Four thoughts on everyone's favorite series. Not a review.
In a rebellion, people will die.
Both the Prequel and Original Trilogy offer the audience the point of view of a hero, who has a high-tech energy sword and some telekinetic power. They were given a clear delineation of right and wrong. Our heroes often do what is right, and if they do something morally wrong, it’s always towards the bad guys.
In Andor, you don't get to be the hero. You do morally questionable things to survive or fight and it always seems to be on the losing side. You do the stuff no one wants to do because it's most often wrong and above their moral stature. Your chance of survival is always slim even if you're not reckless or dumb. Previously, being reckless and dumb leads to more happy accidents or a device to keep the plot moving forward. Here, it results in more bad stuff happening – just like in real life.
Andor's philosophical statement centered around Luthen's chilling monologue and Nemik's hopeful manifesto. Its premise remained consistent from the Original Trilogy: which is about fighting a highly organized powerful force capable of pillaging multiple planets and creating a super weapon, but this time you're just a teeny tiny human with no gifts, with penetrable skin, and who isn’t god’s favorite. How do you do that? Not with lightsabers and superpowers. Not with Andor, no. It's wits, shooting and piloting skills, making morally paradoxical decisions that do not mean 100% good, and dead comrades lying everywhere. With every win comes a lifeless loved one and friend lying somewhere, without the honor of your beloved community’s burial rites, with the identity they chose or was chosen for them. You wouldn’t know if you’ve won, because it sure doesn’t feel like it. Someone else on the end of the line just has to make it worth it.
By the time you sign up for the Rebellion, you're already a dead man walking. The Rebellion chooses you when the Empire decides to exist around you, and they’re everywhere. Surviving is always a surprise. Loved ones were slipping through your fingers like sand. Dead comrades are lying everywhere.
You may have friends everywhere, but you have no idea if you're going to see them on the next mission, or if you're not going to be told that they're gone. You just proceed with the plan.
People dying is simply the Empire’s collateral damage. People dying is also the cost and reason for joining the Rebellion. It's built on hope that we’ll have a better future even if it means playing the Empire’s game when we’re supposed to be better than them.
These were uncomfortable ideas that you're being sheltered away from with lightsabers. That’s why Andor works.
Touch some grass.
In real life, the series presents a dilemma. Andor inspires action. However, what's happening in real life is that it's creating discourse. There will be no change if an idea lives in discourse. An idea can only be effective if done through action. Sure, discourse is important for they work as seeds. However, action is needed to grow a tree.
On the internet, there's only discourse. Only on rare occasions did it push towards collective action. This creates this thought that simply thinking deeply or complexly on a certain idea bears the same equability as taking action. I see this all over the internet. There's a sudden rise of armchair philosophers, media analysts, and political theorists. Suddenly, everyone had a good taste, even those who hated Andor's slow season 1. People are dissecting it and posting their thought pieces online (I’m aware of the irony). But when it comes to analyzing their philosophy and then taking to the streets to support the marginalized— they were only cricket sounds. Sometimes, it's they who perpetualize this oppression. They just like appearing smart.
When the fan’s politics don’t align with the media’s.
It's interesting to watch Andor with a fascist supporter; to hear his thought process, and how everything seemed to escape him. His thoughts were always either mimicked from the posts online or something you can already piece together while watching the series. They could never look at themselves, analyze their position in the politics that reflects that of Andor, and realize that they were the fascists.
The paradox of rooting for the Rebellion when in real life, you support a fascist family, is wild. It works as if it were a way to soothe their internal inconsistencies when one of their favorite show tells them that their beliefs oppress others and deprive others of their rights. One can find relief when their political allegiances have killed innocent people and when their favorite media is vilifying them, by seemingly rooting for the good guys. You don't want to be outcasted, outsmarted, outdated. You wanted to remain relevant, so you supported the Rebellion.
This thumb-sucking self-soothing reaction only exists in today's society, and media literacy dies every time this happens.
Our purpose in life was never centered around conflict.
The conundrum of the common man is that we were told that we have a purpose for existing in this rock that was floating in the vast emptiness of space. And that purpose, we either have to spend our lives living it, or spend our lives searching for it. If you don't have it, you're lost. You're incomplete.
I believe that the purpose of our lives is to be in service of others, of our chosen community. That our talents, our life energy, are used for the better good of our community.
However, many others have decided upon themselves that their purpose in life is to fight. To fight the powers that be (even if the fact proves otherwise), the powers that oppress (even if they're colonists), or to some perceived injury (when you're just reckless). An example of this is Dedra Meero and Syril Karn. They were walking neoliberalism. Dedra found moderate success and significant validation (due to her upbringing) in the ISB that she had found her purpose. She found information by searching deeply and expansively, which proved her value in the group. However, as she chased her first high, her research eventually led to the early discovery of the Death Star. Syril's upbringing made him look for validation from controlling women. He took their aspiration as him, from his mother's definition of a successful Coruscant office man to Dedra's partner in searching for the Axis network. Eventually, his identity was so muddled, represented to us when Andor asked Karn who he was.
Their concerns were a stark contrast to Andor's family being systematically killed, as Jyn Erso's.
They won't get killed if they don't fight. - They will get killed anyway. For the fascist, the marginalized is always disposable. Cower or not, blend in or not, the marginalized will always be objects to the Empire. Heck, even Dedra was ostracized within the fascist’s self-cannibalistic community because she's a woman with a man's ambition.
If we don't live in a conflict, we will create one. It's the easiest thing to point out as something to the purpose of our lives when it could be something nonviolent and community building. However, the maladjusted, live through it vicariously through media, sometimes even in Andor.
From Rogue One to Andor: In a rebellion,
people will die.
5/26/2025