#this is not a dunk on mando btw it’s just the example that got me thinking about this

[communistkenobi]

something I’ve noticed while rewatching other star wars properties after having watched andor is that it’s difficult to watch them without thinking about andor, almost as if andor has produced a new interpretive lens for the star wars universe. and I’m setting aside all comparisons of narrative quality or pacing or cinematography for a moment, because I don’t mean those things.

for example, rewatching the mandalorian, din’s amban rifle is really cool. it’s a weapon that is illegal to have in the new republic, and it functions not only as a mid-to-long range weapon, it also acts as a fairly heavy duty taser. now as I said, this weapon is very cool. I like it a lot! but its function and existence is meant to be separate from who din is as a person - the fact that he has a weapon that doubles as a taser is not meant to be a commentary on his character aside from “this guy is a badass.” to be fair, I think what it’s meant to be is a tool of his trade - he’s a bounty hunter, he hunts people, tasers are handy for that. but there is no larger observation being made about the type of person who would use a weapon like that, or the type of society that would produce a weapon of that kind. there is no discussion in the mandalorian about how the specific economic and social demands being made of din require him to use what is by all accounts an incredibly vicious (and outlawed) weapon to “just do his job.” that is a settled matter that is not intended to be part of the narrative arc of the story.

but in andor, a taser prod is used as a weapon by the prison guards in narkina-5, and in fact the entire floor the prisoners stand on acts as a kind of collective spatial taser. these are not just meant to be narrative obstacles for our hero to overcome, they are actively saying something about the institution that uses it - that the very fact of their existence is evil, that a society who produces those types of weapons are making a particular kind of statement about how they view control and punishment of the people they govern. tl;dr, andor is making that kind of weapon political, and is asking the audience to consider it not just as a tool of the empire but as an ideological expression of the empire itself.

and so to get to the point I’m trying to make, I think a lot of things in star wars are very much settled matters. while the canon seems to constantly be re-litigated and retconned, fundamental premises are not really considered questionable or up for debate, especially a lot of the established visual traditions. and I think what andor is doing is presenting the audience with these very questions - it is reinvigorating the politics of star wars by insisting that a lot more things in the universe are up for debate, that they are politically and socially produced by the fictional societies and cultures and governments that exist in star wars, and every piece of equipment and clothing and relationship says something about those fictional people. it is asking you to view star wars as a universe that is infused with political meaning, and that politics is not a discrete category that things like tasers or prisons or arranged marriages or administrative process can be separated from. to take down the empire in andor, you don’t just have to remove the head of state or kill all the stormtroopers; you need to destroy all the tasers, too