Nerd Pride Radio

I've never seen or read anything of Star Wars outside of the 9 movies, the Christmas special, and that one comic where Indiana Jones finds Han Solo's body. For those of you who know more about the extended universe, do they ever address the issue of droid slavery? Because other than Rey in Episode 7, everyone--good guys and bad--treat the droids as if they are fully sentient beings but then also have no issue with the fact that they're all property. Seems weird.

I cannot get past the fact that you saw Christmas special.

Maybe not so weird. After all, the droids were built to fulfill certain tasks, to automate certain functions, on behalf of their human owners. But the easiest way for most people to interact with the droids is if those droids behave like their human owners, so the owner's interaction with them is natural. So asking the droid to take out the trash is no different for the human (behavior-wise) than asking your kids to take out the trash. Any "feelings" or "emotions" expressed by the droid are ultimately just programmed features of the droid to help make it easier for the humans to interact and relate to it; they are ultimately not actual, genuine feelings or emotions.

My mind is hazy but I vaguely remember droid rights are a thing somewhere. There are also droid who've become independent. In one story, IG88 had a plan to kill tons of biologicals. There are also people who hate droids.

We don't server their kind in here!

I don't recall there being much about Droid slavery in the extended universe, but the prequel movies pretty much destroyed the vast majority of the extended universe in terms of any connection to the rest of the story anyway.