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deepspacepirate · 7 years

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Director Orson Krennic: a character analysis

(Or, a rebuke to a post that got way out of hand, and I ended up dumping literally every thought I have about Krennic, so I decided to make it into its own independent meta.)

Yes, Krennic’s a poor guy who just wants some respect and never seems to catch a break. But he’s also a ruthless and Machiavellian narcissist with a dastardly sense of fashion. One doesn’t negate the other. His character is an interplay of both.

Krennic doesn’t come from the same posh background as other imperial officers and faces much classicism as a result. It’s undeniable that he is incredibly ambitious. He had to be in order to get to his position, both in the Republic Corps of Engineers and as the Director of Advanced Weapons research (aka the Death Star), in the face of much resistance. It’s quite admirable, really, and he sees it as a source of pride as well. Everybody loves a rags to riches story.

His bombast, ego, ambition, and lust for power are not things he’s ashamed of. In fact, these traits in themselves are not bad, nor do they make him a bad person. Problems arise because of these traits in combination with the following, mostly of which are traits of narcissists. He’s less entitled than your average narcissist and has evidence to back up his ego, but still a narcissist.

He is afraid of taking risks. He clings to the rails of the bureaucratic ladder instead of staking it out on his own in a field like pure research, where you can either be wildly famous or wallow in obscurity. Galen says this to him in the Rogue One novelization, and boy does it hurt because he knows it’s true. Because he fears taking his own path, he’s at the behest of the Empire. All opportunities that present themselves to him will be ones that further the Empire’s own goals. Not that he has a problem with them.

Speaking of which, Krennic doesn’t have real goals; he doesn’t know what success for himself looks like. In full accordance with being a raging narcissistic, he’s an ambitious social climber whose only goal is to be powerful. What that looks like, we have no idea.

Before we go any further, I want to make an important comment about power. Power is not inherently evil. Wanting power doesn’t make you a bad person. Being powerful just means having the ability to effect change. You can use it to command the massacre of millions of people, but you can also use it to create a system for sustainable energy. Power is not an end, but a means to an end.

That said, being powerful isn’t actually a real goal. When you set goals, you want them to be SMART. Goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, reasonable, and have a time deadline. Krennic’s goal is neither specific nor measurable (which renders consideration of the latter three letters moot).

There are so many ways to be powerful including, but not limited to: senator, social media mogul, actor, political activist, prominent author, famous architect, and successful tech entrepreneur. “I want to be powerful,” is so vague, it may as well not even be a goal at all. And if you don’t even know what your goal looks like, how can you measure it? How do you know that you’ve reached it?

A quest for power ends when one has enough to execute on whatever end goal they have, but Krennic has none, so his quest for ever greater power never ends. He’ll just keep climbing the bureaucratic ladder to the top. The only way to climb the ladder is by serving your superiors, so the Empire’s goals become his goals.

He has problems with authority. He hates all of them. He wants to have the freedom to do things on his own terms, but they won’t let him. That’s the consequence of working for somebody else. And when you work for somebody else, you know you don’t have all the power.

Now, I want to go on a brief tangent about Galen’s business partnership offer to Krennic. It was an out for Krennic. The perfect out, in fact. He would have been unbelievably happy there. Barring responsibility to shareholders, there are no restrictions as to what entrepreneurs can do; they get to be their own bosses, set their own goals, set their own rules, do whatever they want. The only other authority figure in the vicinity would be Galen, who wouldn’t even be his superior. He’d be working alongside his best friend, whom he knows respects him.

In fact, when Galen first tells him about the project, Krennic is reeling, literally incapable of saying anything other than dazedly repeating Galen’s words with a question mark at the end.

For a brief moment he glimpsed a new destiny opening before his eyes, a window into a future he had never imagined for himself, a path to an entirely different life, and yet just as quickly as the window opened, it closed, slammed shut as much by long years of training as by a feeling of trepidation.

This is such an incredibly tragic moment when you consider how different things could have been had he said yes. How much better things could have been. A life without betrayal and loss. Unfortunately, he was too afraid to take it.

So he’s stuck in the position of simultaneously hating his bosses and also wanting respect from them. This becomes a problem because…

He’ll do what it takes to get what he wants, but he’s not a spineless bootlicker. He’s much too prideful for that. The thing about people ruthlessly ambitious as Krennic is that they don’t bow down to anybody. Bureaucrats hate this. To them, Krennic is just an uppity chav ¹ who thinks he can make it to the top. I have no doubt Krennic picks up on the fact that he’s hit a glass ceiling. He can’t woo them; they hate him just for being him. It’s unbelievably petty, so he’s petty right back at them. They owe him respect for all he’s done! So he seeks to undermine the authority of those above him (i.e. Tarkin) the only way he can - via manipulation and cunning. It’s what he’s good at and he knows it.

Despite all of the above, he seeks external validation (a mark of narcissists), such as rank squares, a dramatic cape, and being in charge of big projects. Narcissists are both immensely prideful and profoundly insecure. His ruthless ambition is a direct consequence of these insecurities. He needs to show off for any modicum of self dignity. Even in the presence of Galen he gets defensive about his position.

“But I am serious,” Galen cut in. “And I do understand your position. I just think you deserve more than…this,” he added, motioning in a way that took in the Corps of Engineers headquarters. Krennic swallowed to suppress a sudden defensiveness, a raw desire to tell Galen Erso that this was all a sham; to load that datapad of Erso’s with the schematic of the battle station and show him what he was really in charge of.

This ties closely to his lack of concrete goals. Without those, everybody else always determines your worth: whether you stand up to their expectations. When you can set your own goals and your own standards for success, you can fall back on those. If you fall short of someone else’s expectations, you can say, “Fuck that. This is what matters to me and I meet my own standards.” But Orson has none of those. He’ll never feel self fulfillment, and he’ll never be personally satisfied with himself.

He doesn’t want to be responsible for his actions, specifically, the ones that reflect poorly on him. I don’t know why Krennic doesn’t have a goal more concrete than “be powerful”, but if had to guess I’d say it’s because he’s afraid of failing at that goal. It would be a failing on his own part and there’s no plausible deniability. He can’t say, “They gave me unrealistic goals,” or, “ They were plotting against me.” It falls on him now. He’s more than eager to take credit for his success, he’s too afraid to take responsibility for his failures. Even though Krennic hates being beholden to anybody, he’s afraid of being completely independent. He’s a child that wants to be a grown up, but he doesn’t want to wake up and smell the taxes.

Everything he does, his ambition, his quest for power, his Machiavellian tendencies, even his dramatic fashion sense, all stem from the fact he is a sad and lonely narcissist trying to prove himself in place where nobody wants him to succeed. It all feeds back into itself. He’s put himself in an environment that exacerbates his narcissistic traits, and he becomes more and more ruthless as he tries to maintain his dignity and feed his ego.

– Notes 1. I apologize for using this word; I don’t know another less offensive word that more accurately describes what the posh officers think of him

Bonus: AU where Orson accepts Galen’s business proposal and quits his job in the Corps of Engineers. The Death Star never gets built, nobody dies, and it’s happy endings for everybody.

#orson krennic #rogue one #sw #ro #this was sitting in my drafts for months wtf #since like january #jesus

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