I think there’s a really big misunderstanding about how the Alphas were ‘willing to kill cadets on Kamino’, about how ‘they grow up loyal to the Republic or they don’t grow up at all’.
The ACTUAL facts are that they wouldn’t kill them freely. They wouldn’t kill them with glee. They didn’t agree to kill the cadets for shits and giggles. They agreed because Jango Fett told them that cadets not falling into the hands of the enemy was the ultimate mission objective.
It is the exact same as making sure your child does not get taken by the enemy in a war because you know they would be treated worse than your worse nightmares. (The most recent example, off the top of my head, is what Cersei Lannister was willing to do with HER children. That happens. That was a mama lion making sure her cubs don’t get taken and treated who knows how badly.) This has happened multiple times in history.
If the alphas were willing to kill cadets for no real reason, they would not have gone on to try to save them on Kamino only minutes after being reactivated (by that I mean, pulled out of stasis that they were in for at least the first few months of the war. They hadn’t even fully figured out Jango was dead before they had to save their place of birth and home and their younger vode).
17 himself even says they should try to save themselves because they are the exact same. He turns down a thanks. Not out of a guilty conscience of ‘if we hadn’t stopped this in time we would’ve shot you out of the sky while you were being taken away’. But because they are the same and he is glad he and the others got there in time for the final mission objective in case of failure to not be necessary. Because he doesn’t WANT to hurt them. He doesn’t WANT to be the one to kill them because he is not a psychopath. One of the other alphas even offers one of his rifles to a cadet. What kind of person would do that? Oh yeah, someone wanting another person to protect themselves.
I think some people forget, that despite all the happy fun times and the silly head canons, that this was a war. That they were all trained for war, since birth. War is not happy, fun, bright, cheery. War has its own morality. War makes it so you kill others or yourself to prevent even worse things happening to you or people you care about. Not everyone would surrender with a hope of rescue or ‘trade’. (And this is also entirely different from a Mandalore deciding it was do or die for EVERYONE. This was a war. These were clones. Given orders by Jango himself for a very specific demographic of clone.)
Fix the way the alphas are viewed in-universe and in-fandom. They are by far the most mysterious clones, but were clearly important enough to keep them appearing throughout repcomm and in the comics.
They deserve the same consideration as any other clone unit. If not because there are 100 of them with 100 different stories, but because they were trained and given orders directly by Jango. They were loyal to a dead man until the end. Their story, and his, is so important and intertwined. The Alphas are the only ones personally trained by Jango Fett. And yet we know so little about his actual time on Kamino training them.
If it helps, put yourself in their shoes. They were probably instilled with these orders when they were chrono-8 or 9, 16-18 in clone years. Being told they had to look out for their little brothers. To do absolutely everything possible to save them and if you can’t win the battle, you keep them out of enemy hands. Little brothers you grew up with. Who you joked with. You alone, 100 of you, are responsible for all these hundreds of thousands of cadets. Even more so because your progenitor and training sergeant is dead.
And, after all, at least that would be a noble reason. Imagine all the clones that the Kaminoans ‘terminated’ because they ‘weren’t up to spec’.
Alphas are the wrong ones to think “they’d have no problem killing anyone even another clone” about. They’d have plenty of problem, as demonstrated very well with Sull in Repcomm. If he didn’t care for others doing it to the other alphas, why would the alphas turn around and want to do it to non-alphas? And no, they are all hypocrites is not the answer.
