Did you wonder what the story was behind the badass baton-twirling Stormtrooper in Star Wars: The Force Awakens who called Finn a traitor and battled him with a lightsaber-resistant baton at Maz Kanata’s Castle on Takodana? You know, this guy?
Oh, you didn’t want his whole life story? Well, some people on the internet not only wondered who he was, but went a little beyond reason with their devotion to this First Order loyalist, as evidenced by some of the memes below. We would have thought the Daniel Craig Stormtrooper would have been the breakout meme star, but the internet is a fickle lover.
Now Disney has responded to the surprising fan interest in this stormtrooper the fans nicknamed TR-8R after his only line in the movie (“Traitor!”). At the official Star Wars site, they reveal the character’s name is FN-2199 — nicknamed “Nines” by his friends, among whom Finn used to count himself — and he’s already in the Star Wars canon.
In Greg Rucka’s in-canon book Before the Awakening, Nines trained and served alongside Finn (then known as FN-2187). Nines gets that cool lightsaber-resistant baton (a “Z6 Baton”) when he earns a spot in “an elite riot squad [that] enforces control and squashes uprisings.” In other words, he really doesn’t like traitors. Nines is the red-headed guy under the arrow in this illustration by Phil Noto:
The agile actor in the armor is stunt performer Liang Yang, who’s been in a ton of movies. The one spoken line (“Traitor!”) was voiced by sound editor David Acord.
Now that Disney has released more information on the character, we’ll just have to see what new memes people come up with. They’ve certainly been keeping busy with limited information so far. Some of our favorites among those memes are below. There are some minor spoilers (regarding this character, not the ending of the movie or anything) in some of these memes:
(Via Star Wars, The Mary Sue, Vulture, John Migle, theilikepie, hs717, tr-8r, and Jeff)
