Star Wars Has Been Struggling with the Slavery of Droids For A Long Time
Slavery has been a core theme in the Star Wars universe for a long time. Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd/Hayden Christensen) — the Jedi Knight who would betray the Jedi Order and become a key figure in the rise of the Galactic Empire — began his life as an enslaved person on the desert planet of Tatooine. His decision to leave behind his enslaved mother, Shmi (Pernilla August), to join the Jedi Order (and his inability to help her) is partly what drives him to the Dark Side.
Human slavery is framed as abhorrent in this universe (because it is in every universe). We empathize with Anakin and are meant to see his “owner,” a junk-dealing alien named Watto (Andy Secombe), as disgusting. Watto is a potbelly grifter, and our leads in The Phantom Menace (1999) have to outsmart him to get the spaceship part they need.
Likewise, Jabba the Hutt (played by Larry Ward and puppeteers Toby Philpott, Mike Edmonds, and David Barclay) is a prominent slaver and crime syndicate boss in the original series (see Return of the Jedi), and he is quite literally a giant worm guarded by walking pigs. We are meant to be sickened by his very presence and the institution of slavery he represents.
Yet this same empathy for organic enslaved persons has historically not been extended to droids in the Star Wars franchise (see Pop Culture Detective’s The Tragedy of Droids in Star Wars), who are almost all owned by an organic. These characters are routinely portrayed as having emotions, pain, and desires, but they are also framed in the narratives as comedic punchlines or faceless villains.
Rarely are they given the actual agency of their human counterparts, even the ones who are likewise enslaved.
Since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, the company has been struggling with the implications of this issue. Multiple mainstream properties have grabbled with droid enslavement and personhood in a way that we haven’t seen before, and it might be too little, too late.
A beeping history
It’s well noted that one of the inspirations for the first Star Wars film is Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (1958) — a Japanese samurai movie about two oafish peasants unknowingly guiding a general and a princess across enemy territory in exchange for gold.
Hidden Fortress’s influence on Star Wars particularly applies to the most famous characterization of droids in the Star Wars universe — C-P30 and R2-D2. They are partly based on the two peasants in the film, Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara), the comedic relief characters that bumble around as the general and princess characters do more serious work.
There is a classist framing here, as, throughout the film, the peasant’s greed causes them to constantly lose and retrieve the gold promised to them — the thing separating them from the nobles focused on more serious things. We are meant to see their antics as almost childish. After losing the gold a final time, the film ends with them ironically getting a single bar of gold as a reward. One, they are finally able to share after being commanded to do so by the princess.
It can be argued that this hierarchy between serfs and lords was recontextualized by Lucas in the Star Wars universe as between owner and droid.
As with the peasant-noble relationship in Hidden Fortress, we might be encouraged to feel or root for a droid helping its owner in a particular scene, but never enough to assess the deeply unfair status quo. C-3PO may quip about its unfair lot, and a Droid in Jabba’s Palace may scream out in pain after getting tortured, but at the end of the day, it’s not an injustice because they are not framed as persons.
Yet, this status quo has been slowly shifting. While there has been some mention of attempted droid autonomy in legacy books and short stories (such as Kevin J. Anderson’s Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88) in more popular pieces of media, we can trace the origin of this trend to the droid L3–37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) in the much-maligned title Solo (2018).
Throughout this fictional biopic about how the smuggler Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) got his start, secondary robot protagonist L3–37 or L3 frames the oppression of droids as an injustice. As she says to another droid: “They are using you for entertainment. You’ve been neurowashed. Don’t just blindly follow the program. Exercise some free will!”
And yet, she is mocked for this sense of justice. In one example, her owner, Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), asks her if L3–37 needs anything. She sarcastically quips, “Equal rights,” and Calrissian just sighs. L3–37 is ultimately framed as a social justice warrior who won’t stop complaining about her second-class status — and for some reason, that’s supposed to be annoying. Her narrative ends not with her freedom but with her consciousness being uploaded to the Millennium Falcon —her agency stripped away.
In Solo, the idea of droid autonomy is introduced unseriously, and that’s more or less where the series has remained until this year.
Another example of droid autonomy that feels underbaked is how C-3PO is treated in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), the last film in the most recent trilogy. A common practice in the Star Wars universe is for owners to erase the memories of their droids for both general maintenance and as a security measure. This effectively kills them, as their consciousness is erased and reverts to an earlier setting.
C-3PO willingly gets wiped to help his owners with plot shenanigans. He gives a passionate monologue about saying goodbye to his friends, and the film hardly skips a beat before our leads move on to the next thing. Protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley) is, in fact, overjoyed to learn mere seconds later that an organic she thought dead is alive.
C-3PO’s memory ultimately gets restored haphazardly by R2-D2, but it’s an earlier backup — he still died, even if it’s not framed that way in the text. It is also not really a moment of celebration among the organics like the rescue of other characters is.
Yet perhaps the best in-universe examination of this theme comes from the recent video game Star Wars: Outlaws (2024), which is unfortunate because the game is not very good. The theme of droid agency is explored directly with the character ND-5 (Jay Rincon). He is the partner-in-crime and handler of protagonist Kay Vess (Humberly González,) as she attempts to recruit a crew across the galaxy to pull a once-in-a-lifetime heist.
ND-5, a droid created for war, is aware of his lack of agency, and he’s not particularly thrilled about it, saying: “I was created to destroy. I didn’t concern myself with why. It can be difficult for organics to understand.”
He lacks free will on a fundamental level, and for a series so uncurious about the agency of artificial intelligence, it was almost surprising to see.
This theme is further highlighted in the final act of the game, when ND-5's owner, Jaylen Vrax (Eric Johnson), betrays Kay and forces ND-5 to fight her. Kay dodges ND-5’s laser fire behind crates and inside air ducts, but she never abandons him, making it her mission to free the droid from his restraining bolt (i.e., the technology that forces him to follow orders) and, consequently, from Jaylen Vrax’s control.
She succeeds with this objective and ends the game by calling ND-5 her family, a level of personhood that I haven’t seen in a lot of Star Wars media — one that hopefully opens the door for a possible shift in how this franchise frames droid personhood.
A robotic conclusion
The way I broke down Outlaws might make it sound like I think Star Wars has entered a progressive era with this issue, but I actually think it might be too little ground too late.
Examining the personhood of artificial life is one of the most basic themes in science fiction. It goes all the way back to the Golden Age with Isaac Asmiov’s The Robot Series (1940-95). Whether we are talking about Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) or the synthetic Geth in the Mass Effect series (2007–12), this is well-trodden ground at this point.
The fact that Star Wars is only getting to this now speaks to a level of stagnation with the property.
Furthermore, the way the personhood of these droids is framed by the affections and attachments of their human owners is paternalistic. Because Rey and Kay grow to like C-3PO or ND-5, these robots are framed emphatically. But the other droids in the series? They often get blasted to bits. These pieces of media are more about an individual narrative of chosen family rather than one of emancipation or demonizing the institution of droid slavery.
It’s not that I expect a full droid slave revolt in the next Disney+ show (though it can’t hurt), but it would be nice if, at the very least, the heroes we are supposed to like recognize that enslaving a sentient being is wrong. By nature of our leads being comfortable with this institution — it’s hard for me to like them.
The Star Wars galaxy may be far, far away, but its rejection of slavery shouldn’t be.