Funny thing about the new canon: despite all the effort puts into gesturing at clone individuality, every time we see a clone, it’s still so they can fight. The Bad Batch’s whole thing is that they are individuals... and that makes them better at fighting. Cut ends up fighting in Deserter which is supposed to be about what life could be like for Rex if he left the army, and the episode depicts that as a way to indicate that he is still worth something as a person. Echo literally gets abducted and turned into the war version of chatgpt, and when he gets out, everyone's like "so, who you gonna join up with for the rest of the war bud?"
It isn't that clones don't have interests outside of war. They do. They listen to music, they drink at bars, Cut gets married, Rex wants kids, we meet tons of clones who think women are hot (and how could you not), there's so many things they want that have nothing to do with war. But no show yet has tried to imagine a clone who not only doesn't want to fight, but whose life has significance outside of fighting. Clones are purpose-bred for war, and the canon has no interest in imagining a life for them beyond that. When we see Gregor, for instance, he is literally inhabiting an existentialist void that has no color until frog man and his droid bois come and make Gregor color it with explosions. The only thing Rex can give his friends is his combat prowess. Lending someone his gun or his military expertise is the deepest symbol of his loyalty.
Real talk, clones are like half the reason I ended up liking Star Wars enough to make 1000 Wookieepedia edits as a kid or write posts like this as an adult. They are the thing I've loved about Star Wars since I was a kid and Clone Wars was airing. If you grew up in poverty, they're such an evocative idea; they are the embodiment of the "I am here because I'm good at something and for no other reason and if I fuck up or change my mind I will be dead because this is the sole purpose that capitalism has assigned me" alienation that you experience when you're poor and your talent gets you stuck with a bunch of rich kids. In the old canon, they were the thing you could point to as evidence that the Jedi were a fucked up group of crazy ascetics. I love that the hypocrisy they embody still comes through enough in the new canon that people like AMCA can see it and give us new perspectives on it. I just wish the new canon was willing to engage with that idea the way the old was. I wish we got a story where Ahsoka grappled with one of her best friends being a slave soldier, or where Cut tries to form his identity outside the army. The old canon gave us things like that, though they were often unsatisfactory. Will it ever exist in the new?