i know i already rambled about this, but the ending of andor where cassian brings kleya to yavin means so much to me because it's representative of two parts of myself, and it was really healing for both of them to witness and reflect on over the last week. everything i'm talking about is happening within my system, so i would like to talk about it more. please forgive any redundancies.
Cassian chose to investigate something bigger than himself as a child, and he walked away from his sister to do so. That shot of her in the distance haunts his entire narrative. The Alliance tells him to ignore Luthen's call for help, and he actively disobeys them. He makes his own decisions, no matter how much he is repeatedly told to stop because he's putting something more important at risk. He goes back for Luthen the way he never got to go back for his sister. He finds Kleya instead, and she practically begs him to leave her there because that's how little value she places on her own life. But like Maarva, he refuses to leave someone behind knowing what's coming for them. He saves Kleya in a direct reflection of the way Maarva saved him, an insistence that no life is disposable, even if that truth requires you to behave irrationally, disobey direct orders, and risk your own life. Refusing to leave Kleya behind marries his hatred for the Empire with the love of his sister. By saving Kleya, he frees Kassa from his guilt and completes his arc. He steps consensually into a bigger circle rather than being brought into it by someone else.
Kleya chose to dedicate her life to something bigger than herself as a child, but she only had ghosts to leave behind. Luthen isolated them both in order to turn them into the most effective version of that commitment. Luthen shows and tells her that she must view her life, and therefore the lives of others, as necessary sacrifices for the greater good. It is inherently dehumanizing, so the characters who have community abandon him, but not Kleya, because she has no one. By killing Luthen and relaying the Death Star plans, she completes the mission they started when she was a child. She is no longer Kleya but returns to being a little girl hiding, afraid for her life, with no idea what to do. Someone finds her again, but it's not Luthen telling her they have to go it alone. It's Cassian, and he's saying the exact opposite. She no longer has to choose between doing what's right and being human.
The reason this shift from Luthen to Cassian is so impactful for Kleya is because she feels Cassian's offer can't be realistic. She wants justice, and Luthen insists that she deserves it. They work towards it together. She does this knowing that the reward for her efforts is one she will probably never see and internalizes that to such a degree that she is resentful of Cassian, Vel, and Mon. Kleya and Luthen make constant assessments of people and whether they can be used in the fight. They determine objective value free of sentimentality. They play god and leave countless people to suffer. The longer Kleya spent fighting for justice in the future, the more she feels she can't possibly have it in the present. Her allies hate what she's done. She got her hands too dirty. If justice can be hers, it certainly can't exist alongside community.
Kleya trusts no one except herself. Being confronted with the end of her mission means having to look at everything she's done, and that creates an internal crisis. Luthen is gone, and she is left with her mind and unfathomable pressure. We see her using the radio in the dark, and Cassian leaves Yavin in the early morning. When he gets to Coruscant, it's fully daytime. That's hours of pacing and thinking and trying not to relieve the pressure by using that blaster too soon. She can only cling to the knowledge that the Empire is bad, that they have to be stopped, that everything she sacrificed has to have been leading to this, and anything else is a threat to her mental stability. Cassian's insistence that her life is worth saving just as much as any intel is threatening to the idea her sanity is clinging to that the only valuable thing about her is her sacrifice.
Cassian is one of the only people in the galaxy who could get through to Kleya because he has direct experience with her. She says "you told me you were done once," and he says "and you told me I was wrong." He reminds her that his arrival is a result of her actions, that she can trust herself, that he wants to save her because she deserves to be saved, even if he disagrees with Luthen's methodology. It's not just that no human being is disposable; it's that Kleya, specifically, is not. He sees her efforts not as a flaw that will weaken the Alliance but as its unacknowledged foundation. He gives her the credit she deserves, which reestablishes a sense of trust in herself that gives her the room to agree to go to Yavin, even if she's not thrilled about it.
By choosing to go with Cassian, that little girl embraces the narrative that she deserves safety without detachment and justice without sacrifice, while simultaneously, Kleya is validated for her efforts and shown that she is good by someone she's resented. It has to be someone she's resented because that makes the kindness undeserved, and that heals the part of her that views people according to their worth. It reconnects her with her humanity. She is brought into the sanctuary she helped create after being told for years that its existence depended on her absence, that people who refused to sacrifice like she had would never want her there because of what she did, even if she did it for them. A heaven she never gets to see because she held hands with the devil and, worse, came to love him.
Until Cassian. Cassian who not only insists she belongs there but who fights tooth and nail for her right to be there, in front of her face and behind her back. His defense of her and of Luthen is the evidence for Kleya that they were right, that hard choices had to be made without the promise of reward. Because here's Cassian, who knows personally how messed up things could get, adamantly saying so. He provides a way out of her cycle and then defends what she did while she was in it. Meanwhile, Kleya's existence on Yavin is evidence that he was right, that no one can do this alone and that individual people are worth saving, as opposed to playing some fucked up chess game with real people's lives. He literally breaks himself free from his inner child's cycle and then holds out his hand and lets Kleya choose to break her inner child free too, while acknowledging that part of his adult freedom is directly thanks to her adult choices.
It's one giant feedback loop of healing and empowerment, and I cannot stop thinking about it. They are both opposites and parallels. They are reflections of each other. It's like poetry. It rhymes.
snowghoul
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