It genuinely does not matter if there were independent contractors or indentured workers on the second Death Star when it was blown up, oh my God.
Maybe for a moment rebel command thought about it and had a hard decision to make. We don’t need to see that because it would be a short conversation. You don’t let the fascist overlords have a doomsday device that can genocide a whole planet at the push of a button because then the next hard decision you’ll be making is whether you keep fighting the Empire at all when they’ll retaliate by destroying a whole planet, and another one tomorrow and another the next day. The Empire hasn’t poured a stupid amount of resources into creating this weapon and then completely replacing the first one because they don’t mean to use it lightly.
Victories in war always come at a serious cost, but of course after the Death Star is gone there’s celebration despite losses on both sides. Soldiers can celebrate victories and still being alive even when there are complicated feelings because people just died. People lived under the tyranny of the Empire for two decades before the rebellion started striking any serious blows, and it’s not bloodthirsty that seeing the Death Star go up in a huge explosion is treated as a huge win both times.
There’s just no quantifying the damage done by that conversation in Clerks and stupid takes like that becoming inescapable and taken seriously, not just put in a movie to be funny. Star Wars is about fighting fascism and it has a relatively black-and-white morality. As someone who loves some very heightened fantasy that feels like myth and folklore and doesn’t need realism in everything, I’m so tired of it being treated as a given that more symbolic and black-and-white portrayals of good and evil are inherently problematic. They’re not. There’s plenty of problems to be found in Star Wars without straining to be such an insufferable edgelord about its basic premise.
Yes, Star Wars is also about the sanctity of life and how violence and anger can corrupt people. But still every SW trilogy has been about a Jedi fighting in a war of some kind. TLJ ultimately shows DJ to be wrong with his “Don’t join” attitude, and Luke to be wrong for abandoning his duty as a Jedi, and Ben to be wrong for thinking he and Rey can carve their own path that doesn’t mean uncompromisingly resisting the dark side without that meaning they become the bad guys. The Bendu, representing neither the dark or the light, turns out to be a petty asshole whose refusal to pick sides because he’s so above it all just makes him totally useless until Kanan insults his pride enough for him to act. SW makes the point over and over that some things are worth fighting for and neutrality or complacency in the face of oppression is bad, that there’s truly not much gray area when the enemy are Sith or greedy and genocidal despots. Any civilians on the Death Star probably were there because they made a choice to just do their jobs whoever’s in power, because there are plenty of people in Imperial space like that. But by all means keep nitpicking how the particular way the rebellion stopped the Empire makes them ackshually not such good guys you know.
