This is the best comment in the thread and all the dorks are modding you down.
No down mods yet - not on that post. In fact, it’s now up to “3”. I think it’s worth digging deeper into what’s likely going on.
Star Wars always had politics but not so blatantly aligned with “the message” and especially its flattening effects - forcing “identity group oppression” binaries into the fore over individual agency, pluralism, etc.
But what about Andor? How did it manage to succeed despite top down mandate of The Message? I think this is well worth exploring as its the exception that proves the rule. I think there are two broad reasons it slipped under its radar:
1 - Its creators had broad independent control, letting them adhere to the formula of the originals. No one is heroic or evil by demographic default; agency drives the story. Cassian’s radicalization comes from lived experience - actual fully contextual “lived experience” not the kind that is cherry picked kind, or “Mary Sue” kind, but the kind that blends with complex personal grit and failings. So betrayals, and hard won reflection, not innate identity superiority, mold him.
2 - “The Message” folks mistakenly interpreted Andor’s criticism of the banal evil of authoritarian bureaucracy to simply be a stand-in for criticism of their “far right” bogeymen. But Andor’s creators weren’t specifically criticizing the far right or fascism in particular - in fact, per interviews, they specifically studied Bolshevism and Stalin’s Stasi as examples. They essentially adhered to Orwell’s contention that there is little daylight between fascism, Leninism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism as all four, in different ways, simply pioneered or co-opted the extreme ease in which socialism’s highly elitist, centralized bureaucratic vanguardism is corrupted.
Andor proves quality storytelling often integrates both real stakes AND moral complexity, while avoiding cartoonish “friend enemy” binaries. The originals succeeded on similar foundations: individualism evolving into pluralism against empire, a transcendence via agency that integrates “identity” rather than is purely determined by it, and that (often messily) overcomes personal fallibility.
That messiness and complex agency, by the way, is the vehicle that lets zaniness like robots and aliens easily thrive in this story’s milieu - they blend in to become avatars for the overall mythos rather than just performative “identitarian” comic relief and window dressing.
