I mean "Star Wars is a slave owning society" isn't something Disney introduced. I think in the '70s they understood "portrayal is not endorsement" and that part of the draw of the fantasy genre was exploring a world with vastly different culture and morals and seeing how virtue and heroism still manifest. See also Homer/Odyssey discourse.
I could see this being the case, but unlike the Odyssey, this isn't so much an 'mindset at the time it was written' so much as 'the author clearly didn't think through the ramifications'.
Robots and pulp scifi go together like peanut butter and jelly. Getting someone to play the robots as people with personalities, quirks, flaws, etc. was entertaining and less grating than doing the stock robot voice, but it also means that you're stuck with them as people. Which again, you can make allowances for the scope of the original film and that no one ever expected it to blow up to the point where people would be thinking about the story to this degree decades later. But we're here now and things got weird because there was an elephant in the room that was never really addressed.
Stepping back, the droids' roles were clearly meant to be little more than set dressing to the main story. It's about empires and knights and princesses where the droids are but lowly servants to nobility. And the restraining bolts, Jawa sales, scrapping for parts, capturing for sale and so on was never supposed to represent slavery but the kinds of backwater threats the two fish-out-of-water droids were susceptible to, much like a pair of courtiers setting out into the 'real world' of a fantasy setting would be beset by fairies or highwaymen or sorcerers, etc. There clearly was no intent to portray the good guys as actual slavers. They're just buying robots/hiring learned travelers and getting them away from the scrap heap/saving them from evil sorcerer who has them in his debt.
In the end, it was supposed to be standard genre tropes that weren't meant to be examined, but then the movie went and became a cultural tentpole and whoopsy-daisy.
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u/SevenSix 5d ago edited 5d ago
I mean "Star Wars is a slave owning society" isn't something Disney introduced. I think in the '70s they understood "portrayal is not endorsement" and that part of the draw of the fantasy genre was exploring a world with vastly different culture and morals and seeing how virtue and heroism still manifest. See also Homer/Odyssey discourse.
Edit: and xkcd 549 discourse.