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K, let’s examine how evil the First Order are:

What have we seen them do, on screen, that looks pretty evil?

They used a superweapon to blow up a massive civilian target
They tortured an enemy combatant
They massacred a non-combatant village
Their army is composed of soldiers who were taken as infants and trained to combat from childhood onward.

Yeah, that does sound pretty bad. But

Who else has done these things?

The US/allies used a superweapon in WWII to blow up two massive civilian targets
Guantanamo Bay: *exists*
During the Vietnam war, US troops operated on a “kill anything that moves” policy, resulting in many massacres of which The Mai Lai massacre is most well known.
Who else raised children to combat from infancy? The Jedi - who we are supposed to believe are the good guys. (Also in the Real World, what other empire used a child tax to fill its armies and civil service? The Ottoman Empire, also a grey area when it comes to villainy)

What moral grounds have we got to say that any of this is justified when we do it - or when the heroes do it - but pure evil when the villains do it? Before we start throwing around the idea that empathizing with the villains automatically makes a person a fascist themself, maybe we should take a look at our own history and remember that all too often our nations have been the villains.

Would we ourselves want to be judged with the kind of simplistic good v evil duality with which we talk about SW characters? How well do you think we would stand up under that?

Now obviously, I’m not saying that torture and mass murder are good things. I’m just saying that it’s hypocritical of us to claim that we could never be citizens of a regime like that. We already are.

When our own nations desperately need to learn how to do better, it’s kind of offensive of us, tbh, to keep insisting we could only be the hero, and that we can’t even make art about the villains without sullying our moral purity.

Swan2Swan says

"Empire’s End confirms that Armitage Hux is not some poor child who was raised to be cruel, but instead chose to be so on his own.

This becomes plain when he is given his first command of fellow children. He sits alone in a room with his peers and decides to test his authority. His first order is this: “I want you to hit the boy to the right of you. Hard.”

The boy obeys immediately, and Armitage “feels a strange and sinister buzz of excitement” as he watches the boy bleed.

He could have issued any command: “take off your shoes and give them to me”, “quack like a duck”, or even “shut your eyes”. He chooses none of these, and instead moves immediately to violence. His goal is to cause harm to others–and it is a goal that is not influenced by anyone else. It is his choice. The decision rewards him with excitement and a thrill, and thus the foundation for his character is born: a cruel, sadistic monster who revels in genocide and hurting the innocent."

This is what really annoys me about the whole “Rey was raised by sand, didn’t become a murderer” school of thought. It divides people up into those who are born evil and those who are born good, and then it goes on to draw the conclusion that there’s something immoral in having sympathy for a scared five year old child, because that child is (presumably, by this school of thought) already irredeemable.

I saw this in the prequels fandom too - people arguing that nine-year-old Anakin should have been put out of an airlock because he was obviously always doomed to become Vader from the start.

It’s funny how the people who think they’re the most moral are the ones who firmly believe that certain children are just born as monsters.

I think it proceeds from a very shallow understanding of human nature. A belief that people are either good or evil and that’s immutable from birth. Therefore you can mistreat a ‘good’ child as much as you like and they will still turn out okay.

But Luke is right - everyone has darkness in them. Anyone who’s had children knows that kids are inherently selfish. They haven’t yet processed the idea that other people have their own inner lives which are just as important as their own. (This is a difficult concept and some people never get there, even as adults.) Half of a parent’s job is going “no, we don’t bite people. That’s bad. How would you like it if someone did that to you? Apologise,” or “No, that belongs to her, give it back.” And the other half is making sure they know you love them and you’ll be there for them no matter what - that just because you’re disappointed and sad that they did this one bad thing doesn’t mean you now hate them and think they’re a bad person.

But that’s assuming you want your child to grow up into a well adjusted adult who has respect for other people’s boundaries and welfare.

Even the good side in the Aftermath books is flush with violence - everyone in these books is violent. And the Imperial culture from which little Hux comes completely valorizes the ability to do harm. You can bet he hasn’t spent his first five years hearing things like “No, we don’t hit people, that’s bad.” Imperial culture isn’t like that. Imperial values are more like “Get them under your heel as soon as possible. If they let you hit them it means they’re weak and they deserve it.”

There are enough posts going round Tumblr pointing out how pernicious the whole “Boys will be boys” attitude is, and how that leads to men growing up with a huge sense of entitlement and an inability to see anyone else as really human. So we know, really, that very often children do grow into the roles they’ve been assigned.

I’m clearly doing something wrong with the reblogging, so I’m reposting this in an attempt to get it to show up this time.

@darthlenaplant said

[Since it’s All Saints Day and All Dead’s Day and we’re visiting the graves of our families ‘n’ stuff] Now I’m wondering how they generally act when someone dies.
Maybe not in battle, but of sickness or old age, but what are they doing with their dead?

Do they even use something like graves? (Where? Is there a distinct planet that is only used for this?)
Do they put the body in a casket and shoot it out into space, like they do in Star Trek?
Or do they incinerate it and put the urns in some special place? Or is there just a plate with a name sitting somewhere? Maybe they have some sort of family altar in their quarters or something? How are the dead honoured?
I like to think that they still have some sort of connection to their ancestors, but maybe they don’t? Maybe they simply concentrate more on the living than the dead?

And now to something completely different: What is Art according to the FO?

Militaristic or not, art is the signature of a culture, and if they don’t discourage cuddling and other indiviuality, and engineering can also be considered an art, they won’t discourage other means of creativity, would they?

What sort of music is “in” in the FO? I mentioned somewhere that Hux strikes me as the kind of person who’d listen to Kraftwerk, and you said that’s because they sound like lullabies sung by robots (it’s so true tho)
But what else? Is it something like Skrillex, Pendulum, or Gigi D'Agostino or can it also be something “organic” like Rembetiko or our all-known European classical music (I read such an awesome fic about Hux listening to the Star Wars equivalent of Mozart, Bach and I think it was Beethoven? Anyway, that fic was awesome, I need to find it again)
Or is there also something like Metal in the Star Wars universe? (I may or may not just want to see head-banging Stormtroopers…)
What is the traditional Imperial folk music? Is there even something like that?
What instruments do they even use? (There must be so many different instruments, like holy shit)
Which brings me directly to the Imperial and FO culture in general: Is it really that monolithic? I know that I personally read it kinda Austrian/German/Japanese/Persian/Russian/etc. (ok, it basically is everything between Austria and Japan taken and mashed up, maybe with some differences from part to part that simply are about which aspects are more pronounced than others? Like you have a bunch of people who may dress like our stereotypical Tyrolean, but they all have names like Ferenc Oromo or Miyuki Untersteger or Taraneh Artemievna? (OF COURSE they all have various skin colours from black to white) The cooking is probably all over the place, like Ćevapi, Sambar and Khao Soi are recipes within the same “family” (or whatever you call a bunch of people who may or may not share a surname and maybe even live together)

To which extend would families even form? Which name does the kid get, especially if no one is “claiming” parentage? AKA it goes to the nursery, but does it get the mother’s name automatically? Which in turn would kinda make way for a matrilineal inheritance culture. (What’s the kid even supposed to get? Mommy’s ol’ Rocket Launcher?)

Questions over questions spawn in my head because you got me thinking, but let me telly you that I explicitly love you for this. (no romo tho) XD

~

Ooh, cool thoughts! I’m going to be wildly speculative and have a go at some of this :)

Rites for the Dead.

I’m thinking that out there while they were rebuilding themselves with very little aid from anyone, they’ve probably become a culture that is used to scarcity and now makes a virtue of not wasting anything. So probably not firing bodies off into space complete with casket. If a Stormtrooper dies on board ship, their possessions go back into the common pool, and their body goes into the recycling, where its water and useful trace elements can be reclaimed.

But (in keeping with the whole ashes and skulls theme, a small bone from each body is kept and presented to the person in charge of that legion (if you’re FN-4598, your remains go to the FN series chapel, where they’re kept with the remains of the rest of your squad.) That way your essence or power remains at home with your people. (Lots of cultures around the world keep their dead relatives’ remains in the house with them, and French sailors in the 18th Century were buried in the ballast of their ships, so this would be a more efficient, communal version of that.)

If they die off the ship and can’t be reclaimed, then some small possession, or even a plaque with their number and call sign on it will do to go in the chapel instead.

Officers may have a different arrangement, because they’re obviously a class who are considered worth the expenditure of more resources. Also they are the class which retains customs from the old Imperial days.

We know the FO officers are keen on remembering their dead, as they use the names of dead imperials on their rank patches on their sleeves. Possibly these are people whose bodies they couldn’t retain in some way, so keeping the names is an equivalent.

I’m actually quite keen on the idea that really important ex-Imperials get mummified and carted around in the ship’s hall of remembrance. (I quite like the idea of Hux going down there to talk to his dead dad.)

Music and Art.

A lot of the older people (where anyone Hux’s age or over is considered ‘old’) will remember Imperial culture, so there will be (musical, culinary, literary etc) traditions from all over the galaxy represented in whatever datafiles people managed to snatch up when they fled from home. So yes, I think they’ll have their equivalent of Mozart and other composers from the old planets who remind them of the glory that has been stolen from them. There are probably officers who practice the old instruments and write music in the old styles (and draw and paint and so on) in an attempt to live up to the ideal of being proper Imperial gentlefolk. There may even be like string quartets and theatre and opera going on during those long periods in hyperspace with nothing to do.

Also I bet the Stormtroopers will make instruments out of anything and play the kind of folk music it’s easy to dance to. Maybe some of that also harks back to the music the clone troopers played, though nobody kept records so nobody can say for sure. Both officer and trooper kids and teens have their own countercultures with (strictly limited and controlled) sanctioned forms of petty rebellion which have been determined to lie within acceptable levels of minor annoyance but not to be actual threats to public morale.

At the same time, a lot of FO culture is about making sure people believe the right things, so I suspect any art or other cultural activity has to be vetted for its ideological purity by Intelligence Officers before it is either quashed, ignored or encouraged as appropriate.

Families

I think the Stormtroopers just don’t have them - from creche to ashes they’ve got their series and their squad. I mean, they may have children, but their children will be placed into the stormtrooper program in turn and they are discouraged from forming personal bonds with them.

The officers, otoh, are fighting a more personal fight to restore the glory to their family names - to get back what was stolen from them - so retaining their names and genes is going to be important to them, but whether any of them would want to be involved with the chore of actually raising their own children, IDK. They’re all very busy with the war, and it’s much more efficient to put them in the appropriate creche and start grooming them to uphold the family honour only when they’re old enough to follow a decent conversation. I think there’d be a level of toleration there, with officers who insisted on having families being seen as old fashioned and not forward thinking enough, yet tolerated because it was an Imperial custom and they like to think they are still Imperials.

Necessities of life

The FO provides universal health care, job security, shelter, food, clothing and an education to all its members as a matter of course. The education may include brainwashing, the shelter, food and clothing may be a dorm, nutrient puls, and a uniform, but they do value their personnel and no productive member of the society starves or dies of ill health if they can help it. That would be wasteful.

OMG, thinking about Brendol’s death, suddenly things make sense. So Brendol’s been using Cardinal all these years to dig at Armitage - look how great he is; look how much I love him more than you etc. They’re kind of like brothers and there’s a power balance going on where Cardinal makes Armitage feel inadequate and Armitage (probably) consoles himself with thinking how he could order Cardinal to take a short walk out of an airlock if Brendol wasn’t around. And it’s all horrible, but it’s also more or less stable.

Then Brendol turns up with Phasma. Suddenly Cardinal’s facing life on the Armitage side of the equation, as the one who isn’t Brendol’s favourite. Cardinal cannot stand this and immediately begins making plans to bring Phasma down. So far so canon.

But, what if Armitage sees this, and this time around he recognizes what Brendol is up to. Things have gotten almost comfortable, he’s been able to learn to ignore Cardinal, and even put him to good use. He had a handle on that situation. But this time around he thinks to himself Oh Hell No, we’re not playing that game any more. This time, dad, you’ve gone too far.

And he goes to Phasma and says “My father is trying to use you for his own purposes - trying to instill loyalty in you, so you’ll follow him like a dog.“

“I’ve noticed.”

“Don’t assume he won’t succeed. He’s cleverer than he looks.” It worked on me most of my life. “Are you willing to take that risk?”

“Or?”

“Or we could kill him now.”

Phasma really doesn’t strike me as a follower. If she thought she was going to be enlisted on Brendol’s side to bolster his position and be used as some kind of token/lapdog for him, I’m not surprised she went straight from “Well he’s useful, I’ll tolerate him,” to “You know what, I’ll conspire with his son to kill him instead.”

And after that, of course, she and Hux have blackmail material over each other and have to stay as friends.

I’d been wondering why Hux chose that point to act. Why he teamed up with Phasma who was an unknown quantity to him at that point. But this helps explain why it was Phasma’s appearance that was the trigger for it. Brendol’s own “make them all compete for my attention,” machinations backfired at last, when the one he’d trained to use the tactic recognized it being used on him and wasn’t having it.

That makes a really satisfying kind of sense now.

Oh… that’s why Hux was panicking when Snoke died. It wasn’t because he was worried about Kylo at that point because he clearly expected Kylo to be panicking too. It must have been because Snoke was the one who controlled the Navigators - I forgot about them. Hux remembers the early days of the FO wandering in the Unknown Regions when they didn’t know where anything was and they weren’t able to avoid all the dangers of this weird space, and they therefore “suffered great hardship,” according to tie-in book canon.

Then Snoke came along with his Navigators and suddenly they were able to find food and resources and avoid all the traps and dangers.

I bet those early days of wandering unknown space while starving and running out of fuel (and while Sloane fought the other Admirals for the leadership) made a big impression. It’s not that he particularly liked Snoke, he just doesn’t want to go back to being lost and starving.

You may have heard that Tumblr is in the process of purging all NSFW stuff, via an algorithm that can't tell an aardvark from an anus. So I'm reposting some of my Hux meta over here to keep it safe. I need some Hux icons for this!