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Jun 9th, 2016
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  1. I love the whole concept of Finn, a defecting Stormtrooper who joins the rebels. The way the film handled his motivations I felt was a huge miss, though. Onscreen Finn states, “But my first battle, I made a choice. I wasn’t gonna kill for them.” And then he promptly spends the rest of the film killing Stormtroopers, once his friends to the point of the death of one just days prior leading him to defect. Two days after that trauma he’s shooting them by the dozens without compunction, with the film framing this as The Right Thing To Do.
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  3. This is a flaw on the side of the script and writing, in my opinion. Apparently, in an earlier draft, Finn had no problem with killing in battle - he defected when he witnessed Kylo Ren airlocking a bunch of unarmed civilians. This act of brutality on unarmed persons broke his conditioning, rather than “killing in general” as it is portrayed in the final version and hence the film.
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  5. This would have made a lot more sense to me, given how in the version we ended up with, Finn’s motivations don’t add up. He abandons TFO because he refuses to kill for them, and instantaneously joins the Resistance, who he knows essentially nothing about, and spends the rest of the movie killing for them instead. How does he know the Resistance doesn’t also execute villages of TFO sympathizers? Killing armed opponents in combat being okay but not unarmed helpless civilians would make more logical sense to me, implying Finn having a warrior-honour code.
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  7. Like, I really would love a discussion about this without it instantly devolving into the internet’s favourite kneejerk of Godwin’s law. Imo the Star Wars Empire has more similarities in behaviour and structure to the British or Roman Empires than anything else, but if we’re going to be comparing TFO to Nazi Germany based on black uniforms and impassioned speeches, then please keep in mind ISIS and Al Qaeda think they’re freedom fighters against an evil empire too, and Khomeini was supposed to be a righteous revolution against a corrupt totalitarian state.
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  9. I realize it’s written this way bc the film is PG13 and canon Star Wars largely operates on a hysterically simplistic paradigm of Perfectly Good versus Pure Evil, but this has always aggravated me.
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  11. If we’re going with the ends justifying the means, then perhaps in Star Wars killing itself is neither good nor bad, it’s the reasons for killing that are the problem. So could the reason be that in Star Wars killing for democracy is right, but killing for dictatorships/oligarchies is wrong?
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  13. Before you answer, please note the following. Leia was in canon rebuffed by the New Republic as a “paranoid warmonger” when she wanted to continue with the Alliance and chase the remnants of the Empire in the Unknown Regions (Source 1).
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  15. The Rebel Alliance (the rebels that brought down Palpatine’s Empire) was NOT a democracy in canon. It was described as a “benevolent” or “benign” dictatorship designed to wage war. (Source 1, 2) So now it’s not “democracies are good and dictatorships are bad.” It’s “MY dictatorship is Good, and YOUR dictatorship is Bad.”
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  17. This leaves me with the very unsatisfying conclusion that it’s written this way because the primary target audience is still children who will rope their parents into buying toys, so the sides of a conflict are painfully cardboard cutout versions of Good and Evil.
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  19. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, teaching children from a very young age that there is one side that is purely Good and the other that is pure Evil is an incredibly dangerous tactic. It’s part of a social conditioning that’s grown in symbiosis with the American political environment, a long-standing bipartisan system, and has also been influenced in history heavily by the Cold War.
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  21. It’s part of the reason for the extreme polarity that permeates the climate of the internet - an attitude where people are either praised as gods and raised to the heavens in cult-like adoration, or denounced as scum of the earth and doxxed to hell. Every issue has to polarize into two extremes. SJWs and Anti-SJWs. Ship wars, shippers of pairing A portraying shippers of pairing B as evil monsters, claiming they must think the real-life version of whatever they write is great.
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  23. Reality is filled with moral grey. Complexity. Nuance. America may have fought on the side of the “good guys” during World War II - but they also nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US has been the global economic superpower for a century for two reasons: imperalism and profiting from both world wars. The US entered both world wars strategically and at a very late date, only when one side was clearly leading, profiting massively from both by lending money to everyone and, due to its geographical location, ending up as the only unbombed production powerhouse following both wars.
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  25. The US also used both world wars as opportunities to expand their imperialism in South and Latin America and the Middle East, overthrowing local (often democratic) governments there and establishing dictatorships friendly to American politics in order to have access to raw resources. Then promptly abandoning the ones that became too troublesome.
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  27. What’s my point? The States, like GB, have done things we generally all consider good, like fighting the Nazis. The States were also (and still are) imperialists, have incredible levels of racism, and monopoly capitalism is ruining the planet. By contrast, Germany is now far more peaceful and socially caring for its citizens than the States. And the US has long had the world’s highest per capita incarceration rate. (1)
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  29. Simply the virtue of fighting a dictatorship does not mean you are by nature pure and good in ALL things, or will continue to be exclusively so in the future. Likewise, having been a dictatorial nation in the past does not mean only a few short decades can’t see an incredible change for the better of citizens. And the reverse is true - trying to overthrow a corrupt oligarchy, like Khomeini did in Iran, does not mean this will be better for the citizens.
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  31. TLDR: So basically what I’d like to see is more moral grey in Star Wars (or at least, in our Star Wars fanfiction). Star Trek did this beautifully in the latter seasons of Deep Space Nine, which remains my favourite of the series and inspires my writing a lot. Even by the 80s The Next Generation was moving on from TOS’s portrayal of Klingons as one-dimensional, moustache-twirling villains, into a society and culture with their own moral compass and values. In fact, Star Trek eventually did this with every alien culture they had previously used as uni-dimensional cardboard cutout Bad Guys. Some degree of moral relativism can make fiction a far deeper, emotionally and intellectually richer experience that probes and questions, rather than handing down simplistic, absolutist edicts.
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  33. Abrams’ said Episode VIII will be “weird.” By weird, I hope he means it will explore the central conflict of the new trilogy a bit more than just “Good Guys Kill Bad Guys And It’s Right.”
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