The second act of Andor season two, among many other things, reunited insurgent lovers Vel Sartha and Cinta Kaz as part of Luthen’s attempts to scope out resistance to the Empire on Ghorman. Separated for years after the events of season one—save from a distant “reunion” at the climax of season two’s opening trio of episodes—when Vel and Cinta meet again across these episodes, they are given a chance to reflect on both their relationship to Luthen and the growing Rebellion, and ultimately to each other, culminating in a tender moment: one that, after the casual queerness of their arc across season one, handily became what is arguably Star Wars‘ most prominent and explicit showcase of on-screen queer intimacy yet.
Alas, it was not to last. Almost immediately after Cinta and Vel get to share a moment of passion together, tragedy strikes. Dealing with anxious and unprepared members of the Ghorman resistance to stage a heist of Imperial weaponry, an altercation between one of the guerrillas, Samm, and a local Ghor leads to an accidental blaster discharge, a stray bolt that catches Cinta clean in the chest, killing her instantly (banner week for Varada Sethu being shot, apparently, between this and the latest Doctor Who).
It’s simultaneously both an excellent dramatic moment—especially the aftermath of Vel’s grief, where she ruefully hangs the trauma of Cinta’s death on Samm’s conscience, a greater pain she can deal in the moment than simply killing him in turn—and an incredibly precarious one for Andor to navigate. No matter however it could be handled, the moment still brushes up on a controversial trope of disposing LGBTQ characters that has plagued discussion of queer representation in media for years: the idea of “Bury Your Gays,” in which a queer character is introduced and then killed off for shock value once they have checked a box off for diverse representation rather than being given much of a character arc.
Star Wars, especially in on-screen material, still has a long way to go in introducing prominent LGBTQ characters, five years on from its painfully lackluster watershed moment with Rise of Skywalker‘s fleeting sapphic kiss. While queer characters certainly exist plenty in Star Wars media more broadly these days, from comics, to books, to games, Star Wars is still in the eyes of many still primarily a franchise of film and TV, and Vel and Cinta were arguably by far and away the most prominent on-screen LGBTQ characters it had delivered in the last decade. Giving one of them a tragic end—especially almost immediately after allowing them a moment of happy reconciliation and romance—would always have stung for queer audiences in this context, regardless of how well it was handled, and especially regardless of how Andor itself is often willing to derive tension in its spy thriller narratives by making it clear to audiences that the vast majority of its cast are rarely guaranteed safety.
But on the other hand, Andor does not treat Cinta’s death as mere shock value. The moment is presented with tremendous weight, a meaning that the arc itself is built around in the tensions of what it really means for people to take resistance into their own hands. Cinta’s bravery could’ve earned her a hero’s death, a blaze of glory reflecting the choices she had made to fight back against the Empire, but the bitterness of her death is that people in conflicts like Andor‘s don’t get the liberty of the death they’ve earned. It can be sudden, and messy, and indelicate, because that is simply the reality we all face in the shadow of the great equalizer. Her death is not only a harsh lesson for the Ghorman Front, but for Vel and the audience too: revolution is rarely clean and rarely without cost.
Vel and Cinta are one of several romances Andor explores, and often fractures, as they are caught up in this question of the necessity of resistance—and arguably even as their relationship forms a significant part of that questioning, its nature as an explicitly queer one is not the sole defining aspect of that lens. In distinct contrast to Rise‘s fleeting, easily discarded queer moment, Andor treats both Cinta and Vel as enriched, fleshed-out characters who happen to be queer, rather than capital-Q, capital-C Queer Characters whose existence only hangs on the metatext of the franchise getting to say “look, lesbians!” and then having little else to say through them before they can be discarded. That doesn’t erase either character’s queerness, but just makes it one aspect of their whole.
Andor‘s narrative treating them both in this regard, even as Cinta and Vel face the tough prospect of still being one of the very few on-screen queer couples the franchise has had so far, also means that the show treats the both of them like it does almost any other member in its cast. In Andor‘s case, that means giving them the narrative right to be jeopardized, to be put in harm’s way, to experience random tragedy as much as any other heteronormative character would. And even as Star Wars still continues to take tiny steps towards better representing a plethora of queer characters, it’s just as vitally important that it doesn’t feel like it cannot risks with those characters simply because of representative importance. Neither Cinta nor Vel had to be doomed by the narrative, but in the story that Andor is telling in Star Wars, the fact that they can be is a testament to the series treating them as more than just a checked box on list of diverse representation.
Star Wars should have more gay people in it, absolutely, so the loss of any at this point is always going to hurt. But part of that journey to tangible, quality representation also means that those queer characters need to be able to be as messy, complicated, and nuanced as their straight counterparts, to be treated as actual characters to whom queerness is just one quality, and one story, among many they can be used to explore. And sometimes that also means, for better or worse, being able to put them in harm’s way and experience tragedy, instead of leaving them safely tucked away on a shelf.
Andor season two is now streaming on Disney+.
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