Oh, you pretty things

Queer fortysomething living on Normal Island. Dabbling in various fandoms for far too long. SW is my first love. Current obsession: HR She/her/hers.

[djkerr]

Genevieve O'Reilly cracking up with Ben Mendelsohn and Diego Luna during introductions for the PaleyLive panel event.

PaleyLive: An Evening With Andor Writers Guild Theater | Beverly Hills, CA | May 30, 2025

[ailsacraigtumbles]

The whole thing is worth watching - the whole panel is great, and Mendo is hilarious in the last third.

[dedrameeroapologist]

Ya all, full NIAMOS! dropped

[karenink]

LOUISE SAMUELSEN

The only reason I’d be in Yavin would be for the chance to say “Yes, ma’am” to Mon Mothma.

Also very interesting to learn that

link is here

[ailsacraigtumbles]

Well worth a read

[djkerr]

Genevieve O'Reilly explores Mon Mothma's pain.

🎥 @batuuboii IG

[djkerr]

Designing the Rebellion - The Costume Design of Andor Season 2

Behind the scenes with Andor Costume Designer Michael Wilkinson, creating different costumes and cultures from the ground up for Season 2.

For Your Emmy Consideration in all categories including Outstanding Drama Series and Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes. 

🎥 @starwars YouTube

[itberice]

Something urgent she needs knowing? Yes. I care about her.

[thevalleyisjolly]

So I just rewatched Rogue One after finishing Andor Season 2. And it really has made me see the movie in a different way. This past season, I've read many critiques that Cassian in Season 2 seems to be a different character from the Cassian we see in Rogue One. The two primary concerns are commitment and obedience; Cassian wavers in his commitment to the Rebellion, and Cassian disobeys orders much more frequently which appears to undermine his decision not to kill Galen in the movie.

I've delved into the issue of commitment before, the TL;DR being that Cassian expresses these doubts and despair after surviving a horrifically traumatic event and that he never actually follows through with quitting even though there is little to functionally stop him. What I want to look at now is the issue of disobedience, and in order to do that, I think we have to start by understanding that Rogue One is, fundamentally, Jyn's story.

Yes, Rogue One is an ensemble cast movie about the many unnamed soldiers who give everything for a sunrise they'll never see. But the driving force in the narrative is Jyn. We start the movie with Jyn's childhood, and apart from occasional scenes necessary to advance the wider plot, we're following her perspective for much of the film. She's our viewpoint character for understanding the narrative as well as the other characters. It's a Star Wars story told through the story of Jyn Erso.

I want to point this out because it means that nearly every major character we meet, apart from legacy characters like Vader or Bail or Tarkin, exist in the film's story primarily through their relationship to Jyn's story. We don't get extensive Chirrut or Baze or Bodhi backstories because they are not in the story to provide different viewpoints. Bodhi reconnects Jyn to her father both through his official message and his personal memories of Galen; Chirrut and Baze provide faith and guidance through the doubt and darkness.

And then there's Cassian. Rewatching Rogue One through the lens of it being Jyn's story, I'm struck by how his role in the narrative is to Call Jyn, not to a grand adventure but to a home, to be the person and the leader she has the potential within to be. He challenges the self-interested worldview she's adopted out of necessity and trauma, he makes her look at herself and her decisions, he inspires her to hope and to fight and he's the first to welcome her home when she commits to the cause.

On the other hand, we're not told or shown very much about him (I'm deliberately not going into the novelization because the novelization, while incredibly written, top tier movie novelization, was written as a companion novel after the film was made and is there to enhance the film rather than be part of it structurally). Yes, Cassian has the biggest presence in the film and the story other than Jyn...but we aren't following Cassian's story. The things he tells us and shows us about himself -being in the fight since childhood, struggling with his orders to kill Galen- are things which exist in the context of his role in Jyn's story, to challenge and parallel her. He, like Jyn, has been in affected by the Empire since childhood but where he had to fight, Jyn chose to run. He cites his orders (and his disobedience) as Jyn is confronting him for trying to kill her father, and Jyn even directly calls him out for trying to "talk [his] way around this."

Yes, I agree it's a hugely significant moment in the film for Cassian to disobey the order to kill Galen, but I think the "why" is just as significant in the film as the act of disobedience itself. Cassian uses his orders as a justification when he's being confronted by Jyn, and a last resort justification too. He first dismisses her accusations as shock ("You're in shock. You don't know what you're talking about. ...You're in shock and looking for somewhere to put it."), then when Jyn continues, he defends himself by saying that he never actually did the deed ("I had every chance to pull the trigger. But did I? Did I?"). When Jyn counters with the evidence of the Alliance bombing raid, at last Cassian falls back on, "I had orders! Orders that I disobeyed!"

This isn't to say at all that it wasn't a huge struggle and a huge moment for Cassian to not kill Galen. He did disobey his orders in that moment and you can see the weight of the conflict on him. It's a turning moment in his journey within the movie; the moment he looks in on himself, at what he's about to do, and doesn't like what sees. The point I want to bring out is that everything he says and does afterwards is in the context of Jyn's story.

Jyn herself is at a crisis point in the narrative; her long-lost father has just died in her arms, thanks to the actions of the Alliance, and her father's dying wish is for the Death Star to be destroyed, something she cannot accomplish by herself. By the time she gets back to Yavin, she's standing up in front of the Alliance demanding that they take action. She's already made her decision. What happens now, in the stolen Imperial shuttle with Cassian, is the moment where she has to choose. Cassian, representing the Alliance who killed her father but also the billions, trillions of unnamed people who've had no choice but to fight the Empire since they were born, calls her out for her self-interest even as she challenges his culpability in her father's death. Yes, he admits, he had orders, but he didn't go through with them. You [Jyn] though, you wouldn't understand because you've chosen inaction. Jyn has not had to make the difficult decisions about whether to follow orders and do something she knows is wrong; she's only just decided to start caring.

Later, in Cassian's speech in the hangar, he says, "Everything I did, I did for the Rebellion. And every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget, I told myself it was for a cause I believed in. A cause that was worth it. Without that we're lost. Everything we've done would be for nothing." In that moment, he admits to Jyn and the audience that he's been holding onto the Rebellion and the cause as a reason for his actions. Every good or bad thing he's done, he's been able to justify it to himself as part of a fight that he's been forced into since childhood. In admitting this out loud, he both acknowledges that Jyn was right when she pushed back against his excuses ("Orders? When you knew they were wrong? You may as well be a stormtrooper.") and signals to Jyn and the audience that this mission now, this cause is worth it. He was lost but has found a purpose once more; just as Jyn was lost but is now home, in the right place at the right time as the leader she has inside her. This is Cassian's role in Jyn's story, the story through which we understand this Star Wars story. He challenges her and us to think about commitment and privilege and the unheroic side of rebellion; he inspires her and us to action and to hope.

Andor, on the other hand, is a Star Wars story through the story of Cassian. For that reason alone, the Cassian we meet is already going to be different because we're not seeing him through Jyn's eyes now. We are seeing Cassian the character through Cassian's perspective and for a much more longer period of time - five years where he is the main vessel for the narrative as opposed a few days where he is a character in someone else's story. We watch Cassian succeed and fail many times, we hear him doubt everything and inspire others, we see some of the events which shaped him and we come to understand his role in the events which we've come to know.

When Andor was first announced and throughout since, it was marketed as the story of how Cassian becomes the rebel we meet in Rogue One. And I think given that pitch, it's fair to criticize the apparent dissimilarities in character between Cassian in the show and Cassian in Rogue One. At the same time, I don't think Cassian in the show is an entirely different person from Cassian in the movie. Many of the same building blocks are there (charismatic, capable, deceptive, clever, manipulative, determined), but we're seeing the development of these traits now through Cassian's experiences rather than viewing them through Jyn's perspective. It definitely feels different, sometimes radically so, and it's not wrong by any means to prefer the more streamlined character we meet in Rogue One. Nor does this mean that ten years' worth of fan discussion and insight into the character is wrong! It just means that unless they remake Rogue One from Cassian's perspective, everything the character does in the film is structured and interpreted through the lens of Jyn's story and not his own.

So having said that, let's return to the issue of disobedience. In Andor Season 2, Cassian disobeys direct orders several times, each time in relation to information from Luthen (which goes a ways towards showing why everyone the Council except Mon is so mistrusting of him). So what orders is he disobeying? Both times he leaves Yavin, he does not have permission to go - although the first time, when he leaves for Ghorman, the rebels on Yavin are very loosely organized, Draven only makes a token effort to rein in Cassian, and they have no issue coming back. And...that's it. The second time, when he goes to Coruscant, he's ordered to stand down and he does not. Then, when they come back hot without a flight plan filed, they're confronted by an X-wing escort and afterwards, Cassian complies with what he's told (even though he vehemently disagrees with the Council about it).

When we look at Cassian's disobedience in Season 2, we see that the orders he disobeys are primarily related to permission. He has not been given permission to undertake these unsanctioned missions but he refuses to stand down and he leaves Yavin under false pretenses that everyone can see through. The charge is insubordination, and post facto, potentially exposing the rebel base and thus endangering the Alliance. Contrast this with the order he's given in Rogue One - do not extract the target but rather kill him. This is not an order related to his position within the Rebel Alliance; this is a mission directive to eliminate a perceived threat. And while I think there's a definite criticism to be made of the "lone agent" elements of his insubordination in Season 2, I don't think it fundamentally undermines his moral and personal struggle in Rogue One about refusing to kill Galen.

There's a difference between not listening to your boss' orders because you want to pursue a personal matter, and choosing to disobey an order to kill someone because it would be wrong. One is a decision that anyone can be faced with at any time, the other is a fundamentally moral issue and one that is complicated into a struggle for Cassian because of the nature of the situation. When you've been fighting a fascist regime your whole life, living through atrocities and doing some terrible things in the name of the cause, and you now have the opportunity to take out an important engineer in the regime's weapons program, is it a greater crime to kill them or let them live? At this point, they don't know what else Galen Erso has been working on, if he hasn't been developing other devastating weapons for the Empire. And what if you had to look their daughter in the eye afterwards, the daughter who believed that you were going to save him, whom you lied to about his safety?

This is getting long, so the last thing I'll say is that it's absolutely valid (and important!) to critique Andor over how well it executed its goal of showing Cassian's journey. There are elements that I personally agree were a little rougher and inconsistent, such as the hints that he's some kind of "destined" chosen one or the development of his relationship with K-2SO which could have done with more time. What I really want to say though is that Cassian is a complex character, whom we now have multiple hours of story and screen time through which to examine (and re-examine!) him. And this opens up so much room for discussion and textual criticism, and I hope that we're able to keep talking about and enjoying Cassian Andor long after his story ends.

[taraljc]

The Rebel Alliance is for the most part made up of a small number of very influential politicians and a very large number of soldiers recruited from everyday people all over the galaxy and trained up by veterans of the Clone Wars.

Cassian on the other hand make call himself a soldier but what he really is is a spy and an assassin. And as such, he doesn't fit into what the Rebellion has become. but he is one of a small number of individuals who are not influential politicians or soldiers who are trained specifically for infiltration, sabotage, recruitment, and information gathering.

Rogue One and Andor are stories about the people who don't live to see the future their building. and there is a reason why the SOE, the OSS, and the Ghost Army had no place in the post-war world. The institutions that followed them, specifically MI6 and the CIA, could never have done what SOE, OSS, and Ghost Army did. Because they lacked the flexibility and imagination. But more than that, they were built by people who would never have employed the same people or the same tactics.

Carl Eifler was a customs officer who noticed the Japanese disguising themselves as civilians and coming in pairs. He informed the president, but no one took him seriously until after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He spent the rest of the war in places like China, India, and Burma, training villagers how to sabotage the occupying Japanese forces. his superiors hated him his men adored him and he had a pet bear. he was occasionally intractable, frequently insubordinate, and very quietly dismissed by OSS founder 'Wild' Bill Donovan, who genuinely disliked him.

Bill Blass was a gay fashion designer in New York who was recruited to the Ghost Army. He and other art students trained alongside army soldiers to create inflatable tanks that could be seen from the air to fool the Germans into believing the allies were were they weren't, and camouflage to conceal the Allies where they were. The Ghost Army were made up of Americans but were trained by British World War I intelligence officers in Canada. They recorded the sounds of ships at sea that could be broadcast in the English channel to fool the Germans into believing the fog held countless allied ships. They were fucking legends that no-one knew about until about 20 years ago when the files were finally declassified.

Leo Marks was the son of a second hand bookshop owner, Jewish, frequently brought his mother chickens he bought on the black market, and when he took all day to decode an encrypted message as his audition that he was supposed to have been able to decode in 20 minutes, he was soundly mocked.... until his supervisors realised the reason it took him so long as they had not actually provided him with the code key. He had broken the supposedly secure cipher and rendered it in clear text by himself. He was sent to the SOE when midway through a course in cryptography that was meant to result in him being sent to Bletchley Park, he did an exercise that was supposed to take a group of people all week alone in a single night. At the SOE nobody knew what to do with him because he constantly pointed out the flaws in their system of having agents memorise famous songs, poems, or quotations to use as code keys that were constantly being easily broken by the enemy. He was the only one to realise that Holland had been compromised by the Germans and that they were being fed disinformation that was endangering lives. And he reported it to his superiors, who ignored him. And when he was proved correct, the head of what would become MI6 basically stuck him in a basement. He developed special one-time use code pads that were printed on silk, that SOE agents could more easily hide in their clothing if captured. He trained agents to use custom poems that he wrote, he trained dozens of women volunteers deciphering coded messages how to work the problem to reduce the number of indecipherables--incorrectly coded or poorly transmitted messages that military intelligence depended upon. he was brilliant, he was mad as a bag of cats, and he was a square peg who would never have fit in with the Eton crowd.

When Cassian hands out the detonators and tells Melshi to make 10 men seem like a hundred that's straight out of the Ghost Army's playbook. The entire battle of Scarif could very easily have taken place in Nazi occupied France. There is a reason why Kleya's rescue on coruscant is framed almost identically to World War II radio operators in the SOE and OSS who were dropped behind enemy lines in France. Right down to the way the ISP tracked her by following the signal.

People talk about Rogue One being a war movie but it's not that straightforward. It is a heist, it is pulled off by spies and guerrillas. Galen Erso committed sabotage from inside the highest echelons of the Empire. It's literally about intelligence gathering and smuggling.

Maarva was a smuggler. Saw was an absolute nutter. Luthen was an Imperial sergeant who deserted with an orphan whose family he most likely had slaughtered, and spent 20 years building an intelligence network from nothing but his will and his knowledge of antiquities. Mon was living a double life and using her money and her privilege to bankroll the entire operation. Bail Organa was raising Anakin Skywalker's daughter right underneath the Emperor's nose. The nascent Rebellion recruited thieves and murderers when necessary, and turned assets and callously discarded them when necessary.

(It took me two viewings to realize that the accident Cinta was referring to was the crash that killed Mon's childhood friend who was trying to blackmail her. And it's entirely possible that she was not actually meant to survive that crash. because his death absolutely had to appear to be an accident and never tie back to Mon or Luthen.)

I really want to sit down with Tony Gilroy someday and pick his brain, is what I'm saying.

[ailsacraigtumbles]

10/10, no notes, for the analysis and the history lesson

[myfandomistingling]

[djkerr]

Mon Mothma text posts

Andor Season 2

[patrick-stewart]

I am hopeful that those of you who know me will vouch for my credibility in the days to come. I stand this morning with a difficult message... ANDOR | 2.09

[ailsacraigtumbles]

This speech is everything.

[patrick-stewart]

ANDOR | 2.09

[ailsacraigtumbles]

Set it off Bail.

[groove-on-boogie-down]

I have so many thoughts about andor y’all. I don’t think I can properly articulate everything but, man.

I’m emotional. There are so many stunning elements.

[willowcrowned]

happy star wars day to everyone who heard binary sunset as a child and never recovered

[mariacallous]

okay, not gonna lie, I can kinda see where the Mothma/Krennic shippers might be coming from...

[ailsacraigtumbles]

I couldn't before but I sure can now

[underestimated-shadow]

Heated debates

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008-2020) Andor (2022-2025)

[ailsacraigtumbles]

Thank you OP! Beautifully paired conversations.

One of the things I love most about seeing Mon Mothma's characterization in Andor is her inner strength that echoes Satine's and just the tireless, constant cajoling and flattering and persuading to bring people along in service of higher values that they both devoted themselves to.

[swshows]

ANDOR (2022–2025) 2.06: WHAT A FESTIVE EVENING

[ailsacraigtumbles]

Ladies and gentlemen, Senator Bail Organa

[gender-luster]

been thinking a lot about these three girls lately. thinking about how they were all born within a few years of each other. jyn in 21 bby, leia in 19 bby, and leida in 18 bby. they could have gone to high-school together. in a kinder galaxy, i think they could have been friends

[otterandterrier]

I swallow the sound and it swallows me whole 'Til there's nothing left inside my soul I'm as empty as that beating drum But the sound has just begun