Small Wanderer - Big World

Yes, I am sure it grew in viewership because it was dark, treated its audience like adults, and was well written. All those are pluses, but it's not why it was successful. I don't think all of the shows and movies should be like Andor. Some of them should be all-ages, and it makes Andor special that it was so different.

No, Andor is good because Tony Gilroy was similar to George Lucas in two key ways.

He didn't really give a shit about Star Wars, he just wanted to tell his story.

Fans are making myths about George Lucas, but the truth is he couldn't be bothered to keep up with his own lore, and would override it without remorse. Take the Ghorman Massacre. Gilroy must have heard about it, and wanted to put it in season 2. But the timeline didn't fit. You know what, fuck it, two Ghorman Massacres! Won't fit in the timeline? Fuck you, I'll make it fit.

If you're writing fanficiton you obviously care about the franchise and the lore, but don't let it bog you down. Kill your darlings if it makes a better story. It's your story.

Secondly, Gilroy seemed to know what made Star Wars special is that it takes inspiration from all sorts of places, Akrira Kurosawa movies, spaghetti westerns, The Dam Busters and other World War II movies, freakin' world myths. You take all that stuff, mush it up, and put it in a space fantasy and it all becomes more interesting.

And that it's inherently political with George having a bee in his bonnet about Nixon and Vietnam in the OT and Clinton-era complacency and George W. Bush for the Prequels. The sequels sometimes come close to saying something political but never coherently. So Gilroy comes along and wants to tell this story about an immigrant hustler turned revolutionary, all the effort and infighting that comes with that, along with police profiling, the industrial prison complex, fascism, grassroots revolutionary movements.

I try to do this all the time. During quarantine I found myself watching my favorite anime over and over, and I remember lamenting that I could never come up with a love story this good. And then I was like, nah. This is Star Wars, I'll just take this movie as inspiration chopped and screwed. I'll keep enough of the signifiers that appeal to me but adapt it to the characters and setting. And again, when I wanted to write my Sister fic, I had no idea where to take her character since there was so little of her in the books. But I knew I wanted it to take place a few years after The Bad Batch so that Omega and Emerie could show up for a few scenes. So, what would a clone trooper be doing a few years after the war, after she was replaced. I was perplexed for a bit, so I thought of other stories about war veterans who are people of color trying to get by in a mean world. Then I was like ah! Devil in a Blue Dress. I'll just Walter Mosley it. Now, Sister in that story isn't quite Easy Rawlins, but there's enough echos there to be noticeable, I think. The story isn't Devil in a Blue Dress either, that didn't fit the themes. But you know, it helped me write the story I wanted to write. Borrow, steal, and transform all you can, it's good for you. It's what George would do.

You can't just base new Star Wars on old Star Wars is my point. That'll just stagnate everything.

A short poem: The thing we couldn't do becomes the thing we can

At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.