#trying to organise my thoughts is feeling a bit clunky atm

[phantom-of-the-501st]

The Rambles Return

Ya girl's back and she's got more thoughts about Echo!

It's been a while since I've done one of these (life be hectic and all) but with season 3 coming out soon I'm revisiting season 2 and I have some more thoughts about episodes 1 and 2. When the episodes came out I touched on the conversations that Echo has with Omega and how he handled the fact that she was pushing too hard to prove herself. Originally, I said that his understanding of her feelings came from a) knowing that she is a child and is more likely to make reckless decisions and b) knowing that what he said could have been worded differently and that "our lives are like this because of Omega" could easily lead to her feelings being hurt (even though the statement isn't wrong and I still stand by that). But looking at the episodes now, I think that there is an extra layer to it.

And it's that Echo understands what it's like to have to try and prove your worth.

Echo was trained in Domino Squad, who were considered by many to be incompetent. It got to the stage where they were almost barred from being allowed to join the GAR completely and only passed their training after being given a second chance. He had to work so hard to prove that he was valuable, that he could be what the army needed, and that he wasn't just a burden. And when Domino passed their training, it showed the higher ups that this group of clones could pull their weight and be valuable members of the GAR.

And then everything went wrong on the Rishi Moon. 3/5 of the squad members were taken out and Fives and Echo were not only left to mourn their brothers, but to carry on going, to prove that even after everything that they had been through, they could be the soldiers that the army wanted them to be. A job that became even harder upon being conscripted into the 501st. Imagine the amount of pressure that those two must have felt to prove themselves and show that they deserved to be in one of the most prominent clone battalions.

And they did prove themselves. Their promotion to ARC Trooper and their subsequent involvement in important missions going forward demonstrated how capable these two were. They could finally stand in front of the people that doubted them, knowing that they had proved their worth.

Cut to the Citadel mission.

Echo gets injured, kidnapped, and turned into a cyborg. His brain is harvested for information and thousands of his brothers die because of the information that the separatists got a hold of. The guilt, the self-hatred, the depression and the PTSD that Echo deals with as a result of that would drag him back down. Because now he's back where he started. Suddenly he has to prove himself all over again: prove that he can still fight, prove that he still has the same level of intellect he did, and prove that he isn't a traitor. If anything, Echo had even more to prove now than he did in training.

Echo knows what it's like to want to prove your worth, to fight to show that you deserve to be there as much as anyone else, and that you are not a burden. It's why he understands Omega.

Because he understands what it's like to feel worthless.

Echo despises feeling useless. "The Empire's growing stronger and we're doing nothing about it". It isn't just about what's right, or about preventing the worst from happening, it's also about an inability to sit by the sidelines and prove to everyone that doubted you that you are the waste of space they said you were.

He's someone who will always be driven to do the right thing. But he's also someone who will forever be trying to prove his worth. He can't do nothing because he got belittled for being incompetent. He can't do nothing because if he lets the Empire take over he could be labelled as a traitor. He can't do nothing because Echo doesn't want to be nothing.

It's why he doesn't question Omega. Because he gets it. He's been in her position more than he should have been.

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Now don't get me wrong. This isn't me saying that this is Echo's only driving force. There are so many different layers and reasons to why he does what he does throughout the series, and a lot of that is rooted in the fact that fundamentally, Echo is a good person. He isn't flawless (no-one is) but he is good. However, his past and his trauma will always be an influence in his actions and his constant need to prove himself is a huge factor in that.