Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
In other words, the script hasn't placed K in a position where he needs to make a choice between the rebellion, maintaining order, and helping the Deckards, and in the end, nothing is really resolved.
I was trying to say just the opposite. The script puts him in a place where he needs to make a choice between helping the rebellion by killing Deckard, helping Wallace by letting Deckard be captured, following through on his original orders by stopping Deckard and killing Ana, or making his own way by helping the replicants yet while saving Deckard and Ana in the process. In the end, he does the latter. This is the path in which he can save each of the lives he cares about rather than letting them be destroyed. It's also the path of highest risk and greatest resistance, but for that matter, of greatest value. K thus resolves to help Deckard and Ana and also the rebellion, thereby continuing to ignore his initial orders and thwarting Wallace's plans.

Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
In any case, my objection isn't that K didn't join the robot underground per se, but that the film does not make it clear why the viewer should care one way or the other if there is a war or not. The status quo does not seem especially worthy of preservation, nor is the necessity of a robot insurrection made altogether clear. (It might have been helpful to give the viewer a stronger sense of what life on the off-world planets is like, instead of falling back on a lot of vague, pseudo-profound yammering about robots having souls.)
Nexus 8 replicants are being hunted and retired. The need for insurrection on the Nexus 8's behalf is very basic: survival. We should care because we can see that the Nexus 8, just like the old Nexus 6 line, are plainly people and do not deserve to be hunted down and killed. We should care because they suffer and are unhappy with the work they must do. We should care because, to the extent that the goals and desires of replicants can and do break from the mandate of their designers, they should have the right to pursue those ends. But they don't. Either they obey, or they die.

As for what Ana represents, I take it that the Nexus 8 hope to recruit the new line of replicants by appealing to the fact that they can create their own paths and perpetuate their species autonomously. The fact of replicant reproduction, then, shows at least two central things the freedom movement can deploy in arguments in recruiting replicants like K. First, it shows that the replicant species needn't depend for its existence on the will of a slave owning designer. As Freysa says, "We are our own masters." Second, it shows that replicants are functionally indistinguishable from human beings ("More human than human"), which undermines the perceived justification for their enslavement and denial of their basic rights. This latter point is precisely the threat that Joshi sees in the power of replicant reproduction ("The world is built on a wall that separates kind. Tell either side there is no wall, you’ve bought a war. Or a slaughter."). So the basic question is this: If the replicants are are no different from the humans, how can the humans justify their enslavement? They can't. That's precisely the argument the freedom movement seeks to make.