priscillajeanohare:

A lot of people have made out that beautifully explosive and ultimately cathartic confrontation over Cassian almost assassinating Galen out to be something other than it is. As I discuss here, what’s at the heart of it is a question of trust, and it’s through this discussion that Jyn realizes how similar she and Cassian are for the first time (something he already knew, as I also discuss in the post linked above). But another layer of it is obviously how different they are in key ways and how it muddies the ideological waters and makes out neither of them to be wholly right or wrong. Objectively, assassinating Galen is not a morally good thing and as Jyn says, Cassian can’t talk his way around it. But even if it isn’t wholly good, does that make it unrealistic or uncalled for? 

Regardless of the right answer – and there really isn’t one – Jyn is allowed to be emotional about this, even if she says some hurtful things in the process. People make her out to be a spoiled brat in this scene, as if both of her parents weren’t murdered before her very eyes and as if she wasn’t abandoned by her only other guardian (who she retained love for but no small amount of understandable bitterness towards), whose cause was the Rebellion at age 16 – hence her abandonment issues and anger towards both sides. She was captured by the Rebellion and this mission was hers to complete and win her freedom or fail and die trying. She and Cassian aren’t exactly in equal positions at this point and there is mistrust inherent in that sort of relationship, where he is essentially acting as her non-optional handler on a compulsory mission she’s been forcibly recruited for – and what’s just happened has challenged and seemingly broken the tentative trust they’d built up to that point. Jyn’s emotions are valid and cannot be dismissed lightly as whining – “Oh boo hoo your parents were murdered in front of you! Suck it up.” Yeah…I don’t think so. Her self-preservation is a psychological defence mechanism that is likely all that kept her alive for years now. There are reasons she doesn’t want to devote herself to anything – she thinks nothing will devote itself to her. When stuff like that happens to you so young, it’s hard to undo the damage. 

But once she sees how similar she and Cassian are (both child soldiers, for one, as she finds out in the course of their confrontation) and how easily they – and anyone really – could have been in each other’s shoes, she gains a whole new perspective on things and she comprehends the wisdom in his words about the Rebellion being built on hope – because it is all that would have saved her or him or that little girl in Jedha – and adopts his motto as her own. She ultimately helps the Rebellion for the same reason she protects the little girl in Jedha – because no one deserves to be alone and because with the knowledge granted her by her father, she has a real chance, however slim, to ensure a brighter future for the marginalized and oppressed everywhere. And because Cassian, in turn, realized he need not always follow orders in his service of the Rebellion and it is worth trusting his moral intuition sometimes, he assembles the team the two of them need to accomplish their original goal. They swap roles, in a sense – Jyn looks beyond self-preservation as Cassian always does and Cassian listens to his own intuition like Jyn does rather than following orders.

I think Cassian had an unconscious interest in Jyn ever since he saw her, probably – hence his decision to trust her with the blaster pistol, which I discuss here. He’d read her file and then he sees her and her temperament and the way she carries herself and realizes how different and how similar they are – how they both have missing pieces of each other. She’s got this fight in her to stick to her own beliefs that he gave up on a long time ago (i.e. how she typically sticks to protecting herself but didn’t hesitate to risk her life to save a small child), aside from his devotion to the cause, and he’s got this level-headed if worn-down idealism that she realizes she needs. Cassian is a fundamentally good person who feels morally dead inside even though he believes in the cause and it’s all he has – like Diego has said, he’d really rather be doing anything else, but for him, this is it. All the actions he took that clashed with his moral intuition have to mean something. When Jyn, in many ways his mirror (as Diego has also described her), takes up the cause and finds strength in hope because of him, she inspires him to assemble a team and revitalizes his faith that all those times he gave up parts of himself – emotionally and morally – were worth it in the end because here she is ready to throw herself into the fray and it is hard not to be inspired by an act of faith on the part of such a cynical and downtrodden person who he sees so much of himself in. And it was he who inspired her to fully devote herself to the cause to begin with, along with the knowledge given to her by her father that paved the way for the Death Star’s destruction. Cassian gave her a sense of purpose by explaining his own (“Suddenly the Rebellion is real for you? Some of us live it. I’ve been in this fight since I was six years old. You’re not the only one who lost everything. Some of us just decided to do something about it.”) and also became a physical and emotional anchor for her and a source of trust and belonging – “Welcome home.” 

Jyn and Cassian need each other and they met at the exact moment in their lives they needed to – and the universe needed them to meet. The Force needed them to connect to save the universe from oppression by beginning the long arduous process of doing so – without them, who knows how many more years of darkness people would have endured, how much further back the Rebellion might have been set. “Hope starts with them.” Ideologically, emotionally, and physically, their connection is multilayered and poignant and connects to the most important themes in the SW universe – faith, hope, redemption, and love for oneself and all living things.