Droids and emotion
A few semi-developed thoughts in no particular order:
Droids have always been portrayed as emotional, from C-3PO’s anxiety to K-2’s exasperation to Chopper’s jealousy to BB-8’s love to L3’s righteous anger. The audience is never supposed to think they’re unfeeling machines, except maybe the B2s or the maintenance droids (though even the mouse droids get spooked). Their emotions are what make them entertaining and relatable.
And that makes viewers’ reactions to/relationships with the droids quite telling. Your favorite droid says something about who you are as a person. But what tells the most is the viewer’s emotional response to the droids’ status in the gffa. If someone can watch an entire class of sentient beings be exploited by another class and not have a problem with it, they’re either not paying attention or are comfortable with exploitation in general.
Speaking of oppression, it both causes a lot of negative emotions and punishes their expression. Droids aren’t allowed to be too sad or too scared or too clingy or too angry. So the droids find ways around this: passive aggression, venting to each other, or burying the emotions. We rarely see droid anger expressed plainly.
I think it would be possible for droids to have at least some voluntary control over certain emotions. If they have access to their own programming, they could choose how they responsed to certain events/stimuli. See @sleepykalena’s The Language of Flavor and @smaragdbird ’s My Body When It Is With Yours (nsfw) for cool examples of this.
The above means that at least some droids would choose to just…not feel emotion.
If, in a perfect world, they were free to do so, I imagine other droids would choose to increase the intensity of their feels.
@droid-appreciation-week
Reblogged for good comment, comment edited at writer’s request
