Thinking about Cassian in the hangar, deferential and respectful, standing a solid 2-3 metres away from Jyn who was just belittled and dismissed and is expecting him to heap on. And saying, fuck what my bosses all agreed on. "I believe you." And how much weight that has, because he was a good soldier who followed orders even when they meant getting innocent blood on his own hands. And yet faced with this choice that seems comparatively reasonable, that seems like an order that would be a relief compared to most of his previous ones - an order that is protecting the existing rebels, that was presented as preventing needless bloodshed, all at the small cost of telling one young woman who isn't even part of their group "sorry, you clearly believe this very strongly and it clearly took you a lot to bring this to us, but we are choosing not to believe you" - he says, no. He decides that believing this one woman is worth going rogue for just as much as every justified, terrible act before that would have been worth going rogue to prevent.
Thinking about how much that meant to me when I saw it at age 20, in ways I couldn't even explain until a few months later, when for the first time in my lifetime, believing women became a thing people talked about.
Thinking about a man getting the job to make a prequel for this movie years down the line, and setting out to make the show progressive and political. Thinking about that man not seeing a problem in taking Cassian's deliberately, desperately blind following of rules until this woman away from the story. Thinking about how this likely wasn't a malicious choice. How, to the male show writers, this scene was just a bunch of people talking in a hangar, this was just the lead-up to a cooler more interesting action sequence. Thinking about how clearly, something about the way Cassian was so deferential for most of the movie, deferential in the same way towards his powerful male commanding officer and towards this woman he didn't know but chose to believe and follow into hell, rankled with these writers. Not enough so they'd criticise it outright, maybe not even enough that they noticed it bothered them. But enough to change it.
Thinking about that.
