Bix
The first three episodes of Andor have been generally well-received by fans alongside the show’s record 99% critic score, the most for any Star Wars live-action project ever.
One scene in the final episode has generated a fair bit of a controversy online. A content warning for discussion of the concept of sexual assault follows.
A certain theory-based Star Wars YouTuber with the largest following on the platform went viral for saying that sexual assault should have no place in Star Wars content, and was something Darth Vader “wouldn’t tolerate” among his Imperial soldiers.
The scene being referred to is when Adria Arjona’s Bix Caleen is assaulted by an Imperial officer taking advantage of the fact that she’s a woman alone in a house in the middle of nowhere. A fight ensues between the two and the officer ends up dead, but it’s a brutal assault and in the end, Bix yells to his fellow Imperial waiting outside that he attempted to rape her, certainly the first time that term has been said in Star Wars.
Showrunner Tony Gilroy immediately offered an explanation for why he put this sequence in his already mature Star Wars series, speaking to THR:
“I get one shot to tell everything I know — or can discover, or that I’ve learned — about revolution, about battles, with as many incidents and as many colors as I can get in there, without having [the story]
tip over,” says Gilroy. “I mean, let’s be honest, man: The history of civilization, there’s a huge arterial component of it that’s rape. All of us who are here — we are all the product of rape. I mean armies and power throughout history [have committed rape]. So to not touch on it, in some way … It just was organic and it felt right, coming about as a power trip for this guy. I was really trying to make a path for Bix that would ultimately lead to clarity — but a difficult path to get back to clarity.”
He also says that Disney itself did not push back against its inclusion.
Andor
It’s one specific sequence but it raises an old issue about whether Star Wars is still “for kids.” That’s certainly something George Lucas has previously said, but the series has gone beyond him now, and that doesn’t even fully add up with his own work, say when Jabba the Hutt is licking Leia who he has forced into a bikini and to be literally chained to him.
More generally, Andor has never been a show for children. Many pieces of Star Wars content has not been over time, spanning all the way back to EU novels. This is like saying that Marvel is for kids when it has content ranging from Spidey and His Amazing Friends which my son watches to Daredevil: Born Again where I just saw Kingpin explode a man’s head with his bare hands. Plus at this point, we should remember the average age of the biggest Star Wars fans has to be 30+, at least.
I’m not even sure what to say about the idea that Darth Vader “wouldn’t condone” this, as the show is making a clear point that enabling fascism encourages crimes like this to happen. Not to mention this is a guy who murdered a bunch of children in Revenge of the Sith and almost choked his own wife to death.
I think Gilroy has it right, and he’s the one we should listen to on this, not hand-wringing YouTubers and their followers. Star Wars can be mature and complex, and no single property has done that better than Andor.
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