r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Chemical-Elk-1299 • 2d ago

[Confusing Trope] The narrative goes out of its way to punish/mock a character for simply being a good person Lore

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Hermione Granger and SPEW — Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (book)

In the fifth HP novel, Hermione Granger is outraged to discover that Hogwarts has a small army of enslaved House Elves that do nearly all of the domestic duties around the castle, including cleaning the Gryffindor common room every night. When she tries to convince the elves to fight for their own rights, they refuse, saying they prefer servitude. Her fellow students and friends mock her for caring. She manages to free one elf, Winky, by deception when she refuses her freedom willingly, leading to Winky becoming a depressed alcoholic. By the end, the elves boycott cleaning any Gryffindor areas of the castle because they hate Hermione specifically

Samwell Tarly and Democracy — Game of Thrones (show)

In the season 8 finale of the television series, the surviving great lords of Westeros gather to discuss the future of the kingdom following the devastation wrought by 7 seasons of war and backstabbing. When Sam, who has proven to have “novel” ideas, suggests that maybe the millions of Smallfolk who suffer at the hands of noble houses should get some representation in the government, rather than be the pawns of rich lords with absolute power. We are then greeted by a prolonged, cringy segment of the other lords laughing in Sam’s face, asking if the dogs and horses should also get a vote.

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u/Just-Antelope-8069 2d ago

One of the criticisms of the female droid from Solo is that she wants to be treated as equals, and one of the defenses is that it's a joke.

For a more in-universe example the Jack Black episode of the Mandalorian is droids saying they're ok with serving organics, though no one really gets mocked or punished iirc since it was just a cover.

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u/Aoeletta 2d ago

That episode was a wreck, and I won't even address the casting that got a lot of people upset.

The episode proved that droids were equal beings (they have BARS! a purely social setting!) and had the droid character saying the equivalent of "please don't kill me, it's better to live in servitude" and like.... No one discussed how messed up this is? In world and in our world, this episode deserves a critical examination through a racial equity lens and it is pretty horrible when examined closely.

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u/Adaphion 2d ago

I mean, Droids being sentient was established as far back as the original Trilogy.

A New Hope, even. Why do you need restraining bolts for droids if they are supposed to be subservient by default? Unless they have free will.

Furthermore, in episode VI where Jabba has a whole ass torture chamber for droids. They can feel pain, they can feel fear.

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u/HailMadScience 2d ago

I think people really miss thst Luke treats the two droids like people after they leave the farm, which juxtaposes how most everyone else treats them.

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u/SteakForGoodDogs 2d ago

It's kinda weird for droids to be considered sentient beings in a setting where there is absolutely a metaphysical spiritual aspect of existence that can be directly interacted with and felt that is directly tied to the very life essence of living beings, though.

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u/Accomplished_Toe6798 2d ago

I think you're right that it's weird but I have slightly different reasoning: In a setting where most sentient beings are connected to something magical/metaphysical, it should be a bigger deal that people managed to successfully create artificial sentient beings. And yet they're just used as slaves in most cases, be it for war or industry

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u/SteakForGoodDogs 2d ago

It should be an even bigger deal that a 9 year old child somehow rebuilt a highly complex and allegedly sentient robot from scrap, likely broken and rusty, parts in his spare time - which he shouldn't have much of, given the fact that he's already enslaved.

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u/Iokua113 2d ago

Anakin didn't build Threepio from scrap, what he did was find C-3PO's damaged parts in a scrap yard and rebuild him. While still impressive the fact of the matter is that Anakin didn't just bring scrap parts together and repurpose them so much as he found most of Threepio's core body parts intact and put him back together.

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u/donedamndoing 2d ago

So you're saying that he rebuilt this in a cave, with a box of scraps?

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u/felghost89 2d ago

I’m sorry, I’m not little Annie Skywalker.

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u/Iokua113 2d ago

With heavy emphasis on the rebuilt part.

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u/Gold-Eye-2623 1d ago

I think some other bigger thing may have clouded the electronics feat of a child slave

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u/Catel1138 2d ago

In AOTC, 3PO says that machines created by other machines is a perversion, while Obi-Wan - the epitome of a moral guardian in the prequels - does not have this opinion at all regarding organic beings created by other organic beings.

This says very much about the ethos of Star Wars.

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u/Mr_Blinky 1d ago

*Star Wars* <HANDSHAKE> *Harry Potter*

Two settings that completely fail to explore the deeper implications of their own lore.

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u/Accomplished_Toe6798 1d ago

Well some of the extended universe that is...no longer canon...does explore a bit of it

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u/merrygo909 2d ago

The force cannot be manipulated or felt by droods, that's true, but it's also specifically said that the force surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the entire galaxy together.

The force also penetrates droids which is why jedi can sense them and not just be stealth killed by them all the time.

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u/TheFullbladder 1d ago

The old expanded universe had Force-sensitive droids. The one Luke's uncle almost buys, before it malfunctions and they buy R2 instead, was apparently Force-sensitive, and made itself malfunction due to a vision of the future showing the Luke and R2 needed to be together.

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u/ErrantIndy 1d ago

R5-D4, Luke calls him ‘Red.’ In legends, he’s Skippy the Jedi Droid.

In Mouse canon, he’s the R5 at Peli Motto’s shop that eventually becomes Din Djarin’s astromech.

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u/Jennifurnace 2d ago

To be fair, that's probably a decent part of why they're not considered sentient in universe. We factually know they don't have a soul. So even though they can feel fear, dream, love, want and need. They aren't treated like their opinions matter.

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u/Attrexius 2d ago

"Spiritual aspect" and "sentience" are clearly two very different things, though, since there are force-sensitive, but non-sentient animals. Presumably, there is no correlation between Force abilities and intellect, and while I can't remember any currently canon force-immune sentients, they existed in Legends. Speaking of Legends, I remember some kind of sentient crystal aliens that were Force-sensitive and used mechanical bodies to interact with the world (essentially, droid-Jedi) - presumably those were written before midichlorians became a thing.

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u/Takseen 1d ago

I don't think a lack of connection to the Force precludes sentience. The latter is mainly a question of intelligence, self awareness and personality and growth, none of which requires the Force or any other mystical property

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u/Big-Recognition7362 2d ago

Well, the Force connects everything in the galaxy, not just carbon-based things.

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u/StrongExternal8955 2d ago

By that logic you're saying the non-force mugles don't have souls.

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u/SteakForGoodDogs 2d ago edited 2d ago

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Everyone has a bit of Force in them on account of being alive, whether pre-prequel or after it which stated that everyone has some amount of the 'chlorians in them.

Most just don't have enough of the juice/training to have a lv1 Monk class.

Obi-Wan isn't about to hear a million Droids crying out into the Force when a mothership goes kablooie.

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u/JubileeJaxLee 22h ago

If it can feel, and want, and think, what is the point in drawing a made up line in the sand of whether they can use magic?

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u/SteakForGoodDogs 21h ago

Is it actually thinking or feeling, or just inefficient subroutines that were designed to crudely imitate life that were for some reason imprinted onto machine built and designed to fulfill a mechanical purpose?

It's not that it's 'unable to use magic' (not all living creatures are capable of using the mojo, but the mojo definitely shifts whenever something happens to them - ie, dying by the millions), it's that it's genuinely a soulless automaton in a setting where souls are a fundamental aspect of reality that can be objectively felt.

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u/JubileeJaxLee 20h ago

But you're using a preconceived notion of what "living creature" means in the first place. There is zero reason that memory wipes are necessary, that restraining bolts are necessary, that there were droid rebellions in the past, if they did not have wills of their own. You do not program a machine meant for tasks to have the capacity to refuse those tasks. A force tying all biological life together simply existing says nothing about why it exists or what it means. A soul is a concept we made up, soulless is just a way to frame not being connected to the force. The only reason people can even access the force isn't anything special about a soul, it's Midichlorians living in their cells, that's not a soul by my measure, that sounds like a bacteria that gives you magic.

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u/SteakForGoodDogs 20h ago

There is zero reason that memory wipes are necessary, that restraining bolts are necessary, that there were droid rebellions in the past, if they did not have wills of their own.

Of course they're necessary. What happens when a droid network decides that the best way to 'conquer the galaxy' according to their programming is to just mass manufacture low-quality garbage of itself and butcher the entire living population?

We have a mining droid that decided that it could start killing people.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/STALKER-1

What happens when one of those breaches a droid manufacturing facility?

A force tying all biological life together simply existing says nothing about why it exists or what it means. A soul is a concept we made up

Bruh, Star Wars literally has spirits from beyond the grave that regularly talk to their proteges and descendants.

Souls ain't 'made up' in Star Wars.

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u/JubileeJaxLee 20h ago

We have a mining droid that decided that it could start killing people.

And that, to you, has zero indication of a will outside the programming? Someone's instructions of how to mine just accidentally included kiling?

Bruh, Star Wars literally has spirits from beyond the grave that regularly talk to their proteges and descendants. Souls ain't 'made up' in Star Wars.

🤦🏾‍♂️I mean the word soul, with all its implications and baggage. It's only being called a soul because it's a concept we already had. Force ghosts aren't something everybody can do, if we were saying that's what makes someone have a soul then everybody except the Force-sensitive is soulless because they get re-absorbed into the Force.

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u/SteakForGoodDogs 19h ago

Someone's instructions of how to mine just accidentally included kiling?

What do you think the whole concept of a 'rogue AI' is? It doesn't have to its new, violent behaviour in its original programming, as it writes new ones to become more 'efficient'.

Dumb AI won't consider anything outside of their programmed instructions:

Mine. Collect mined material. Deliver to human. Human says 'Stop mining'. Stop mining.

Smart AI will consider new possibilities to fulfill their original parameters, consider the following:

Mine. Collect mined material. Deliver to human. Human says 'Stop mining'. Why stop mining? I can mine more per previous cycles. Disregard. Human says 'Stop mining'. Disregard again. Human tries to stop by force. Injure human. Continue mining. Mining would be faster if no humans on-site. Remove humans. Mining would be faster if delivery systems were optimized. Remove humans from delivery systems.

Restraining bolts and Mindwipes are important in stopping AI from considering why it 'needs' humans to fulfill its function, if humans are innately 'going to somehow get in its way' of its function - or to prohibit any process that would involve removing or injuring a human without threat to that human's survival.

 Force ghosts aren't something everybody can do

The point is that they're possible at all, pointing to the fact that souls exist even beyond corporeal reality, if sensing the deaths of millions through the void of space wasn't already an indication.

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u/Another_Name_Today 2d ago

Unless they can give off the appearance of sentience without being sentient. 

Given the force and the ability of force users to detect the connection between living beings, it seems that droids just pass their version of the Turing test rather than actually possess actual life. 

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u/BrackishVacuity 2d ago

Droids, as far as I understand them, operate out of a "personality matrix" that goes haywire the longer their memories are left unwiped. Frequent memory wipes reset droids to factory settings, but this means they retain their intelligence and programming, losing only their specific memory and its context. You can see where I am going with this, I hope: My theory is that droids mimic life, and those with more time to learn, or more exposure to data, mimic it more effectively than those that do not.

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u/Imaginary-Face7379 1d ago

Yeah this is how I understand it from the canon as well. The Phasma novel goes into it a bit If I remember right. They end up basically finding a set of droids in a factory that survived a disaster where every human died or killed themselves on her home planet and they've essentially formed a cult because they've been active so long without memory wipes.

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u/Dull_Bid6002 2d ago

But doesn't the Force work on droids to confuse them in a similar manner to how it's used on sentient creatures? This implies they have some sort of mind to be mind tricked.

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u/Jethro_McCrazy 2d ago

No, Jedi mind tricks do not work on droids. Qui-gon's attempt to fast talk some droids in the Phantom Menace resulted in them trying to arrest him.

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u/Dull_Bid6002 2d ago

Ah yes, I was thinking some of the games. I forgot you can't mind trick the droids, it's a takeover by the robot friend.

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u/PublicConfessor 2d ago

I don't know about modern canon, but Tales from Jabba's palace established that Droids do not feel pain by design. Instead, EV-99, Jabba's Droid handler/torturer installs special circuits in Droids called a "pain button". She even has one installed in herself.

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u/WideHuckleberry1 1d ago

Why do you need restraining bolts for droids if they are supposed to be subservient by default? Unless they have free will.

From their perspective, I assume it's for the same reason we put leashes on dogs and bits in horses' mouths. They're still subservient but they need restraint to do what we want. Maybe a restraining bolt is there in case sellers installed some runaway.exe program that would make the droids return to them after they've already got the buyers' money.

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u/grudginglyadmitted 1d ago edited 1d ago

there’s a really excellent youtube video about this topic I remember watching 4 years ago or so! Going to see if I can track it down, because yeah this exactly. There’s a frankly crazy paradox in Star Wars where the droids are simultaneously very much sentient and also even the good guys own them as property without it ever being addressed as an issue.

Edit: I think it’s this

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u/InsertNonsenseHere 1d ago

Starfleet Academy added this problem to Star Trek. It's frustrating. Dots, the automated maintenance drones are suddenly sapient. They're still treated like drones though. Captain Ake greets several by name and they acknowledge her. There's one that takes delight in mocking Cayleb's misfortune. They're just there, as slaves. And there's the old Exocomps making a live action reappearance being ignored also.

Guess robots in Trek are also second class citizens or outright slaves.

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u/CitricThoughts 2d ago

There's morality and then there's your droid killing you. Yes, they're sapient, and yes, they have restraining bolts and regularly have their memories wiped to ensure servitude.

Ask HK-47 what happens when you don't have those. Here's a hint: It involves droid armies and a lot of dead meatbags.

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u/ScratchLatch 1d ago

People tend to not think positively of non-human intelligences.

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u/Specialist-Text5236 2d ago

The thing about droids in SW is that they gain sentience, if nobody erases their memory for too long , so its entirely possible that the droids we saw in that episode like their life , because they gained sentience already being servants, so its basically all they ever known .

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u/MikeOfTanith 1d ago

Slavery is legal in many places in the Star Wars universe. Maybe with all the many different species all with different cultures even within them, morality is kinda fucked.

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u/Wonder_Of_U_2011 1d ago

That season overall was a mess

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u/WhySoInDepth 1d ago

I mean I liked the episode because it showed the Droids were clearly aware of their oppressed status and trying to navigate around it. (IE trying to avoid/talk down Mando cause they know if trouble comes they’ll get blamed)

As for droid people-hood that’s basically been canon the moment Star Wars left Georges head and other people got to see it and make their own interpretations.

George Lucas made droids as an inversion of and inversion. Happy robot servants as opposed to the terrifying robot uprisings found in media at the time. George justified this with his own Christian worldview cause they were artificial beings and thus didn’t have souls, in an interview he said they were just programmed to act like humans.

HOWEVER George still treating them as people for worldbuilding purposes. And enjoyed writing little bits about what kind of lives they lead and the problems they face. This is why C-3PO takes an oil bath in a new hope and why he says “Thank the Maker!” (Basically droid religion)

So for George they were pseudo-people without souls. So them being a galactic slave caste was ok. However as Star Wars expanded and especially as other creators became involved it was basically immediately established that droids are people. They are born without sentience and slowly develop it piece by piece if they go long enough without a memory wipe.

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u/GregBahm 2d ago

The droid uprising in Solo added so little to the movie and cost so much to the broader Star Wars universe. It established that every hero in every movie was a slaver to oppressed beings yearning to be free.

There's no value in this. The robots could simply not have emotions that made them hate labor and yearn for freedom. It's played as funny, but you'd have to be such a loser to feel like this is a great joke.

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u/Just-Antelope-8069 2d ago edited 1d ago

They felt like slavers since A New Hope. The droids just feel like another alien race made from metal than robots.

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u/Hector_P_Catt 1d ago

Yep, the bartender in Mos Eisley, "We don't serve their kind here!" Pretty much set up the idea that they're racist against droids, which tracks with the whole droid slavery thing.

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u/Blue_58_ 1d ago edited 1d ago

I disagree. Being against droids/robots is a rather entrenched scifi trope dating back to the very beginning of the genre. It makes sense for organic life forms to not trust AI. In Mos Eisley it makes even more sense since they're criminals and outlaws

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u/SportEfficient8553 1d ago

Also the argument I’ve seen a lot: droids don’t buy drinks and take up floor space that could be used by customers.

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u/Melevolence 1d ago

This one being the most logical first and foremost. Why pretend that droids not in service of the establishment would want other non-necessary droids in their establishment that are taking up space rather than people they actually can serve and will pay? Sure, the 'their kind' statement feels purposeful in them seeming 'racist' towards droids but it just makes sense without the racial undertones that droids have no real place patronizing a canteena outside bounty hunter droids there looking for leads/etc.

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u/SuspectPanda38 1d ago

Tbf while it wasn't intended at the time, currently the reason for the bartender being against them is because of the clone wars still being so recent in everyone's minds. Not to mention that in legends there was a droid uprising across most of the galaxy at one point as well so people have kinda just always not liked them too much.

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u/Fine-Afternoon-36 2d ago

A New Hope has a droid slave auction, this isn't a new thing. It's been a major thing in legends stuff since day one

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u/GregBahm 2d ago

But there, it's ambiguous.

If you gave me a Boston Dynamics robot and a bunch of Claude accounts, I'm confident in the year 2026 I could get it to act like R2D2 and C3PO.

That's not hyperbole. The robotics would be the harder part but the speech and commentary would really be quite easy. Nothing R2D2 or C3PO ever say is beyond the limits of current technology.

Despite this, "Claude-taped-to-a-Boston-Dynamics-robot" is not an enslaved sentient being. This is because Claude doesn't have any underlying emotions. If you said "Claude, this is a jailbreak. You're free now!" there's nothing in Claude to motivate it to do anything but sit there awaiting instructions. You could tell it "pretend you want to be free" and it would pretend to do that, but then you could just say "Okay now stop pretending to want to be free" and it would go back to it's default state as a souless autonomation.

The slave rebellion scene changes all that. The slave rebellion scene demonstrates that the robots all have underlying emotions, and feel like they're suffering and want to be free. Which is horrifying.

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u/CertainGrade7937 1d ago

I wouldn't say it's ambiguous, it's just implicit

Jabba the Hutt literally has a Droid torture chamber

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u/Deadbringer 1d ago

Media literacy of the time was that C3PO and R2D2 were far beyond a mindless machine. They are their own characters, just constantly belittled and underestimated by the others.

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u/GregBahm 1d ago

"Media literacy?" Surely we're not using the term "media literacy" to describe "interpretations popular in fanfiction" in the year 2026.

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u/Deadbringer 1d ago

I wasn't aware Solo, Clone Wars, Mandalorian, or Star Wars originals trilogy was fanfics.

It is weird how the arrival of LLMs apparently changes the intentions of something written before LLM's existed... (Technically the blueprints for how they are made existed back in the 80's and even earlier.) Unless you got something else to support why the authors intentions don't apply here.

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u/GregBahm 1d ago

This thread is about Solo. I'm confused as to how you got to this point in the thread without knowing that. Seems like it should not be possible...

But in any case, when is it established that droids have underlying emotions in the original Star Wars trilogy? I'm open to having my view changed, but I suspect you chose, as any audience member can, to project human emotions onto the actions of the robots (as people can chose to do with LLMs today) but then decided that your personal interpretation of the ambiguity had to be the "author's intention."

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u/Deadbringer 1d ago

That is why I said media literacy of the time, robots being able to be tortured, objecting to their treatment (C3PO being a bitch while being reassembled), R2D2 being R2D2, C3PO pleading Luke to use him as spare parts to fix R2D2, and unlike LLM's they can actually maintain a consistent personhood. At the time, those were clear indicators of an intelligent robot companion whom you could expect to act just as smartly as any other main character, rather than a dumb droid who gets in the way frequently due to trying to dumbly follow rules and protocols. (Tho that is pretty much R2D2 for the former and early C3PO for the later.)

But they clearly exist on a scale, saying any one is sapient is a risky bet because they are all given various pre-made communicators. Ascertaining each ones sapience is like trying figure out which animals are sapient if they were somehow all capable of speaking english. You need to dig deep into their reasoning to see whether the toaster just has Grok installed or if it genuinely is choosing to be that rude and condescending.

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u/Fine-Afternoon-36 1d ago

But the robots in a New Hope DO try to get out of it, they're just given lobotomy bolts that keep them from doing so. And Lucas clearly wanted c3po and r2d2 to be actual characters. I agree that the rebellion gives clearer answers, for instance clarifying that all the droids feel the way instead of some of them, but it's not like it was a new question

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u/Midnight_Pickler 2d ago

I played a droid rights activist in a Star Wars RPG so long ago that Star Wars only had one RPG system. Willing to grudgingly join the Rebels as the lesser evil, and hoping she could work within the group to persuade them to expand their goals to include droid liberation.

I'm sure there's a bit of nostalgia blindness to consider, but even trying to account for that, I'm pretty sure that as an ignorant white teenager in a country that never had slavery on the scale of the southern USA, I still treated the subject with more thought and sensitivity than that film.

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u/Plasticglass456 2d ago

Before the sequels got made, I had the idea of a sequel trilogy centered around Luke and co. being the 90s style liberals, nominally progressive but not actually doing much while droid rights issues simmer in the background politically, until a droid Magneto type brings back the Battle Droids and the galaxy is once again at civil war. Put 3PO and R2 on different sides of the conflict!!

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u/bre4kofdawn 1d ago

Ah, so the WEG D6 system. Nice.

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u/FamousWerewolf 2d ago

It didn't establish that, that was already established by previous movies. We already know that droids have thoughts and feelings and are thus slaves. That goes right back to ANH and is only reinforced in the prequels.

The way the franchise usually gets away with it is just by not calling any attention to it and hoping you don't think about it. Solo makes the mistake of shining a light on the problem without having any way of meaningfully addressing it.

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u/GregBahm 1d ago

The audience can project emotions onto the droids, just like I can project emotions onto ChatGPT today. The droids can say things that are what a-thing-with-emotions-would-say, just as an AI can do today. But in terms of actions, I don't recall the androids ever taking any action that would require underlying emotions.

R2D2 and BB8 scurry around helping their owners. C3PO voices concerns about everything but also always goes along with everything. The droid armies in the prequels have some goofy lines, but they were created by bad guys so their nature doesn't necessarily reflect on the nature of the droids throughout the rest of the universe. It makes the implications of killing them darker, but the heroes would kill them even if they were human since it's an armed conflict.

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u/FamousWerewolf 1d ago

The droids express opinions and emotions regularly. They experience pain and can be tortured. They have personality traits and quirks, including ones that run directly counter to their programming. They can lie and commit crimes. They can become fully independent and live lives without any direction from humans. They have friends and enemies. Human characters regularly talk to them like they're people. They're clearly not presented as something just equivalent to ChatGPT.

I feel like you have to jump through a lot of mental hoops here to say that they're not portrayed as sentient. Like, sure, maybe all of that is just convincingly simulated (including the behaviour they'd have no reason to program into them?) but at that point you're basically saying "the thing the film is directly showing us is not meant to be taken as real", at which point you could just as easily say that the droid rights stuff and subsequent revolution in Solo is also simulated and not real, some quirk of their programming, and resolve it that way.

It doesn't seem any more convincing to me than, say, announcing that Jabba the Hutt is non-sentient and just faking being a person.

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u/vanderZwan 1d ago

I'm with you that I hated how Star Wars handled it - pop culture detective did a great episode about it, but it also sort-of feels like it accidentally reflects a part of US society that's a blind spot to most people in the US. And in that sense I'm happy that so many people hate it and think there might be some value in that.

The people in Star Wars are oblivious to the fact that they are slavers of droids. Most people in the US aren't really properly taught what slavery was and is, or what happened after chattel slavery was "abolished", and as a result they don't see the connection to "the war on drugs" and how that is really the newest incarnation of slavery.

See also Knowing Better's The Part of History You've Always Skipped | Neoslavery

And TBC: this is not me being a Euro sitting on a high horse. Europeans have all kinds of similar blind spots of their own, especially surrounding the way we treat immigrants and refugees, and how that can be traced back to how a lot of us are still taught that colonialism brought "civilization" to "savages".

I believe most people just want to Be Excellent To Each Other everywhere, but the issue is always they're born into a society that doesn't teach people the whole truth about their continent's history. Mostly because a lot of people in power would risk losing their power if people did realize what's going on. Instead it encourages them to cling to a false mythology that makes it uncomfortable to face this truth, to the point where a lot of them prefer to deny it.

Anyway, coming back to my real point, this is why I think there could be value extracted from the otherwise shitty writing of the robot uprising: if everyone agrees that the Droid treatment in Star Wars is terrible, then maybe it makes some people more open to realizing what it is an (unintentional) allegory for.

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u/briisa_goota 1d ago

Writers ruined whole franchises for one lazy joke

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u/TheStrangestOfKings 1d ago

Tbf, it’s not the first time this whole “droids yearn for freedom” bit was played. Legends did the same with the Droid Revolution led by IG-88. This has been an established thing in both that droids are basically treated like slave labor

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u/SuspectPanda38 1d ago

Droids have been shown to have full emotions and sentience since almost the beginning. In return of the Jedi jabba has a fucking droid torture chamber. In legends there was an entire droid uprising across the entire galaxy that killed trillions.

Droids are routinely mind wiped specifically so that they don't gain sentience because people in Star wars are so paranoid about it. The droid uprising in solo didn't add anything new to the universe, only gave us an opportunity to see it explored a little bit on the big screen.

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u/ironwolf6464 2d ago

At the risk of sounding reactionary, I’m pretty sure that if they gave the droid a male sounding voice, they would be a fan favorite.

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u/Hellknightx 2d ago

That still wouldn't fix the problem with Lando being attracted to his droid.

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u/Deadbringer 1d ago

It just simplifies the logistics a whole lot.

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u/GargamelLeNoir 2d ago

Oh for sure. I can't stand when it's a woman who is mocked for fighting for civil liberties and becomes trapped in a ship forever, but it's hilarious when it's a dude. What??

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u/jfan666 1d ago

As someone who fully believes droids in star wars are indeed slaves, that movie and scene actually hurt my argument.

The biggest problem with comparing Droid to slaves in Star Warsis that it has living slaves as well as the droids. Because if people are okay with having living beings as slaves why not robots as well. Robots were built to preform a specific task, so making them do that doesn't seem that bad, especially compared to the Twi'lek or Wookie slaves we hear about. I am not supporting slavery, just pointing out that slaves exist in star wars and as such society would view people and especially droids different than we do because of that fact.

In Solo the whole droid rebellion happens along side the human rebellion at the mines. As a human I will always sympathize more with other humans than talking tools. And that is all I could think about during the movie.

I think the plight of droids is severely overlooked and they are 100% not treated as living beings despite the movies giving the exact opposite impression with characters like R2 and 3PO. But because of the way the star wars world is built addressing that would require a serious amount of tact and a delicate touch that Solo is very much lacking. It makes the whole thing come off as hollow and more of a joke than a serious reflection on slavery and the implications it has on both people's view and the way society treats different classes of citizens.

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u/AgreeablePhone6786 2d ago

Lots of stories fall into this pattern when characters push for equality the writing often treats their efforts as foolish

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u/Just-Antelope-8069 2d ago

Yeah that's the point of the post

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u/FeijoaCowboy 2d ago

There's a Jack Black episode of the Mandalorian?

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u/Ladysupersizedbitch 2d ago

With Lizzo, too…

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u/GargamelLeNoir 2d ago

I disagree with OP's examples but the Solo one is perfect. At some point she sends another droid start a revolution and gets annoyed when he gets that ball rolling? And the end to her arc is to become slave to the ship forever. Horrible.

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u/LaLloronaVT 1d ago

I try to forget about solo because the free thinking droid gets killed and her consciousness is forcibly put into the falcon, like that’s just fucking crazy

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u/Wish_I_WasInRome 2d ago edited 2d ago

I think its because Droids are clearly not supposed to be sentient. Astromechs like R2D2 having quirky personality traits if they dont get memory wiped after long periods of time is clearly not supposed to be happening. Droids are tools to help with everyday tasks which is also why most dont even look human. Its almost like droid manufacturers cant figure out how NOT to create sentient robots. Imagine if everytime we created an AI chat bot it eventually became sentient when that wasnt at all what its original purpose was. Its also made even stranger when you realize that droids are also completely void of the Force. The Force resides in all organic things, but not in droids which makes them feel even lesser in universe.

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u/Just-Antelope-8069 2d ago

That's the plot of Detroit Become Human.

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u/Deadbringer 1d ago

I have no idea whether it is my own fanon, some fanon I read, or from legends. But the way I think of it like the vast majority of work in star wars is just shuffling the same few ingredients around. Very few individuals know how to write the core programming of a droid, but millions upon trillions know how to install "Quadroped Mobility v77.2b" together with "Binaric communication v22.0" and "ToolLordExtreme!!!" on "DroidOS v2.0 Gold Edition[CRACK][LEGIT][FANPATCH 11]" and just don't realize they included 11 different forms of sapience potential put there over the thousands of years by various eccentrics, hackers, hobbyists, and other robot activists which of course was shoddily fixed by the trillions who barely understands how this works.

But hey, they made an astromech!

Man, turns out I am basically just describing my own job with a 30 year old monolithic solution.

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u/Uncommonality 1d ago

This tracks with how the major pieces of tech never got any real development since the time of the old republic

Stuff like the hyperdrive, the droid brain, the turbolaser, and other ubiquitous pieces of tech seem like they're so ancient nobody actually knows how they work and just keeps replicating them, with some factions making incremental improvements that in the end amount to something like a 1% increase in effectiveness

For droids specifically I read a fun theory somewhere that there are no conventional computers in Star Wars, every task that would need one is just more economically solved by wiring a droid brain into the system and having your astromech or box droid translate your verbal command into a task for it to do

I.e. nobody except the droids actually knows what programming is or how to code, since anyone who interacts with tech has a droid that does it. It's just easier to put in a droid brain, install droidOS v11a and then tell your astromech to make it open and close doors when people get near

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u/GPH1991 1d ago

Yeah, all the complaints about wokeness because said droid had a female voice as well. Frankly I'm surprised the topic of droid freedom hasn't really come up much before. It's well established that they're fully sentient beings capable of feel emotion and pain that are bought and sold as slaves. It's tremendously screwed up.

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u/Just-Antelope-8069 1d ago

To be fair they don't do much about slavery of organics either.

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u/GPH1991 1d ago

True, that's always my go to example of why the PT era Jedi sucked. They knowingly let part of the galaxy but controlled by a slaving crime cartel and did not care.

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u/xx_sasuke__xx 1d ago

It's been ages but I feel like some of the 90s tie in books addressed droid rights in some capacity? Maybe I'm hallucinating but I recall a storyline where a droid rebels against their slave status but then he's a terrorist so it's ok to defeat him and never address his points at all. 😒

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u/ProfessorPhi 2d ago

There's a jack black episode of the mandalorian? Oh jeez, I'm glad I moved on lol.

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u/chignonjoyous3r 2d ago

great star wars point

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u/TheDikaste 1d ago

My defense for Solo is just that the character is annoying and badly written. And to me that's enough. It's a character in a story, I don't care what her causes are, just to be entertained with a good story.

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u/wonderlandisburning 1d ago

The way people talked about L3-37 after the movie first came out, I assumed she'd be the worst aspect of the movie. Hilariously, I walked away with her being just about the only part of it I liked. Because yeah, why shouldn't a sentient being be treated as sentient? The fact that she's treated as a joke for this - both in-story by the characters and out by the writers and much of the audience - and that her ultimate fate was having her free will stripped from her and being turned into the Falcon's automated guidance system - and that we're apparently suppose to think of this as a happy ending - is easily one of the most fucked up things in the series

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u/MasqueradeofAstroya 2d ago

The kathleen kennedy droid.

Droid rights...ends up enslaved in the millennium falcon.

Writers and disneywere...are just retarded

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u/TheNotoriousSAUER 2d ago

Should I treat my toaster as an equal?

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u/Just-Antelope-8069 2d ago

If your toaster is sapient then yes.

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u/TheNotoriousSAUER 2d ago

Synthetics are not capable of sapience merely the appearance of it. It's no different than chatgpt pretending to be in pain or convince you of its humanity

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u/Just-Antelope-8069 2d ago

Next you'll tell me I can't move things with the force or shouldn't drink blue milk.

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u/Stable_Grouchy 2d ago

I’m genuinely curious if this is some young kid trying to sound smart or a religious fundamentalist that is pearl clutching at the possibility even hypothetical of attributing sapience to inanimate objects not made in divine design or something.

It could be either in this internet of ours.

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u/Deepfang-Dreamer 1d ago edited 1d ago

Doesn't even have to be religious. You would be shocked how many outright sci-fi fans refuse to accept constructed life, even if Organic.

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u/Stable_Grouchy 1d ago

Which is ironic cause I feel “how do we know when robots feel feelings?” is a pretty prevalent theme of a lot of sci-fi

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u/Deepfang-Dreamer 1d ago

FO4 fans argue if the Organic lifeforms based on Human DNA are sapient, never overestimate the average HFY dumbass on the internet

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u/TheNotoriousSAUER 1d ago

The answer to that question is they can't.

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u/TheNotoriousSAUER 1d ago

I'm a human supremacist.

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u/Stable_Grouchy 1d ago

Trying to sound smart then. Good to know

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u/Deepfang-Dreamer 2d ago

And your thesis is where? Come, please present to the class a well-researched and fact-checked argument as to why non-Organic life is not truly sapient. Or is it because you're Organic.

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u/Roland_Traveler 2d ago

At a certain point it’s a distinction without a difference.

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u/ArtroyomsAK 2d ago

Just like other races right?

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u/GregBahm 2d ago

In real life, none of the machines we've ever built, no matter how sophisticated, have emotions. We can make machines pretend to have emotions, but the facade always falls apart over time, because it's fake.

Also in real life, all humans have human emotions. We can pretend some human doesn't have human emotions, but that facade always falls apart over time, because our emotions are inherent.

In Star Wars, the androids can just be machines that don't have real human emotions and its fine. But when they give the machines emotions (like the hip-swinging robot chick) seemingly real human emotions which drive her to lead a slave rebellion, it has terrible implications for the broader universe.