobs that the Bureau of Standards." This is something I spoke about in my "Nature of Work" video, how capitalism only views us in terms of our ability to work endlessly for a corporation. If we aren't working, we aren't useful. We aren't even fully seen as human beings. With anyone who is not seen as working, as considered lazy and not deserving of help. We even saw a very recent obvious example of this with the hardcore work culture that Elon Musk attempted to enact at Twitter, leading to a mass resignation, though we'll talk more about that side of things in just a little bit in this video.

Thus, by trying to create this ordered society, states focus on a high modernist ideology that attempts to structure society into massive mythological structures, and by doing so, try to make everything look aesthetically orderly. "The carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense. They tended to prefer certain forms of planning and social organization." We see this aesthetics of order and power all over Andor with the Empire putting society into aesthetically pleasing terms to order it, in order to showcase the society that all has a meaning and purpose and function with every individual human being fitting into this exact mold that the society sees for them. We can even see this in the architecture of the series. We revisit Coruscant, the center of Empire control, but this time it looks much different than it did in the prequels, filled with modular and efficient structural designs, high towers meant to evoke order. As the wonderful channel Morphologist pointed out, the interior of Karn's apartment home is intended to reflect, for example, the Nakagin Capsule Tower, a structure in Tokyo built for practical use. Each room was a capsule meant to feature a modular design to fit as many people in it as possible and grow over time. Its utility alone. These apartments aren't meant to represent some sort of high-minded aesthetic beyond what it represents as something ordered. It's stripped away all of its inherent meaning to just be what it means for the state. Even further, by creating architecture that towers above someone, representing a sense of utilitarian order, these structures within fascistic states are meant to make someone feel small and meaningless next to the service of the state, reflecting how states view individual people as simply cogs in a vast machine serving a larger state goal, rather than the state serving to enable individual human life and happiness. We can even see small acknowledgments of how these large structures looming over someone can influence someone's psychology, such as when Cyril Karn, who we will talk about later, is a little fascist boy, constantly looks up at the large buildings around him and feels small in comparison and feels a drive to try to serve a larger fascistic ideology.

The architecture that we see on Coruscant, the center of Imperial control in Star Wars, with Ferrix, the mining colony that Cassian Andor is from and where a large portion of the series takes place. This town was literally built from the ground up for this show, and it's telling that the architecture here is smaller, more chaotic, less orderly, and open, representing the colony's more community-oriented world. Here, the architecture is not meant to reflect a higher state ideal, but made to enable the community interacting with large open spaces where people can interact and mingle. Unlike Coruscant, where people are often only shown to be headed somewhere by themselves. On Ferrix, we see people just hanging around and mingling without any need for a direct purpose or destination. Even further, unlike Coruscant, which isolates everybody with its architecture, making them feel small and alone, Ferrix allows people to feel like they are part of communities, such as where we see all the miners placing their gloves on a wall out in the open, where anyone could theoretically take them. But because people all trust each other and feel a sense of community, they all know that everyone around them will not take those gloves, and it reminds everyone that they are part of a community.

This desire to see people and the society as a whole as units to be controlled and forcing human society to mold into utilitarian function implicates Nazism, Soviet Russia, and even capitalist thought, as we discussed earlier on in this video, which all sought to justify a modernist Utopia, only seeing people for function, how they all serve the state, and how they all serve to make money, rather than seeing human beings as full people with larger context and meaning. Scott goes even further in his book to say that there is an endpoint for tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering projects, and that comes when an authoritarian state arises that tries to exert these designs and functions into being, but it has the ability and power to try to press everyone into these molds to function alone, only for state use. And this is what we see happening in Andor. The fascistic society around people forces them to be placed into these functions that limit their humanity, only seeing how they service the larger state and overall service great work. The series also showcases is how these totalitarian states ultimately perpetuate themselves by giving the illusion of choice to its citizens without actually providing them a choice. At one point in the series, an imperial officer discusses a group of indigenous people that they are attempting to press into servitude by making them think that it was their decision to do so. "They breed a sad combination of traits that make them particularly vulnerable to manipulation. On a practical level, they're very difficulty holding multiple ideas simultaneously. We found the best way to steer them as we like is to offer alternatives. You put a number of options on the table, and they're so wrapped up in choosing, they fail to notice you've given them nothing they thought they wanted at the start." The idea this officer is highlighting here is manufactured consent, by offering people two choices that they don't even realize aren't really their decisions to begin with, thereby making them ultimately have to choose, slowly but surely, to fall further into a system that they didn't ultimately want. "It is the sacred valley, is it not? Well, ultimately, they will return." Monte Carlo.

When you need plenty of arms and legs to build all you've got planned, you've been here the longest. Have any left-handed? Yes, sir. Seven years. Well, the down is, let us build our new facility in peace. I don't see them having a choice.

This is something that author Noam Chomsky, who helped develop the theory alongside Edward S. Herman, discussed. The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion and but allow very lively debate within that spectrum, even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people a sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

While you're seeing this idea of manufactured consent play out explicitly within a colonialist context in the Empire, with the Imperial officer dehumanizing and racializing a specific group of people based on their culture and appearance and framing them as other and less than the rest of the people in the Empire, this idea of manufactured consent is present throughout fascistic, totalitarian, imperialist, and colonial states. It is not just something done in colonialization, but within citizens themselves of a state. Current, for example, is believing he is choosing a job among many, but he is still ultimately just working for the state.

Further, we see characters like Senators throughout Star Wars believe they are functioning as anti-establishment voices, but still are ultimately upholding the system itself. "Is there a more important issue facing this body right now than Imperial overreach? The Public Order Re-sentencing Directive is the next step on an all too predictable march toward complete, unchallenged authority." We'll talk about this more in just a minute when we talk about my mouth mother, but this reflects how many Democrats, for example, in the United States believe that they're pushing back against a fall into fascism, but ultimately are upholding the same system by falling into a binary that still fits with a neoliberalist thought. The senator is pitching politics, not charity, saving the Empire from the Emperor.

Also, quick aside, as I briefly mentioned it, we should touch upon one feeling of both Andor and Star Wars in general, and that is racialization. One way in which totalitarian states keep powers by othering specific groups of people and placing them against each other. And we see echoes of this type of racialization in the Imperial officer's speech and how he dehumanized the Aldhani indigenous people. "They breed a sad combination of traits that make them particularly vulnerable to manipulation." On a practical level, they're very typically holding multiple ideas simultaneously. Notice how this man is viewing these indigenous people as somehow more susceptible to this type of manipulation. However, as we discussed, this type of manipulation goes throughout the entirety of the state. It's not something inherent to these indigenous people, but he has so dehumanized these people because they are from outside of the state that he is able to view them as less than. This is one way in how racialization is done, and this is just a small showcasing of it.

But we also get hints of it throughout all of Star Wars with how the Imperial Navy is mostly made of human officers, thereby implying that there is an anti-alien bias in positions that would give power over others, suggesting the depersoning of aliens within the Star Wars universe. But this racism and racialization is never explicitly depicted much on screen, often unless mostly to books or comics, if at all. This is an area where Star Wars has continually failed to highlight a crucial aspect of how colonialist and Imperial states function. However, I will say that Star Wars Andor does do better about this idea in one specific way than the rest of the franchise. So let's take a moment to talk about B2 emo, my little baby. "Not now, I don't have time."

This is the most adorable droid in Star Wars, and it is telling that Andor is the first show to empathize with the droid. Truly, certainly droids throughout Star Wars have been humanized and shown to have personalities, and we've seen them have their own opinions and desires. "I present to you a gift, these two droids." "What did he say?" "Both are hard-working and will serve you well." But often they aren't really seen as full people. I mean, the one movie where we do have a droid fighting for her own liberation and her own sense of identity, we're meant to take it as humorous. "I'm gonna go check on the dentist. You need anything?" "Equal rights." And we've seen how droids are treated throughout Star Wars, even by our heroes. "We don't serve their kind here." "What? You're droids? They'll have to wait outside." "We don't want them here." "As much way out by the speeder. We don't want any trouble." "I possibly agree with you, sir. They're a problem."

Ingrained deep within Star Wars as a franchise, how these droids are clearly people, they have their own identities, but not treated as such. How even the droids that we're supposed to like can be dehumanized by those that see them as less than. But in Andor, B2 emo is given empathy. He hurts, he feels pain. "I'm gonna take around a minute if you want to say goodbye. I'll have them clear the room." "You want to be alone?" "I really don't want to be alone. I want mama." And there are those who let him feel this instead of belittling his pain, and I love Andor for it. "I can't leave you here alone. She wouldn't want that. You could stay one night." This is how the series showcases that while sentient entities may be depersoned like the droids, they are still full people with a range of emotions, even if we don't see them as such. But the state has so ingrained that they are just tools to serve a function rather than people, that this is all droids are seen as. "I'm placing these droids in your care. Treat them well. Clean them up. Have the protocol droids mind white." What this is ultimately what the state has done to droids. They're throwing them as just cogs in a machine, not as full people. And this is because the state itself has so ingrained this within how people should view others.

And all of this is ultimately what interests Tony Gilroy as a writer. It's a common theme in much of Gilroy's work. These central characters are the institutions that make people act the way that they do. Michael Clayton, for example, is a film about a problem fixer who is brought in to represent a corrupt chemical corporation in a legal suit. Ultimately, the movie is about this man's desire to do the right thing and stop behind this corporation's causes, while also having a juxtaposing motivation in needing to pay off his spiraling personal debt that would motivate him to just do the job and let the corruption continue. "I, I, I realized Michael, that I have emerged not through the doors of kennardi, not true the portals of our fast and powerful offer, but from the [ __ ] of an organism who so function is to excrete the the poison, the ammo, the defonement necessary for other larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity. And that I had been coded in this patina of [ __ ] from the best part of my life, the sense of it, and the stain of it was in all likelihood take the rest of my life." Gilroy is all about how individuals are forced to function within inherently amoral systems.

As a result, Andor is about the types of people that populate fascistic systems like this, not Jedi or Sith Emperors or magic monks, but actual people who have to live within this world, and what leads them to make their decisions within these systems, and how those choices ultimately feed or push against state power. In a fascistic state that only sees humans as bodies in the function of the state rather than individuals, all of us individuals have our own desires and choices that we make, which, as a result of us being human, will not always directly fit into these systems. So what do our choices within these systems represent about how we fit into these systems of power?

For example, we have Deirdre Damiro, who we meet as an Imperial Security Bureau officer. She is consistently shown, especially over the first few episodes of the series, to be clever and ruthless in connecting the dots and uncovering systems that the rebels use. Throughout the series, and in many ways, we as the audience in these first few episodes cheer for her. We see her as a woman trying to fight for her voice to be heard as equal to the men around her, while also having to work twice as hard. Her motivations are personable and relatable to all of us. "I wish the lodge a charge against the fellow supervisor. I believe our sector protocols, as described in the ISB code of conduct, are being violated by supervisor Miro, and that this overreach, for which she was previously reprimanded, risks compromising Imperial safety to a degree that silence is no longer possible." "You think this forum appropriate?" "I do. Serious charge." "I believe you'll share my sense of urgency." "Supervisor Miro, do you mind having your integrity ventilated in public?" "No, sir." "Supervisor Blevin obviously finds my conduct a more interesting subject than the advancement of integrated Imperial Security. He's put a lot into it. I'm curious to hear his insights." Many of us can even recognize ourselves in her story, in some cases, trying to get her voice heard within these government and corporate systems. She's a girl just trying to please her boss in a story that is primarily focused in in boardrooms and offices. "Well played." "Thank you, sir. Watch your back." Deirdre is making choices within her storyline that impact our anti-empire characters like Andor, but because she's making them in a boardroom, it feels distanced from those characters. Thus, we as the audience are allowed to root for Deirdre in her story because her scenes are so isolated from the rest of her actions. Like Deirdre herself, we never have to see her actions in relationship to her choices directly, always indirectly, as her decisions impact others light-years away from her. We're never really given a full context for what those decisions that she's making in those boardrooms and offices are until slightly later in the story.

However, eventually, we do see her go out into the field, and one of the first things she does is commit torture on one of the other characters who we've come to like in the series, Bix. And it's one of the most brutal and horrific scenes we've ever had in Star Wars, and it's all done, by the way, very cleverly written, without actually showing us the torture, but leaving it in the implication. And dear God, it's [ __ ] horrifying. "You'll want to be sure of that, Bix, that you're cooperating fully. It's repeat listenings that cause the most damage. We ready?" But as a result of this theme, we ultimately realize that Deirdre is a fascist and willing to do anything she needs to get ahead, uncaring about morality, because the system that she's working within doesn't tell her to care. She represents a sort of girl boss feminism, only wishing to get ahead for herself in a system that harms others, and she is willing to enact that harm as long as it means that she gets ahead. Ultimately, she services the state and its state power, even though her only direct motivation is pleasing her boss and getting ahead within the system. She enacts horrible abuses just in the name of that motivation, and as a result, she's dehumanized everyone else because that's what the system tells her to do. She sees them only for their function, whether they work against the machine or for it.

On the flip side, we also see people who ultimately join the Rebellion. We meet Mon Mothma, the show's only significant legacy Star Wars character, and finally, a person who doesn't get to be the only other woman in the Star Wars galaxy besides Leia. She is a senator trying to work within a corrupt system that only has the veneer of legitimacy. For example, we see the Senate chamber in the show from the prequel era, but this time it's empty and devoid. People, her voice crying out about government overreach into an empty void, heard by very few. "There will be a fact-finding commission put in place this session, and it will prove that this is a boot to the throats of all Gormans who've done nothing more than request their basic rights. My bill assails the course and blatant domination of a peaceful and faithful ally." Ichuki is one of the few times that Andor is actually intertextual with other Star Wars media, but this team juxtaposes that prequel's height of the Senate to showcase its decay into fascism. By the time of Andor, the Republican Senate has meaning because of its allegorical relationship to our real-world political institutions that the prequels themselves were directly trying to talk about within those movies. But then this intertextual relationship with real-world institutions is given heightened importance in Andor based on its juxtaposition between how it appeared in the prequels and how it appears in Andor, and showcases how a decay into fascism ultimately makes things like the Senate less and less effectual. "I wonder how that relates to our real day life in America."

Mon Mothma realizes her ineffectualness, though, and thus works behind the scenes with growing rebellion cells to help fight back against the Empire. But as a result, it forces her to lead a double life. This is highlighted wonderfully in the scene where she meets rebellion cell leader Luthen, where they face the window in her shop, the public view that they put out to the world, where they have to put on smiles and a fake demeanor so that others can't see who they are, what they're talking about. Yet when they turn around and don't have to put on a public face, they can let their guard down and actually talk directly about what they're doing. "Well, you'll have to try harder. Did your dad talk to me like that? Revolutions are expensive." "I think I can." "Your everything seemed to be all about bringing in the savior to access your family funds." "It's a fantastic ally." Blocked and seen that represents metaphorically what these two characters have to do in their everyday lives, hide themselves from others. Yeah, this ultimately distances Mon Mothma from her family, her husband, and daughter. Her daughter hates her because Mon Mothma is always busy, always hiding her true self from her own family. Thus, her daughter even joins a religious cult, a regressive traditionalist group that reinforces traditional understanding roles for women, forcing them into arranged marriages as a rebellion against her mother and her mother's seeming lack of caring, something that her mother has to do in order to fight for her own daughter's freedom, something that her daughter is inherently rejecting. Ultimately, this shows how fascism is still in the rise, even within Mon Mothma's home, even as she tries to fight against it.

Even beyond this, with Mon Mothma, we also see her as a character who still believes that maybe she can change the system, that maybe she doesn't have to tear it all down, maybe she can change the Empire and direct it in a new way. And ultimately leads her to be more ineffectual than characters like Luthen, who realize that all of these systems need to be torn down in order to create something new. "I explained to you the risk of new faces, but you seem to know better. Have you realized what you've done? I thought you were here to tell me about the meeting." "It, I warned you when we started." "You told me yielding a net worth." "What were my words?" "Entirely. Turning back will be impossible. You knew where this was going. You've always known." She's ultimately like a Democrat in the American system, one who's enabling fascism by continually trying to push against it, but realizing more and more that that ultimately isn't going to work. At the end of the season, Mon Mothma realizes that she has to do sometimes morally duplicitous things in the name of fighting the Empire, such as when she coldly throws her husband under the bus by letting the Empire believe that he had a gambling debt in order to hide her money transactions to give herself plausible deniability for funding the Rebellion. "Someone's lying to you on that, we can agree." When fighting fascism, we cannot always take the high road. It sucks and it's horrible, and we should never let ourselves out the hook for what we have to do against fascism, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do it. And we see later on in Rogue One and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi that she does choose to join the Rebellion and work outside of the system, realizing that it's the only way forward.

We also meet Saw Gerrera, a character from Rogue One and the animated Star Wars series. Here he is running a rebellion cell, but he is only one of many. We see him point out that he is unwilling to work with other rebellion cells, pointing out that different ideologies are all fighting the Empire. "Whatever a final version of success looks like, there's no chance any of us can make it real on our own. Oppression breeds rebellion. Neither of you could do it on your own, but together." "Krieger's a separatist. My pays a new Republican. The Gorman front, the partisan Alliance, sectorists, human cultists, galaxy partitionists. They're lost. All of them lost." For example, he mentions separatists, who are the same group of people who killed his family as a kid, hence why he wishes not to work with him.

[Music]

All of this represents how many revolutionary movements are often incompatible, despite them all fighting fascist existence together. And the wonderful State aneurysm spoke about this in his video. We've also seen the consequences of bleat and divisions bare out in reality, most famously with the Soviet Union's Pluto cracked down on non-Bolshevik socialists and especially anarchists after the revolution, a pattern that would be replicated in other revolutions of the 20th century. During the Spanish Civil War, assassinations of anti-Stalinist socialists continued under the NKVD, and the Spanish left, united behind the Popular Front, felt the strain and eventual irreconcilable splits within the coalition of Republicans, Social Democrats, Anarchists, Libertarian Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, and Cynicists. Reformist and revolutionary segments of the many American Civil Rights movements, each with their own visions of liberation, would also come together and fall apart throughout the struggle. You can honestly point to any movement or revolution under the banner of leftism and find a web of factions and groups they worked with and against each other to advance their various distinct causes. The just to try to fight doesn't mean that all of our ideologies are necessarily aligned. Yet this distrust that Gerrera constantly has to live in leads him to be the broken man we see in Rogue One. "You have people everywhere, don't you?" "You're avoiding the question." "All of your sources try to concentrate someone with Krieger, someone at ISB. There's someone here." He fought the good fight and did horrible things to try to help others. Still, the constant anxiety and worry and the choices that he made left him a broken man. "Well, the greater good. Call it what you will. It's calling." War.

And these are only a few characters I've discussed, but Andor is littered, like positively littered, with characters whose ideologies we learn about. No one in this show is simple. Every character comes from somewhere, has an ideology that is different from someone else, and ultimately leads them to be working for or against the Empire in some way, shape, or form. And it just gives the show such a rich text and flavor. "I don't have lately. I have always. I have a constant blur of plates spinning and knives on the floor and needy, panicked faces at the window, of which you are but one of many." "She wants me to tell you about my brother. There's a long version, but what matters is they killed him. You fell in love with a local woman. Emotion. And he lost the woman. Then he lost his taste for the Empire." Everyone has their own rebellion. And this backstory isn't necessarily told to us, but is shown to us in how these characters act and what they do within the story. Any scene that could have been a simple phone call or information scene becomes a way for a character to show us their interior lives. "The mystery of your former triumphs, of things vanquished. I can sleep peacefully now."

Take for example, Syril Karn, who we initially meet as a corpo rent-a-cop. We clearly see that Karn is the type of man who would have clearly tried to join the military, but ultimately failed out. He stands rigid at attention, even though everyone around him is sort of taking the job more lackadaisically. He takes the job incredibly seriously because he believes in this mission. "You've been very busy." "Two minute dead, sir. Employees. There's no worth staying up for." "Then I'm not worthy of the uniform." "Have you modified your uniform?" "Perhaps slightly. Pockets, piping, and some light tailoring." When Andor, the character at the beginning of the series, kills two fellow cops, Karn wishes to hunt down the man who did it, but is told by his boss not to do anything. "This case appears to bear all the hallmarks of what I like to describe as regrettable adventure, sir. Two dedicated primor employees caught in the sad orbit of a calamity." "I don't understand." "I want you to conjure a suitable accident, but and let's make sure it's on the far side of the plaza. Let's get it outside the leisure zone." "But they were murdered." "No, they were killed in a fight." The boss ultimately realizes that the system works better if they just don't care. These two men were disposable to the system, and things would just keep better if they hummed along. Yet Karn, as we later see when he returns to his mother, has been brainwashed into thinking that he should have a greater purpose within a fascistic society. He's falling into that fascistic rhetoric, which as Umberto Eco points out in his essay, "Educates everyone to become a hero in such a perspective. Everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology, the hero is an exceptional being, but an earth fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. The earth fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for heroic life. The earth fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death. More struggle and conflict are all eternal in fascistic ideology. There must always be a great conflict, and thus everyone must be a hero for the greater purpose of the state. But as a result, the state must always be in some form of decay if it needs heroes to come to its rescue."

Thus, Karn, by believing this, tries to enact power over others, thinking that he can be the hero he believes in. "This story. It's the murder of two primor employees. Put out a bulletin. Kanori, human men, wanted for questioning. Slam their channels, flooded. Set up a desk here to monitor anything that comes in. Let's go." But ultimately, he's a mediocre man at this job, and we see this clearly in a scene where he tries to give a speech and inspire his men and fails. "There's no room for doubt on the path to success and, uh, justice. Best of luck to us all." He believes that he's supposed to be able to to do this, and yet he can't, because he's believed in this fascistic rhetoric that told him to join this greater purpose and work. He's a man who's just, because of his anxiety and this story that he's been told by society, gets further and further frustrated by the situation around him because he can't live up to this idea that he's been told to live up to. But eventually, all this plays out as he fails to bring in Andor, which was obviously going to happen because he sucks at his job, and he gets fired. "It took the combined ingredients of idiocy, ineptitude, and total disengagement for this farce to have reached the full apex of incredulous disaster. Seriously, my files are filled with corporate security fiascos, but this takes the prize." Emasculated, he returns home and feels endless frustration at being seen as a cog in a machine and continually shamed by his mother, who also reinforces this narrative. "What is it that you hear my caller saying? Look at me. I don't believe in myself. I am desperate." Spirit. He eventually joins this job that just makes him feel useless, purposeless, just an endless wheel turning. Yet believing in this heroic ideal, he doesn't believe that he can tear down the system of the Empire, but believes he should have one individual to beat. He individualizes his systemic problem, and he does so by individualizing his anxiety onto Andor, and thus goes overboard trying to get back and kill Andor. All of this is done to prove himself heroic. If he could just beat this one man, beat his arch-nemesis, Andor, who, by the way, doesn't even realize that Karn exists, he can enact his heroic monomythic story, often against the ones who they've been told by those in power are the reason for their problems, often other marginalized people, so those in power can pit these two groups against each other and not have them actually fight the group harming them, the state and those in power. It's by no means a coincidence that this show features a white man endlessly trying to hunt down and track down a Mexican man, blaming him for all of his problems. Even though these characters aren't racialized that way within the world of Star Wars, they are within our real world, and the casting mirrors this dynamic in our real world. And we see much the same today with many people who have been emasculated men, radicalized into alt-right ideologies, going out and enacting violence in horrific ways. I was initially going to reference the Pelosi attack here in the section, but dear God, we could point to numerous men throughout the past few years who have just tried to enact violence, believing that they were going to be the heroes of the story, going to fight back against the people who they have individualized as the reason for all the systemic problems that they have been facing, without realizing that the system is the one doing this to them. We see him even believing in his grand purpose so much that he stalks Deirdre outside of her work. "Just being in your presence. They've realized that life was worth living. They realized that if nothing else, there was justice and beauty in the galaxy. And if I just kept going, perhaps my deranged belief that there was something better fitted for me in the future was a dream worth clinging to." This mirrors how many men caught up in this idea that they deserve a purpose and a reward of a woman as a result of that storyline that they've been sold will see women as something to be owned and not respect their agency or stated boundaries. "The Cracker Barrel, and I was going to play a song for a woman that I kind of like, and I got there, and she saw me, and she immediately pulled away. And, uh, I wasn't forcing her to listen or anything, you know. I just wanted to play the song for her, you know, give her her own choice if she wanted to be with me, you know." "Does she know you?" "Yeah, I worked with her there for like, six months." "Did you have a relationship?" "No, we were talking a little bit, but it never really got serious." "Okay, so I chased her a little bit, just because I'm, I don't know. Women are crazy, like I felt like she like wanted me." "Do not think somebody's crazy." "Well, it's just like, I only went like a couple blocks down the street. I'm just saying, don't you think Jason is somebody's crazy when they, when they obviously don't want to?" "Oh, I had my song playing, and I wanted her to hear it, maybe." "Right, so what else happened?"

As an aside, by the way, this also dovetails with Deirdre's character arc, allowing us as the audience to see her both as victim of Karn, as that he is someone that is stalking her, but also, given that she incarcerates him later on without any warning in another scene, as an abuser of state power as well. Not limiting Deirdre to just be victim or victimizer, but allowing her to be both within these state functions. All this goes to show that everyone is miserable in fascist societies, even and sometimes especially the fascists, because the fascists are often the ones that are most reduced to just function, dehumanizing even themselves. And as a result of this, and this is where Andor is so [ __ ] brilliant, Karn becomes a critique of Joseph Campbell's monomyth.

Star Wars, in its original trilogy at least, it's how the myth around George Lucas tells it, utilized Joseph Campbell's storytelling structure of the monomyth, the idea that there's an endless cycle of storytelling that we've returned to over and over again throughout history. Joseph Campbell is a man that argued that these same stories of the hero occurred throughout history, that told of this same mythological figure that could reaffirm and then change the status quoes. But in this monomyth, heroes become representations of our belief in institutions and ideologies. The monomyth requires the idea that individuals become representations of entire ideologies, institutions, and societies, upon which the fate of which lies solely upon their choices and their individual shoulders. "I mean, you know, do you have optimism about the world?" "You know how terrible it is." "I said yes." "Just say it's great, just the way it is." Yeah.

As a result of this, what those ideologies mean are themselves subsumed by individual success. "I don't think it would help you to change the system, but it would help you to live in the system as a human being." Thus, the monument ignores systemic problems and blames individuals when fails them. First place, if they do have a success. If there's one major issue with the original Star Wars trilogy, when we look at it through a political lens, not just as a storytelling one, it's this: how Luke killing Vader could represent all of these political ideals. Yet, as a result, Luke is a Schrodinger's cat. He is both exempt from the system and upholds it simultaneously. His actions can decide the fate of everyone, and yet he could fall into either fascism or not fascism, just based on his final choice at the end of the movie. "Take your Jedi weapon. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger." It's why the Emperor focuses so much power on Luke, because he realized that if the Emperor can turn Luke to Fascism, well then he wins. He doesn't have to necessarily beat the rebels, because these heroic heroes represent everything within these systems. And these stories. Yet framing stories this way forgets things like how communities help people fight back against these systems. It forgets all the Bothans and X-wing pilots who died to get Luke to these points to make these decisions. Many Bothans died. And the monument ultimately argues that it's an individual's job to reassert the system as it should be by falling into this mono mythical belief in a hero. Karn himself represents this in believing he can succeed over others, but ultimately, in reality, he cannot move outside of the system.

Mono mythical heroes ultimately feed this idea of democracies decaying into fascism, for the monomyth is a cycle, and if heroes are constantly needed to reaffirm a status quo that has to begin again and require a hero, then the status quo that they return to must always inherently be failing. Democracies must always be in decline if heroes are required to come to their defense. We can see this in direct parallel of characters like Darth Vader, who is exactly like Luke and had a moment in the original prequel trilogy where he could have chosen between Fascism and democracy and chose Fascism, unlike his son who chose democracy. "It's not the Jedi way." "He must live." "Please don't." "I need him." But ultimately, this isn't really true. This isn't how systemic fights against these systems work, and believing that it does is ultimately feeding the system itself.

In the season finale, Karn travels back to Ferrix, the planet that he worked on when fascism used him and then cast him aside when he was no longer useful. And there he risks his life to save Deirdre. He nearly dies trying to sacrifice himself for the state and the woman who cares so little for him, because he thought he was fulfilling his purpose and that he would be rewarded. In fact, in this moment, he almost acts as if he believes that he and Deirdre were about to kiss, and it's very clear that's what he wants to happen. "That's true. I need it." He wants to win the girl. He believes that he was owed by becoming the mono mythical hero for the status quo. And it's telling to me that so many people watch this scene in the finale and thought that it was a sign that these two were going to end up together. It's because that's the story that we're told, that the guy saves and gets the girl. It showcases how the monomyth is so ingrained into our storytelling psyche when it comes to film, that it's expected that the guy should get the girl, even he's the villain. All he has to do is save her. That's why many men who sacrifice themselves for the state believe they will become. "I saw the double murder and found the killer in two days. It was overly ambitious, yes, but time was slipping away, and the opportunity was real." "Service to the Empire." "You just said it. Can one ever be too aggressive in preserving order?" And yet, in reality, Deirdre hates him and despises him. She even feels disgusted at the idea that she would even have to thank him. What Karn has really done here is give himself back to the fascist state, and it is willing to use him again, as it did before. And when he is of no further use again, it will toss him aside, as it did before. But this time, he gave himself to the system gleefully. He thinks he's the hero, just like so many in our real world, and act violence thinking that they will become the hero, that they are cast aside as villains by the very people who benefit from their actions.

[Music]

The individual hero is in opposition to our central character, and how he is represented within the show. Andor consistently refuses the call to action throughout the series. We see this in contrast at the start of the show itself. We meet Andor when he kills two cops who are after him, but when he's forced into that moment to have to kill them or die, because he knows that if he doesn't do so, they'll report him and they will kill him, he's still hesitant to do so because he doesn't want to get involved. He just wants to live his life. This scene juxtaposes him with his introductory scene in Rogue One, where he kills an informant, someone on his own side, without hesitation, in order to protect the Rebellion. So the show is implicitly asking us, what takes this man from not wanting to get involved, to not even wanting to kill people who want to kill him, to getting involved in killing people in service of this greater cause? What makes someone make the active choice to join a revolution? "What does it take?" "Everything I did, I did for the Rebellion."

Throughout the series, Andor is consistently seen refusing the call to action, unlike characters like Karn, who believe in this monomythical journey. "People are standing up." "Yeah, and getting killed for it." "Says what?" "They're doing... whatever it takes." "I've been lying around waiting to die long enough." "You can't beat the Marvel." "Not if I run away." Andor, in contrast, is only forced into situations where he has to push back against the Empire. Luthen tries to recruit him in episode 3 for the Rebellion, but Andor says no, and is forced to join Luthen after Karn's forces attack them. "I'll take the drop off and do what?" "Continue as you are. We'll use the same rope to hang you, whether it's for a plasma coil or 20 million credits." "I'm offering you everything you want, all at once." "What is everything I want?" "Put a real stick in the eye of the Empire." "So we agree?" "I know." "I think it's all useless." After helping with the heist, Andor refuses to read Nemik's manifesto, a document created by a man, Nemik, who died during the heist, but ultimately believed in the greater ideals of revolution. "That is the real trick of the Imperial thought machine. It's easier to hide behind 40 atrocities in a single incident, but they have a fight on their hands, don't they? Our elemental rights are such a simple thing to hold. They will have to shake the galaxy awfully hard to loosen our grip." As a result, Andor doesn't become radicalized into this belief. He was just forced to do this job for money, and as a result, afterwards, he tries to leave to just escape and live his life outside of the system. "You want to live under that? It's happening everywhere." "Well, we'll find a place they haven't ruined yet." "I'm already there. The place is in my head. They can build as many barracks as they like. They'll never find me." "What's left to keep you here?" He escapes to Space Miami because where else are you gonna go in the fascist Empire? But Miami. But even here, he ultimately can't escape the system. He still lives within it, even though he wants to escape it.

Ultimately, unlike other heroic characters who ultimately fight back against the system, Andor just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and becomes a victim of police brutality and shoved into a prison. Six years. Six years. Repeatedly, Andor is shown as only being forced into situations because the state around him exerts control on his life. He's not trying to be the monomythical hero. He just wants to be a person, but the state won't allow him to be because it has to force him into these molds. Ultimately, these individual characters like Andor's stories to come together and end up highlighting the way out of fascistic states, fighting against this view of people just as cogs in a machine, and the way to do so is through collective action, working together, and building solidarity, and recognizing our diversity in power together, not for the state, but for each other, and helping each other.

And this is best exemplified in the prison storyline. Andor and his fellow prisoners are told that "Work will set you free," a phrase which literally hung over the gates of Auschwitz. Except here, it is meant quite literally. Their time to release in prison is measured in work shifts. Their work will quite literally set them free. But they ultimately learn that this is a lie, that they will never be allowed to leave, just be shuffled to another prison and work to death once their shifts end. "What are they?" "Not now. Not after this." "That's because this is where the Empire wants them. That wants them to be these cogs in the machine. They have decided that this is who they are as people, to work for this greater goal, and thus can't allow them to leave because it would upset the system and how they're supposed to be viewed." But within the show, Andor, when the prisoners learn the fact that they will never actually escape the system, in order to hide this fact, a whole group of prisoners is murdered by the prison steak. "A man who was just released on four ended up back on two the next day. Well, got out on the floor, and then they killed them all." But as a result, Andor, recognizing this for what it is, a panic move. "But they're afraid, right now. They're afraid. Afraid. Afraid of what? They just killed a hundred men to keep them quiet." "What would you call that?" "I call that power." "Power doesn't panic." "Five thousand men are about to find out they're never living here alive."

"Don't you think that worries them upstairs?" Fascism is all about the aesthetic of strength, projecting power, but fascism itself is not actual power. It's weak, and all you have to do to recognize how weak it is is realize that if you work together, you can beat it. And Andor does that and starts to build class consciousness with his fellow prisoners, recognizing that the prison and the Empire's power is only in its projection of power, and if they work together, they can beat it. But he has to force these people to get to that point to realize that that is the case. "Plan works around a new man coming down. They'll replace all of tomorrow. Might not happen again until it's too late." "I'd rather die trying to take them down than die giving them what they want." Something that Andor himself has to realize to do. Outside of the prison, the prison itself is a microcosm of Andor's actual reality. Outside of the prison, the prison is just a microcosm of the Empire, and the only way out of the Empire is to fight back with collective action and realize that you need to get to the point to choose to do so. That you have to realize that you can't just continually work within these systems and expect it to change or work for you, because it's not supposed to. It never will. It never was.

But going back to the prison, though, eventually Andor and the prisoners work together to fight against the Empire and the prisons and escape. Yet, even here, even in all of this, Andor is not the monomythical hero. He's not the one individual who saves everyone else. In fact, in the escape, he has Andy Circus's Kino lead the charge, and Kino has to be the one to inspire others. In fact, when Andor has the chance to give the final speech to inspire everyone to push back and escape the prison, he gives it to Kino. "Tell him what to do." "It has to be here." "Come on. You do this every day. Tell them what to do." Our hero, the person whose name is on the show, doesn't give the speech that inspires the revolt. He only enables it and gives it to others. He is an organizer, but not a charismatic leader. He knows and recognizes each individual's person's power and ability, and recognizes his own power and ability within the fight as well, again, working together and uplifting each other, not trying to put yourself as the hero.

In many ways, this story is juxtaposing itself to the hero's journey. Since I know someone is going to get butt hurt about in the comments, I am not saying that every hero's journey story is fascistic propaganda. You can make good media that features a singular hero, and even a story that is anti-establishment. But the issue is that the hero's journey in film mythologizes power and change within individuals or small groups, that societal change hinges upon singular or individual choices, instead of recognizing that systems and the society that we live in ultimately influences individual or small group choices. All this generally leads to stories that reaffirm a status quo system that can begin a cycle anew, just constantly having individuals or groups reaffirming the same status quo, rather than highlighting collective action as the signifier for radical change within a society, that it takes groups of people to change a status quo, not singular individual choices.

This is something that early cinema, before the codification of Hollywood systems in the United States, would highlight, such as in Sergey Eisenstein's famous 1925 film Battleship Potemkin. In films like that, it was the movement of the revolution that was the driver of the story, not individuals, but a collective pushing back. In a similar way, Star Wars: Andor is highlighting the same thing, not just in the prison storyline, but in the entire series. This is itself reflected in the fact that while the show is called Andor, as it was a show made in a capitalist society that venerates individual success, Andor the character himself is not really the main protagonist of the show, but instead, there are many collective characters that share as much, if not more, screen time as him. There really isn't a single character you would call the central protagonist of the series.

Further, the prison storyline itself references the 1927 German expressionist film Metropolis in a lot of its visuals, highlighting a similarity to how the workers in that film were treated to how Andor were treated in this fascistic society. The film is about how a downtrodden worker class is necessary to create the fascistic utopia seen in that film. Even the utopia skyscraper world, the Metropolis, looks like Coruscant in its initial sequences. Metropolis, like Andor, is a film that works like a pro-Marxist critique of a capitalist world, even showcasing a worker's rebellion that seems similar to Andor's prison storyline. However, Metropolis itself was a film that ultimately vilified the workers' rebellion, with the workers' revolt falling into anarchy and mayhem and being taken over by individual self-interest. The film itself ultimately was venerated by Hitler as a pro-fascist film. However, Star Wars: Andor almost acts as a direct refutation of the pro-fascism of Metropolis, showcasing how a worker's rebellion can work, and showcasing that even though there may be distrust within an anti-fascist movement, like we see with Saw Gerrera, the movement itself is still powerful and necessary, and that ultimately, if the collective is working together, regardless of their individual motives, then it ultimately can push back against imperialism and fascism. This show is about how

Collective action is the hope that saves us all within fascistic societies. Humanity itself is built by community, not state function. We aren't just college, a machine.

In the first episode, we can see this. We see a wall of gloves at the mining colony of Ferrix. These workers place their gloves on a wall every day and trust everyone in their community not to steal them because they know they won't. Because by hurting one person, they hurt everyone. It's a wall that showcases how everyone in this working class has solidarity and trusts each other because they all know that they are there for each other, not some modern mythical idea of a state or a hero. And for them, it has been that way for centuries, even before the Empire. We can see even how this communal solidarity leads directly to the rebellion, not in all the different cells we see in the series, but in the workers fighting back the Empire.

[Applause]

We see this symbolically with the prisoners in the prison wearing orange and white, the same colors as the rebels in A New Hope, as if the colors of the workers' revolution were adopted as the colors of the rebellion. And these collective actions are not without tragedy. The show is clear about how many will die in these fights against fascism. Characters we know and like are not Jedi, able to deflect bullets with their lightsabers, but normal people that can be felled and killed with ease. There are so many characters who I came to know and love and enjoy their backstory who just died quickly and casually, even in off-handed ways. Take Nemik, who is a character who I loved and adored, and who, who probably is closest to me ideologically. I do also believe in writing a manifesto against bastism. Why do you think I'm doing this here? But that character is just killed when Andor starts up the ship a little bit too fast and a crate falls on him. He's not dying in some big fight. He doesn't have a heroic end. He dies casually from a mistake and dies on the operating table off-screen. I've never been so disturbed by a TV show by how quickly and casually people die, just shot once and fall to the ground, and the camera lingers on their dead body longer than most TV shows would, as if to remind us of the finality of their death in the face of facing the Empire.

[Music]

Yet despite this, despite knowing the horrors that face us when we fight back, it also shows us that working together can inspire and push us all. If we join the fight, that we can change things together. The show is also not shy about what it sometimes takes to fight back against fascist systems, that we can't all hold on to our ideals. One of the best scenes in the show is from the character of Luthen, who gives a speech about what he has had to sacrifice in order to fight back against the Empire. And he doesn't talk about how he's lost family or his life. He's talked about how he's lost his soul. "I burned my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. Now the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything."

In fact, one of the most beautiful moments within Andor is about this textually. The character of Kino is a character that we see really, really pushes hard against wanting to fight back against the Empire, believing that work will set him free within the prison. Yet he ultimately realizes that the Empire will kill him no matter what he does. He could work hard every single day, and he will never escape. And so he does eventually fight back and helps lead the rebellion within the prison. "With Andor, we are done with counting shifts. There is only then and now. There is only one way out. Play it how you want that I'm gonna assume I'm already dead and take it from there."

Yet in the final moments that we get to see with Andy Circus's character in the series, he tells Andor that he can't swim. He can't escape the prison that is surrounded by water. "I can't swim." Something that Kino must have known, given that he arrived in this prison and saw the water around it. He knew that if he fought back against the system, he was going to die no matter what. But he also realized that he was going to die staying in the system. So the only choice that he had to make was, was he willing to sacrifice himself for those around him, or sacrifice himself for the system? And that is ultimately incredibly beautiful and tragic and sad, because these systems force people to make these types of choices. Andor is a show that talks about how when you fight fascism, it's never going to be pretty or kind or easy. Yet it's also a show about how working together can inspire and push us to fight back, how we can create a better society if we believe in each other, not in some mono-mythical state ideal, but believe that the only thing that is true is that we care for each other, and that humanity is better when we see each other as individuals, as full people, rather than just as some utilitarian function, a cog in the machine for some larger purpose.

In the end, the show is about how Andor, the character, is finally pushed to join the fight. How he ultimately realized that to live his life, to live his life the way that he wants to, he has to fight back against the system, because the system won't let him be any other way. We even see this subtly in how he, recognizing that this was always his fight. In the film Rogue One, Andor said that he was in this fight, meaning the fight against the Empire, since he was the age of six. "What do you know? We don't all have the luxury of deciding when and where we want to care about something. Suddenly the rebellion is real for you. I'm supposed to leave it? I've been in this fight since I was six years old."

And we see this in the first few episodes of Star Wars Andor. We see Andor as a child of imperialism, an indigenous child who was forced out of his home by colonizers attempting to steal the resources of his land. Yet this colonizing nation was the Republic. If you look at the timeline, the Empire wasn't the one that colonized Andor's home. It was the democratic, yet imperialist, Republic that did so. And all of this brings us back to why Andor feels so damn vital today. At the start of the essay, we discussed how the original Star Wars Trilogy managed to be a salient political critique by highlighting connections to specific intertextual references and political groups, yet how Disney took Star Wars and removed much of these in favor of being self-referential to the franchise to sell more products. Yet Star Wars Andor is not a show that is about selling you the next Obi-Wan action figure or Grogu Funko Pop. As a result, the show is not built to make big sellable moments like, "Oh my God, see, he said hello there," or "We got a Hayden Christensen cameo," or "Look at Luke Skywalker." In fact, it became somewhat of a joke as many of the biggest sites online tried to create Easter egg videos and articles about Andor, stretching to find some. Well, this did mean that the overall online engagement with the series was lower than most. It managed to allow Andor to feel more powerful as a story because it had meaning beyond being a marketing tool for more Star Wars media and Disney Plus. Andor did not find meaning by referencing other Star Wars, but by actually having intertextual references with things outside of Star Wars, and even more so, references that implicated the United States by association. Because the show is about fascistic systems and totalitarian governments and hearkens back to the genuine intertextuality of the original Star Wars, but by doing so, it's about implicating us as Americans and Western nations watching the show, and how we can fall into these systems, how our grand states that we have built fall into this. The Republic was in the prequels, a representative democracy falling into fascism, just given away with thunderous applause. "So this is how liberty dies." [Applause] And then in Andor, the totalitarian regimes referenced aren't Soviet Russia or the Nazis alone, but also the U.S. Mon Mothma mentions a policy similar to the Patriot Act. "How much protection is enough? We know what too little looks like. Surveillance and prosecution without limit. You're doing nothing wrong. What is there to fear?" "I'm fearing your definition of wrong." "It's a dangerous time, are they not?" Well, the "nothing to hide" argument is when people say, "Hey, I'm not really concerned about government surveillance or government listening in on my phone calls or collecting my data because I've got nothing to hide. I'm not doing anything wrong. Everything I'm doing is innocent." And, uh, unless you have something illegal that you're doing, then you shouldn't be concerned about government surveillance because they're only out to get the bad guys. The prison worker system we see on Arcana 5 is identical to the gulag, sure, but also is about how the US often forces prisoners into the for-profit prison systems to work. Their food is slop and tasteless, like for-profit prisons cutting food for prisoners in the U.S. to save money. "Don't worry, you'll learn to eat it." There have been countless instances of maggots and feces being found in the meals supplied by private food service providers. So yeah, they're obviously trying to save money by providing small amounts of shitty food, in some cases literally shitty food. But then, then add on top of that the fact that oftentimes the private company that supplies the meals is the same vendor operating the commissary. At that point, you basically have a [ __ ] sandwich. But you'd also even talk about how our criminal justice system also often funnels the same types of people, often people of color, back into prisons over and over again. And when they are released from prison, gives them no actual help to be able to try and rejoin society in the system, and just pushes them back into committing crimes and thereby back into the prison industrial system because the state only views them as this way, doesn't want them to change, because this is where it wants them to be.

We can even see this in small ways. The "rent-a-cops" at the beginning of the series talk about Andor swimming to safety. "Let me swim over. Swim over, scroll." Now, it's a derogatory comment within the text of the Star Wars universe, but it's not one that is immaterial or one just tossed aside that has no meaning to our real world, especially given how Andor actor Diego Luna is a Mexican man. It references how Mexican immigrants often swim to try to get to the border. Yet Andor also shows the flip side of this, not just how it's used derogatorily, but how it actually represents freedom and people working together. We see in the show Andor is able to survive the prison because he is able to swim. Swimming sets him free.

Andor is a show about America. As Star Wars should always do, it uses the nebulous nature of the Empire to relate totalitarian histories to our present day, forcing us to look at America and what we can become if we continue down this path. It shows us that we cannot and should not ignore these problems embedded in our system. But the show isn't just nihilistic that way. It also, in true Star Wars fashion, shows us the way out. That hope can be inspired by working together, accepting and realizing that we've been fighting this fight our whole lives, and the only way out is to see each other's humanity. "Right now, get up. Stop the work. Get out of yourselves. Take charge and start climbing. They don't have enough guards, and they know it. Wait until they figure that out. It'll be too late. You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who's lost, and moving, and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us." And if this is the most Star Wars thing this show has done, that we can fight even without lightsabers or Jedi, because seeing each other's humanity is the true New Hope. Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Requires constantly still the Greeks. It leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is fear. Remember that. I know this. If they will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance, will have flooded the backs of the Empire's authority, and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.

[Music]

So that last line of that last section was how this video originally ended when I scripted it. I wanted to end all of this discussion on a note of hope, as it felt fitting that Andor, the show, led directly into Star Wars Episode 4. So I felt that I could use Andor to recontextualize that original film as not being about the mana-myth, a Luke alone, but about how community power is what allows us to win in a fight against fascism. But since filming and editing that section of the video, two things happened, and I realized looking back at this video as a whole that I missed something crucial in my original writing.

The first thing that happened was on Saturday, November 19, 2022. That day, which also coincidentally happened to be Transgender Day of Remembrance, a person entered an LGBTQ+ nightclub, Club Q, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and killed five people and injured 25 others. I spoke about that event more directly in its own separate video that released last week, and is why this video on Andor was delayed a little bit, as I had to swerve to focus on that one, as I felt it was more pertinent. But working on this video after that made me realize that this video did have something to say about that event as well. You'll see, while we do not know why this person did this horrific action in Colorado Springs, we do know that it comes after months of stochastic terrorism spread by many in the United States with platforms vilifying and sexualizing the LGBTQ+ community, and specifically transgender people like myself. They call being transgender a sexual fetish. They describe the bodies of trans people, bodies like my own, as mutilated, disgusting, and sexual. They dehumanize us and call trans people and those who provide us life-saving health care and try to fight for our rights as child abusers and groomers. Groups like Libs of TikTok or Matt Walsh or Tucker Carlson or even many politicians with actual power over others have used this rhetoric and directly and indirectly led to mass harassment and targeting of individual trans people and organizations such as the Boston Children's Hospital that recently received a bomb threat for lies spread about its trans health care program. And there's even more and more reports every single day of increasing violence caused by these stoking and escalating rhetorics around LGBTQ+ people. Violence against the LGBTQ+ community is on the rise, and it is not an accident.

But with that on my mind, the Club Q shooting and everything going on around it, the second thing happened that same week as the shooting, and that thing was the release of the season finale of Star Wars Andor. When I watched that episode, and you can even see this in my review of that episode that I filmed directly after watching it, I cried. The episode spoke to what I needed to hear, but hadn't realized. In the finale, we see the funeral of Marva, Cassian Andor's adoptive mother. And we learn in that episode that part of the tradition of Ferrix, Marva's home planet, is that when you die, your ashes are made into a brick and put into the ground upon which the community itself stands and walks upon. As Marva put it in her own speech at her funeral: "I was six, I think, first time I touched a funerary stone. I heard our music, felt our history. Holding my sister's hand as we walked all the way from Fountain Square, where you stand now. I've been more times than I can remember. I always wanted to be lifted. I was always eager, always waiting to be inspired. I remember every time it happened, every time the dead lifted me with their truth. And now I'm dead, and I yearn to lift you. Not because I want to shine or even be remembered, it's because I want you to go on. I want Ferrix to continue. In my waning hours, that's what comforts me most."

This brick represented a lot to Marva, not for some legacy or to be remembered, but because it represented that she got to care for her community even after her death, as it both those alive and those around her and those before her did for her. Community is what cared for and comforted her throughout her life. Yet Marva also went on to say this: "We've had each other. And Ferrix, our work, our days. We had each other, and they left us alone. We kept the trade lanes open, and they left us alone. We took their money and ignored them. We kept their engines churning, and the moment they pulled away, we forgot them. Because we had each other. We had Ferrix." Marva recognized that her entire life she had been taking comfort in her community on Ferrix, and understandably so, especially during her life. She saw the Empire continuing to grow, and as fascism grew around her, no matter the atrocities, the violence, the horrors that happened, her community had her, and she had them, and that was important during such a dark and scary time. But Marva realized more: "We were sleeping. I've been sleeping, and I've been turning away from the truth I wanted not to face. There is a wound that won't heal at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything, to everything around us. We let it grow, and now it's here. It's here, and it's not visiting anymore."

[Music]

"It wants to stay."

[Music]

"The Empire is he is that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we sleep." Marva continued to take comfort in the community, but allowed her to fall asleep because she thought her community would always be there and believed that the Empire would not touch it. Hell, her husband was killed by the Empire on Ferrix for basically no reason, as we learned earlier in the series, and still she went back to sleep because she had her community. And so she didn't fight back because she could hold on to this thing that she thought she would always have. Yet she was wrong. Because power and fascism only see people and how they can be useful to the state. And a community is not useful to the state. Only isolation and anger can fuel a fascistic society. So no matter what you do, fascism will try to take community from you. It will take everything, even the ground upon which you stand, the history of those you wish to remember.

In the days after the Colorado Springs shooting here in the United States, the rhetoric around the violence by those who work to support growing authoritarian rhetoric was not the normal thoughts and prayers sent to the queer community, but instead this rhetoric became "the groomers," which they equate to all LGBTQ+ people deserved it. "Like, I really don't care that those people got killed." "You're like, that sounds really hateful." "Pastor, well, it is hateful because I do hate them because they're a menace and a wart on the rear end of society, and there's nothing redeeming about them whatsoever." But even by their version of events, if it's causing this much chaos and violence, why do you insist on continuing to do it? If, according to you, it's like putting people's lives at risk, if the effort to have men cross-dressed in front of children is putting people's lives at risk, why are you still doing it? Is it that important to you? And unfortunately, you know, the tragedy that happened in Colorado Springs the other night, uh, you know, it was expected and predictable. Um, we all within Gays Against Groomers saw this coming from a mile away, and sadly, I don't think it's going to stop until we, uh, end this evil agenda that is attacking children. "Drag is inherently sexual and ideological. It is burlesque, and it's not appropriate to bring your child to a burlesque show, you disgusting freaks." Those stoking this rhetoric try to hide it in coded phrasing and dog whistles, but the message was very clear for those who wanted to listen: Stop being gay, stop doing gay [ __ ], or die. The goal of this rhetoric was clear. They don't want the queer community to gather, to see each other, to be with each other, to exist at all. They don't want us to have each other. They want us to be scared and alone. To even show our faces to each other, they believe they can scare us into submission and take away our community with that fear. But in truth, we are stronger than any fear that they can stoke within us.

Just as in Andor, the community showed up for Marva's funeral and listened as she gave a speech directed against the fascist Empire that continually oppressed her community. And when the Empire realized what was happening and tried to shut it down, the community didn't hide. They didn't run away in fear. They realized that they had been sleeping, that the Empire was still trying to take their community from them, and as a result, they fought back. The Empire.

[Applause]

Just like queer people fought back against the cops at Stonewall by throwing a brick at them, marking the beginning of a riot that pushed back against the state control of queer people at the time with community standing in solidarity with each other. So too was the brick that Marva became made into a tool to beat a fascist head in. Hell yeah, I don't think that woman would have wanted anything better for that brick, honestly. Me too. If my funeral doesn't inspire direct anti-fascist action, I have failed. But I watched this sequence and this episode, and like I said, I cried because I realized how true Marva's speech was. I have been taking comfort in my queer and trans and larger communities of nerds and weirdos because I love all of you. You give me comfort. All of you watching this video, not just the queer folks, but all you wonderful, unique, and diverse and strange, awkward, amazing people. I take comfort in you. But fascists want to drive us away from each other. They want us to isolate ourselves. And by isolating ourselves, they want to kill who we are. They want us to get on program, or the violence against us will continue, or they will use us to enact violence against others. Either way, they will try to fry a whole floor of prisoners at once in fear of us being able to work together, or work us to death slowly, taking away our identity until all that is left is our inhuman working shifts. Either way, we are dead.

So this is the final message of Andor. We cannot take comfort in each other. We cannot even take comfort in a show like Star Wars Andor. It should not be something that lulls us to sleep, saying, "Yes, we engaged in anti-fascist art." We need to use this art to inspire us to continue the fight, continue to push back, continue to say, "[ __ ] the Empire. [ __ ] fascism." We cannot sit passively by anymore, hoping that they won't take at least my friends, my community, because if we isolate ourselves smaller and smaller, they will make us weaker. It's why you see numerous attempts to pit marginalized groups against each other: trans people against TERFs, people of color against Jewish people, and many others. And they will not stop at the trans community. They won't stop at the LGBTQ+ community. They will stop until they control the bodies of every single person. But we can fight back. Because as we saw in Colorado Springs, it wasn't the cops, the importance of state control, that stopped the shooter. It was a trans woman and an LGBTQ+ ally who stopped the shooter. Communities working together. It takes solidarity, not just within a community, but between communities to stop fascism and violence. That's why there isn't separate communities. There's only one community, just solidarity between us all. And that is why I am no longer wearing a Padmé cosplay for this video, but the outfit of Bix, one of the characters who calls the community of Ferrix home. This is who I wish to be a member of, a community that is larger than myself, a community that I am willing to fight for, and who fights for me. And that even after I am gone, I hope that my actions helped to uplift and uphold. As I've said before, fascism is weak, but it tricks us into thinking we are weaker. But we aren't. We are stronger together. And all it takes is us saying no, saying no while we still have something to lose. Fascism, like in Star Wars Andor, is already entrenched in our society, and it will take time to dig out. But we can begin that work now. We can lay a new foundation working together. This is the realization we all need to have, that there is no stopping fascism, no stopping violence against our community, until you choose to fight back with everybody. This is ultimately what leads Andor at the end of the season, stop being a passive character and actively choose to join the rebellion. In the season's final moments: "What game is this? Okay, kill me or take me in." And this is ultimately what we all need to realize to do in real life. Stop this now, because there really is only one way out. If I could do it again.

[Music]

All right everybody, thank you so much for indulging my, uh, neurodivergent hyperfixation, which has become Star Wars Andor these past few months. I adore this show. But one final thing that I wish to say that wasn't in my script, but I also want to put here: Recognize importantly that this show is made by Disney. Some of you may be wondering, well, if this show is so anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, why is it maybe a Disney? And that is because capitalism often tries to sell us anti-capitalism. It's trying to make our catharsis, this feeling of overcoming these systems, into just consuming. But our catharsis shouldn't end with shows like Star Wars Andor. Andor should show us the way forward, how to fight for each other and build community and community solidarity. But it shouldn't be our end catharsis. To really fight back, to do what Andor says to do, is not just to watch the show, which you should do, but to find each other, to find connection, to fight back against isolation, and to fight back against these horrible systems that oppress us all and try to push us into these molds. So that's something I didn't have in my script, but recognize that anti-capitalist art made by capitalism is ultimately meant to be a false catharsis, and don't let it be. Enjoy Andor. I love the show. You should go freaking watch it, please do. But recognize that it should be the beginning of the fight to help you recognize these problems, not to be the end catharsis. Anyways, now that I have repeated myself a bunch there, um, please, if you liked this video, uh, please subscribe to this channel. I also, as I teach through this video, have a lot of big plans going forward for this channel going into next year. I'm going to have an announcement, uh, probably within the next few weeks, a video that I'm going to release that is going to be about the future of this channel, and things are going to change just slightly in terms of the output and things that I make on this channel. So be on the lookout for that. Uh, if you want to get that video early, as well as help me make these videos and these bigger projects that I have coming next year, which you all should be very excited about and, uh, get teased about them, um, you can also support me over on Patreon. Patreon does help me pay the bills. Um, it is allowing us to build a wonderful community over there, and also get yourself wonderful perks like your name in videos and access to Discord servers and videos early and things like that. And also, you get to see me being a weirdo dork even more, um, because that's just what I am, a weirdo dork trying to make videos about stuff and politics and just being a weirdo. How many times can I say a weirdo? Anywho, um, I am very bad at the YouTube thing, like comment, share, subscribe, all that stuff, as I hit my lights. I adore you all. Mwah. Take care of yourselves, and I hope you all live long and prosper.

So, uh, as we round out the year, I just wish to say a very special thank you to all of my patrons. I know I say this every single month, but you know, looking back at this year, I feel I've really grown as a creator, as an artist, as a person, even though I'm generally really tired as a human being. Um, I feel like I've really grown, and a lot of that has been enabled through all of your support over on Patreon. Um, so to my patrons, legitimately, thank you for giving me the life that I have and allowing me to do what I do and to dream what I dream. So, um, yeah, thank you. And with that said, an extra special thank you to Catherine Lambeth, Chelsea Williams, Joe Herman Holt, Carrie Allen Foss, Maran Janelle, Lily Gray, Olivia Tantivi, Heather Long, Darkest Caliber 42, Barba Ann Rounds, Jack McAllen, Stephen Kleinard, Jim Shin, Babaruski, Ali Gobert, Mary Mello, Matt Chung, Alan Atman, Super Desi, Randy Thompson, Spooky Heather, Sylvia Brits Creek, Zach Cody, D Cassaray, Wellington, Marcus Vincent, Ellington Boyd, and Mary Bethel, Meadow Whisperer, Lily Blameley, Chloe Dollar, Joseph Dewey, Felicia Tossed, James Crivda, Grace Rose Connelly, Dominic Noble, Elizabeth Christensen, Gordon Alexander, Jennifer Fuss, Chris Bodley, Dinch, Andy with an I, Sean McKenzie, Sony Narrow Purdue, Nathaniel Fronten, Hellscape Wanderer, Jolene Cassidy, Eric Connect, Mag Ferengato, Transit Toronto, Sasha M, Spencer Brownlee, Matt Rain, Concord Rand, and Pan, the fabulous ferret. When does Abyssel, Ryan Hunter, Sage Gobert, Shield Maiden 4444, Piston, Twisted Garage, huh, nice, uh, Mary, Damien Rice, W Randy, Edie, Melinda Walters, John Weatherby, Tag Wilson, Drew Bach, Angie Pugh, Stephen Richardson, Zach Praxed, Klara Arula, Autumn Jenning, Cyber Quaker, Kevin Frotek, Fox E, Beatrix Purvis, Lisa Maddie, H Sean Piper, Flynn, Fine, Canida, Dragon, ah, just odd, Devin Cam Launcher, Casual Observer, Sarah Leslie Hodgkins, Maron Herve, Epsilon is greater than Gretchen, Badger, the Mighty Jinjo, Joe to Banjo Kazooie, because if it is, I love you, Patricia Crompton, KDK, Blueberry Hill, Sarah Lamoreaux, Michael and Katie, hey Becky Sparks, Julia Sweeney, Sarah Bystem, Kayliss, Chris Hurst, Jess Johnson, Jason, not Melody, and Winter's Good, Leo with a Boyd, Kurt Mullen, Verdicts, Kai, Laura Demero, here, Reese's Celestial, Don Zumoula, Kincaid, Mix Sofas, Skyscanner, Nathan Steele, Cephas Keister, Troy Stahl, Blue Luna, T Terista, Jordi Lucero, The Tipsy Changeling, Zane Stutcher, Tony the DC Nerd, Mave Grumpty, Dragon 75, Nikki Gordon, Bloomfield, Quit Back, Strawberry Pop-Tartlist, It's a bug, not a feature, Ulrich Bogdan, Barbara Borges, Elizabeth Dravel, Unicorn Floof, Abigail Marine, James Hodge, Cory and Vale, Honkin, love to you all. Have a happy end to your 2022, and I hope you have a wonderful 2023.