crosspost: the Rogue One soundtrack—"Hope"

[anghraine]

queenofthenaboo on Tumblr asked:

ok if you're talking about the rogue one soundtrack - thoughts on "hope"?

This is another one from a long time ago, but I was combing through and I have been thinking about this one.

The thing about “Hope” is that it’s not at all what we’d usually call hopeful, musically. It’s violent and menacing. 

You could argue that that’s simply because it covers the scene which culminates in Leia saying “hope,” and that scene is … well, violent and menacing. For me personally, though, it really works as the direct follow-up to the main characters’ deaths.

One of the areas where I differ quite a bit from the fandom is that … well, I’m not sure how to put it. 

Okay. I often see people, esp in fanfic, saying that Jyn and Cassian—but particularly Cassian—were at peace with dying. (In fic, of course, this is usually by contrast with an everyone-lives present.) But I don’t think they were. 

They were resigned to their deaths, to an extent. They had hope for the Rebellion—they’d given a greater hope to the Rebellion than it ever had before—and they considered their lives an acceptable price for that. For themselves, they understood the inevitability of dying and resolutely faced it down on their own terms. 

And yet, Cassian looked frightened at the end. Jyn cried. They died with hope, yes. But they also died in pain and fear.

So did others on their team. So did the nameless Rebels who passed on the plans. So did a … lot of people through the movie. In RO, hope is bound up with suffering. It’s especially bound up with violent suffering. I think that’s part of what makes it so powerful—that people’s lives aren’t reaching a peaceful conclusion but are being brutally cut short. There’s a real, heavy price for action, a price that just keeps rising and rising and rising even after the protagonists themselves have been killed off, which makes that action more daunting and yet also more necessary. 

It’s genuinely painful and unsettling and powerful. And I think “Hope” is all of those things. So it feels very appropriate to me as an escalation from the gentler melancholy of “Your Father Would Be Proud of You,” and for the arc of the film.