i love star wars with my entire being. it is among my favorite things in the universe. however, i can't be normal about anything, so of course i latched onto one of the most niche characters possible. my all-time favorite star wars character doesn't exist even a little bit in the movies. he is in, throughout the entire franchise, two novels. his name is archex (or captain cardinal - i'll explain more later) and this page exists solely for me to infodump about him.
i first learned about archex from the first novel he is in: delilah s. dawson's phasma. the novel came out in 2017 and describes captain phasma's backstory (a much-needed addition to the star wars canon, in my opinion. but this is about archex, not phasma. i'll save it for the inevitable phasma shrine because she is my wife.) the novel tells her story through the framing device of resistance spy vi moradi telling it to first order captain cardinal.
cardinal is a model first order soldier. he was born on jakku, where he went by the name archex. as an orphan, he had to fend for himself (much like another jakku orphan we know...) until he was recruited by general brendol hux to join the first order. there, he became a stormtrooper with the code cd-0992. be it because of his undying loyalty or his naivety, cd-0992 became brendol's personal guard later in life. brendol presented cd-0992 with new, bright red armor, and named him cardinal.
ultimately, i might not have gotten so attached to cardinal if it wasn't for one very important part of his character: his dynamic with armitage hux. see, armitage is also one of my favorite characters in the franchise- HEAR ME OUT, OKAY!!
star wars is so unsubtle in its color symbolism. blue/green = good and red = evil. this is incredibly on the nose - lightsabers are explicitly good or evil based on color, for example. there are a few reasons why i think cardinal's red armor is heavily symbolic and this is one of them. red is associated so heavily with "evil" in this universe. so having this guy going around in bright red armor while fighting on the bad guys' side is already on the nose. HOWEVER, it goes a little deeper than that. cardinal's hair is described as blue-black in the novel. blue, like i said earlier, is one of the colors representing "goodness". because of how strictly cardinal adheres to the regulations of the first order, he avoids removing his armor unless absolutely necessary and... do you see where i'm going with this? he is hiding the part of him that doubts the order underneath an exterior of loyalty and pride in it.
another thing is in his name. cardinal is explicitly named after the bird, which is, like his armor, very bright red. the fact that cardinals specifically exist in the star wars universe is very funny to me. regardless, cardinals are associated with a number of ideas, the most important to me being devotion, loyalty, and faith. this is fitting given archex's absolutely undying devotion to the first order and, more specifically, brendol hux.
in my own writing and art, i associate cardinal heavily with dog imagery. this is obviously because of the themes of loyalty and blah blah blah. more importantly, i use the dog motif to explicitly draw connections between cardinal and armitage hux. armitage is compared to a dog constantly in canon ("rabid cur", "pups who are abused often grow to be vicious creatures", etc) so i think that the parallel there is really interesting. it shows that the two of them are a lot more similar than they seem. honestly though, i just love anything that has to do with the horrible dynamic these two have going on.