• LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      31·
      11 days ago

      Especially her arc in Mando. Like, you leave the Jedi order because they suck, sure, and your better alternative is to tell a toddler they can’t see their dad anymore? Yeah. Ok, Ahsoka.

    • TrippyFocus@lemmy.mlEnglish
      17·
      11 days ago

      Anarchist based on a line in Andor season 1

      Wish they’d gone more in depth in exploring his groups workings since nothing about what is shown really portrays a horizontal leadership structure.

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        31·
        11 days ago

        Makhno’s anarchists weren’t horizontal either in pre-soviet russia. Makhno advocated for and practiced a vanguard anarchist group which diverges quite a bit from what is currently popular anarchism (and was divergent for his time too).

        Given that Andor is basically all based on Russian revolution with divergence to make Disney’s sequels work (IE all the radical left leaders die leaving only the liberal shits leftover to lead the revolution straight back into a repeat of the republic) it’s easy to assume that Saw is Makhno.

        • TrippyFocus@lemmy.mlEnglish
          13·
          11 days ago

          Thank you for the context! I saw some similarities with the Russian Revolution like the heist with Andor basically just being what Stalin did but hadn’t considered this connection.

          • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            33·
            11 days ago

            My take is that Andor is Stalin, Luthen is Lenin, Saw is Makhno, Nemik is “revolutionary theory” and every chance for something different died with these characters. Instead what ended up happening was the liberals taking over. Andor’s story is a February revolution without the October revolution, it just leads into them wanting to rebuild the Republic and nobody has any desire to change any of the contradictions that exist in the galaxy. Look at the droids, look at the aliens, look at how human-supremacist the galaxy is, look at how unequal it is. This isn’t just a product of the empire it was this bad before the empire took over, the empire just took off the mask.

            These characters saw that, to different extents each. The liberals hate Luthen specifically because they see him as a radical that wants to do something different.

            Also Luthen’s hospital room is shot the same way Lenin’s tomb gets photographed very intentionally.

            • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              12·
              11 days ago

              Luthen makes me think of Nechayev more than Lenin. Especially his speech to Lonny (idk how to spell it) in the elevator about sacrificing everything including your humanity for revolution. It reminds me of Nechayev’s catechism

              As for Andor himself, he doesn’t really strike me as Stalin-like. Andor dies young. Stalin died old. Andor never held any kind of political power in a government, Stalin did. The politics of the rebels in Star Wars strike me as more like bourgeois liberalism than Communism. They’re trying to restore a Republic (that confusingly has a princess and an order of quasi-religious knights, which sounds more feudal) that has “decayed” into an empire. But really a Republic can be an empire anyway. See America.

              There’s clearly some Communist influence in the writing and Nemik’s hat looks very much like a budenovka, but the parallels to the October revolution are few and far between I think.

              • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                12·
                11 days ago

                They’re trying to restore a Republic (that confusingly has a princess and an order of quasi-religious knights, which sounds more feudal) that has “decayed” into an empire.

                Nobody is doing that until Episodes IV-VI. In Andor’s time it’s simply a rebellion to end the empire. It’s the opportunists who who turn it into restoration of the republic and no radicals survive to oppose them.

                If Nemik were alive when the Rebellion army was training and fully professionalising on Endor he would have insisted on theoretical education forming part of the the Rebellion army’s curriculum and there you go, you have a real revolution instead of a restoration.

                The problem is that anyone who would’ve opposed a restoration and insisted on something different is dead, or they’re like Saw who was intentionally kept on the fringe by these liberals because they knew he was a threat to them. They call him “mad” not because he’s actually mad but because he does not want what they want, and Saw openly discusses the different views everyone has with Luthen when trying to pry into what Luthen’s real ideology was. Luthen, like Lenin, had one true ideology, the ideology of revolution, and everything else was subordinate to achieving that one task first and then transitioning to the task of actually taking power when it was clear the first revolution alone was not going to achieve socialism. This is exactly the mindset we see in Luthen, except one problem, he and everyone else dies in this universe because it MUST fail because Disney’s sequels are ideologically dogshit. And that’s why they suck ass and feel bad to the audience too.

                • darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  4·
                  11 days ago

                  Nobody is doing that until Episodes IV-VI. In Andor’s time it’s simply a rebellion to end the empire. It’s the opportunists who who turn it into restoration of the republic and no radicals survive to oppose them.

                  Minor Spoiler

                  To be fair Saw specifically says to Wilmon (who Luthen sends) in S2E05 during his rhydo speech thing about revolution not being for the sane, how “we’ll all be dead before the Republic is back”, now maybe he was just talking in broad terms of the goals of the others or has certain better ideas about what a new Republic should look like but it certainly sounded like the show writers were making it his goal too. He is one of the most revolutionary coded characters though.

                  Much as we might want to cast our wishes onto Andor there were never any strong mentions of left revolutionary thought (nothing that would be out of place in liberals talking about bringing down the USSR or Nazi Germany from the liberal perspective) and only vague baiting towards communism without so much as a solid two spoken lines of dialogue that suggests more than some aesthetics being adopted in the way liberalism tends to recuperate revolutionaries.

                  It was all about tearing down bad thing (Empire) and replacing it with either hand-wavy thing that isn’t “authoritarian/dictatorial” or just straight up restoration of the Republic. Nemik in particular doesn’t come off to me as spouting anything but liberal platitudes for the most part. None of them talk about broad, just about how the empire is bad and hurts people and walks around like a bully carrying out abuses. Nothing about economic systems, nothing about say promoting gender equality, racial/species equality, addressing any kind of structural issues in the Galaxy they live in. So we have little idea who they really are or what they’d do if they took power. You mention subordination to the goal of the revolution and fair enough but it’s just a way to leave it open to paint it whatever color you want depending on your ideology unless you’re a raving fascist freak who loves the empire of course.

                  It’s all very liberal and VAGUE in that way, there’s this big bad government (thankfully very fascist coded not communist coded) and it uses authority badly and abusively and does arbitrary executions and all kinds of just vicious repression and occupying power abuse stuff and they’re against that and they get together with friends, do a little adventurism but a lot of it is idealistic speeches by the lib Mon Mothma and such that we’re to presume opens a gas line to the revolutionary flame that gets the new recruits, welds the various factions together and sets things off for the events of the films.

                  In this way of keeping things vague people can see what they want. The can see the American revolution in it, they can see the French revolution, they can see the fall of the USSR to US backed protests and color revolutions as cast as “organic uprisings” by western media and history books, they can if they’re leftists see the rise of the USSR against feudal Russia. They can see the empire as a “what if Nazi Germany succeeded” type thing.

                  I do agree about the killing off of radicals at least being potentially a kind of statement. As is the fact they try to rein them in but only because they fail does the rebellion succeed (if Luthen had thrown in the towel when they wanted they wouldn’t have learned of the death star until too late, if Andor had been less of a rogue guy and obediently followed all his orders they would have been destroyed by not properly following through). Though ultimately it’s not shown that this is anything other than luck and dedication, nothing ideological that sets Luthen, Andor, etc apart from the lib rebellion leaders cowering on Yavin.

                  It’s definitely one of the most leftist, revolutionary shows from the west, in the English speaking world made in probably at least a quarter century (post 9/11), maybe longer because it can be interpreted that way and does critique fascism and have a lot of revolutionary spirit but by the last 4 episodes it does as you and others note cram itself back into Disney’s timeline.

            • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              11·
              11 days ago

              I like the interpretation but I eouldnt confuse it with authority intent. I dont think the creators read that deep into soviet history aside from reading a book about Stalin