I've been watching this show with my girlfriend, and while we both love anything to do with the rebellion side of things, she's significantly cooler than I am on any time they focus in on the Imperials (mostly because she feels like its too many characters without enough focus). And its really gotten me thinking: what is it about the way this show depicts fascism, and the people who becomes fascists, that I find so compelling, that excites me even.
This is what I figured out yesterday: there is so much of what Andor depicts as evil that the rest of the mass culture tries to elide. Growing up in the USA involves really being gaslit (a term I don't use lightly) into an understanding of what "goodness" and "badness" looks like, or even just what the normative values are, that celebrates injustice and domination and cruelty and as a result can only spit out the most banal and insubstantial caricatures of "evil" in most popular fiction.
Watching something like Andor feels incredibly grounding, its watching a mass entertainment product that seems to understand all of the sick things I see in the world around me that I've been told I'm supposed to celebrate or just ignore and it gives me this connective feeling of "Oh thank god, other people see it too". I've known that on a conscious level for a long time of course, I talk to other people about it all the time, but with how integral entertainment media is to just about every level of American life there's something powerful about seeing it onscreen with a big budget.