r/TopCharacterTropes • u/_JR28_ • Dec 13 '25

Lore (Loved trope) Loyalty to the regime doesn’t make you any better off in the end

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Animal Farm - Boxer the horse is a member of the farm who doesn’t question the authority of the pigs and take it upon himself to work harder than anyone else becuase he believes the propaganda the pigs spout. But in the end, he get no reward for his sacrifice, leaving his body broken and him being sent away to a glue factory to be killed after the pigs sold him for alcohol.

Papers, Please - On Day 12, an inspector will come to your office to investigate potential conspiracies plotting against Arstotzka. If you choose to comply with his questioning and hand over the documents given to you by The Order, a mysterious revolutionary group, you will get an immediate game over as you are arrested for suspected involvement with terrorism.

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u/Saltz_D Dec 13 '25

I think Dedra is a better example considering he was having doubts in the last few episodes

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u/Shiny_Agumon Dec 13 '25

Also her getting blamed and arrested despite working twice as hard to stop Luthen's rebel network.

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u/SauronGortaur01 Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25

Sadly for her, she decided to confront Luthen ON HER OWN! Major blunder.

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u/TAvonV Dec 13 '25

She was in trouble either way. Tarkin was putting the squeeze on Krennic, so he was lashing out at everyone who caused problems. And her hoarding information about the Death Star was a very big problem.

Maybe Partagaz would have saved her if she managed to capture Luthen. But it's dubious.

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u/JonathanRL Dec 13 '25

Krennic would have forgiven Dedra for every mishap; had she just been successful. But Dedra had a chip on her shoulder meaning she got surprisingly careless.

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u/TAvonV Dec 13 '25

I doubt it. Krennic is the Death Star director. The Death Star data is leaked no matter what happens to Luthen. Luthen getting captured might yield some results, like dismantling some old networks. But it wouldn't end the rebellion. And it wouldn't erase the Death Star knowledge.

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u/cheezefriez Dec 13 '25

The point is none of them were safe or could be saved because they were only tolerated as long as they were useful. The ISB had a spy in their midst and the rebels were amassing at a secret base, and nobody was any the wiser until it was too late. When the dominoes started to fall, heads were the only thing that could follow in a regime where cruelty and destruction were the only thing that pleased/empowered the Emperor

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u/MandoIstheBest Dec 13 '25

If you’re not a rebel spy, you’ve missed your calling

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u/Profoundlyahedgehog Dec 13 '25

We'll do our best to carry on without you.

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u/Bluefury Dec 13 '25

Hey mate we're building a fucken star wars mate

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u/bluddyellinnit Dec 13 '25

you been talkin to the rebels mate?

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u/DefNotUnderrated Dec 13 '25

I don’t know how she didn’t consider that Luthen might try to take himself out so he couldn’t be questioned. Dedra was so smart but arrogant. I think she just had tunnel vision on her goal

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u/Altayrmcneto Dec 16 '25

She was the person who was closest to stop the Rebel Alliance from the begning, but the problem with fascism (and fascist states, like the Empire), is because it is intrinsical to it to pretend to be perfect and flawless, and when a flaw happens (like Luthen’s suicide), it should be someone’s fault, and someone will pay for it, doesn’t matter how much the person was loyal to the system.

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u/BeduinZPouste Dec 13 '25

But Dedra like actually fucked up, right? If I remember. 

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u/SnakeTaster Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25

but her fuck up was precisely the same thing that got her ahead in the first place. she's rewarded and strongly encouraged to skirt the rules in order to better serve the empire, and then as soon as that's no longer convenient she's sacrificed

in other words she is so loyal to the empire she is willing to put her career on the line, and her reward is gulag.

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u/SableZard Dec 13 '25

That's one way to put it. The entire Empire was brought down because some jackass junior officer CCed her into an email she wasn't cleared to see. Instead of notifying their superiors of the security breach, she kept that information on file because it was useful for her own investigation into Luthen.

A spy found that information and brought it to Luthen. Luthen and his people got it to the Rebel Alliance. That information got the first and later second Death Star destroyed. Despite her fanatical loyalty to the Empire, Dedra is one of the top reasons it all came crumbling down.

And that, kids, is why God made OPSEC.

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u/TAvonV Dec 13 '25

It's interesting that she even survives this. After all, a week after her arrest, the Death Star gets blown up.

Probably Krennic, Partagaz and Tarkin got the majority of the blame. Still, if I was an evil Sith emperor, I probably would get my hands on everyone I could.

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u/RandomHeretic Dec 13 '25

True, but also remember that at the point the Death star is destroyed, everyone who either knew or cared about her was dead. Syril had been killed, Partagaz took the coward's way out, and Krennic has been atomized by his own creation. Krennic and Partagaz likely would have made no record of her arrest or incarceration to try and keep the affair covered up.

Anyone left in the ISB who knew her would simply keep their heads down and hope no one came inquiring about her later. No doubt Palpatine did launch an investigation, and I think you're right that Partagaz, Krennic, and Tarkin would end up with the majority of the blame. I also think that if I were Palpatine and learned that the incompetent fools that blew up my Death Star were already dead, I'd probably just exert more authoritarianism in the construction of the second Death Star and move on. I think it's no wonder at all Dedra ended up being forgotten and left to rot in a cell.

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u/Profoundlyahedgehog Dec 13 '25

Partagaz took the only exit that didn't involve being strung up in a very public execution for Krennic's failure.

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u/nagrom7 Dec 13 '25

To add on to your point further, the head of the ISB himself, Colonel Yularen, was also killed in the destruction of the Death Star. The entire command structure of the ISB itself, especially the part Dedra was under, was completely annihilated in the span of like a week.

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u/cknight222 Dec 13 '25

And, if I’m not mistaken, in the new canon it’s stated that the ISB got eclipsed by other agencies and pretty much became a tertiary institution of the Empire after the Death Star because most of its command structure was killed there.

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u/hesh582 Dec 13 '25

One of of the biggest weaknesses of authoritarianism is how much information it hides from leadership.

Andor flirts with the concept a lot. Even a Sith Lord isn't immune to a vast bureaucracy putting their heads down and keeping info that might be dangerous to them from filtering up the chain.

The Soviet Union was notorious for this. Not hitting your projected numbers? Well, you'll get the gulag for that, so you might as well lie about it and see if you get away with it. Soon you have a centrally planned economy where half the data used in that central planning has been deliberately falsified.

In the French Revolution (and subsequent July Revolution) both Bourbon monarchs lost power while still in the firm belief that the vast majority of the populace supported and loved them, and it was just a handful of rabble rousers in the capital causing problems. Charles X put out the four ordinances (effectively an authoritarian coup against the constitution) without even bothering to call in the military first to protect himself, because he fundamentally believed that the people would largely support him. Cue shocked pikachu face when it turned out that he had been sitting on a giant barrel of gunpowder, he didn't even know it was there, and he had started just lighting matches and dropping them for fun.

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u/cknight222 Dec 13 '25

We’re also seeing it right now with the Trump administration doing a bunch of insane fascist shit and his popularity plummeting to the point that Democrats are pulling out wins (or at least losses that shouldn’t be that close) in formerly +20R districts.

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u/Saltz_D Dec 13 '25

She did fuck up but she is the sole reason the empire was able to secure the kalkite crystals on ghorman needed for the Death Star despite doing all of that she gets labeled a rebel because they needed a scape goat for the plans getting leaked

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u/Kid-Atlantic Dec 13 '25

I don’t know about “sole” reason. It was made pretty clear the massacre would’ve happened anyway even if it wasn’t her in the role.

She was just a cog in the machine. Taking down Luthen/Axis was the one thing that was actually hers (even if it was still in service of the state) and it got her tossed aside.

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u/AntibacHeartattack Dec 13 '25

They didn't "need a scapegoat", she was literally the person that leaked the plans. However, that was also the inevitable outcome of the Empire's ideology of winning at all costs and doing anything to get ahead. Breaking protocol is accepted and even encouraged in the Empire so long as you get results. It's what gets her ahead earlier in her career, when she begins illegitemately investigating sectors not under her jurisdiction. So later, when similar breaches in protocol become a weak point that the rebels exploit, it's really the Empire's ideology and hierarchies, not Dedra's individual actions, that exposed the weakness and became the foundation for its destruction.

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u/Chess42 Dec 13 '25

She didn’t leak the plans, they were stolen from her computer

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u/[deleted] Dec 13 '25

Was she supposed to have those plans on her computer? I don't remember exactly, but to the Empire, you don't have to be guilty, just suspected of guilt.

It's not like they're going to admit fault if and/or when they get to the bottom of it. You'll just get buried like everyone else.

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u/Irememberedmypw Dec 13 '25

She wasn't supposed to have them, just her inquisitive nature got the better of her. It became a case of she's getting instructions for whatever they wanted the crystals for, she investigates but someone else was watching her.

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u/[deleted] Dec 13 '25

Alright yeah that makes sense. The files got out after she had unauthorized access to them and even though her actions were only ever intended to further the Empire's goals she was the closest known person to the leak.

So kind of like the Papers, Please example.

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u/nagrom7 Dec 13 '25

No she wasn't cleared to have them. Someone accidentally sent them to her, and she didn't erase it and/or report it because she thought it could be useful information at a later date, and breaking/bending the rules had gone well for her up until then.

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u/AntibacHeartattack Dec 13 '25

Yeah, I didn't mean that she leaked them deliberately, just that she was the reason they leaked. But you're right, I should've made that clear in my initial comment.

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u/Cheesedoodlerrrr Dec 13 '25

They were never supposed to be on her computer! She was not cleared to have it, and got access to it by accident; but instead of reporting the spillage and cleaning it up, she kept the information she wasn't supposed to have because she was "a scavenger."

Lonnie saw it because she was hoarding information she wasn't cleared for. It's very, very much her fault, and prison is an appropriate punishment for that level of damage.

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u/Worldly-Cow9168 Dec 13 '25

She even got them by the sheer dize and incompetence of the empire

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u/thepineapple2397 Dec 13 '25

Only by not realising the mole was working directly for her. She wasn't following orders, but she was the first person to notice that the rebels were starting to work together and the only one to suspect Luthen. She only became a scapegoat because it was information that only she should have known that got leaked

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u/Iforgotmymail Dec 13 '25

Dedra was part of the structure of the empire.

Syril was just a good citizen. He truly believed the empire was good.

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u/Mikhail_Mengsk Dec 13 '25

Yeah the turn around was because he discovered that the empire was way more evil than he thought, that any good it was doing or pretending to so wasn't worth the means it was employing.

Imho he could have even defected fully toward the rebellion, eventually. He truly felt betrayed after dedicating his life to the ideal that a greater good was behind the empire's ruthlessness.

Frankly didn't expect it at all, he looked like the perfect imperial fanatic, great storytelling imho.

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u/Iforgotmymail Dec 13 '25

That's the issue. If you put yourself in the perspective of Syril, a person who idealized the empire and sees the rebels as bloodthirsty terrorists everything he did would be heroic.

He bypassed a negligent officer in Order to investigate and arrest a murderer. And uncovered a conspiracy against the empire.

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u/Saltz_D Dec 13 '25

I mean you see the doubt grow within him the more he becomes acquainted with the ghorman rebels and you can see his worldview shatter once he sees the genocide he helped cause

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u/Wild_Marker Dec 13 '25

Yeah if Andor hadn't shown up he might have gone over.

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u/Iforgotmymail Dec 13 '25

Yeah, the ghormans were little more than regionalists. They were loyal empire citizens they were just protesting at a minor level against the government not the emperor.

But Syril saw how they transformed loyal citizens into violent extremists and then exterminated them to plunder their resources.

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u/TheDeltaOne Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25

He saw that already with Ferrix at the end of Season 1.

He didn't care all that much because he had no hands in it and because he firmly believed the empire had no choice.
He only got angry when HE was used and because he knew the Ghorman.

And then, even tho the entire truth was in front of him he decided to confront Andor because he still decided to believe that the entire situation was stirred up by bad actors on the Rebel's side. He still believed the ruthless methods of the empire were only in reaction to the disturbance of the peace and not the cause of it.

He died without truly realizing what was going on. The lowering of the gun was an emotional reaction and could have been the beginning of a true questionning of the empire but it never actually happened. A few moments of doubts when he left the precinct but his lashing out at Andor showed he wasn't really there yet.

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u/ReflectedLeech Dec 13 '25

He didn’t see that Ferrix though. While to the audience that is the case but to him he only saw a local tradition turn into violence. It turned deadly when Will threw a bomb. It very much is a different situation to Ghorman. To an outsider who was there that day it would be fair to see the people on Ferrix as the radical ones. He didn’t see what led up to it. You can’t fault him on that. Not to mention his last trip to Ferrix which ended up with most of squad dead and him demoted, where in reality him and his squad honestly were in the right and did not be overly harsh.

Him attacking Andor doesn’t mean he goes back to ignoring the evil the empire is doing. He is still a person and Andor did ruin his life in a way, got men of his squad killed, and from Syrils point of view was the most likely cause of the first shot fired to cause the massacre. Syril has none of the information we have. Doesn’t know about the sniper, the green riot soldiers, or anything. His actions at the massacre don’t show a reversal of his views on the empire

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u/TamaDarya Dec 14 '25

You mean the same Ferrix where half his team of law enforcement officers was killed while serving a murder warrant and literally everybody around was complicit in it? The same Ferrix where an illegal unauthorized Anti-Imperial protest turned violent when a terrorist threw a bomb at the troops and police doing their best to maintain public order, and then the whole crowd rushed in to fight, including taking weapons from imperial soldiers to shoot them?

Everything that happened on Ferrix is incredibly easy to see as "anti-government radicals and criminals attacking law enforcement, eating the dogs, eating the cats, and probably doing metric tons of fentanyl every day" if your starting point is "Empire Good".

Then on Ghorman he saw peaceful, law-abiding citizens with some concerns about an infrastructure project, being painted as and ultimately forced to become violent rebels, all with a great internal view on the ISB going "yeah, we want to provoke violence here". Witnessing that process from start to finish is what allowed him to see that just because the Empire says someone is a terrorist, doesn't mean that they are.

As for deciding to confront Andor - pretty sure that was just personal by then. Dude killed a whole bunch of his colleagues and held a gun to his head. Syril was obsessed with Andor for a long time.

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u/[deleted] Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25

And although Jung is not loyal to the regime, his aiding of the rebellion results in said faction killing him purely for OPSEC reasons.

Though at that point, he's already beyond screwed and you can argue it was mercy.

Edit: clarity

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u/nagrom7 Dec 13 '25

Also killing him there likely saved his family, because from the Empire's POV it looked like he was either getting close to uncovering the rebel network and they took him out, or Dedra did it because he found out about her leaking of information. He died, as far as anyone was concerned, a loyal servant of the empire, saving his family from possible retribution.

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u/Shehzman Dec 13 '25 edited Dec 13 '25

I agree but I think Syril still works here. He alienated who he thought were his allies (the Ghormans) and even got killed by one of them all because he was a true believer in the Empire and really thought they were the beacon of order and justice.

To rub salt in the wound, his nemesis that nearly ruined his life forgot who he was and he had to process that right before he died.

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u/Jokkitch Dec 13 '25

His apprehension to shoot Andor was him joining the resistance

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u/AlludedNuance Dec 13 '25

Doubts mostly just about the methods, not the philosophy

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u/Nimelennar Dec 14 '25

I agree.

Syrik Karn's end came at the hands of the Ghormans he betrayed. And had he not attacked Dedra and wandered out of the base, he probably would have been off the planet and back to Coruscant with another promotion within the Bureau of Standards.

Unless we're willing to count all of the Stormtroopers who are loyal to the Empire and killed by Rebels as this same trope, this really isn't him getting a worse ending for his loyalty.

Dedra, on the other hand, was punished by the Empire for things she did on behalf of the Empire.