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Transcript

Andor + Rogue One · The Spectacle

• 0:45
  Star wars. Talking about Star Wars. Margaret and, hi. Oh, here we are. Podcast. Hello. Welcome to the Anacle geek power hour. It's a podcast. We are just trying to do a fun little podcast for us. Come on this journey, won't you, where we talk about nerd bullshit with all our powers. And I got a pal right here. And you just heard and it's Margaret Killjoy. Margaret, how's it going?
• 1:18
  Good. Hello. Thanks for having me on as a guest on your show. I'll probably be trying to talk my way into being on this particular show a lot because it's a pretty cool premise.
• 1:31
  Oh, yeah, anytime. Door is always open because we're all living on the same fortified mountain compound. Yeah, the general premise of the show is just, we're going to talk about nerd bullshit. And we got one right out the gate. Something I'm just over the moon about. We got and or.
• 1:56
  That's no moon.
• 1:57
  Yeah, no, it's a television show and a fairly good one. Margaret, what's your background with Star Wars?
• 2:07
  I grew up not liking it as much as Star Trek, to be real. But now that I'm older, actually, both franchises are really hit or miss. But I like a lot of the newer Star Wars stuff, and I particularly liked Rogue One, so I was particularly excited about Andor. Same about you.
• 2:25
  Well, more or less same, though. You know what? Let's scale that back. I am captured by Star Wars. Star wars has my ass for life because I like it for the same reasons I like The Ramones, because I grew up with it. And it's stupid and it's stupid and simple and it's easy. And that's why I liked it. I'll watch all that garbage. And would you believe they made a good Star War? Not just a good Star War, but a good show about my favorite shit, which is morally complicated resistance movements.
• 3:04
  It really is kind of a gift specifically to you, but to probably half the people listening to this, too.
• 3:11
  Yeah, well, if you haven't seen, andor I highly recommend it, pause this podcast and return to it. Maybe someday, but go watch Andor, because we are going to talk about spoilers the whole premise. Basically, in a Star War, you got your Jedi's, you got your space lasers. Between all the bantas and the R jiz music, you forget that the plot is about a rebellion and finally they're fucking doing something with it. I grew up really into Star Wars. It was like my first fantasy Sci-Fi anything. And I read a lot of the extended universe, which is no longer canon, chewbacca is no longer canonically, killed by a planet, which is a real shame.
• 4:07
  When did they retcon it all? When did they take the extended universe out?
• 4:11
  When Mickey Mouse got his hands all over this franchise.
• 4:15
  They said, none of that.
• 4:18
  No, we're not dealing with any of that shit. So they just pick and choose the stuff from the extended universe they want to fuck with. And some of it stayed, some of it went, it's all Calvin Ball in the galaxy now. But yeah, even in the extended universe before though, there were a few like really great, like the Han Solo trilogy. It's been like a decade but I remember it really fucking whipping.
• 4:48
  These are the books, right?
• 4:50
  Yes, the books.
• 4:51
  Okay.
• 4:53
  And a couple of others deal with the rebellion, but not like this. And we're not going to. Well Margaret, I don't know about you, I'm not here to argue that Rogue One is anarchist propaganda.
• 5:10
  No, but I might argue that Andor is part of anarchist propaganda.
• 5:14
  Oh yeah, okay. I'm not here to argue Andor's anarchist propaganda made by the Mickey Mouse Corporation, but me as an anarchist and really fucking enjoying it. And I was trying to get everybody into this for so long because it's like obviously coming from this place of knowledge of the continuum of revolutionary movements. The writer said he was influenced by like Palestine and the Russian revolution and the Haitian revolution. We watched Rogue One the other day and you pointed out why does everyone have the slightest Irish burr? They were also influenced especially in the funding, especially in the mon mothma funding of the Irish revolution. Okay, but yeah, let's get into it. We both recently finished and or what did you think? Overall?
• 6:12
  I liked it and I'm kind of I mean, I'll watch junk TV because life is short and why not spend my short life watching it? Okay, I don't have a really good excuse for why I watch junk TV, but I will happily watch drunk TV when I need to turn my brain off or whatever. And so I kind of like go into almost any TV show sort of expecting that. And then instead I found actual depth and a less one or two dimensional resistance movement than I see basically any time I watch, especially TV. But movies as well. Resistance movements are so always clearly painted by people who've never either read history or threw a rock at a cop. And I don't want to make any criminal accusations towards anyone involved in writing this, but I will guess they've at least read history if not thrown a rock at a cop. Yeah, don't throw rock at cops, kids. I'll do whatever you want.
• 7:12
  I'll say it. I got left to loose.
• 7:18
  Fight the empire.
• 7:20
  Yeah, fight the empire. Everybody subscribed to our patreon. So you can see the video of me doing hand quotes. Yeah, there's dimension in it that I was not expecting from Star Wars and I didn't really expect from anything. It's like writing, writing is a hard job. Being able to like express like the moral complexity of a gorilla cell who's going to go rob a big bank on some fucking planet. But they did it. They pulled it off really well.
• 8:10
  Yeah, tell me about how this relates to the funding of the Irish revolution. I don't know if you have other direction you want to take this, but I'd be really interested in some of the more obvious or some of the historical parallels that we've picked up on and I would love to hear more about that.
• 8:31
  I was noticing the fact that they had Monfma up in the mix, who is a character from the original Star Wars who's the one who's sort of she says, many botnins died bringing us these plans and she's always given the spiel and bringing her back as someone who's down for she's not involved, obviously, but she's doing whatever she can to get the money to these people who are off fucking killing cops across the galaxy while still sitting pretty in high society and working in Parliament in this very subdued, liberal way that is like towing the line in a way that a lot of especially like Irish representation in England was and even some English representation in England was. And there's nothing that's one to one on andor and I wouldn't say that. But the way the IRA and the pre IRA revolutionary movements funded themselves was a lot from the Irish diaspora who made it big in Boston and New York sending money back or straight up sending boats full of guns back.
• 9:49
  Yeah. Okay.
• 9:51
  To see to see not only the like, the scrappy people in the woods ready to do whatever, and the shadowy Stellan Scars Guard who I would love to get into because.
• 10:08
  I love the.
• 10:08
  Whole Scars Guard brood, but Stellan especially. To see not only the cloak and dagger part of things, but the be able to have some fucking Game of Thrones political intrigue was very fun.
• 10:27
  Okay, well and to to going continue with the Irish fundraising thing, I'm sure someone out there, fortunately, I don't live in the parts of the Internet where people complain about this shit is like complaining that two of our primary revolutionaries are in a gay relationship, right. And two women who are dating and the tension in their relationship based on which one prioritizes love and which one prioritizes revolution, someone somewhere is like, oh, they're making all these people gay or whatever. There's no gay revolutionaries in history. First of all, it's like obviously bullshit. But in terms of the Irish revolution, one of these such a good example of a character who does actually feel kind of an and or Star Wars character is have you heard of Roger Casement, the gay Irish knight? For anyone who's listening, there's this guy named Roger Casement who was a big part of bringing down King Leopold from Belgium, the fucking monster who murdered millions and whatever. He's one of the worst people in all of history.
• 11:31
  Little historical ghoul.
• 11:33
  Yeah. And so there was this like, colonial Irish guy who was like part of the English colonization of Africa and he was like oh, I'm on the wrong team. Like, absolutely on the wrong team. And he got, like, really into Irish nationalism as well as working really hard to fight against the exploitation of Africa and South America, actually. And then he, like, went and spent his life and lost his life smuggling guns into Ireland for the for the Easter Rising. And he was so fucking gay. Just so completely tragically gay. And I don't know, he feels like a very Star Wars character, I guess. He's not again, he's not one for one, but yeah, these but he was part of the English establishment. He was a fucking knight, you know?
• 12:15
  Yeah. And there was plenty of those. I mean, in every in every movement, you know, death to the bourgeoisie. Whatever. Whatever. But OOH, you can get a lot done if you if you know it and if you know in your heart what's right and you're in positions. And just as an aside, because it wouldn't do to zero in on this, but maybe on a later episode. Definitely on a later episode. But queers have been in every revolutionary movement in the early in the 19th century. There's a quote from somebody from some openly queer person that says, if you want to be yourself, you go find the anarchist.
• 12:57
  Yeah, I can't remember who that quote is from. Yeah, no, totally. It makes sense. And I really like that we've entered a stage of gay representation in Hollywood or whatever, mainstream TV, where it's not like the shocker. I mean, there's a little bit they play a little bit on the like they're gay, but only like the tiniest little bit, and no one isn't upset by it. And that's nice.
• 13:23
  Yeah. And it's a little bit of a hobby horse of mine that the big media establishment knows that by and large, the people consuming things like liberal culture is very ascendant in media. We'll see how long that lasts, but they know that representation or whatever sells. You can sell a terrible movie on the concept of representation. When you put a diverse cast at there, like the writer's room and the people making the decisions are still lily white and straight, but they'll sell it to you with whatever. And Star Wars very famously was like, we got a gay kiss in this one. And it's like two women kissing in the background. Very easy to edit out for whatever. International audiences wouldn't allow something like that. There like dog shit, this one, where they don't it's not a big deal. It's just a fact. It's just a fact of it that they are lovers in a struggle together. And the tension being that, like you said, one is not more committed to the cause, but the relationship is eclipsed by the cause. Certainly a great tension to play with. And I'm excited to see, like, they at least have a season two to play around with.
• 14:58
  Yeah. I mean, it's kind of funny watching this, because it's like, well, you know how the characters end up. You know that Andor isn't ending up with Bix in any way. That at least in any way that is worth note in Rogue One and then also spoiler, they're all going to die. At least Cassie and andor is okay. My other historical parallel that I want to draw, that I've been thinking about a whole bunch since I saw it. There's this whole trope within it, and I really am curious to see what they'll do with it. I'm afraid they'll do it badly, but so far, they've kind of earned my trust more than most things. There's this thing about authoritarianism on the rebel side, right? There's this tension. I am incapable of remembering names. You've got your head honcho revolutionary guy, right? Who is the doomed revolutionary? What's his name?
• 15:56
  Star card? Lutheran.
• 15:57
  Yeah, that's the actor's name.
• 15:59
  The one who's an antique seller.
• 16:03
  Yeah. You don't remember his name either.
• 16:05
  Luthan something.
• 16:07
  Okay, Luthan. So you've got Lutheran, and he is the tragic leader, and he specifically refers to himself as doomed at one point. And I think that this is probably consciously a reference to Catechism of the Revolutionary by Sergey Necheyev. And Sergey Natiev was this Russian revolutionary nihilist who actually, if you want to hear me and I o talk about Sergey niche, I've listened to my episode of Cool people who did cool stuff on the Russian nihilists.
• 16:39
  Find it anywhere you find podcasts, folks.
• 16:43
  Yeah. And I fucking hate this guy, the historical guy, sergey, like, he is trash, and he is absolutely the kind of guy who will get his friends arrested on purpose in order to advance the cause without asking their permission or telling them what's happening. Right? And I think he has lost his ethics in what he's doing and his whole thing. He writes this book called Catechism of the Revolutionary. That is, the revolutionary is a doomed man. It's one of the main concepts of this book in which basically, like, you don't have friends, you don't have lovers, you have the revolution and you will die. And it has, like, a romance to it. It has, like, a beauty to it. Right. I think fundamentally it's a flawed concept, but what's really interesting to me is that in Andor, you have a character who I believe is a conscious reflection of the Sergey model. Although Sergey was not actually the leader of revolution he wanted to be, but he was a fucking whatever he was this also tried guy who fucking killed his own side more than he killed the other side, and all around stuck. Luthin is almost like the positive incarnation of a Sergeant Netshev so far, in that he's doomed, and he makes the hard calls and stuff, but he's not quite a fully authoritarian leader. There's a couple of points where he gives people full information and lets them make their own decisions. His assistant whose name I also don't remember clearly can exert a certain amount of power over him. He's not quite a dictator, and he's clearly tormented by the fact that in some ways he is a dictator of the revolution. And the thing that I find interesting almost on with his rant and I'm really curious your thoughts about it. The thing I find really interesting about it is how it compares to the manifesto that were being presented by the.
• 18:34
  Dead kid Nemex, the fucking hot, the space twink, the crime thing, loving the little revolution. The crime twink.
• 18:45
  Yeah, the crime twink who rules. And I love his character because he's like, afraid, but he does it anyway, even though it literally kills him. Like, that is something to aspire to. I mean, I want to survive.
• 18:59
  I aspire to be crushed by a metaphor for galactic capital myself.
• 19:06
  Yeah, exactly. And in his manifesto that we start exploring right at the end of the season, he talks about the enemy specifically as authority in a way that like, this is why earlier I was like, I will go to bat a little bit about and or being anarchist propaganda, but only a little bit. Right. But the enemy isn't the Empire. The enemy is authority in what he is writing. And I'm wondering whether this will cause conflict in future episodes or whether they kind of, in this case, mean authority. Mean like big ol authority. Like the Empire, not like scars. Guard's character. But I'm really excited about that tension. I'm really excited to see what they do with it.
• 19:51
  Yeah, me too. I love that he has his little monologue, that beautiful monologue. I've made my mind into a sunless place and I work for a sunrise that I will never see, and I'm damned for what I do and all that shit. As he's talking to this guy who infiltrated the Empire to give them all information, and he's preparing to sacrifice a squad of like, nine people on his team just so the Empire doesn't get wise.
• 20:26
  Yeah, it's like 30 people. I think it's a bunch of people.
• 20:31
  Too many people. I'll go ahead and say it, but yeah, he does represent that very like the revolutionary is a doomed man thing in a more competent, braver way than that.
• 20:50
  Fucker yeah.
• 20:52
  But I love it. Revolutions are morally complex. You're not going to get out of them with your hands clean. And I like that they're not like the original Star Wars is past the point where there's nothing where the rebellion has been built up. But to organize something at that scale in a galaxy of apathetic or unorganized or unmotivated people is going to be a fucked process. Especially when he's like, yeah, we want the Empire reacting. We want them cracking down and making people's lives miserable. Obviously. Fuck that. But acts of insurrection are going to make your enemy crack down in that way, and he's preparing for that eventuality.
• 21:58
  Yeah. So he once again is presenting this like there's a version of him that he could be a full on accelerationist, right. Accelerationism being the concept of kind of making things worse so that people realize they're bad and then try and make things better or whatever. Right. And he absolutely he makes several statements about how, look, it's going to get worse. Right. But he's not quite so far, it's not like he's quite making things bad on purpose so much as he's not stopping them from getting bad. And to me and maybe I'm just like I want to like him talk about Lutheran here. But to me, this is a really big, important difference. Right. People have been making the claim that you shouldn't do anything disruptive because it'll look bad, or even more than that, it'll cause the police to crack down. Right. And that claim stops people from resisting quite often, because realistically, people don't want bad things to happen. That's why we're interested in fictitious representations of revolution, is because we want a better world for our Star Wars characters. And since we want a better world, we want to take certain actions to try and get a better world. But when you turn it into a fight, the other side is going to fight, too. And so I don't think that it is ethically on the person who throws a brick at a window. I don't believe it is on them. The police crackdown onto resistance movements that could result from that. Right. Ethically, there's all kinds of arguments that people can make different ways about this. I think throwing the brick to make things worse is fucked up, but I think throwing the brick because it is the best expression and the best way that you are able to choose what to do. When the Empire puts that moral weight on us as potential rebels and says it's your fault that we are hitting you, that is like I mean, it's abusive logic and it's a real fucked up thing. And you get into this. The climax of the entire season is that this kid who I have a shitty memory, I think maybe his dad got killed by the Empire throws a bomb at the very end.
• 24:20
  They did a hay market.
• 24:22
  Yeah. He does a haymarket for anybody who wants to listen to that episode about haymarket. It's the first episode ever of cool people do Cool Stuff, in which someone throws a bomb at some cops when the cops have been really fucked up and the cops open fire and it causes this whole big fucking thing. Right. And I'm not mad at that kid. Was it the right move? I have literally no idea. Right. And the world will never know whether or not it was the right idea because we only get the one thing that we saw happen.
• 24:48
  Yeah. I'm almost 100% of the time on people who have the bravery to try some shit. And the other side, like, the fascist playbook is to use our conscience against.
• 25:06
  Us.
• 25:09
  In a stop hitting yourself type of way.
• 25:12
  Yeah.
• 25:19
  I can't imagine somebody even having the foresight to being like, oh, I'm going to do this because it'll make it worse. But the argument of just like, what will the news say if this happened? Or this, that, and you're going to turn people off from our side.
• 25:39
  Has.
• 25:40
  Failed for centuries now.
• 25:42
  I will say, though, sorry, I just.
• 25:45
  Don'T want to fuck with it anymore.
• 25:48
  But I think as an ethical argument, I think it is a bad ethical argument to say that that kid shouldn't have thrown the bomb right. In this fictional Star War that we're talking about. I don't care about the ethical argument against that. But if you're throwing a bomb at the oppressive force that is busy oppressing you, your conscience is clear from my point of view. Right. The strategic question is where it gets really interesting and is it a good idea? Is a very different question from is it justifiable and that's where it gets into like, really messy stuff where it's like, well, that's just hard to know. I mean, the history of people killing tyrants in in on Earth is a real mixed bag. Right. In terms of its efficacy, it said.
• 26:44
  Assassinations do tend have a tendency to get messy.
• 26:47
  Yeah. And often they make everything worse. And not just in the like, everything has to get worse before it gets a better way. But sometimes they're like, no, everything just sucks now.
• 27:01
  But the extant situation was like unsustainable something. Yeah. No one can predict how things will play out, but there was a chance that they could have gone well. And if nothing else, you've shown power to be vulnerable, which echoes through history. And I don't know, I guess that's a bigger question that we can keep getting into, but to bring it back into andor a little bit as for Nemic's little manifesto, every act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
• 27:51
  Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
• 27:53
  No, go on.
• 27:55
  Yeah. And they even use the term insurrection there, right? Yeah. Which is like they got so explicit.
• 28:03
  I didn't expect them to I know. A manifesto fucking rocks.
• 28:08
  I know. And it's specifically like I'm with I think it's Krapaka. And I don't know, I don't always read all of the old books by the people. I usually read books about the people, but dead anarchist cropakin, I think it was him who was like, why do we have this dichotomy between insurrection and revolution? It might have been Malatoso. One of these fucking dead anarchists was like, what a useless dichotomy between insurrection and revolution. Revolutions are made up of insurrections as compared to this. Like, the traditional way of presenting the dichotomy is that you need to have on a purely insurrectionist side. Like, all that matters is the insurrection. The larger overarching goal is not worth attempting to accomplish or setting your sights on, right? And then on the purely revolutionary side, it's like, oh, don't do the insurrections because they'll defuse our energy, or they'll wake the sleeping dragon or they'll cause the cops to crack down on us or whatever. All that matters is building up the mass to have the one big glorious revolution. And, like, history, at least the history of revolution is like, no, no, no. Insurrections are that manifesto is right. Like in and or they want to have a revolution. What that revolution should look like, there is not an agreement upon which kind of rules.
• 29:34
  Oh, that's the best part of the show. When he goes to me, Saw Guerrera, my man, the cool guy.
• 29:47
  He's talking about anarchist.
• 29:49
  Yeah, I'm not going to fuck with that guy. He's a human supremacist, and those guys are separatists, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm the only one practicing pure ideology here or whatever. And I'm like, yeah, I've been in a room with him.
• 30:07
  Yeah, totally. But then they say, his ideology, he's like, well, anarchy is not an ideology. I remember the actual quote. Yeah.
• 30:16
  And his response is just a shrug because, like, whatever, dude. I'm not here to convince you I'm off. Maybe I'm just projecting what I want to see. But he's on the like, yeah, there's action and then there's whatever other useless that surrounds what action is being taken. And I'm like, yeah, he's right. This is all, like, laying this ideological bedrock that eventually morphs into the same neoliberal government that easily falls to Death Star Three and Force Awakens like, you've got. We can keep on this, but maybe we should talk about Rogue One in a second because we just watched that a few nights ago. The early days of a revolution are so spicy.
• 31:15
  Yeah. And it's when everything is still possible. But to use Saguerera to tie us into Rogue One. By the time Rogue One comes around, saga Guerra is basically just like the terrorist who's still just being like, no, I know where the Empire is, so I'm going to fuck him up. He's not, like, trying to think, like fourth dimensional chess or whatever. He's just trying to fuck up the Empire. And I think that fucking rules, and I think that I like him. I mean, obviously, by the time Rogue One comes around, his neuro divergence has continued in a way that makes him probably unsuitable to be a leader of.
• 32:02
  A hard he's had a hard go of it.
• 32:05
  Yeah. He does not mind revolutionary suicide. He is perfectly content with revolutionary suicide by the time he gets his chance.
• 32:15
  Yeah. How could you not? And the plot of Rogue One is they need to get close to Saw Guerrera. So they break I forget her name, the main character of the movie to get her close to Saw because they just want to kill Sauce because he's making them look bad, essentially. And because they're developing into yeah, like liberal revolutionaries. And Sail is still out there on Jeddah, just like, stealing shit from the Empire, blowing shit up. They can't get to him.
• 33:00
  Wait, I thought they weren't there to kill him. I thought they were there to kill protagonist's dad. And they just needed to get to Saul in order to find out where protagonist dad was.
• 33:10
  Like, right before Andor gets on the ship, they're just like, all right, remember that thing that we told her? Fuck that. No. Kit. We see.
• 33:19
  Saw.
• 33:19
  Kill them. So I think maybe they do the same thing with Mads Mikelson's character.
• 33:27
  Okay, so that ties into what you're talking about about you've got like, hard Choices guy Lufen, right? And he's presented as like the real radical in andor but it's the same attitude of kill people who are making us look bad because you're thinking about the big picture that leads us into the liberal stage of revolution that you're talking about, right, where they are just going to end up being like this sort of less interesting revolutionary movement. And I think that those are related. I think that the cold, hard, calculating leader is absolutely the person who's going to be like, all right, kill Saul. All right, kill protagonist dad. Because they think they're thinking about strategy instead of ethics. And I know ethics is like a word that people have a million different thoughts and feelings about, but I mean, doing what's right rather than what is believed to be the most strategic, I think, is and that's what I like about Saw, is he does what's right, which is fight the empire.
• 34:34
  Yeah. I see him as an ideological insurrectionary anarchist and Luthan as just a straight up insurrectionary. An insurrectionary who wants to get extremely sun zoo about it all.
• 34:52
  Yeah. I mean, a nihilist in the Russian sense, not in the anarchist sense. Because it's not a coincidence that most of the Russian nihilists were like social democrats at heart. Maybe that's getting a little too off the I don't know.
• 35:08
  Anyway, yeah, I see a lot of people trying to square this as, like Disney published, like, anarchist propaganda that's like this and that, and I'm like, I don't think they did that. It's set in outer space. It's obviously made by people who give a shit about these things. And you and me care about the historical stories and context of revolutionary movements. And it's from that perspective of people who are interested and also think it's just think that fighting cops is the coolest thing you can do with your life and making a show about cool people fighting cops. And that is cool to me. Yeah, but do you want to talk a little bit about Rogue One?
• 36:03
  Sure.
• 36:06
  Well, I guess we were already kind of on it. Saw, he lives in the holy city of Jeddah, where the Jedi began as a society of monks. And they were guardians against galactic tyranny and fascism, but eventually became a liberal military arm of the Republic or whatever the fuck. And bunch of other shit happens. But where I think this movie really starts screaming is this stupid General Assembly is suddenly ready to pack it up because suddenly they're up against these overwhelming odds. And you remember this fucking nerd shouts, what is she proposing? And everyone was just like, Crumbs. Well, I guess we're done for. Packet in, everybody. But luckily we got lucky heroes. This platoon of doomed men who say, fuck this, they go rogue because a man with nothing to lose and a sharp stick can take the day. And they're the last chance to save the galaxy, to do some overwhelming violence against the Empire and go against all this bureaucratic cowardice. They all pack into one shitty spaceship. Bunch of cuddle puddle revolutionaries saying, fuck it. Life sucks. Fuck the empire. Let's do a cool suicide. And do they wanted to get out?
• 37:44
  I'm sure they did.
• 37:45
  Yeah. But they knew it was not likely. This is a part of canon. This is a part of the extended universe canon that has transferred over the Mon Calamari. You all know Admiral Akbar, it's a trap, et cetera, that planets and race of people involved in the rebellion are like the most ready to throw down forever. And I'm glad that that transferred over to Rogue One. Everyone else is just like, being swell, I guess. The empire wins. And Mon Calamar was like, oh, we've got Rogue One. Awesome. Love those guys.
• 38:30
  Yeah, totally. And that's why I like Rogue One so much.
• 38:36
  Right.
• 38:36
  Yeah. Is because you have your doomed revolutionary cuddle puddle that goes off to go do massive violence and steal some plans, and then the solidarity that it will kill you is like what breaks my heart more than anything else. If you want to see me cry at a movie, like the second Lord of the Rings movie, when the ride of the Rohiram, when Rohan shows up to support Gondor, is the safe space for being a nerd. So when they roll up and they yell, a red day, a blood day. And it's actually this Norse maybe not Norse, it's the Scandinavian poem that Tolkien's ripping off, but it's fucking beautiful. And then they like, scream like, death, death, death, and then run charging into the forces of mordor, right, to have the backs of Gondor. That's when I start crying the most consistently in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And so Rogue One operates on a similar principle of the well, fuck it. I guess we'll show up sometimes when all your friends are jumping off a bridge, like, you should probably show up to support them anyway.
• 39:48
  Wouldn't you rather die all at once rather than piece by piece?
• 39:52
  Yeah, totally. Which is from andor and then there's also a quote from Blackhawk Speaks, which I haven't read in a long time. I apologize for possibly paraphrasing this badly, but in the war against the colonization of what later became the United States or whatever, right, a bunch of people are sitting around being like, well, we should go to war against these fucking white invaders. And someone is like, no, we shouldn't, right? Because it's useless. If we do it, we'll die. It's like killing mosquitoes. You can kill them, but they keep coming. There's no point to it. And then the rest of the council is like, all right, well, we're doing it. And this isn't fiction. This is a nonfiction piece. And the same guy who was like, well, we shouldn't do this is like, well, I'm coming with you because I'm not a coward. And I really like that concept within Rogue One. The like, well, this isn't how we wish it had gone. This wasn't what we planned, but we're not going to fucking just let you go out and do that on your own. We're not cowards. Obviously, some of the people in that council chamber were cowards. Yeah.
• 40:59
  A lot of people didn't show up. And I think a lot of other people were invested in the assembly or didn't invested in building an army against the Empire, rather than we can really get a lot done with some sabotage. We can get a lot done with a plucky group of fuckers just plopping down and putting on some weird uniforms.
• 41:31
  Yeah. And it was considered right. I think a lot of what we're talking about, about insurrections or what push us forward. It wasn't like, I know where we can go throw a bomb. Let's just go throw a bomb randomly. They were like, what are we going to do? The first big action in Andor is like, we're going to steal all this money because we need it. Right? And so all of the actions have a purpose. They tie into a strategy. And that's one of the other things I love about Rogue One, right? It's like, all right, well, against all odds, we're going to go get the Death Star plans rather than just we're going to go explode a thing. Because the Empire has lots of things.
• 42:23
  They got lots of things. And I think that there's a poetry and an affirmation of life in attacking something symbolically. But yeah, you got a symbol and a rush of adrenaline and a huge danger to yourself and everyone else around you. If you're going to put some danger out there, be sure of it. And I don't know, maybe have a little bit more pay off in minecraft.
• 43:01
  Totally. In Star Wars, you should think about, like, if you're going to gamble at all, you should wait on the pot of sweet. I don't know, whatever.
• 43:16
  Go big and then go home.
• 43:19
  Yeah.
• 43:20
  See your safe house.
• 43:22
  I do think that the Star Wars rebellion in general does relate to a style of revolution that is less the style of revolution that I would guess the average person listening to this thinks about the history that they're drawing from, at least based on what you were saying is like national rebellions for against an oppressive outside force. Right. We've seen revolutionaries on the capital planet but we haven't seen them being like, here's how we're going to take the capital planet as ours. Right, because we're from here or whatever. Instead you see all of these colonized forces, these colonized people being like we don't want to be colonized anymore. So we're now in this alliance of all these colonized people to fight against this oppressive force.
• 44:12
  That's just another thing that I like a lot about andor in that the end of A New Hope is just this dyess of lily white heroes of the rebellion that might as well be out of Triumph of the Will and cheering and Chewbacca doesn't get a medal. I know that's. Well, trodged territory. But just as for my man and, andor has very few white characters making up the core of the rebellion.
• 44:57
  Yeah, there's kind of this funny problem that we're running into from a cultural point of view that all of a sudden we're watching all these prequels. Right? Or at least like I watched the Game of Thrones show the new one, House of Dragons, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. I liked it possibly more than I like Game of Thrones. I have literally no idea whether that's a statement mad at me or not or dragons.
• 45:22
  You can't argue with that.
• 45:23
  Yeah, and it's less white. It's still majority white but it is like markedly less white and there's something kind of depressing about watching these prequels that are less white.
• 45:37
  Something very bad must have happened between then and then.
• 45:41
  Yeah. Even though what we're actually watching of course is that the media that better.
• 45:47
  Caption choice is getting made.
• 45:49
  Yeah, exactly. I don't know it's just something I think about when I watch that kind of shit.
• 45:56
  This one sort of maps to my head cannon of obviously it's just the casting choices are better now, but it also maps to successful revolutions, and especially the one that installs Princess Leia, a princess into royalty, into positions of power in, like, a new neolib corusant seated government eventually, where the people who did the dirty work saw Guerrera and andor and whoever else are long forgotten were all just cannon fodder for this respectable and hard. They fought hard, but they were put in an impossible position. But let the lower cast get their hands dirty in a way that every successful revolution winds up to it, which is why I'm obviously interested in massive change. But the thing that really interests me is not the end result but the process, the affirmation of life, of being able to resist in your modern day and live for me anarchistically but just live rebelliously in the time you are in. Not for some far off future. Not what am I supposed to do, put all my fucking plans and morals on hold? Because I hope that the proletarian revolution is going to come off some way. Come around. If I just joined enough DSA chapters. Here's your sign.
• 47:52
  I mean, I feel like Andor gets into this kind of stuff in a useful way with the whole prison sequence, right, where they're in prison about the prison break. I know. So they're all in prison and they're all doing prison labor. And is a brutal regime, very controlled. It does the thing where part of the systems of control is very panopticonish. Part of the systems of control is also that the I guess in that fakoi way or whatever right. Where people are controlling themselves because the prisoners are in charge of the prisoners on some level. Right.
• 48:32
  Yeah. You got Gollum as the boss.
• 48:39
  I thought you were telling me we watched this together. I thought you were telling me that the really old guy was Gollum.
• 48:49
  No, Andy Serkis, the other prisoner is the guy who did Mocap for Gollum.
• 48:55
  Okay.
• 48:56
  The one I mean, literally, Gollum. I wasn't making I wasn't being ageist.
• 49:01
  Against oh, no, but I thought you were saying the old man was the person who did the motion capture for Gollum.
• 49:07
  No, he used to be very spry.
• 49:10
  Okay, so Goyal so you have Gollum, who is the sergeant, essentially, who's telling everyone what to do on the cell block, and then as soon as they know that they're doomed men, they're able to be free. Right. And it is a very literal metaphor in this particular context. And then the fact that they are like, what does freedom mean? Freedom means jumping into the water even if you can't swim and trying right. Is a very non subtle and they just express it as beautiful. They just have this beautiful scene of everyone jumping in the water. They don't have a grander plan. They don't hold the guards hostage in order to get I mean, to be clear, it might have been smarter if they had held the guard's hostage in order to get, like, an escape vehicle, but whatever.
• 50:11
  They would have just bombed the planet.
• 50:13
  I know, maybe, but yeah, that's true.
• 50:20
  A modern prison uprising will hold guards hostages for the sake of, like the people who are holding the guards hostage are going to get extra years on their a ton of extra time on their sentence if not outright killed by it, but could wind up winning.
• 50:43
  Better.
• 50:43
  Conditions for people inside. I don't have faith that prison officials will uphold their end of the bargain, but yeah, resistance is beautiful, no matter the end result. Somebody slipped Andy circuits a copy of Blesses the Flame, and they're all like, fuck it, let's go. Let's go for a dive.
• 51:07
  Totally. And the ones who die immediately while throwing a wrench at the second armed guard are just as beautiful and free as the people who swim to safety. No, I really like that whole long extended metaphor that they did around what it means to just actually be free. Just why I do hold that. I don't know. I guess the real question would be to know the writers because people talk about, oh, Disney made this. Like, no, Disney didn't make this. Disney put their name on it. It was made by people in the same way that like, workers make all value, you know, the the writers and the actors and the the directors and and all of these people, like made and or yeah, exactly. So I don't know I don't know where I'm going with that, but well.
• 52:09
  I had a if you want to if you want to think about it a bit. I wish I could remember who said this, so I would credit them, but somebody put out that when Disney was making The Lion King and Pocahontas at the same time, they put all their stock into Pocahontas and really micromanaged the entire project. I've never seen Pocahontas. It sounds like it's a decent movie, but Lion King undoubtedly turned out awesome because all the writers and artists involved got creative control of it because they didn't have Walt over their shoulder the whole time. Same thing happened with Star Wars because Andor was being developed at the same time that Obi won Kenobi and nobody at Me, but that show was not good. I did not have a good time watching McGregor do his thing again. But yeah, they really micromanaged that and they were just like a thing that's like rogue One share, proceed. And makes me a little nervous about season two because we'll see that this is it. And I don't really know much about the writers. I know that they were interested in Palestinian resistance and the Haitian revolution and things like that, which you can see in the show. And that the next season is going to get more into the shit that I was so excited about, which was like the internal politics of rebellions. I would love to see Saguerera talk some more shit about space tacoonus or whatever. But yeah, fingers crossed they'll realize that it was successful because they didn't get their fucking fingerprints all over it.
• 54:02
  Well, maybe next year we'll be sitting down to do another episode and we'll know whether or not everything went to hell or whether it pulled it off.
• 54:12
  You'll be like, no, what they brought R was there for some reason. That's another great thing about this. I think it's great because the rebellion never really got it to do it's like the entire plot of Star Wars and nobody ever really fucked with it. It's just like the scenery. But also we don't have to hear anything about space lasers and the Jedi. I guess there is a wisecrack and droid, but I love that little guy.
• 54:48
  Yeah. I don't know I mean, you need the wisecrack enjoy in the same way that you need the animal who sits around and tells jokes or whatever. That is a good character that gets added to TV and movies.
• 55:04
  Yeah. Bring up the Ewoks.
• 55:06
  But it still was like way more I mean, essentially it's just more proletarian than working class or whatever jargon word I suppose to use here, instead of like space nights and space princesses and space royalty and all that shit. It's just like fucking people in the muck to getting it done.
• 55:28
  Yeah, the space surfs out there, perfectly capable of braining a stormtrooper as good as Luke Skywalter.
• 55:39
  Yeah.
• 55:40
  Well, I think we did it. We talked about everything in andor but margaret, any final thoughts?
• 55:47
  I'm excited for the quality of the storytelling that we now have available to us as we go forward. Because the world is in very dire conditions right now and we need better stories. Or Sula Gwyn has the story has a quote about like we need authors who can remember freedom. And I think that we're starting to see those stories and we're starting to see them, including in mainstream places. And I think that's like one of the most promising things that I've ever seen as a radical or whatever. So I'm excited. Who knows, maybe it'll all go off the rails, but for now is good.
• 56:28
  There will always be small examples and whether it erupts soon being that freedom is a pure idea, or we just have to keep settling for these little diamonds in the rough, I don't know. I'm excited. Yeah. There does seem to be a lot more good stuff recently. But that's us. That's the Anarcho geek review. We did it, folks, in our geekhour. That's the one.
• 56:58
  For anyone who's listening. We used to have a blog called Anarcho Geek Review, and that's not what this show is called.
• 57:07
  Not related to the Anarcho Geek Review. We disavow. We disavow. That right.
• 57:14
  Splitters. They're splitters.
• 57:16
  Yeah, we split off from them. They were ideologically unserious.
• 57:21
  Yeah.
• 57:23
  Margaret, you want to tell people where they can find you?
• 57:27
  Yeah. I've got some podcasts. One is called cool. People did cool stuff. I referenced it like three times in this article. I also talk about individual and community preparedness on another podcast by the same strangers network called Live Like the World is Dying. And until by the time you listen to this, I might not be on Twitter anymore, but I'm currently on Twitter at Magpie Kiljoy, Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy, all that shit. IO. What about you?
• 57:53
  I'm, as of this recording, still on Twitter at Bum Lung and I'm also on Instagram at Bum Lung. And if I get on any other social media, fingers crossed they won't have to. It'll probably be under that as well. And before we go, I would love to thank we have a Patreon patreon.com strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And I would love to thank some of our Patreon supporters right now. Hath the dog. That's a good boy.
• 58:28
  Michael McKAYA.
• 58:30
  Kaya. Thank you.
• 58:32
  Mike. Isaiah? Actually, that's funny. As Mikaya, actually, you better and right.
• 58:43
  McKAYA or Mackaya, please settle this bet and whichever one wins owes the other a Coke. Chris, Sam kirk, Eleanor Jennifer Star o, Kat J. Chelsea, Dana David Nicole mickey Page, SJ sean hunter, theo Boise. Mutual aid millika and Papa Runa. Hope I got that one right. Thank you. Thank you all for your support. Big hugs and kisses out to all of you. And thank you, everyone who listened. And yeah, tune in next time when we'll talk about some other nerd bullshit and I'll see you at the movies.
• 59:40
  At times when a struggle seems impossible, I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this the imperial need for control is so desperate because it's so unnatural tyranny and requires constant effort. It breaks. It leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the empire's. Authority. And then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.