crosspost: Cassian knew exactly what he was doing

[anghraine]

[Feb 2017]

I’m a broken record, but whatever.

I keep running into the idea that Cassian had lost his way, in some sense, until Jyn shocked him out of his detachment and blind obedience. In this view, he’s so numbed and hardened at this point that he no longer seriously considers the weight of his actions; he’s almost indifferent about it. 

I mean, there are quite a few different permutations, but the fundamental idea seems to be that he’s disassociated to the point of losing perspective and becoming dangerously chill about the various horrible things he does. 

And I just don’t see it? At all?

Cassian has not ceased to care about helping people. He is entirely motivated by it! He says outright that he considers not caring to be a luxury other people have. Or—not even “not caring,” but just being capable of choosing whether to care or not. It’s a luxury he has been denied, not by external forces, but by his own essential nature.

Cassian carrying his prison with him isn’t about withdrawal from the world around him. He’s openly contemptuous about that kind of withdrawal, in fact. He carries his prison with him because he’s trapped in a narrow, suffocating, miserable existence that he hates, with no way out. And he’s not held there by literal locks and bars, nor by subtler constraints, but by who he is as a person. As long as the Rebellion needs him to do its dirty business, he’ll feel compelled to keep doing it. That’s who he is, and he can’t get away from himself.

If anything, his problem is that he doesn’t detach. People do, generally; even terrible things become easier over time, step by step, compromise by compromise. But for Cassian, they’ve only gotten easier in the pragmatic sense. Certainly, he’s become cool-headed, reserved, extremely controlled. He has it in him to make calculating decisions and ruthlessly act on them. But he does not have it in him to get used to it. 

Unless I am severely misremembering, Cassian never says that he’d lost sight of what he was really fighting for, or anything remotely like that. What he does say is, in fact, the exact opposite:

Everything I did, I did for the Rebellion. And every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget, I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in. A cause that was worth it. 

Remember, he’s been fighting for twenty years, since he was six years old. Six is—it’s really, really young. In all probability, Cassian can only dimly remember a time when he wasn’t fighting. Yet he has to talk himself through what he’s done every time. And what he tells himself isn’t anything that diminishes the weight of his actions. He doesn’t justify it because his victims were this or that. He doesn’t convince himself that what he does isn’t that bad. No, it is that bad, and only made endurable by his conviction that resisting the fascist dictatorship they all live under is worth doing things he would like to excise from his memory. 

That belief is what keeps him going, what allows him to face himself every morning. He doesn’t actually forget; at least, he doesn’t say that he has, or that he’s even tried, just that he’d like to. Instead, he says that if he falters in his dedication to the cause, then the weight of everything he’s done would come crashing down.

Everything we’ve done would have been for nothing. I couldn’t face myself if I gave up now. 

This is not someone who didn’t grasp that he was doing fucked-up things. This is someone who knew perfectly well that he was doing fucked-up things, who continues to know that he’s doing fucked-up things, who is haunted in the moment and afterwards, no matter how many times he does them. If you can only do something because the cause is worth it and have to keep reminding yourself of that and longing to forget—that’s not detachment. 

And it’s worth noting that Cassian himself doesn’t frame his decision to go rogue as a swerve from the path he was on. He frames it as a continuation of that path, the culmination. One more thing he has to do for the cause, and the most important of all. But this time, it’s not something that’s going to shove him deeper into his self-imposed prison. He’s not relying on faith in his leaders’ judgment that it’s best for the cause. He’s defying their judgment, instead choosing to trust Jyn’s and his own. 

It’s an important change, but it’s a very different one from detachment to moral engagement.

tl;dr: at any and all points, Cassian has zero chill.