Thread by @mattcolville

I had a negative reaction to Andor at first. I checked out after the first three episodes. I couldn't figure out why Cassian Andor was the main character. But I went back to it after a few weeks, picked it up, and I quickly understood. 🧵

Cassian Andor is not sympathetic, he's not particularly likable, although Diego Luna is incredibly charismatic. He has friends, but it's not obvious why. They seem mostly put-upon. They do for him, he does what he wants.

They like him, or maybe they want to like him, but he is too selfish and unreliable.
He seems to view every relationship in the show as transactional. With one exception. He often has to remind his friends that he has done something for them in the past.

And you can see that he did those favors, to trade on in the future. Not because he's a good person.

He believes in nothing, he wants nothing except his own survival. (And maybe the answer to a question about his sister.)

That's why he's the main character.

The show is about how people get radicalized. About how one becomes awakened to revolutionary consciousness. So if you're going to tell that story, the best main character is the person hardest to radicalize.

Everyone else around him is radicalized in a more straightforward way.

Ultimately, and I think brilliantly, what we've seen in ep 10 is that there isn't actually a specific moment where the rebellion begins. Or when Cassian Andor is radicalized.

He uses a phrase I don't think he meant revolutionarily. But then someone else uses it in front of him.

Him watching someone else using his phrase to lead a rebellion causes him to think rebelliously. Before then he was just trying to survive. He was trying to escape. Which lots of prisoners have tried to do without joining rebellions.

If we had a more likable or sympathetic main character, then it would be too easy to radicalize that person by hurting them. Cassian Andor has built a life around him that makes it very difficult to hurt him. Because it doesn't care about anything. With one exception.

It's a brilliant character, incredibly well written, and well acted. The same reason he's so hard to radicalize, is why he's so effective as a rebel. He only ever lives in the moment. Alone among the cast, he can act instantly as soon as he sees the shape of the future.

We know what's going to happen to him, and that's one of the things that makes it interesting. Because no one in Rogue One seems to think that Cassian Andor started the rebellion. But he did. But it's not even clear that he realizes it.

It's like the whole rebellion is an analog for his experience in the jail facility. People in that facility have heard about what happened in the heist. But he does not tell them he was there for that. He was just one cog in a machine anyway. One person amount seven.

When all is done, he will have been at every significant moment in the birth of the rebellion, without realizing his actions birthed it.

Which is the point. No one person, no one event was the beginning. It emerged dynamically out of the background radiation of oppression.

Lucas liked to fuck with the original movies. It's time Disney fucked with them. Re-edit Return of the Jedi, and put back in the stuff they filmed with women pilots. Old people pilots.

Then those three movies belong to the same world as Andor. It's about a rebellion.