I liked your living weapons video, but I had a question - how do you think bad guy mooks (battle droids, orcs, locust, trollocs) fit into the Living Weapon idea? They clearly are bred for battle, but much more rarely have any angst over it - in fact most seem to love being evil warriors. Do you think there are parallels there, or are they too different from a narrative point of view?
They're in a very weird narrative space where most of the time they are intentionally designed so that our heroes have something that they can mow down indiscriminately without grappling with moral complexities or feeling like bad people for killing people. It's an authorial tool to create an acceptable target to facilitate extremely cool action setpieces without undercutting the heroism of our leads.
So while from a worldbuilding standpoint they are completely comparable, from a narrative standpoint they are totally distinct from living weapons. A living weapon is a person stripped of their autonomy. These guys are never granted personhood to begin with.
