What is it like to be a clone? To grow up as a clone? Do you understand how different you are? Do you know that you grow too fast and that’s why your legs hurt so much? If your trainer is a Mandalorian who scarcely takes their helmet off, or a non-human, does it even occur to you that other humans might not look like your brothers? That you might be set apart from the people outside Kamino in some trivial way by virtue of there being millions of others who look just like you? Sound like you? March like you?
Do you understand that you’re being abused? Controlled? Do you speak up? Are the clones who speak up disposed of? Are they reconditioned? Are they returned to their batchmates, the same, but horribly different? Do the rest understand that this is wrong? How much of Jango’s nature persists in the cadets and young troopers on Kamino? Do they rebel? Do they even consider it? Are there little pockets of unrest constantly sparking and dying in the depths of Tipoca city? Do they band together? Do they say “if he goes, we all go”, or do they simply let things happen because That Is How It Has Always Been?
Do they know that other people do not grow up running drills? Do they know that the correct word for a juvenile human is “child”, and not “cadet”? Have the infantry cadets ever seen a clear blue sky? Do they know how to button a shirt? Are any of them, outside the scuba corps, taught to swim? Do they understand that they are artificial?
When do they realise their true purpose? When they’re junior cadets? When they’re senior cadets? When they graduate? On their first deployment? Do they understand, truly understand, what Death is? Not being decommed, not being “disappeared”, but the smell of blood and the lives of the only people they’ve ever loved slipping through their fingers?
Do they grow up dreaming of glory, of their hard work and suffering finally paying off once they get out there to fulfil their ‘purpose’, only to touch down on Geonosis and have their entire world fall down around them? That the drills, the decommissionings, the reconditionings, the abuse, were not to make them capable. They were to make them obedient. Good soldiers, follow orders.
Do some of them still persist, in their fading dreams of fulfilment? Do some of them push through the war, striving constantly for something, anything to justify what’s been done to them? They learn from the natborns and the Jedi and the civvies that what they’ve been through was Hell and they NEED to find a way to make it all worth it, there has to be a way. And then Order 66 comes through. And the Purpose. The Purpose becomes as clear as the kyber within the sabers of the Jedi who have been mercilessly slaughtered at their hands. And maybe, for some, the ones who held out hope, there is simply Nothing Left, anymore.
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