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Canon in Star Wars is a double-edged sword (or dare I say, vibroblade?). While maintaining a sense of consistency across movies, television shows, novels, audio dramas, comics, and video games can present one cohesive vision of a galaxy far, far away, it can sometimes impose creative limitations for showrunners like Andor's Tony Gilroy. Season 2 of Andor, much like season 1, was characterized by big creative swings. And as Gilroy revealed in a new interview, he wasn't going to let a minor piece of Star Wars canon stop him from telling the best story he could muster.

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Gilroy brought up how he chose to ignore the existing canon origin for the fan-favorite droid, K-2SO. In 2017, Marvel released a one-shot comic called Rogue One - Cassian & K-2SO Special #1 by Duane Swierczynski and Fernando Blanco. Because it was an official Star Wars comic tying in with the release of Rogue One, the events in the story, including that of K-2SO's origin, were considered canon. Gilroy, however, had other plans. 

"Canon, I usually try to deal with it," Gilroy began. "And I'm really sympathetic and into it. I was annoyed to find out that somebody had, in the interim between Rogue and [Andor] had written an origin story for K-2, and I was like, 'No, I'm not paying attention to that. We're not doing that.'" 

In Andor season 2, K-2SO's new origin story was revealed in the devastating episode 'Who Are You?' K-2 was originally a droid who participated in the massacre of innocent civilians on Ghorman, who Cassian later salvaged. The episode was hard-hitting stuff, and the revelation that K-2 was finally going to enter the story offered a little bit of light at the end of the episode. 

If anything, Gilroy's approach shows that the canon is more malleable than we think it is. And maybe we could all benefit from being a little loosey-goosey every once and a while. 

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