#and when maarva…

[darlingjmiller]

finished watching Andor.. I’m so mentally ill rn

[hegodamask]

“There is a wound that won’t heal at the centre of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow and now it’s here. It’s here, and it’s not visiting anymore.”

ANDOR - Health, disease and the Empire

[clonehub]

The acolyte dared to focus on the importance of mothers instead of fathers and that's a huge reason why people hated it.

[waterlilyvioletfog]

No but you don’t understand. The storytelling of the flashbacks to Cassian’s life as Kassa on Kenari. The fact that we get no translations for the language, but everything we need to know is communicated to us anyway. We understand which kids are In Charge, we see the leader’s prudence, how she commands respect, her generosity in allowing Kassa to join. We see the ritual of the marking application. We see jewelry, bowls, cups, toys— and weapons, though we don’t realize exactly what kind they are until they are needed, but used too late. We don’t know what the last thing Kassa said to Kerri was. We know exactly what he said. The green of the forest, the yellows greens and oranges of the kids’ clothing. The older kids stepping over a log, but Kassa, the youngest and smallest and last of the pack, swings his legs over sitting down. The shot panning from the green of the forest to the dead land near the mining site. The shot of Kassa overlooking the ridge where the mining happens. The total saturation of Kassa’s world— the color, the teeming life, the grime. Contrasted with the world of the Republic-soon-to-be-Empire, which is dead, cold, grey and black and artificial red. Glassy and clean. Literally and metaphorically surrounded by death, Kassa is the only alive thing on that ship. His shirt is the same color as the dead crew’s faces. The pop of color of the Andors: Maarva and Clem’s bickering, their bright clothes, Bee’s shiny paint, Maarva’s bright hair. Theirs are the first words chronologically that the audience can understand. Kassa can’t. Maarva kidnaps a frightened, angry, child with a community— on a whim. After the event itself, the fact that she kidnapped him is never discussed. Two people were lost to that band of kids: their leader and their straggler. Cassian is still looking for his sister. Cassian keeps going home and promising he’ll be back. Kassa never returns to Kenari.

[andorerso]

rebelcaptain teenage runaways au, Jyn was left behind by Saw, Cassian was kicked out by Maarva, they meet, instantly bond, and decide to make their own way in the world together

[sheena-isa-punkrocker]

people complaining that bix 'isnt her own person' in andor s1 like did we even watch the same show

[colleybri]

“Look how nicely that’s cleaned up. People don’t look down the way they should, they don’t look past the rust. But not us, eh?.. eyes open, possibilities everywhere!” (Clem Andor)

“Your father would be proud of you” (Cassian’s last words to Jyn in Rogue One)

Memory can be painful. But sometimes those memories come at exactly the right time, and our fathers live again.

“I’m sorry that I never did call you “Dad” while you were alive.

Perhaps if your name had started with the same letters it would have been easier for me. Perhaps you were a little jealous when, while I was learning your language, I said “Ma” and you and she had realised about the coincidence for the first time. She had laughed and looked delighted, and I had smiled. So had you, but a little sadly, I thought.

But I used your name with the exact same love. And in time you became to me the figure I thought I had lost forever: my father. My Dad. 

I’m sorry, too, that I haven’t thought about you often enough in the way that I would have preferred to. What I mean is - I thought about you a lot. Every day. But always with the association of what happened to you. And to me. Your memory had always brought me pain, because even when I remembered you alive I also saw you dead. Cold, stiff and dusted with frost. The rope, creaking. And I always tasted the acid bile of my grief and my horror and my pain, retched into my mouth, burning me so badly that I would always swallow it back down so it could churn and boil below, contained as much as I could contain it. 

See? Even now, though I’m not much good usually with fancy language, the horror is apparently more vivid to me than the joy of remembering you. When I let it overpower me again. 

But I’m changing that. I’ve already started, I think. 

You see, a few months ago I was asked to do something brave. I was going to be paid for it, but the danger was clear to me from the scale of the job. It turned out to be even worse. But before I knew that ��� I chose to be you. I chose your name. I thought I could make you live again, a little, through me. 

I know you told me, before you died, that it was “not our fight”. I love and respect you enough to tell you that you were wrong. I knew it then, deep down, and I know it even more now. Then, I fought in the only way I knew how to. With just my rage and sense of justice -  and a stupid stick. And I paid the price for all that so bitterly that I went on to convince myself that you had been right, and that the fight wasn't ours and was something to avoid. 

But you can’t avoid this. You just can’t ignore it. Because if you ignore it, it doesn’t go away. It just gets worse. We have let it get worse and worse and it’s almost too late to do anything about it. Almost, but not quite. 

I learned this lesson for myself. I can’t ignore what is happening, not anymore. 

When I first used your name - borrowed you - I was like you: a man who didn’t want to fight, but one who grew to love and respect his new family members. So I ended up wanting to fight for them. 

And just as you had welcomed me into your life and your heart despite your early misgivings, so too I learned to love, and to care for others outside of my own circle. I didn’t want to give up on them. I grew to care. 

So you might not have approved, at first, of what I chose to do but I think that in the end you would have been proud of what I did. And what you did too, living on in your name, as part of me. 

I was so proud to have you with me. 

And I had you with me again, earlier tonight. I came here for Ma's funeral. Though I can’t mourn her yet. There's too much raw pain - I can hardly stand to think about it all, can hardly stand to think about her. All I can think about is how I left her. How I had only just missed her. So I went straight to you, for comfort, perhaps in the knowledge that I can now properly mourn you. And this time, the memory came bright and pure and hopeful. I didn’t see your body and I didn’t think of the pain. I thought of you, whole. A simple happy memory from simple happy times. It made me sad, of course, but I smiled anyway. You had lived again for me, and this time through a loving memory. But also one with a lesson. It’s like you were trying to speak to me, having me remember that particular moment. I am pretty good, I am discovering, at learning. You would be proud of me, I think, if you could see how adaptable I am becoming. Practically, but also in terms of understanding and acting on … I suppose I should call them: deeper messages. 

I cleaned up nicely, I think. People didn’t look past my rust. But there is still a lot of good in me. Iron. Pure Ferrix iron. I am dissolving away my rust in new resolve. You see, I need to be put to use again. I have salvaged myself from the yard, been repurposed as a weapon. I have been welded together with my need for freedom and justice. I have been oiled with new resolve. And I have been fuelled with love.

I don’t know how effective I will be though, as this weapon, against such a huge and solid fortress of hate and oppression. Just like Nemik describes - I’m alone, unsure and I feel dwarfed. I have lived and loved and lost so much. 

Bix. Tomorrow, I am going to die, probably, trying to save her - even though maybe there's nothing left to save except her honour and her memory. I will fight for her because I love her, and I owe her so much that I could never hope to pay off my debt - except like this. I don’t think I valued love enough until I accepted once again how hard it is to lose it. But also because if I don’t try, I will have failed in this fight before I have even properly started. 

If I live, if I succeed, I think I will go on fighting. I think I have found the man I really am. Either way, I don’t want to go back to who I was in these years since I lost you. I like the new me better. Because I respect him. Because he reminds me of you, at your best. I will keep my eyes open. I will look for possibilities everywhere. 

I think I have a choice, now. If I hide or run again, none of this will go away. And nothing that I have done will matter. I have to fight. I have to save those I love. Those I have left. Those who are still alive, but also the the memory of those I have lost. You. Ma. Kerri. My first parents. Nemik. Kino. All the others. But I also simply have to try to stop allowing others, who I don’t even know, to be forced to feel the same pain that I have - of this injustice, this tyranny, this hate. I have to help bring the Empire down or die trying. That’s something I know beyond doubt that I can do: I can try.

I will try. 

I know you always loved me. Maybe now you can be proud of me too. As I can be proud of you. 

I love you, Dad. And I’m so proud to be your son.”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/56405944

[rotzaprachim]

so just... chewing on maarva and cassian’s relationship (like many people i think this is where most of my biggest discordant notes of season 1 struck) and how i don’t think the way it’s... handled is even particularly internally consistent within the season. much about the circumstances of it - i.e. her straight up kidnapping of him - are kind of left on the table without much unpacking, although i think with some individual nuances. one thing that strikes me is the scene at the end of episode three, which almost made me cry both times i watched it, as the sun goes down on ferrix and paints cassian’s face, and young kassa’s face, in gold. it’s beautifully shot but also explicitly contrasts kassa and cassian’s repeated forst exile, how cassian is having to flee and being again taken from his homeland by circumstances beyond his control. and that sunrise looks an awful lot like his face being lit on that beach in scarif. it’s not a happy motif, to me, too see his waking up on the spaceship painted in this light. even if maarva is outlined in gold, she’s taking him into something that is being visually compared to death. 

and there’s another thing that really struck me with the long episode 7 sequence between cassian and maarva that the AMCA guys were later talking about that i WISH the finale had dug more into, which is this: cassian has become, for whatever intents and purposes, maarva’s son. he’s living to be what she raised him to be, in a life very similar for the most part to her own. Maarva for the most part isn’t a rebel. She probably isn’t aquiescent, fully, but she and klem were drifters living off taking bits off other people’s spaceships, or downed craft, and bouncing around and living on it. When we see Cassian hustling around for the starpath unit, he’s basically just continuing in the family business, something further confirmed by his memories of Klem in the season finale teaching him to clean rust from scrap. And this adds all these complex, fucked layers to that episode seven exchange. Because maarva wants to rebel, now. she wants to join the rebellion. but she’s older. she probably has a lot of ideas about the end of her life. And she has this absolute condescencion and frustation about what Cassian is and what he’s doing. How he’s off with His Women, how he’s Gadding About or Doing Things she doesn’t like him doing. and it IS complex, on screen, beyond what the show later treats their relationship as. 

but i really, really think there was more room here to represent the more complex dynamics of a working-class parent whose been struggling their whole lives essentially taking their frustration at their own life and how it was lived out on their son for doing the same thing, rather than the kind of Saintly Mam Figure In a Chair and her Lowlife Washup Useless Son Who’se Failed Her. cassian being the younger mirror to maarva that she doesn’t want to see is a much more interesting dynamic. she’s angry with him for not being the rebel she never was. considering uh actual stuff fiona shaw has said... i really wish there’d been more space to unfurl maarva’s frustration with him in a more complex way. i wish cassian had more love and rage and frustration with her all mixed together. one part that struch a wierd note with me in the finale is “i love him more than he could ever do wrong” because it’s like... even after death, maarva’s love is still swirled in with her judgement of him. it’s that i love you unconditionally EVEN if you’re bad logic a lot of parents have and it’s fucked. 

 i wish she’d been cassian’s messy older mirror rather than ultimate paragon. he doesn’t live up to her image, he does the work she never did. 

[notasapleasure]

you're running a fandom shitposting blog stop being so fucking salty about people not voting in your silly polls the way you want aaaaaa not everyone has the same mummy issues you do!!!!

[cherryblossomshadow]

Can I just say that I love the way the music indicated it was time for Helen to stop?

There's so many markers here that she's basically won. She got the Disruptors to turn on Miles (partially, at least). She's completely trashed his showroom, almost all of the glass displays shattered on the floor. Miles is too busy looking unimpressed to try to stop her.

The Disruptors themselves have slowed down their destruction, turning to congratulate each other.

And my favorite? The music hits its crescendo and ends on a triumphant note.

The language of the score itself is telling us we're done.

But Helen isn't done. Helen isn't satisfied with this little victory. Helen is willing to "break the thing that nobody wants her to break."

[jynjackets]

Do you think Jyn and Maarva would like each other?

tl;dr: no <3

I don't think Jyn would get along with maarva as she is a source of Cassian's issues with self-worth and guilt, similar to how Saw is a source for her fear of abandonment. Maarva doesn't even like her own son so who knows who's good enough for her lol.

a long rant below the cut

Jyn being someone who knows exactly what it’s like to be adopted and re-abandoned, her seeing Cassian's mother be consistently disappointed in her drugged n kidnapped adopted son is a whole other level of fucked up parental issues. Maarva opting to be with her her town instead of Cassian in her last days and also disbanding his actual family, it would be very difficult for someone like Jyn to see past these actions.

There's also no real justification for Maarva's treatment of Cassian (because he doesn't do his capitalist ferrix job? because he brings girls home? because he still lives with her even though he takes care of her?). AND even after her death, the last thing she wants him to remember was “hey, you’re a big fuck up, but that’s okay <3”.

Maarva has done nothing but live her life from her fuckass couch and yet had the audacity to tell Cassian that he needs to stand up, that he needs to rebel or get a job. Even after when he fought back and went to child prison after seeing his adopted father hanged. So not only did you get ripped away from your parents, but also the person that supposedly chose you felt like they got more than they bargained for, Cassian therefore feeling ultimately undesired by both the biological and adopted family.

But being a parent is complicated, is she at fault?

Compare it to Saw abandoning Jyn. When Jyn grew older he was forced to choose between his daughter and his life's mission. Abandoning her is, without argument, fucked up. While it created irreparable damage, we can understand why he did it. Not only was it traumatizing for Jyn, but it was THE ultimate sacrifice he was making from himself. The thing that shifts some blame away is that it gutted him to do this, and he did it from a place making sure she was safe and alive.

So with this in mind, what is Maarva’s sacrifice in being constantly disappointed in your adopted son because he isn’t like everyone else? What does she gain when she tells him to forget about Kenari, that there’s nothing left? Imagine being adopted, being told as an adult that, no, you can’t be looking for your biological family and that they’re nothing now, and that even trying is useless. The only thing I can see is that she just wants Cassian to fit her image of an ideal Ferrix citizen, which isn't amazing and isn't enough to justify her actions.

Moreover, as someone who has lost a parent, the last moments you have with them hold a permanent memory that weigh differently than everything else, and imo require its own sort of grief. On Maarva's last days, she made him leave without her, even when she knew she was going to die by not taking her meds. She would rather spend her last days being memorialized as a hero on Ferrix than being with her only son. And at the end of your days, you want to go home. You want to be with family for as long as possible. For Maarva, home was Ferrix and everyone else there, not Cassian.

So Maarva sucks because she was a terrible mother at the benefit of literally nothing. Where Saw was the insurgent leader of the extremist cell that made major attacks against the empire; and not the best father largely because of his life's work but also still wanting to do his best to keep his daughter safe. But look who gets more villainized than anybody else and who is more celebrated as a hero?

On a tangent now, I believe Jyn and Maarva would be comparable to Cassian and Saw's relationship: you don't feel all warm and fuzzy inside meeting the [person you care about]'s greatest source of trauma.

All that Cassian knows about him is that he adopted her, then abandoned her. Upon seeing him on Jedha he almost draws a gun to protect Jyn (doing that before THE guy, THE supposed terrorist and Empire's most wanted, mind you), unsure where their relationship stands. Saw of course, would protect his daughter in turn, not knowing who this guy is.

I would believe Jyn would see Maarva in a similar light on a dramatically smaller scale. That "I hate my MIL and our interests are only mutually aligned around what's best for Cassian", but of course what that means is totally different things. Maarva sees Cassian and believes he needs to change. Even when she’s fucking dead he still needs for things to come together in order to be unstoppable, or whatever vision she had in mind for him and that him on his own is not enough.

And so the rest of this is how I interpret the implications for Rogue One: that the lessons both Jyn and Cassian took from their adopted parents can be mutually shattered as they see each other for who they are and not what they've been molded to believe.

As we know with Jyn, she has a complex moral code. When she sees a stormtrooper she feels the reflex to kill. When she sees a war-torn child, her reaction is to risk her own life to save innocents. And this is what she continues to do when she meets Cassian. She has every reason to shoot him and steal his ship. But on Jedha, seeing him agreeing with her that she was perhaps worth saving after her deed of saving the child, she sees him in return when he shoots the partisan. They see each other for their actions, for the better parts of each other, despite their words and even their own personal doubts. Jyn continues to risk her life for him over and over again and vice versa. She doesn’t want to change him at all and she inspires him to fight in ways he perhaps has forgotten or never knew was possible.

In fact, the reason she’s angry with him on Eadu is because he lied to her. Revealing the intention to kill someone’s dad easily put your anger in the right, but while she is mixed up with grief, the bigger part of her knows he was incapable of doing it and doesn’t revel in the fact of who he could’ve been if he killed her father or even combined with terrible things he's done, but just sees the present man that didn't and instead came back for her. Even Cassian is thinking how she was going to kill him for it, when he hadn’t even committed the crime. He’s caught up with the impression and perception of the kind of man he is, the narrative that he’s been fed his whole life that he’s committed atrocities that deem him unworthy.

Jyn and Cassian offer each other a break from narratives and reputations that they've tried to sound out their whole lives. And although both characters have a lot of integrity, being told the same thing over again through life lessons, you begin to believe it yourself. It's where we meet the two of them at their lowest points. That for Jyn, she wasn't someone worth returning to, that there isn't hope amongst war. And for Cassian, that he's not a good person for things he's done, that war is endless, and he has to follow orders or do things for others in order to belong. As the events of Rogue One unfold, we can see how they come to understand each other. They create a bond by feeling seen for the first time.

IN SUMMARY:

Maarva is like the exact opposite of Saw Gerrera in all the worst fucking ways, I tell you. Instead of being family friends with and saving the child that he later abandons, she kidnaps the child away from their actual family and then holds them hostage on her planet to force-assimilate and take care of her in her old age. And instead of actively rebelling through extremist insurgencies, she sits around and berates her son to go be a rebel, and yet disappointed that he doesn't have a job or doesn't do what everybody else does(?).

Jyn would hate that bitch like. Every Life Day would be an ordeal. The irony of how she fucking dies doing nothing when Saw Gerrera is barely held together by oxygen tubes and yet outlives this couch potato. Andors versus Erso-Gerreras it's first-planet problems versus outer rim problems. Yeah they're both traumatic but the biggest difference is one of these is entirely avoidable if you just weren't a piece of shit.

[benoitblanc]

...well i just finished andor

[swan-orpheus]

Cassian as Prometheus

Maarva Andor saying "We've been sleeping" as a larger metaphor about how people have collectively failed to notice the slow withdrawal of the light from the galaxy. Of how it’s there, but overshadowed or stolen. 

The line, “The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. it is never more alive than when we sleep.”  And the image of Nemik sleeping at the start of the Aldhani arc and then sleeping in death and the idea of sleepers within the earth, bearers of magic , speakers of truth like the legends of Arthur one day waking up and returning to bring light and peace to the land and of how the land itself is a reflection of its people, of the powerful symbiotic relationship between the two-the inhabitants of Kenari whose planet was stolen from them, the Narkinians whose water was poisoned, the Aldhani who were forcibly removed from the highlands and eventually denied their sacred rites, and how the greatest evil is to remove a people from the land that gave birth to them. 

How the Force manifests in different ways, is within the land, within people, within everything. How there are as many expressions of the Force as there are types of life and living beings and energy in the universe because the Force is life itself. 

The sky kyber as a reflection of the Force, a reminder. Cassian who sleep walks through much of the series before slowly waking up to his path. The repetition of “Climb!”, a climb out of darkness, out of sleep, and into the light of freedom and awareness of self. 

And then compare this with the wealthier residents of Coruscant who are dreamers, perpetually asleep, living above the poor who literally live down in darkness. We need that distinction to know when to sleep and when to wake, but for them it is always dark, there is always that strong impulse to sleep, that dulling of the senses. Light and wakefulness are being denied them. But they can still dream. 

Cassian Andor is like Prometheus stealing fire and passing it on one heist, one manifesto, one prison break at a time. His sacrifice helps save the galaxy from darkness, from bondage, and perpetual sleep. 

Maarva Andor saying, “It was already burning. He’s just the first spark of the fire.”

[magic-number-3]

reading a Diego Luna interview for Andor:

[unproduciblesmackdown]

and i draw parallels solely on the cinematographic basis of “when my man is no more than a millimeter away from perturbation at all times but you give the Whole Right Half Of The Screen 3/4 Closeup of Harrowing Recontextualizations” like that’s right. we’re living it up

[silver-pieces]

Me listening to Past/Present on the Andor Soundtrack