fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4019 ]

[ SECRET POST #4019 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4019 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Love Actually]

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[Brooklyn 99]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #575.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't think having more fighters would have made them able to hold off the capital ships. The plan was always to run away and not engage because of how outnumbered they were. What stopped them from doing that was the tracking, not Poe's attack on the dreadnought.

Also: I don't think Poe can be blamed for the revelation of the escape plan. Trying to get away from the tracking was a reasonable plan, and he had no way of knowing that it would lead to the revelation of an escape plan (that he didn't even know about).

Poe's entire storyline in the movie was that he thought he knew better than the people running the show, and didn't. My issue with how this plays out is that the bodycount is really, really high. Ludicrously high. Which makes everything worse. And the characters don't get any time to grieve, which makes everything seem meaningless and flippant. This is from the creators' side, not the character.

As far as Poe is concerned, if they still had fighters, they might have been able to prevent the First Order from blowing up all the escape pods on the way.
He might not have anticipated that it would end so badly, but that's the nature of fuck-ups. It did. And even if it was unintentional, I'd have appreciated more guilt, at least in private.

NAYRT - The problem with Poe's storyline is that they were obviously trying to subvert the "big damn hero's crazy plan that miraculously saves the day" trope, but they handled it really clumsily. All Poe's suicide runs and convoluted plans led to was a whole bunch of largely unnecessary deaths, and not only does he never acknowledge the fuck up, everyone else is surprisingly cool with it. Sure, Leia scolds him like he's a teenager who broke curfew, but the only person who actually holds him accountable is Hondo and everyone's supposed to think she's being an unreasonable bitch for it. Now, it's the second part of a trilogy, so Poe not acknowledging how badly he screwed everything up yet is not a dealbreaker for me. He's in the middle of his story arc, after all. What kills the storyline for me is that the narrative doesn't really acknowledge it either. Poe doesn't need to be gently chided for being reckless. He needs to be grounded until he understands that his arrogance and incompetence killed a fuckton of his own people so maybe don't do that anymore.

All Poe's suicide runs and convoluted plans led to was a whole bunch of largely unnecessary deaths, and not only does he never acknowledge the fuck up, everyone else is surprisingly cool with it.

Because none of the decisions he was making had anything to do with those deaths, except in an exceedingly random and completely unforeseeable and unpredictable sense that he had no conceivable way of knowing about at the time he was making the decision. That's not a screw-up. That's bad luck.

It's not even like he took a bad risk. He had no conceivable way of knowing that the risk even existed - he didn't know that Finn and Rose would recruit someone that couldn't be trusted, and he didn't know that Finn and Rose would be able to reveal important secrets, and he didn't even know that there were important secrets to reveal if they were captured.

The only thing that he should be punished for, from a narrative point of view, is mutiny and distrust of his superior officers. And that's what he actually is punished for, narratively speaking.

everyone's supposed to think she's being an unreasonable bitch for it

I don't think you're supposed to think Holdo is a bitch. That's definitely not how I read the movie. What I got from it was that Holdo and Poe were both sympathetic characters being unreasonable and somewhat emotional in a deeply difficult situation. In ways that were, honestly, very parallel (and further deepened by their similar relationships with Leia).

What kills the storyline for me is that the narrative doesn't really acknowledge it either. Poe doesn't need to be gently chided for being reckless. He needs to be grounded until he understands that his arrogance and incompetence killed a fuckton of his own people so maybe don't do that anymore.

He was punished for what he actually did wrong. I can accept that there's narrative dissonance stemming from how high the death toll gets, but I think that's divorced from the actual choices he made and the things that he did.

100% my feelings.
The thing is, the movie ended with a sort of symbolic return to glory for him, when Leia says "I don't know, follow him". So he's kind of restored, but they never actually acknowledged the losses, like you said.

But my whole point here is that no one could have reasonably predicted that any of Poe's decisions could have led to those deaths, given the information that Poe had at that time. The deaths were tragic and fucked-up, but I don't think you can even say that they were his fault. The bodycount is high, yeah. It's not his fault. It's, like, fog of war stuff.

(and I don't think there's any particular reason to think that the fighters would have been able to defend the transports effectively, and I certainly don't think that has anything to do with why the command didn't want to attack the dreadnought, unless the command knew that the First Order would be able to track them through hyperspace and just didn't tell anyone)

If the storyline is supposed to be about chastising Poe - and I'm not sure it is - then the things that happen are so detached from Poe's choices that I just don't think it carries through. To me, it's more about the tragedy of war and coming to terms with the idea that it's not a joyride, rather than about Poe fucking up. That's how I read it. And personally, I thought that the film gave sufficient weight to the death and the grieving, but that's just my opinion.

But regardless of that, I definitely don't think you can read it as being Poe's fault. Because it really just isn't.

I'm pretty sure you can read it that way, actually.

1. Poe was the squadron leader. That makes him responsible for the squadron. If he orders them to do something that gets them all killed, that's his fault.

2. He was ordered to retreat and ignored it. By ignoring orders that would have saved multiple lives if followed, he becomes responsible for those deaths. And while taking down a dreadnaught was good optics, in the long run, it didn't accomplish anything useful, so you can't even fall back on the "all those lives were sacrificed for the greater good" argument. Essentially, it was nothing but showboating.

3. Instead of taking some time to reflect on the fact that his plan was bad and disobeying orders got all his people killed, he immediately does the same thing again and gets more people killed. His failure to learn from his mistakes is his fault.

Honestly, I think it takes more mental gymnastics to decide that Poe's not responsible for the direct outcome of his actions than it does to say that Poe got a bunch of people killed by being a dumbass.

I agree that he is responsible for the deaths of the squadron, yes. I don't think that's him being a dumbass. Those deaths weren't senseless. Those people died in a successful attack on a massive capital ship. And I don't think that's meaningless in the long run. It's an important part of, you know, fighting a war. It wasn't showboating. It was wrong to disobey orders, and it's generally a flaw of Poe's that he thinks he has to try to win the war by himself. But it's not an intrinsically wrong or reckless decision taken on its own merits. It's not the case that he's senselessly throwing the lives of his squadron away.

I don't think that he's responsible for the deaths of the people on the transports (which was the direct context of the conversation). Because, first of all, those deaths are not really the direct result of his choices. They're the result of a bunch of other shit that happened after he made his choices and had nothing to do with them. Again, it's wrong for him to disobey orders, and it's wrong for him to think that he needs to win the whole war himself. but he is appropriately punished for those things in a way that narratively makes sense. I don't think it's accurate to characterize him as senselessly wasting lives, or getting people killed, because he doesn't do those things in this instance. You can't even say that his plan was bad, because the things that actually go wrong with his plan are totally unrelated to anything that he could conceivably have known or been expected to know when he made his plan, on multiple different levels.

The deaths of his squadron were tragic, and they are his responsibility, but they weren't senseless - they were part of fighting a war, and leading people to their death is part of what he does as a commander. And the deaths of the people on the transports weren't his fault or his responsibility.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #4019 ]

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