I never even realized some people could see thid character as someone will be redeemed, I loved his character because he was so on the nose, doomed to be a low level bureaucrat forever but ultimately the person that enables empire, someone who really believes in it all
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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He's a fucking idiot. He's the personification of ritual belief in an idea instead of the material reality. The very first fucking thing he does is ignore his own boss, who is clearly more experienced than he is, who wants to brush the 2 deaths under the carpet because it will cause more trouble otherwise. His boss understands the fucking mess everything is and how none of this shit actually operates cleanly and how they have to let shit go to keep things smooth.
What does he do? Ignore him. Do his own thing. Get multiple people killed, start shootouts in the street, lose a fucking dropship (like losing a Blackhawk) and fucking everything up. Why does he do this? Because he's completely and totally bought into the empire, the fascism, the hierarchy, the rigid corporate structure and rules. He's a hall monitor rules pervert. He's not willing to analyse reality and adapt to it. He wants to follow the rigid structure and it goes wrong literally every single fucking time.
The fascist system and structures do not work the way they claim they work on paper and you have to adapt to how they really work in order to succeed, he never learns this, not even once. He just constantly conforms to the obvious bullshit of everything and fits into the nazi machine and dies for it. Fuck him. He deserves it. The little rat piece of shit. It is only his own mortality being threatened that finally makes him realise it, seconds before his end.
You see dweebs like this in every fucking corporate job too. The morons that fully buy into corporate structure and the work hard and climb idea of them. The absolute toolbags that never think to stop and analyse how it actually works inside the company because it sure as shit never works like they claim it works.
Great take! I really like Andor and really appreciated how much of a whiny sad sack this character was. Your comment makes me want to rewatch it with this perspective.
He likes the hierarchy and strict order of things. He likes conforming to a simple set of rules and "the way things work". He believes that this is all structured and fair and that it all works like they say it works.
None of it does though.
There's a lot of people who sincerely believe this about the system we currently live in too. They are completely oblivious to it not working that way until a cop literally beats the shit out of them, or something happens in a job to utterly destroy their life, career and more. Only a true life shock snaps them out of believing it and makes them reassess. In Syril's case he externalised his life shock onto Andor though, it wasn't his own fault that his life fell apart it was Andor's fault in his mind.
it wasn't his own fault that his life fell apart it was Andor's fault in his mind.
Sounds familiar…
I believe Syril is a great litmus test for your average lib. Either a person realizes Syril was internally a crap individual that got satisfaction by being a rules Nazi, or they turn him into a sad little woobie man who could be redeemed any day now just you wait! Nope there is no redemption for the dude that willingly became a gestapo bean counter, he goes into the pit with the rest of them 
Lowkey I love his character because he gets domed in the head when he realizes, only when people are legit torn apart in front of him by murder bots, that he "might be a bad guy". Nope you libs you don't get to whitewash the space Nazi.
"who are you?"
Was such a great ending for him.
A great example of how many people believe in the mask of liberalism, to borrow the term from the
. They belive all the propaganda about freedom, bootstraps, the American Dream, democracy, blah blah blah. Some people need the mask torn down right in front of them to see the truth. It's one of the big advantages of the US is that it has all its wars abroad instead of at home, with an all volunteer military, and now even with drones. Each step keeps the truth more and more removed from the average person, so they will never have to see the mask drop.spoiler
Deserter in Disco Elysium
Yup some people legit need to see the mask of capital to truly fall off before they realize the empire is not human and never has been and they are participating in mass murder.
Took me way too long to realize you are talking about syril not about the critical drinker
Waaaiiit a moment I don't even think the critical drinker has a drop ship
The critical drinker should be given a drop ship so as to massively increase his odds of dying in a drop ship related accident
I haven't watched Andor but this guy sounds like this
(No offense to Spongebob)
Yes
Calling Syril a "good man" lmao okay buddy he was a space nazi who deserved worse.
E: also the point of his character was to show that all cops are nazis at heart.
not just cops, but the rent-a-cops/private security which was where Syril got started. he was a completely devoted cop-wannabe that was too dim and ineffective to even make it into imperial security.
he got completely bent out of shape by his two fellow "corporate security" rent-a-cops getting popped while doing the dirt and was so upset that the institution didn't want to investigate, that he went over his superior's head (Chief Hynes) after being told to let it go.
"They were killed in a fight. Outside of a brothel, which we're not supposed to have. The expensive one, which they're not supposed to be able to afford. Drinking Revnog, which we're not supposed to allow."
so he calls it in anyway to get a rapid response team of gungho door kickers on the case, which of course costs a bunch of money and leads to nothing but the corporation losing the contract, just like the boss said it would, and Syril gets shit canned from his mall cop shift supervisor job that he had his uniform tailored for. so he moves back in with his mom and broods about how troublemakers go unpunished.
personally, i loved how they portrayed him as instrumental to the fascist machine. a completely unlikable and dimwitted asshole who worships rules and procedures for security and social order. he was like supervisor meero, except zero guile or cunning. meero, by contrast, was fucking terrifying and i loved how she ended up getting hers. absolutely poetic, since she was the one that perfected the prison work process to get promoted into ISB.
anybody who comes away from this sympathetic to syril should be isolated and studied in a lab.
anybody who comes away from this sympathetic to syril should be isolated and studied in a lab.
I'm sympathetic to him in the sense that he clearly grew up with a narcissistic mother and I think his whole embracing of the Empire's ideology was essentially him trying to replace her structural control over his life with a new one but one that made him feel less emasculated. Plus clearly at the end of it all he realized he was being used and didn't even know why the fuck he was so stupidly dedicated to an Empire that didn't give a fuck about him.
Still a total piece of shit and I'm glad he got-got, but he definitely had a human side to him.
His character introduction is being the sort of loser that tailors his corpo slop security uniform and argues with his superiors about following the rules (on the side of rules).
reminds me of that quote "It Is No Measure of Health To Be Well-Adjusted to a Profoundly Sick Society", i doubt the hog can properly abstract what "good men" and "bad society" is; his definition of good men is probably rigid and subscribes to harmful patriarchal themes.
It is no measure of 
to be
in a society of 
We get to know him as an incompetent cop and he only gets worse, yea. The only thing that Drinker is correct about there is that the Empire obviously does not give a fuck about the little cogs in it's machine.
The point is he stands for something, larping as a cop gives his life meaning, and he does think he's doing the right thing. The point about his final realization was just entirely spot on. He literally walks away from the empire and his evil girlfriend after telling her shits fucked like ten seconds before he dies. You get to see how he could have been a good person.
You get to see how he could have been a good person.
I appreciate how he dies regardless. He had ample opportunity to be a good person, yet he fought against it to the last possible moment. It is not enough to be good “on the inside.” Being a good person, doing the right thing, requires courage.
This I think was what I liked the most, that redemption isn't easily earned and just realizing you "might be the bad guy" doesn't mean you aint getting a bullet in the head for what you've already done. Syril encapsulates that there is no final hour come to Jesus moment for Nazis and their enablers, they either realized much earlier the system was F-ed or they wouldn't have come along for the ride so far into the shitshow to then pull back at the last second because "oh BUT THIS is too much".
final hour come to Jesus moment
Reintroduce the concept of purgatory into Protestantism so that people don’t imagine their sins can be erased in an instant of clarity
If he'd been born into a system that wasn't dysfunctional and evil at every level, he could have been an annoying but ultimately harmless jerk nobody likes
Oh, like there aren't good obnoxious jerks nobody likes.
I thought about this a lot while watching it. He would've been a great, albeit annoying bureaucrat in a communist society. It doesn't matter what the rules are, he would make sure they're followed to the letter. In his life, that meant dying for a fascist empire.
In a communist utopia, he would've made sure all the forms are filled out before getting your alottment of food or guaranteed job, or tracking down corruption in party officials, or something else indispensable that doesn't require people to like you, but does mean picking some principles and following them to the end and gives him some authority to retain some control he never got while living with his mother.
Maybe your idea of utopia is different than mine, but my version of a communist utopia doesn't have forms or bureaucrats .
Fair. Think I was just looking for a word with a different connotation than empire and "society" or "state" felt boring lol.
What instead of the critical drinker he was the critical sprinkler and he kept plants healthy and hyrdrated
The Empire isn’t or wasn’t “really” anything at all. It’s fucking fictitious.
I know lots of people say Andor is some sort of great political thriller and very deep and super thoughtful, but I just can’t get past the fact that it’s a Star Wars spin-off. The leader of this banality-of-evil fascist state is a cackling cartoon wizard.
I know lots of people say Andor is some sort of great political thriller and very deep and super thoughtful, but I just can’t get past the fact that it’s a Star Wars spin-off. The leader of this banality-of-evil fascist state is a cackling cartoon wizard.
Is that really the most unrealistic part of the empire?
I liked it a lot more because I don't like Star Wars. Notice anything Force-related is conspicuously missing. It's for better that it doesn't try to tie into the Canon™ except for maybe the island prisons making parts for Death Star and obviously Kassian himself being in Rogue One.
There's a little bit near the very end when there's some "feeling of destiny" stuff around Andor. But ya, that's about it.
The fact that the empire isnt really anything is Andors strength. It can, for instance, demonstrate that colonialism and fascism are two facets of the same thing by having them occur simultaneously in different places. It can have characters speak about fascism writ large without getting bogged down on the specific cultural circumstances in which one instance of it arose because the empire is a vague stand-in for all fascism. It functions like all fantasy-as-allegory, by stripping things away.
Yes, we all enjoy a good science fiction allegory story. Requiring that it must be a part of a recognisable brand family in a corporate portfolio is the shitty part. Andor had no business being a Star Wars story, but if it weren’t then Disney would have never funded its production. That fucking sucks.
I have no disagreement with that position and see where you're coming from, but i would argue that it wasn't at any point made worse by being a Star Wars spinoff, that it in fact avoided all potential ways being a Star Wars spinoff could have sloppified it and that it actively made the franchise less shit by countering the great man heroism of the orginal trilogy and showing that the rebellion wouldn't have achieved anything without collective action.
Sure, it would have worked just as well as a standalone story about space fascism. But it was nice to see a Star Wars spinoff without a single lightsaber in it. It demonstrates perfectly what franchised media normally does wrong by just not making these mistakes, and there's a certain merit in offering that kind of contrast.
I haven't watched andor yet but tbh Star Wars is my favourite slop. I love the old legends stuff especially. It's a definite guilty pleasure, but it's both nostalgic and extremely fun.
I agree but also I get to point out Andor is based on Stalin and libs hate that
As RLM says, "I don't even know what a Star Wars is anymore."
One thing I liked about Andor is it fleshed the Empire out. Yes in the original series they are just cartoon villains with a Nazi coat of paint. Andor got into the details of how the Empire is exploiting and oppressing people. Cassian is born on a planet that was strip mined by the Empire, he grew up on Ferrix, a planet of ship breakers who are under the authority of a private corporation who the Empire has licensed regional power to, his first mission is to a planet where the Empire is driving indigenous nomadic people into urban manufacturing centers, he helps the resistance on a middle-income planet who the Empire is manufacturing justification for an intervention in because they need to mine a resource that they know will fuck up their environment.
All of this is being under the guise of an "energy program" that's actually just a massive WMD development program (granted the WMD in question is the Death Star which is kind of a goofy concept scifi wise). Andor show the Empire is a extractive colonialist power harvesting resources to develop their military industrial complex.
Cassian is born on a planet that was strip mined by the Empire
Actually, Cassian was born on a planet that was strip mined by the Republic.
I'm not saying this just to do the nerd correction. It highlights the continuity between the Republic and the Empire, and how fascism is colonialism turned inward.
They don't even shy away from pointing out that the rebellion was taking the form of the Republic at the end. The more radical revolutionaries all die and the liberal reformers take control
Despite how fucking bad the sequels are, it's amazing to know that the fascism returns because the liberals did nothing useful.
Somehow, fascism returned.
Avoiding the censors but for the IP slop era.
Completely off topic, but I've just realised that he looks like the twins from Blonde Redhead when they were young. Maybe it's the haircut?