There’s a certain, age-old joke that continues to be one of the most evergreen jests amongst generations of geekdom, along the lines of “A Stormtrooper and a redshirt got into a gunfight; the Stormtrooper missed, but the redshirt died anyway.”
This, of course, is in reference to Star Trek‘s crimson-clad personnel, whose attire famously signified that they were probably going to die, thus spawning the “redshirt” character archetype in pop culture, but more importantly to the Stormtroopers’ notoriously low blaster accuracy over decades of Star Wars content, with many a Jedi or rebel managing to get through a dense storm of Stormtrooper fire without so much as a singe.
Dying in a gunfight is no impressive feat, but the shaky aim of the Empire’s first line of defense has been the rightful subject of ridicule and certainty for some time, and such scrutiny seems to have come to a peak on r/FanTheories, where one dedicated fan divulged an explanation that might even make Palpatine himself offer some forgiveness.
The original poster compared the Stormtroopers to the Clone Troopers, who have a much better track record of hitting their shots, likely due to the fact, as the original poster suggests, that Clone Troopers are not subject to Force sensitivity due to their robotic makeup. Stormtroopers, meanwhile, often make targets out of Jedi, the deaths of which would cause in imbalance in the Force, which has led the original poster to believe that it’s the Force itself making the Stormtroopers miss all of their shots.
Others offered up theories of their own, with varying dubiousness towards the likelihood of the original.
Whatever the reason, here’s hoping that Stormtroopers continue to miss their shots over the course of Andor, lest we find our hearts broken a bit too harshly to continue on to the first season’s conclusion on Nov. 23.