That’s true, the storm troopers and stuff are basically presented as automatons. I guess some audiences like not having to think, but it would have been much more impactful to show them as people with their own beliefs and motivations and stuff.
There’s a lot of short stories about that in various books, though they tend to overuse both the tropes of banality of evil and the cackling evil maniacs.
Oh interesting, I’ve never really delved past the movies.
They did also choose to humanize a storm trooper with Finn in the new films, but I don’t remember him going through any “deprogramming” or anything, he just kinda realizes he’s a nice guy one day.
It would have been much more interesting to see him struggle with his changing worldview.
From recent books, short stories anthology “From a Certain Point of View” have some quite good ones, can recommend.