aayla-securas
Rex attacking Crosshair in Star Wars: The Clone Wars
7.02 | A Distant Echo
imrowanartist
I think it’s super interesting that Rex actually reacts this way. It shows so much of his character development throughout the show. Start-of-the-war-Rex would never have lashed out like this. He was too strict for that. He still believed too firmly in that he was simply bred for laying down his life for the Republic. But we slowly see that resolve crumbling over the cause of the war.
Rex tells Cut that he has a name, but I don’t think he truly believes he’s not just a number until later. We see him get close to brothers, only to have them ripped away from him. Fives and Echo are the biggest examples of that. Rex realises that he’s not just losing numbers, he’s losing *friends*, something he probably tries not to think about for the longest time.
But during Umbara we finally see him voicing some of his doubts. They’re not just numbers. What is gonna happen to them after the war? And then Fives dies too and we see how it breaks Rex. I think it’s the most emotional we’ve seen him up until that point.
So why does he lash out so badly towards Crosshair? Here’s this guy, who up until then has been treated like an actual individual because of his mutations. Who has not experienced what it’s like to lose those closest to you for a goal you don’t actually understand. Who then calls Echo, one of Rex closest friends, a ‘reg’. By which he means, just one of the thousands of others. Just a number. And basically tells Rex that Echo’s death wasn’t worth anything. And Rex, even with his General present, just can’t take that anymore.
It shows us how broken Rex actually is at this point. How much he has internalized until there’s a catalyst to set it off. And how much more there is to this then just ‘Rex hits Crosshair because he’s angry at him’. Rex is not just angry at Crosshair, he’s angry at the entire universe at this point and he has no idea how to deal with that.
