Tumblr crosspost: Finn and violence

[anghraine]

An anon asked:

I love that we see into the mind of a former stormtrooper thru Finn's perspective. Yet I can't help but wonder why he shows no concern stabbing his fellow stormtroopers, probbaly to death, when he objected to killing before. I get the situations are different (helpless civilians who didn't deserve it). But Finn doesn't seem to mind potentially killing those who've been brainwashed and kidnapped just like he was. I would think he'd hesitate before killing anyone, let alone people similar to him

My response:

I loved that too!

I’ve seen a lot of people raise that concern, but honestly, I’m a bit “???” about the whole thing. Finn may or may not empathize with other stormtroopers in general, but he takes a firm zero tolerance policy towards people trying to kill him. That’s perfectly reasonable and justified.

For me, the situations really are different–so different as to be completely incomparable, in fact. Finn doesn’t object to killing; he objects to unprovoked slaughter. There’s no reason for that horror to carry over to fighting in the defence of his life and the lives of his loved ones. It could, for someone who came out the other side a pacifist, but it’s never remotely suggested that that’s Finn. He doesn’t shrink from violence; he just refuses to be a tool of mass murder.

Really, if he stopped to think of all the philosophical ramifications he would be dead.

Comments

[sathari]

You make a good point about Finn distinguishing between killing the helpless and fighting to the death in a kill-or-be-killed situation for himself and His People.

And I was thinking about this myself recently, and... okay, I'm kinda flailing around on this here, just kind of thinking aloud. But! Here we go!

- He says in the movie that he was pretty much trained/conditioned as a killer.

- Before the Awakening gives us a Finn who is very attached to His People. Specifically, he's got a bond with his teammates, including Slip, who's not that good at "stormtroopering", that supersedes larger mission objectives, even while he's still more-or-less loyal.

- Slip is the guy who gets killed in that first scene, the one whose death, arguably, is at least partly the trigger for Finn breaking from the First Order.

So I think... there is definitely something up in there with Finn and His People. As in--- based on what we see of him, he does not so much have an ideological crisis in the sense of deciding that the First Order is so evil that he has to oppose it. He's a kid who saw his best buddy die, then saw a bunch of other people shot down while they were helpless, and ran.

And I think what happened with his conditioning was that it had already "gone awry", from a First-Order perspective, before the movie, clear back in Before the Awakening. Because whatever loyalty conditioning they were doing on the stormtroopers--- in his case, rather than attaching to the First Order and the ideology, he attached to people. And even in the movie, he still attached to people. (This is interestingly like Anakin, or at least Anakin as he's presented in the novelization of RotS, where Obi-wan talks about him being loyal to people, not to principles.)

In this case, it's Rey. And I think with Rey, there might also be some guilt there, at least by the end, because he's wondering if the fact that he left her is how she ended up getting captured. So he's attached to her, and he's feeling like he abandoned her or at least that he should have been there with her, and... well, there you go.

(Also, I can see Phasma not knowing the part about Rey and going, "How in Kessel did these people give this boy the killer instinct that I spent twenty years trying to beat into him? Possibly I need to look into this...." LOL. But then, Phasma is weirdly one of my faves for no reason.)