skygiants

To no one's surprise I really dug Andor, the show that is theoretically about Cassian Andor from Rogue One but in practice about systems and abuses of imperialism, colonialism and the carceral state and the various shapes taken by resistance to those systems!

Not that it's not about Cassian, in that he's often either the focus of events or the conceptual pivot point that sets other things into motion -- and also he is in a lot of ways going through quite a traditional refusal of the call/acceptance of the call kind of journey -- but this really is much less I think a show about individuals as individuals and much more about the glimpses we get of individuals as part of very specific systems, contexts, groups, cultures, in a way that I thought was really interesting to see.

I was a little bit spoiled for it going in but fairly minimally, and all of the plot points I knew about or thought I knew about ended up playing out in ways that were a step or two sideways from what I expected. "Surprise! here's a twist you can't predict!" is for sure not the thing that I most value in storytelling, and that's not the thing the writing of Andor is generally doing either -- just as often the broad narrative beats are exactly what one would predict (or, occasionally, symbolism so aggressively on-point that I didn't actually call it and then ended up staring at it with my mouth open like the moment when the setup for someone else's pun pays off and slams into me like a train) -- but frequently a storyline that seems to be building in one way gets abruptly derailed by anticlimax, in a way that couldn't possibly have been predicted but feels inevitable within context.

My personal favorite small example of this is when Cassian comes home in the middle of the show and tells Maarva with a great sense of importance and urgency that there's a rat in the community, somebody sold him out and he has to find out whom, and Maarva's just like 'oh honey this is a small town, we've all known who did it for weeks, and why, and he's dead now anyway," and Cassian is just kind of left gaping at the way this great mystery is just irrelevant now! But also Cassian's arrest is in this category for me -- I knew he did get arrested, but the manner of it was a complete surprise -- and I knew Maarva died, but I absolutely had the impression it was a dramatic & heroic sacrifice and did not at all expect the slow sad storyline of ungraceful aging we got instead. And also Saw Gerrera deciding he's been convinced by Luthen Rael's arguments about the necessity of collaboration towards the success of the struggle just when collaboration becomes impossible, and Kino Loy's sad little "I can't swim" halting the triumphant rush of the prison break, which hit me like a brick.

(Although, speaking of bricks, Brasso beating up stormtroopers with a brick made of Maarva's literal ashes is the visual pun I was thinking of above that absolutely took me out at the knees ajsk;ldfjdl)

Anyway, the other thing I like is the show's commitment to showing various forms of resistance and the pros & cons & messiness thereof -- there are long-running cells like Saw Gerrera's, there's flash operations and ideological infighting and Le Carre-esque , and then there are popular movements that arise naturally from ordinary people within their own contexts fighting their own particular and personal battles, and these things all happen individually but also the ripples and runoffs of those things play into each other like. Hmm. Not just streams running into the same river but a complex tidal system? My metaphor may be running away with me here but either way it's a kind of storytelling I like.

In other news within a few weeks of starting to watch this show I was required to make a character for an RPG and I said "hey is anyone else planning on making a manifesto kid because I kind of want to make an annoying manifesto kid --" and then everyone laughed at me. I did love Nemik and this was very predictable of me.

I also loved getting to grab

genarti by the elbow and hiss in delight "IT'S THE PRIDE LESBIAN! THE LESBIAN FROM PRIDE! SHE'S HERE!" perfect typecasting no notes