“Avenge Us,” Star Wars, and Sympathetic Villains

 Hallo! I’ve been thinking about Verdi a lot lately for Reasons. I finished the second Thursday Next book, and I think I’ll be doing either Silver Chair or The Disaster Artist next.

There is probably not going to be a Saturday Note next weekend because I will be out of town.

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“Avenge Us,” Star Wars, and Sympathetic Villains

Alright I had this idea at the beginning of the week and figured I’d go with it. I suspect I was browsing the Headscratchers page for the Sequel Trilogy on TV Tropes, and thinking about how terribly-planned out it was and trying to think of some really good Star Wars media. Some spoilers for Star Wars: Rebels and Jedi: Fallen Order.

The main antagonist of Star Wars--Jedi: Fallen Order is the Second Sister, one of the Inquisitors, Force-users that are trained with the express intention of hunting down remaining Jedi and Force-sensitive individuals. Their numbers reflect their rank. Most of them appear to have been former Jedi, and the Second Sister is no exception--she was Jedi padawan Trilla Sudari, who upon finding out that her master sold her out to the Empire after extreme torture, turned the Dark Side and became one of the top-ranking Jedi hunters.

Our hero, Cal Kestis, not only fights her, but makes an actual effort to redeem her--despite her being the one hunting him across the galaxy throughout the entire game. Her goal is to grab the Jedi Holocron Cal’s after, which holds the names of a butt-ton of Force-sensitive children, in the hopes of either eliminating them or recruiting them. And yet Cal sees the good in her, and tries to bring her back to the light. And after her final boss fight, it looks like maybe he’ll succeed.

And then Vader walks in, berates Trilla for her failure, and kills her. Her last words are: “Avenge us.”

Which is… odd. Not in an ‘out-of-character’ way, but interesting and not what one might expect. 

It reminded me of Maul’s final death in Star Wars: Rebels. As he’s dying on Tatooine, having been bested for the final time by Obi-Wan, he realizes that he’s there to protect someone (Luke), and asks if he’s the Chosen One. When Obi-Wan answers in the affirmative--George Lucas disagrees, but it’s not out of the question that Obi-Wan himself thinks Luke’s the Chosen One--Maul says, as his last words, “He will avenge us.”

Now both of these cases aren’t really redemption. I don’t think anyone would ever look at Maul’s character arc and call it redemption. I think Trilla’s arc ends just short of redemption, because maybe she’s about to start down that path, but Vader kills her before she can reach it. But both of them are, in their final moments, portrayed sympathetically. Trilla gets sympathetic moments long before her end--Maul only sporadically gets those, and those mostly relate to his brother Savage. But in these sympathetic death scenes, their last words about how they would be, or should be, avenged.

This is odd.

If you’ve been paying any attention to Star Wars, unlike in most pop culture fiction, revenge is almost universally portrayed as a Bad Thing. In mainstream Star Wars media, you can probably drop the ‘almost.’ This is not what being a Jedi is about. Revenge is giving in to anger and hatred, to negative emotions. The Jedi aren’t doing the good things that they do because they want revenge, it’s because it’s the right thing to do--defeating the villains will stop oppression and bring balance back to the universe.

So we have two villains who have sympathetic death scenes, asking or hoping for something that we’re repeatedly told is a Bad Thing, a selfish act that we know (from the way the story works) won’t actually make anything better. They know that a Wrong has been done, not just to themselves, but to the balance, and something needs to be done to fix it. And so they request the one way to fix imbalance that they understand: revenge. They’re not redeemed, and these lines make it clear that’s the case, but they were reaching for it and they still want things to be fixed from the wrongs they’ve experienced, the things that have twisted them to the Dark Side.

I know Star Wars gets some flack from people as being very “Black and White” in its regards to morality. As I’ve explained before, I have never really minded this--I’m not going to complain about the fascist authoritarian government run by space satanist wizards being portrayed as Evil. But I think making the assumption that the setting has absolute Good and Evil means that there are no in-betweens, and that characters must fall into one or the other all the way is a mistake. Here we have two characters who are villains, and are quite wrong in the final wishes they express--explicitly so by the rules of the text. But they’re not portrayed, in that moment, as being worthy of sympathy.

It’s a small thing, but a really interesting bit of dialogue in both cases that shows a complexity in the characters that I think isn’t talked about enough.

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