#the story of the clone troopers is a tragedy and it's only brought up occassionally | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

somestorythoughts · 6 months

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Narrative Role vs Personality

There was something that felt weird to me when I watched the 1st season of the clone wars, I thought I figured it out and now that I've seen a few more seasons and haven't changed my mind I'm gonna post about it and hopefully make some sense in the following ramble.

It feels like there's a bit of conflict between the writers giving the clones a narrative role and making them actual characters. Yes all characters have a role in the narrative that's not the point, the point is that, from the outside, the clones' role in the story is just to be an army. You need bodies to make up an army to show the audience that this a war, and the audience isn't supposed to really invest in them past wanting the good guys to win.

That's not a bad thing, it's normal when you have sci-fi/fantasy armies. That's the role these guys play:

We love the dramatic charge of the Rohirrim, we take a solemn moment to acknowledge the bodies in the aftermath, and that's it. We mostly feel actively sad for the characters we know, or sometimes background characters who are there for emotional impact. The role of an army in these shows/movies is to look good, die, and win or loose. It's the same kind of role characters in adventure movies like Indian Jones or the Mummy play, those people who get caught by lethal traps. You can expand that into "it's messed up that they're being used as test subjects for booby traps" outside the film but their only role in the narrative is to show that the traps are dangerous. Again, not a bad thing narratively. In a story, someone's gotta show that the 1000-year old knife trap is still sharp somehow and yes the evil scarabs are alive. And sometimes those are also minions or bad guys but it still applies.

I think horror movies do the same thing but it's not my genre so not certain how their deaths work.

And in aotc and rots, the clones are pretty much pure plot device. They've got a narrative role and they fill it. They're an army, they do the fighting the dying and the killing, we get very little personality out of them. Been a while since I've seen rots so I can't say if they get no characterization, but I'm pretty sure it's VERY low. We know the basics of their background, we don't know them.

And then the clone wars came around and it gave them personality. It gave them characterization. And sure the series seems to be largely focused on the Jedi, but they still took the time to give the clones some character beyond just being bodies to fill the ranks.

And it's not like you can't kill characters the audience cares about, everyone knows that isn't the case. But if you give characters personality, the audience is more likely to care. If the care, they might be upset that they're dying over and over so easily without much in story mention. And people really latched on to the clones.

It doesn't help that their backstory is kinda fucked up. I have no idea how much of the shit they go through on Kamino and in the wider galaxy in fanfics is canon and how much of it is fan-based (I haven't finished the clone wars series and I'm not quite invested enough to track down the comics right now) but even without that you're talking about millions of people cloned and raised for war by trainers that are at the very least unfriendly, a genetic donor that selected one for a son and does seem to care at all about the rest, and the war they're fighting is entirely engineered. They're made to fight a war and then wiped into blank slates by a bunch of mind-control chips (even if we look at the movies without the show since that was later, there's still plenty of messed up stuff in being bred and raised solely for war). It's messed up enough that people are gonna be interested in that backstory and that might be part of why people latched on to the clones in general instead of only individual troopers though I can't be sure. It's one thing if you've got people who's narrative role is to kill and be killed and look cool while doing it. It's another thing when that's their purpose in the story.

And the clone wars gives us these occasional episodes that show first that some of the clones actively don't want to be here and second that there are some even among the jedi that see them as inferior. Their reactions in the Umbara arc to Krell using numbers instead of names are strong enough that even without them saying something like "we don't like being called by numbers its dehumanizing" that idea still comes across clearly.

Umbara also tells us that they can be ordered to kill their friends, and they will have to comply.

One of the things the clone wars tells us is that this is a really messed up situation. That the story of the clones is a tragedy. But I don't think it always acts like it.

The thing that was bugging me was Plo Koon's declaration that the troopers mattered to him and Windu taking the time to rescue a trooper and later on Ima-gun Di's last stand with his troopers, juxtaposed with the casualness in the series as a whole with which entire ships are destroyed. And I know, its tricky to talk about this kind of thing when you're making a kids' show and you only have 20-odd minutes on top of that. I'm not really blaming them for treating the troopers the same way you treat an army in any fantasy war story. It's fiction. Explosions on a screen are fun. We all like a badass fight scene. I'm probably not the intended audience for this show anymore and that means my perspective isn't the one the writers are trying to hit.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that it feels a little like the writers gave the clones too much character for their narrative role. And if you as a writer say in-universe that these people's lives matter, sometimes it might feel a bit weird when a ship full of them is blown to pieces and never remarked on again.

I want to end this by acknowledging that I am WAY overanalyzing a kids' show I KNOW so if you're going to criticize this analysis feel free but please criticize about a different point because I recognize the overthinking hell this took like three times as long as I expected to write I have no fucking clue where the time went.

#so I've seen people complain about characters doing something that doesn't match their personality to fill their role or the larger plot #if you've ever see a show/read a book and felt like that I feel like this is a variation of that feeling #or a varient of 'they would not fucking say that'#star wars #clone wars #writing #clone troopers #the story of the clone troopers is a tragedy and it's only brought up occassionally #because they're here to fill a role as army and that's it #this is the risk of taking a cannon plot device and giving it feelings #okay I'm done now

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