VixensVengeance wrote:
"Everything I did, I did for the Rebellion, and every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget, I told myself it was for a cause I believed in. A cause that was worth it. Without that, we're lost. Everything we've done would have been for nothing. I couldn't face myself if I gave up now."
―Cassian Andor
You see here how Cassian embraces his emotions instead of denies them. His passion for what he believes in is as complete as his commitment to accept the consequences for the decisions he makes. That is why he killed the informant and that is why he did not act against Jyns father. Both the action and the lack of action are a result of what he was willing to sacrifice and what he was not willing to sacrifice and to hell with the rest of the Galaxy. He did things because of what he wanted, not anyone else and that is power.
I don't know if I'd agree with the conclusion you came to VixensVengeance. To me, he's not embracing his emotions, he actually is trying to deny them here. His emotions are filled with guilt and regret, and he understands that some of the things he did were terrible, maybe so bad that he wouldn't even see himself as that much different than the empire he was fighting against. What I believe he poses in this quote isn't so much embracing the emotions, more he seems to be trying to justify the actions he took even though his conscious tells him that it was wrong. I think he is saying that if he were to fully embrace the emotions which he knows are lurking underneath, that it would destroy him and make him give up the cause. These things he's done only end up appearing as justifiable IF the rebellion wins, but if the rebellion didn't win or if he quit or if he was part of the empire instead, they would not be justifiable at all.
I think this points to what Kobos said that Cassian through the movie begins to actually listen to what his emotions are telling him, and in actually embracing the emotions, he refuses to obey a direct order and refuses to kill as a means to justify the end, and as Kobos pointed out sacrifices himself for the greater good.
I'll admit that he's definitely passionate for what he believes, but I think the moral in this story is that passion taken too far without morals of some sort, doesn't seem to make you much different from the enemy, and the only way to redeem yourself from that point is to recognize the fault in your thinking and change how you act. That's how I see it anyhow, the power of Cassian as a character is his transition from being a dark and questionable character, into someone who heroically sacrifices himself. In how he acted prior, I'm not sure I see much of a difference between him and a terrorist, but by the end he is a heroic figure. You could almost say that the foil to Cassian is Saw Guerra who is mostly just viewed as a terrorist and not as a hero, even in his final moments he doesn't seem to really dying for a greater cause, but rather simply giving up fighting. His lust for fighting without morals has left him as a shell of a man... hmm... similar to Darth Vader.... just now put that together... but he ends up being a character that is (literally) lost to the sands of time, probably forgotten by most.
I may be wrong of course, but that's how I saw the storyline playing out.
