‘Andor': Understanding the politics of sexual violence in ‘Star Wars' and its backlash from fans

The Hindu

24-04-2025

A curious phenomenon has always plagued the Star Wars fandom. It's this frustrating reverence for rebellion and the fantasy of resistance neatly repackaged for family-friendly consumption without the stomach for reality. But in the third episode of Andor's second season, showrunner Tony Gilroy commits an act more transgressive than anything we've witnessed so far from this galaxy far, far away, by making fascism cross the line and exposing it for how systemic, grotesque, and gendered, it always has been.
The scene in question involves Adria Arjona's Bix Caleen, a woman already brutalised by the Empire in season one, cornered once more by a predatory Imperial Lieutenant Krole. He offers her freedom in exchange for sex, and when she resists, he attempts to take what he wants by force. She kills him in self-defence. 'He tried to rape me,' she screams, and the word is finally spoken aloud in a franchise that had relegated it to subtext in the galaxy's coded vocabulary of oppression until now.
Then, almost predictably, came the backlash. For some viewers, this was a bridge too far — as if genocide, torture, slavery, and child murder were within the acceptable bounds of imperial evil and sexual violence somehow exceeded the mythic palette. 'It has no place in Star Wars. Period. Unnecessary,' read one viral post. 'Vader wouldn't tolerate that s**t nor does the Empire condone it'. The irony of invoking Anakin Skywalker's iconic masked war criminal who strangled subordinates for sport and once slaughtered a room full of children as some sort of galactic HR enforcer is of course almost too rich to parody.
SA in SW feels unnecessary. You can portray power dynamics and making the audience hate the empire in other ways without taking it to such a disgusting place.
Vader wouldn't tolerate that shit nor does the Empire condone it.
It has no place in Star Wars. Period. Unnecessary. — StarWarsTheory (@realswtheory) April 23, 2025
What these criticisms seem to reveal isn't simply discomfort with the act itself but a willful misunderstanding of the Empire itself. Fascism, historically or otherwise, is invasive, bureaucratic, and yes, it is often sexually violent.
Gilroy seemed to have anticipated the pushback. 'The history of civilisation, there's a huge arterial component of it that's rape,' he told The Hollywood Reporter. 'All of us who are here — we are all the product of rape.' It's a staggering admission for a Disney-backed storyteller, but also an honest one. Gilroy's Empire is systemically evil and is far from interested in giving us fascists with boundaries who politely abstain. 'I mean, armies and power throughout history [have committed rape]. So to not touch on it, in some way… it just was organic and it felt right.'
What Gilroy understands, and what many fans refuse to reckon with, is that sexual violence is not an aberration of war; rather, the logic of power taken to its inevitable, fleshly conclusion. Yet, amid the disbelief, a barrage of infantilised fans clutch their lightsabers and argue canon over consequence. For them, the Empire can enslave but not rape. Jabba can chain Leia to his throne in a bikini, but say the word aloud and the illusion shatters, as though Star Wars has always been a bloodless, ahistorical fantasy free of the grim textures of real-world power. What they truly object to is not the act itself, but its clarity, and that kind of cognitive dissonance feels dangerously naive.
It's also deeply privileged. Because, for countless women crossing borders, surviving war zones, or living under suffocating regimes, what happens to Bix is routine. To ignore that reality, even in the context of speculative fiction, is to perpetuate the silence that survivors have long been forced to live within. What Andor achieves in just one very necessary scene is not gratuitous trauma, but fidelity to lived realities. It's bold enough to enquire what it actually means to live under occupation and demonstrates the mechanics of how evil operates and preys on the powerless.
To depict this is not to sully the franchise. It is to elevate and stretch its familiar mythology into terrain that reflects the complexities of the real world. Andor is the first time Star Wars has truly asked: what does resistance cost? For Mon Mothma, it's her daughter. For Bix, it's her body. For embittered fans watching, it might just be the comfort of pretending that evil comes without violation.
Perhaps that's what some fans truly mourn. Not the supposed loss of innocence in the franchise, but rather the loss of their insulation from reality. They came for pew-pew space battles and got a mirror reflecting something that made them wince.
To those squirming in their seats, good. In some imagined, syntax-challenged wisdom of Master Yoda: 'Discomfort the enemy is not. The teacher, it is.' When it's firing on all cylinders, Star Wars was never just a bedtime story about hope. It was also about the machinery that hope has to claw its way through. If Andor has the guts to call that machinery by its true name, then it isn't 'too political' or 'woke'. It's just finally doing what Star Wars has always promised but seldom delivered throughout its PG-13 existence — telling the truth, no matter how much it burns going down. After all, the galaxy was never that far, far away.
New episodes of Andor stream every Wednesday on JioHotstar