LogFAQs > #974437426

Blightzkrieg posted...

The droid racism is definitely the funniest bit of classic GL worldbuilding, where he throws some bizarre shit at the wall and it sort of sticks. It carried on into basically zero other star wars works and most writers just kind of ignored it.

The droids are a nightmare in general.

If you think about them for more than about 30 seconds (ie, 23 seconds longer than Lucas ever thought about it, and about 27 seconds longer than Disney ever did), you'll realize that these things that often seem sentient (and are treated as such by plenty of characters) are literally treated as slaves. In fact, they deliberately wipe their memories on a regular basis specifically to prevent them from becoming too sentient (and thus complain about being slaves).

It kind of makes everyone in that galaxy seem like a complete asshole. No one's running a "House Elf" civil rights crusade like in Harry Potter - everyone (including the good guys) just implicitly accepts that droids exist to do the menial work, generally get treated like shit, and then get disassembled whenever it becomes convenient.

Conversely, we accept the idea that droids aren't sentient in any way and are just programmed to ACT like people. In which case everyone still kind of comes across like an asshole, because it means they get off on the idea of their robotic servants acting like people they can treat like crap.