aw man... i love threepio and now i kinda wanna see an au where his memories WERE preserved somehow. partitioned away before the memory-wiping process, maybe, or perhaps he leaves copies of them with artoo...
You know, I get a lot of variations on asks like this every time I make a post about Threepio and his memory wiping.
I get people suggesting that Artoo must have made a backup of all Threepio’s memories. People suggesting that Anakin built in some kind of backup program, or some kind of work around in Threepio’s programming, that would preserve his memories if they were ever wiped and create a file that could be recovered. People suggesting that there was a failsafe somewhere in Threepio’s programming that the memory wipe didn’t touch. And so on and so forth. I have, at this moment, seven separate asks in my inbox to this effect, as well as several more comments on the original post.
And I get it. I do. We don’t want Threepio’s memories to be gone. Maybe even moreso, we don’t want the heroes we love to be responsible for the permanent destruction of Threepio’s previous self. In all honesty, fans see Threepio as more of a person than the characters in the story do, and we don’t want to think about the fridge horror of memory wiping, and...yeah. I get it. I absolutely understand the urge to headcanon our way out of this.
But I also just...don’t think that urge actually holds water in the canon universe as we have it. As an AU idea, sure. But in canon no.
There is not a single character in the original six Star Wars films who expresses any kind of sentiment that could be interpreted as an argument for full or even partial droid rights. Not a single character, and that includes the droids themselves. The closest any of the characters get to something like that is probably Anakin himself, and to a lesser extent Luke, but even they are only really concerned with the personhood of individual droids they know and care about, and at no point do they universalize those thoughts to encompass all droids, or even all droids of a certain type (astromechs or protocol droids, for example).
I think the most that makes sense to suggest, in canon, is that Anakin and Padme never would have wiped Threepio or Artoo’s memories so long as they owned them. (And they did own them. They may have regarded them like people, and even considered them somewhere between pets and friends, but there are no characters in the films, not even Anakin or Luke, who would ever have suggested that a droid could own themself, or should have complete autonomy in their life. That’s just not something on anyone’s radar in canon.) And because they never planned to sell Artoo and Threepio, it was enough simply to choose never to have them memory wiped. It just doesn’t make sense, given the attitude toward droids displayed by the characters in particular and the universe in general, to think that they would have made any kind of contingency plan to prevent their droids from hypothetically being wiped in the future.
I think @astudyinimagination put it really well in their tags on this post, so I’ll just quote:
#this is one of those Star Wars things I try hard NOT to think about, #because it's absolutely heartbreaking, #and it's difficult I think for most of us to really wrap our minds around the concept that the Threepio Anakin and Padme knew is dead, #because he has the same voice and mannerisms and personality; all the same likes and dislikes, #but memories are what truly define us; what make us who we are, #it's not like amnesia where an organic person has a chance of regaining their memories, #the memories that he lived are gone, #so while the core traits of Threepio remain it's like he's a different soul, #and now my heart hurts a lot
I know everybody wants to headcanon their way out of that. But for me personally, I just don’t think any of those headcanons are sufficient, and they don’t address the reality that the Star Wars universe is just...entirely unconcerned with the ethics of droid memory wiping. As much as it hurts not to, I just can’t imagine that anyone would have planned ahead sufficiently to preserve Threepio’s memories, because there is literally no one in this story who devotes any amount of real thought to what it means to wipe a droid’s memory.
This is also why the droid revolution is only a thing in one of my AUs. Because most of my AUs are focused, to a greater or lesser degree, on Anakin, and I genuinely cannot imagine Anakin coming to the realization he has about droids in DAV in any universe where he is not “more machine than man” himself. He finally sees the droids as fully people in DAV in part because he first sees himself as a droid. And yes, that’s fucked up. That’s kinda the point. Because there is no basis whatsoever in the culture of Star Wars canon for any organic person to view a droid as a fully realized person in their own right. Even as a slave, Anakin tells Threepio, “I’ll make sure Mom doesn’t sell you or something.”
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