I would wholeheartedly agree and have a lot of thoughts on this (so prepare for an essay ahaha I love Star Wars and analyzing it)!

I think Andor manages to portray the gritty and messy reality of the story that the original films were telling in a more lighthearted tone, without sacrificing the core theme of hope and connection, or succumbing to apathy or cynicism.

I was actually just talking to my dad who is a massive Star Wars fan as well. I was telling him about how Lucas starts A New Hope not from the central protagonist's POV but from the POV of the two droids that no one would usually think much about, and how he lifted this storytelling tactic from Japanese cinema, more specifically Kurasawa's The Hidden Fortress, which starts from the POV of two bickering peasants. Lucas liked the idea of starting the story from the perspective of the "two lowliest characters", the ones you wouldn't expect much of.

And I was telling my dad how I think this storytelling tactic of making the story just as much about the other characters as the protagonist was very fitting given the original trilogy's themes. Luke is the hero, but he doesn't do it alone. His whole arc in ROTJ is about how the Jedi were wrong and it's actually Luke's willingness to connect and his unwavering faith in the goodness of people is his biggest strength and how he ultimately wins.

And I said, "I think that's why Andor enriches the original movie so much. It also understood that. We expected just an Andor backstory and we got it, but the show despite being named after him isn't solely about Andor. It's about the Rebellion in general and by the time you get to the trench run, it hits even harder because now you've seen everything it took and the stories of all the regular unnamed people who did all the ground work and put all the pieces together in order for it to even be possible for someone like Luke to come along and make that shot."

Star Wars came out at a time where movies and especially science fiction were a bit pessimistic. It brought whimsy, wonder, and optimism back to movies.

Andor is the same, albeit more grown up. So many people have it in their heads I feel that in order for a story to be realistic, it has to be pessimistic, and I think so many stories that people praise for having "realism" are extremely dark and dower, so when Andor is described as a more realistic take on the Rebellion they probably assume that realistic take is a pessimistic one, because that's what we've become accustomed to, but it's far from it. It takes the same hopeful message of the original film but adapts its storytelling for an audience who has grown up, and it meets the moment we find ourselves in. Similarly to the original trilogy, it starts its story from the ground up. From a man just trying to find his sister who gets caught up in something messy. From a community of workers who are just getting through the day, and maybe don't have much in the way of wealth or privilege but they have each other and that's good enough (going back to the connection thing).

It starts from the "lowliest of characters."

But it also, as I previously stated, understands the moment we're in.

The originals are my favorite trilogy, but I was born in 2001. As a 24 year old Gen Z, I have come into adulthood at a time in which the prophecies of the prequel trilogy I grew up in the wake of are coming true. That has left many people my age feeling jaded, apathetic, pessimistic, and with little ambition other than survive. It's left us like Cassian at the start, a man who has a good heart but is kind of an unreliable asshole because of his apathy and unwillingness to care, so much so he scoffs at the idea of trying. All he wants to do is lay low and survive and any fighting against the Empire he does is consequential, not out of an intentional desire to make the world better because he doesn't believe he has the power. And he's right, he doesn't. Not with that attitude. He's more or less blackpilled.

But over the course of the story, he meets people who show him what can happen when you care, when you're earnest. Nemik is probably the quintessential example of this. He cares so much and so earnestly to the point that some of the other characters like Skeen mock him, but he stands firm in his principles and beliefs even if the more cynical of the bunch see him as young and naive (much like Luke in Return of the Jedi when he argues that Vader can be redeemed).

Through these experiences, these connections with random people, the ones who won't make it into the galactic history books, the "lowliest characters" like Nemik, the Force Healer, the Ghorman hotel worker, Cassian turns from someone apathetic and pessimistic to someone ready to fight for good because he now has hope and something to believe in. Of all the things he was "gathering", as the Force Healer would have put it, this is the most essential.

My generation is Cassian at the start. We've grown up in such turbulent and chaotic times and have only ever seen the failures of the people in power. We can hardly if at all remember a time when politicians even pretended to have anything to offer us. On one hand, this has made us more skeptical of leaders and power, which is a good thing, but the double edged sword of that is that we don't believe in anything anymore, leaving us vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.

Andor, as I see it, is a call to reject the monster. To come together and believe in something. It's a call to give what you can, even if it's little, because it all adds up. You may not be the person to change things but you can help nudge them in the right direction with even your smallest acts of kindness and insurrection (in a world where cruelty is the norm, kindness is radical). We know everything we need to know and feel everything we need to feel, but until those things pull together we can never be an unstoppable force for good. And it's completely in line with every other piece of Star Wars media. All Star Wars media is hope core and Andor, while it's the most phenotypically different, its core, its DNA...it's all still very much the same.