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I’m already seeing a lot of portrayals of Finn’s backstory as a Stormtrooper hinging on wanton violence and trauma. But I wonder if anyone has considered that the way Troopers are conditioned might be by an excess of care/attention, not by violence? I mean, we have evidence of that reading in the fact that Finn’s negative reaction is noted and pursued by his commanding officer. That demonstrates a heightened awareness of each of the troopers, not a lack of care. I wonder if maybe the medical care for troopers–as an example–was absolutely the best that money can buy, but not offered with pleasantries. Like, maybe Finn has had medical care thousands of times but usually he was put under sedation at the drop of a hat rather than allowed to stay conscious and engaged with the medical process. Like, maybe the biggest difference between his current medical care and what he experienced as a trooper is that they’re going to explain what they’re doing at every step now and he’s going to have to push himself to heal, not rely on them making it easy on him.
Like, if a trooper got a spinal injury, wouldn’t it make sense for the clearly affluent First Order to simply replace the spine and, like, build new muscle tissue or whatnot, rather than putting a trooper through longterm physical therapy and making him choose which course of treatment he wants.
Also, I think it’s worth thinking about how everything is easy as a trooper, but nothing is personal and that might be another key difference. I totally buy the idea of Finn being chronically touch-starved and unable to assert choices, though. I am loving that trend in the fic. I bet other key differences could include:
now he has to own things and remember where they are. Like, he takes off his shoes outside and then forgets that, you know, they’re his and he has to come back barefoot to find them later
also remembering how stuff belongs to other people too. Like, he doesn’t recognize the gesture as significant when Poe gives him the jacket. It’s not until Poe says it, maybe even later when he thinks about it again, that it’s a gift.
having to remember names is probably very hard. and then finding out people have two names each, that probably frustrates him and blows his mind equally.
it might take him a while to understand how different people’s backgrounds are. like, maybe he assumes everyone knows how to use a lightsaber because Rey was good at it. If Rey knows it, he just assumes everyone knows it. That’s the way it was for troopers: everyone knew exactly the same things. You never chatted about your childhood because it was exactly identical to everyone else’s. He probably grows to really love hearing people talk about their pasts. He probably makes a lot of friends by being just utterly charmed by the most prosaic of stories.
i bet the messiness of the base bothers him. i bet he has to keep telling himself it’s fine that no one has scoured that wall over there, it’s totally fine. because he clearly wants to go find a bucket and a sponge and just bleach the fuck out of that mold.
god, he is actually probably the neatest ever. once he gets a hang of the idea of this being his room, he probably keeps it fucking spotless
so many good points here. the thing is, stormtroopers are an investment. years of time and effort goes into conditioning them from birth, so they’re not totally expendable. not as much as we might think, anyway. otherwise the Empire/First Order would have kept using droids as foot-soldiers, you know?
the stormtroopers’ life is obviously horrible (brainwashed into murdering innocent civilians; discouraged from building personal/familial connections), but it doesn’t make sense for their entire existence to be completely torturous, because that would decrease their efficiency. it’s a highly regimented and cult-like atmosphere, with an emphasis on eschewing all signs of individuality – a point that makes itself abundantly clear through the use of serial numbers instead of names, and everyone’s identical full-body armour.
this movie made stormtroopers a lot more interesting by introducing the concept of loyalty to the First Order. i liked the way that Finn was specifically branded as a “traitor,” which is a very different tone from the apparently motiveless stormtroopers of the earlier movies. Hux’s speech to the troops on Starkiller Base strongly implied a deep sense of patriotic zealotry, even if it’s the result of explicit brainwashing.
re: the everyday life of stormtroopers, i’m pretty sure there would be like, a black market for snacks and stuff. i think the officers would turn a blind eye to minor ~frivolous behaviours, as long as the troops were still self-policing each other for more serious crimes. this particularly counts for the troops who spend a lot of time planetside, because they’d be exposed to (and therefore tempted by) the way normal people live. otherwise, you’d see way more stormtroopers defecting or going AWOL.
basically, the stormtrooper life is probably a combination of propaganda/indoctrination (”the First Order should be in charge of the galaxy, and everyone else is criminal scum”), a lack of personhood (ie, striving toward being a faceless, nameless First Order loyalist), constant surveillance, and rigorous, habit-forming tasks and schedules. with just enough ~appeal (ie healthcare; a sense of superiority and power and being part of something greater) that the troops would be less likely to defect.
I had to go back and search for this post, because I’d seen it weeks before I saw TFA, before I knew anything about the Star Wars verse beyond the distinct memory of watching Return of the Jedi at least half a dozen separate times when elementary school classmates picked it during free movie afternoons. I’ve seen TFA now, and the original and prequel trilogies, and I’ve read both Alan Dean Foster’s film novelization and Greg Rucka’s prequel Before the Awakening (which in my opinion, should both absolutely be required reading for anyone attempting to discuss the film and its characters). There are a lot of excellent points made here - I don’t need to present agreement about Finn’s upbringing as a stormtrooper being more of a clean dystopia than an active war zone, because that’s explicitly spelled out at length in the prequel - but I would like to add another element to this conversation that I haven’t seen discussed yet.
Finn and Rey’s stories as survivors are meant to directly echo one another, but also meant to contrast one another directly, too. Rey’s story is a fairly conventional narrative of neglect and abuse: she’s been abandoned by her family, left to fend entirely for herself from childhood in abject squalor, and, as the prequel points out, a culture that doesn’t shy away from violence when needed. She muses at length in both novelizations about her overwhelming loneliness - a state she has nothing to compare to, as she’s never known any alternative, at least not that she has clear memories of - and especially as portion trades get stingier and stingier, she often doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from or how long it will be between that and the next one. The culture of Jakku is alien to us, but Rey’s story in its heart isn’t. It’s a story of abuse and neglect, the conventional kinds that come to our minds when we think of those terms, and also, incredibly importantly, a story of poverty, of hunger, of the physical and emotional toll of living in a very low socioeconomic environment. (That socioeconomic element is just as important to Rey’s backstory as if she were a protagonist living on the streets of an inner-city lower-class neighborhood in modern-day America, and we shouldn’t forget that.)
Finn’s story doesn’t look like that same kind of abuse on the surface, and that’s because it’s an entirely different tale in that regard. Finn’s life, on the surface, doesn’t seem to be all that bad. Sure, he’s a soldier stripped of his identity all the way down to his name, a number in the ranks of an army commanded by mass murderers who hardly blink at the thought of annihilating entire planetary systems as a decoy move in a larger battle strategy - but he’s clothed, well-fed, lives in conditions no more uncomfortable than your modern-day army base accommodations, he has access to (what’s being purported as) education and training and camaraderie. At first glance, he’s doing okay.
Except he’s not okay, because his life is about as textbook of an example of gaslighting as an abuse technique as you could find in storytelling.
Seriously, if you haven’t, please do yourself a favor and read Before the Awakening. It’s a gorgeous piece of writing in its own right, but it’s absolutely essential for understanding Finn (and Rey, and probably Poe most of all, I would argue) as a character. The running theme throughout Finn’s narration in his section in it is one of an underlying dread and unease he can’t shake, because he literally does not have the vocabulary to do so. He keeps being told that what he’s doing is Right - not only right in the sense of obeying the rules, but right in a moral sense, that the stormtroopers are doing a great service to the galaxy. There’s a small scene in the middle of his section, just a few paragraphs, but probably the most resonant one for me personally, where he’s in a morale-boosting session being shown propaganda videos about how the First Order’s missions are a service, how others in the galaxy create conflict and the First Order helps to restore safety and wellbeing to citizens affected by others’ actions, and everyone around him is cheering and clapping and hollering and Finn cannot, absolutely cannot, understand why he can’t go along with it, why this thing he’s being told is so Right feels nothing but wrong to him in the depths of his heart and intuition.
He acts, at several points in the prequel, to save a squad member during training session who’s lagging below the rest in competency, and even though he’s been told that he should do anything he can to ensure the successes of his squad, he’s pulled aside and reprimanded for his acts - given a bare-bones explanation why, although we as the reader know it’s because they showed compassion and compassion is unacceptable because it can lead to independent thought and insurgency. He’s left feeling utterly dumbfounded by this, because he thought he was following the rules, thought he was doing the Right thing, only to be told the fact that it’s unacceptable with most of the why withheld, leaving him with a sense of active confusion and cognitive dissonance and no vocabulary to express it adequately.
Listen: I’ve never been a child soldier plucked from my home and family to fight for an interstellar army, but my entire childhood was basically one long string of emotional abuse and gaslighting, and Finn’s story is so unbelievably resonant to me I don’t know where to begin. The feeling that what you’re being taught as Right is not at all so, but not having any sort of vocabulary or perspective to explain why, and looking at your seemingly cushy-by-comparison life and living in a constant cycle of second-guessing yourself and your own intuition that something could be Wrong - I spent two decades of my life feeling that feeling every single day, too. It’s a hellish feeling, because not only do you second-guess everything you’ve ever been told in your life, but once you reorient your worldview back around to something approaching normalcy, you spend the rest of your life second-guessing that that footing could fall out from underneath you just as easily, that maybe the new moral compass you’ve built for yourself is just as Wrong as the old gaslit one, except worse this time around because you did it, which would make you just as bad and just as capable of harm as whoever did it to you the first time around. That’s an aspect of Finn’s story that I deeply hope gets explored further in the next two films, or at least in the supplemental material for them.
There is a post in me for another day about how Finn’s story, once you take away the surface details of evil armies and stormtrooper helmets and space battles, once you remove it from the context of the purpose he serves in Rey’s larger story, is a variant on the Cinderella story at heart: a boy who loses his home and family and normalcy to have it replaced by uncaring, monotonous evil, albeit one where there was no Before the wicked (dictator-)stepmother to look back on in his memory and compare it to, a boy who can’t quiet his intuition that kindness can be revolutionary because kindness can break the cycle. There is another post in me for yet another day about how Finn’s “because it’s the right thing to do” is a revolutionary act and not a moralistic one, not only because kindness can be revolutionary but because of how subversive that statement is linguistically, in that all he’s ever been told his whole life is that what he’s doing is Right, and in that moment he finally triumphs in taking back the language of his abusers and oppressors and saying, “fuck that, this is MY definition of Right.” (There are many, many posts about how his relationship with Poe factors directly into those things, in whatever capacity you want to interpret it, but those are certainly for another day altogether.)
But what I am saying today is that it’s important to remember this: Finn and Rey are both survivors, and surviving doesn’t have to be tied to blood and death and violence and physical horrors. Prior to Jakku, according to the prequel novel, Finn had never seen battle, only simulations that amounted to little more than video games and endurance training - blood and physical horror and the things we think of as violence/abuse only affect him that one time under the First Order’s watch. What Finn survives is a world that looks Okay on the surface, if not ideal, one that’s built on a foundation of lies and active information withholding and a morality so skewed it should be almost impossible to find true north out of it. And through all of that, through his own sheer will and intuition and refusal to shake the feeling that there’s a better Right out there than the one he’s been presented with, Finn finally learns how to define Right on his own terms. And trust me: surviving that, and making that choice, is just as heroic as anything.
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