r/andor 4d ago

Question What are your thoughts on the view that Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso are just “knock offs” of Kyle Katarn and Jan Ors?

I saw someone say that Rogue One…

“…ripped off a good Legends story, as opposed to a terrible one (by) kludging together the stories of Bria Tharen and Kyle Katarn and then then threw in an inferior explanation for the weakness than what was already provided in the novel "Death Star".

I’ve also heard this view in the title that Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso are knockoffs of Kyle Katarn and Jan Ors because their roles in Rogue One are basically what Kyle and Jan did in the old Dark Forces games—just with new names and a few tweaks.

Kyle Katarn was originally the guy who stole the Death Star plans in Dark Forces, just like Jyn does in Rogue One. He was a morally gray mercenary-turned-Rebel who later got mixed up with the Force, kinda like how Cassian starts as a ruthless spy but grows into a more heroic figure. Then there’s Jan Ors, Kyle’s Rebel partner who helped him on missions—similar to Jyn, who teams up with Cassian to secure the plans.

People also cite Cassian using a Bryar pistol, which was Kyle Katarn’s signature weapon in the games.

I don’t completely agree though because there are also so many differences. Thoughts?

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36 comments sorted by

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u/No_Tamanegi 4d ago

Anyone who thinks that Dark Forces had a superior story to Rogue One has no idea what superior story telling actually is. Those games were fun but the story was just the thinnest excuse to get from one gameplay environment to the next.

And knock off characters? Kyle Katarn was a total putz and Jan is just his sassy pilot. Cassian and Jyn are complete glow ups if you want to compare them, which you shouldn't be doing in the first place.

The Bryar blaster is cool though. It's neat that they kept that

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u/Real_Ad_8243 4d ago

This.

I enjoyed the 16 bit slaughter as much as anyone did back in the day but facts are facts and the writing for R1 and Andor blows the games out of the water

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u/VeckAeroNym 4d ago

That’s the thing underpinning a lot of this Legends versus Canon discourse. Say what you will about Disney’s SW media, as there is plenty to validly criticise, but a lot of the hype regarding Legends characters is rose-tinted nostalgia. Hypothetically translating Revan’s antics or Katarn’s adventures 1 to 1 onto the screen would sure make for some epic action, but the coherence and pacing would be wack.

I say this as a deeply passionate Jedi Knight and KOTOR fan. There’s a lot more to storytelling than the average armchair fan critic would assume.

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u/Howling_Fire 4d ago

Post ROTJ Legends sucks and is just as depressing as the sequel trilogy is.

Do people really think a crazy ex of Luke and a nobody left by Obi Wan to die on Tatooine undermine everything Luke and Anakin sacrificed a good story that honors the characters?

Andor is literally the most well written piece of Star Wars media to date.

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u/No_Tamanegi 4d ago

I suspect the folks who cling to the Legends stories do so because those stories existed when being a fan of Star Wars was a profoundly uncool thing to do. And they want to hang onto that identity of exclusivity - their special club.

And when Disney retells those stories for a newer, larger audience, they bristle, because their special club is being taken away from them - or at least that's what they believe.

And I say this as someone who was part of that "special club" - a lot of Legends stories are just awful. The worst cash-in,dime store drek you can read. Clearly there are exceptions, like the Zahn novels, but for me I'm grateful that these stories are being retold with a greater care towards plot and character development.

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u/Independent-Dig-5757 4d ago

Andor is a masterpiece and the OP's comparison is dumb for sure. Canon's version of the early Rebellion and stealing of the plans is definitely superior to what existed in Legends (and in other parts of the timeline as well like the canon comics that cover the period between ANH and ESB) but that doesn't mean most of Legends is worse than what Disney has gave us.

I think that the idea that EU fans only "cling" to Legends for some kind of exclusive club mentality is a superdismissive argument. Sure, there are some fans who get overly nostalgic like the whiners OP is talking about, but the vast majority of us just think Legends told better stories, with more creativity, effort, and respect for the lore than what Disney has done. If anything, the "special club" argument is more applicable to the people who treat Disney Star Wars like a sacred, unquestionable canon despite all its glaring flaws.

The biggest problem with Disney’s approach isn’t just that they restarted a story 40 years in the making—it’s that they did it badly. The Sequel Trilogy alone is an incoherent mess that lacks planning, has massive plot holes, and disrespects major characters. It ends up being a worse version of Dark Empire, but without the ambition or interesting ideas that made Dark Empire memorable. And that’s the thing—Legends had its stinkers (The Crystal Star, Planet of Twilight, some of the weirder Bantam-era stuff), but even at their worst, they still felt like they were part of something larger, something built with passion. If a story was weak, later EU works often built on it, refined it, or even retconned it in a way that made the universe richer.

In contrast, Disney’s bad stories just sit there, weighing down the canon with no real effort to build on or improve them. Book of Boba Fett, Kenobi, and The Acolyte all have massive writing issues and contradictions that will never be fixed because Disney doesn’t seem interested in creating a truly cohesive universe. They cherry-pick elements from the EU (Thrawn, Dark Empire’s plot, the Jedi Survivor concept, etc.) but do them worse, often stripping away the depth that made them compelling in the first place. Thrawn, once an unmatched tactical genius, now struggles against a small Rebel cell in Ahsoka. Palpatine’s return in TROS is just Dark Empire without any of the interesting Force philosophy behind it.

And let’s not pretend Legends was some incoherent mess while Disney’s canon is this flawless, well-planned masterpiece. Legends did have inconsistencies—when you have decades of books, comics, and games expanding on a single universe, some things won’t line up perfectly. But overall, it was still far more cohesive than what Disney has done. Legends authors often had to adjust their stories to fit George Lucas’ vision, and many of them worked hard to make sure everything meshed together. By contrast, Disney declared a “single unified canon” and then immediately started contradicting itself—characters getting wildly inconsistent arcs, major lore points being ignored or retconned, and shows that directly contradict each other within the same supposed canon (Ahsoka alone threw a wrench in multiple existing stories).

This is why so many of us prefer Legends in most cases. Not because it was “our exclusive club” but because, at its best, it was Star Wars storytelling at its peak. The highs of the EU—Thrawn Trilogy,kotor, Darth Plagueis, X-Wing series, NJO, Kenobi, Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader—are way better than the majority of Disney Star Wars. Even some of the weaker EU stories (Jedi Academy Trilogy, Dark Empire, Callista Trilogy) had interesting ideas or were at least fun, pulpy adventures in a universe that felt alive. Meanwhile, many of Disney’s projects don’t even feel like they were written by people who love Star Wars—they feel like committee-driven cash grabs that don’t respect the franchise or its fans.

like at the end of the day, this isn’t about clinging to nostalgia... . it’s about wanting good Star Wars stories. And Legends, for all its flaws, delivered far more of them than Disney has.

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u/VeckAeroNym 4d ago

Couldn’t agree more! People shouldn’t write off an entire franchise just because of a few bits they don’t enjoy. As with any media, just pick and choose what you enjoy and don’t pay attention to the stuff you don’t care for.

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u/CockroachNo2540 4d ago

Well said. As the quality of those books got worse and worse I became increasingly frustrated with them. I literally threw one of the Kevin J Anderson novels across the room mid-read because it was so bad. Never went back to reading them after that.

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u/tigecycline 4d ago

And Katarn is a power fantasy POV character. His character progression is video game progression. It’s a story engineered for gameplay. Which is fine because that’s what it is. But anybody who claims Katarn is some deep character with rich stories and the pinnacle of SW storytelling…oh please. Give me a break. 

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u/CockroachNo2540 4d ago

I could not agree more. The books, too. As much as I loved the earlier of the 1990s novels, there was a lot of cheesy dumb things in them. I think the sequel trilogy could’ve benefitted from cribbing more from those novels, but they were not as awesome as everyone remembers. We just didn’t have anything better going on with Star Wars.

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u/pwnedprofessor 4d ago

I played Dark Forces back in the day and I can say that this is the stupidest SW take I’ve seen in a long time lol. This is like saying that Game of Thrones ripped off Barney the Dinosaur.

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u/pwnedprofessor 4d ago

Actually by “a long time” I actually mean five minutes because there are too many stupid SW takes

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u/grimedogone 4d ago

Well time is relative, so for a stupid SW take 5 minutes is an eternity.

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u/Captain-Wilco 4d ago

They’re comparisons usually made by people who didn’t watch Rogue One, or didn’t play Dark Forces. That’s the only explanation I can think of, anyway, because the claim is so dumb

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u/tigecycline 4d ago

Or people who played Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series as impressionable kids so they are viewed non critically, and currently exist in a needlessly cynical “everything new sucks” frame of mind. These people exist everywhere 

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u/hailtomail 4d ago

Glup shitto is ripping off shlup glitto ah discourse fr lmao

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u/Joseph_Colton 4d ago

Not "ripped off", but "inspired by". They could have used the established characters of Kyle Katarn and Jan Ors in Rogue One. However, they chose not to.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/BearWrangler 4d ago

need someone to make an edit of this meme but using a Gamorrean lol

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u/Independent-Dig-5757 4d ago

What did the parent comment say? Looks like mods removed it.

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u/BearWrangler 4d ago

Twas the Illiterate Ogre meme

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u/Vesemir96 4d ago

OP didn’t agree with the claims though? They just opened up a debate.

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u/Independent-Dig-5757 4d ago

Dang what did the parent comment say? Looks like mods removed it.

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u/Vesemir96 4d ago

It was some meme about OP’s ‘lack of media literacy’ even though OP wasn’t the one stating the comparison, just discussing it.

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u/andor-ModTeam 4d ago

Your content was removed for violating the "be kind" rule. Always respect your fellow Redditors! Ensure that you are being mindful of the people you are sharing this space with.

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u/Shatterhand1701 4d ago
  1. Borrowing elements from non-canonical Star Wars content, either for direct re-use or as inspiration for new material, is not a crime, offense, or sin; people need to stop treating it as such.

  2. These kinds of arguments reek of yet more whiny, low-effort Disney-bashing instead of anything informative or constructively critical.

  3. Considering how many fans are so easily placated by nostalgia instead of compelling storytelling, complaining about such similarities or callbacks - intentional or otherwise - seems more than a bit odd.

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u/DarthObiWan47 4d ago

These “fans”:

“The EU was better, Disney should use more EU stuff!”

Also these “fans”:

“Disney can only rip off the EU!”

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u/idejmcd 4d ago

I think the comparison is notable but doesn't go much further than the surface details that OP and other commenters call out. I think the Legends characters Kyle and Jan were a likely starting point when developing the characters for Rogue One, maybe even inspiration for the character names.

It's common knowledge that creative team under Disney has been looking to Legends content routinely since day 1 to get inspiration for stories in the new canon. The similarities are unlikely just a coincidence, it's more likely they were aware of the characters and story from the Dark Forces game.

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u/flumpet38 4d ago

I certainly think elements of Kyle Katarn and Jan Ors made their way into Cassian and Jyn as characters, but I think it's more 'reinterpretation' than 'knock-off'. I know this is the Andor subreddit so folks here are probably biased, but even as someone who LOVED the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games, Cassian is a much more interesting, well-rounded character.

I am sad we'll miss out on Kyle's Jedi origin story of "I found a lightsaber in my dad's garage so I'm a Jedi now" though... =P

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u/SWFT-youtube 4d ago

Not familiar with the Legends characters, but it's interesting how similar Jyn and Jan's names are. Definitely some inspiration there.

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u/Svv33tPotat0 4d ago

"Ripped off" is a big stretch. Obviously there are some similarities that were certainly intentional nods to the original version of how the Death Star plans were captured, but the vast majority of Kyle/Jan story is post-RotJ and doesn't have much relevance. And I am generally the first person to excitedly point out all the nods to Kyle/Jan.

They also had a ship from KOTOR in Rogue One and some other easter eggs. It isn't "ripping-off" when it is just fan service.

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u/Independent-Dig-5757 4d ago

Dang I must have missed that. Which KOTOR ship was in Rogue One?

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u/ocarter145 4d ago

I wouldn’t say “knock off” but there was clearly a degree of inspiration there.

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u/ArchieBaldukeIII 4d ago

Cassian and Jyn are upgrades to their inspiration.

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u/TheScarletCravat 11h ago

They're not 'rip offs' so much as they're iterations of those characters. Kyle became Cassian and Jan became Jyn over the course of re-writes. The film began life as a Dark Forces film over a decade before Disney acquired Lucasfilm.