motleystitches:

Sometimes I’m so in love with Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso and the whole Rogue One squadron that I want to put them in all the fics of history.

Cassian Andor has all the attributes of the swashbuckling hero as a space James Bond-Han Solo mix but instead he’s sullen and sly and repressed. Jyn Erso could’ve been the nice ingenue who suffers before triumph but she’s cynical thief and her triumph is painful. And Bohdi could’ve been a hero and a laugh but he survived torture and remains pilot who drives all events. And the blind martial arts master is such a trope, but Chirrut has Baze and Baze has Chirrut, whose emotional richness subverts all lonely swordsman types. 

People say Rogue One did not seem “fantastic enough”, that it’s “too real”. But it’s not real and that makes all the difference. Rogue One is provocative in that it uses a very grandiose archetypal framing – Star Wars setting, epic journeys, good vs evil– to evoke sympathy for the smaller stories between people without reducing them to mere caricatures.

In an age of superheroes, it’s usually the other way round: it’s the clear-cut principles of heroes and heroes’ journeys that makes the world into shades of gray and interesting- see Marvel, even Pacific Rim in a way, and I think, too, Force Awakens. Rogue One did the opposite, it built the movie on ambiguously aligned characters, Jyn, Cassian, Draven, even Mothma into a universe where good vs evil is clear in a larger scope.