My premise was the entire sentence, which was a reference to their rallying cry of "no taxation without representation."
I agree with all of that. That's a large part of what I loved about the show. I just don't feel that it makes them grey. They're still the bad guys, IMO, and we want them to fail in their efforts to capture the rebels. We just find out more about their daily routines.
I suppose that we have different perspectives. You're judging the sides based on how the individual characters are represented and I'm judging them based on how the overall conflict is represented. We may have to just agree to disagree.
Isn't it possible to judge each thing on its own? Andor doesn't paint the conflict as grey, but it paints the characters as grey. I don't disagree that Andor doesn't try to make the Empire anything other than tyranny, but that's just one part of what makes up the show.
Anyway, the American Revolution didn't really start off as a tax complaint. The colonists problem with the Stamp Act was really a dispute over who had the authority to do it. Parliament and the Crown clearly believed they did, but the colonists believed only their local assembly had that power. As oppression goes, that's fairly mild. There was also the section of the Stamp Act that denied violators trial by jury. Honestly, that's a much more oppressive part of the legislation, but less widely known today. The first thing to happen in the colonies after it passed was the VA House of Burgesses passing resolutions stating only colonies could tax colonists. The "taxation without representation" issue wouldn't get solved by granting the colonies representation in Parliament. Americans didn't want Parliament taxing them, representation there or not.
In a lot of ways, British attempts at assertion of their authority over the colonies was destined to result in a revolution at some point. The other alternative, letting the colonies go their own way, wasn't ever going to happen. If it wasn't the Stamp Act that started up resistance, it would've been something else. If it wasn't taxes specifically, it would have been something else. Once the Stamp Act was repealed, Parliament issued the Declaratory Act which basically said "we can pass whatever laws we want to govern the colonies." As soon as the British sent in troops to quell the resistance to the Townshend Acts a couple of years later, the game was up. It was only a matter of time. And at that point it WAS tyranny and oppression.
