Star Wars rumors: Peelee (2 e's) to buy Star Wars

[Infernally Clay]

There's certainly some places for critique. That one Mandolorian episode especially shows that while in many places the New Rebublic is trying to do the right thing they're just not very good at it. It doesn't take a genius to see how they're treating the former Imperials by denying them even their names is going to be a breeding ground for resentment, the droid councelling is woeful at picking up potential problems, and their security just plain sucks.

I don't put it down to malice. Just a heady dose of incompetence, cutting corners to save costs, and over confidence now that with the Empire defeated it's never going to be a problem again.

It's kind of amusing that The Mandalorian explores the dehumanising way the New Republic is trying to rehabilitate Imperial officers and then Ahsoka outright says that much of the government is run by these former Imperials who are clearly still loyal to the Empire and the former Rebellion leaders are completely blindsided by this.

Is the Rebellion being too harsh? Is that what is driving former Imperials to become pro-Imperial, to undermine the Republic and try to return the Empire to power? These are people who, for twenty years, did terrible things or were complicit in the terrible acts of the Empire and they're actively working with or for Imperial remnants with designs to take the galaxy back from the New Republic.

I'm not sure how you win this.

There are still active Imperial garrisons spread across the galaxy who firmly believe that the people of the galaxy don't care who is in charge as long as there is stability and order, so they'll welcome the Empire back once they prove the New Republic cannot maintain that stability and order. There are politicians actively sabotaging and undermining the New Republic because they would rather do nothing than do something and all they really seem to care about is continuing to profit and benefit from whatever political system is currently in vogue.

It'll take decades for the New Republic to finally get control of the situation and defeat the Imperial remnants and replace the pro-Imperials working within the New Republic itself and make actual meaningful progress but, to make matters worse, twenty three years from now, the First Order is going to show up, wipe out the New Republic and start this whole thing all over again.

[Mechalich]

They talk a big game about the New Republic as this distant far off entity that can't figure out its role in the outer rim (an idea that definitely works conceptually), but then they show a single X-wing pilot flying from the rim to Coruscant and back in the first 20 minutes of an episode of the Mandalorian! I don't remember there being any lines about about that being a difficult journey, having taken a while, or anyone at command being surprised to see him.

This is partly to do with how hyperspace travel times in Star Wars works, something that hasn't been explained outright in any of the TV shows but appears to work more or less exactly as it did in Legends since the shows deliberately referenced Legends-based lore openly. Specifically this happened in Mandolorian season 2 in the classroom scene when they children are taught about the large hyperlanes.

Hyperspace travel time isn't based on distance in real space, it's based on the navigational quality of the route to get from point A to point B. Speed is therefore dependent on what is essentially hyperspace bandwidth. As such, it's possible to go from the center of the galaxy to the edge in a matter of hours on a super-hyperoute. For example, the Twi'lek homeworld of Ryloth is located in the distant Outer Rim quite close to the edge of the galactic disk but is easily reachable because it sits on the Corellian Run. By contrast, it may take days or even weeks to reach worlds only a few parsecs away from a current location if there are no well-known hyperlanes in place.

As such New Republic units can move easily throughout large chunks of the galaxy along major hyperlanes, but that's not the same as exercising control. Nevarro, in Mandalorian, is on the Hydian Way super-hyperlane - something that show states outright multiple times, but the New Republic not only doesn't control it but doesn't consider controlling it a strategic priority. That means the more remote systems in that region are totally outside their influence.

[Flashy]

As such New Republic units can move easily throughout large chunks of the galaxy along major hyperlanes, but that's not the same as exercising control. Nevarro, in Mandalorian, is on the Hydian Way super-hyperlane - something that show states outright multiple times, but the New Republic not only doesn't control it but doesn't consider controlling it a strategic priority. That means the more remote systems in that region are totally outside their influence.

Oh, absolutely! I don't mean to suggest that it's totally incoherent, just that the inner/mid/outer rim framework for understanding New Republic priorities doesn't really align with that established way of understanding travel times. If Nevarro is on a major hyper lane, why does the New Republic consider control of its space low-priority? If the hyperlanes make it easier to get there than a spatially closer world in the core, why do both the Republic and the people of Nevarro act like it's a distant backwater beyond the Republic's reach?

If an X-wing pilot can get there and back in a reasonable amount of time, it's presumably a pretty trivial ask for a Nebulon-B to pop in and see what's up, which the fleet officer he talks to treats as laughably difficult.

[Forum Explorer]

You can't really blame the New Republic for being the way it was. Mon Mothma inherited a government that no one had any faith in. Overthrowing a tyrant doesn't undo decades of tyranny and I'd assume it became common knowledge that Palpatine orchestrated the Clone Wars to kill the Jedi, given that they're clearly no longer fugitives and can exist openly.

You misunderstand my complaint. I'm saying JJ flat out screwed the pooch in how he designed the New Republic, which then set the tone for everything else using the New Republic, which hey! Is basically my problem with all of the new stuff. Everything has to deal with this huge freaking albatross that is The Force Awakens. JJ wrote and wiped out the New Republic in like, two paragraphs of stuff? And in doing so he firmly established that the New Republic is basically useless. Kinda like how he established that Luke abandoned the galaxy, Han and Leia's relationship fell apart, and the Rebellion basically failed since the FO wipes out everything they worked for in the span of a single scene.

[Errorname]

You misunderstand my complaint. I'm saying JJ flat out screwed the pooch in how he designed the New Republic, which then set the tone for everything else using the New Republic, which hey! Is basically my problem with all of the new stuff. Everything has to deal with this huge freaking albatross that is The Force Awakens. JJ wrote and wiped out the New Republic in like, two paragraphs of stuff? And in doing so he firmly established that the New Republic is basically useless. Kinda like how he established that Luke abandoned the galaxy, Han and Leia's relationship fell apart, and the Rebellion basically failed since the FO wipes out everything they worked for in the span of a single scene.

This is the thing which has sort of killed the Mandalorian and co for me.

It's all building to Force Awakens. It's like starting Game of Thrones at Season Eight and then trying to care about anything that's happening in the early seasons. We all know how this ends.

[pendell]

It's kind of amusing that The Mandalorian explores the dehumanising way the New Republic is trying to rehabilitate Imperial officers and then Ahsoka outright says that much of the government is run by these former Imperials who are clearly still loyal to the Empire and the former Rebellion leaders are completely blindsided by this.

Is the Rebellion being too harsh? Is that what is driving former Imperials to become pro-Imperial, to undermine the Republic and try to return the Empire to power? These are people who, for twenty years, did terrible things or were complicit in the terrible acts of the Empire and they're actively working with or for Imperial remnants with designs to take the galaxy back from the New Republic.

I'm not sure how you win this.

There are still active Imperial garrisons spread across the galaxy who firmly believe that the people of the galaxy don't care who is in charge as long as there is stability and order, so they'll welcome the Empire back once they prove the New Republic cannot maintain that stability and order. There are politicians actively sabotaging and undermining the New Republic because they would rather do nothing than do something and all they really seem to care about is continuing to profit and benefit from whatever political system is currently in vogue.

It'll take decades for the New Republic to finally get control of the situation and defeat the Imperial remnants and replace the pro-Imperials working within the New Republic itself and make actual meaningful progress but, to make matters worse, twenty three years from now, the First Order is going to show up, wipe out the New Republic and start this whole thing all over again.

I hope they explore this further because the assumption that just because people are former imperial doesn't mean they were fanatically loyal to the Empire.

Imagine you're a cop on Coruscant assigned to the vice beat. Your job is chasing death stick dealers. There were death sticks under the Republic -- Kenobi was approached by just such a dealer. When the Empire takes over, the dealers are still there , and with them the damage they cause. Your office changes and so does your label, but it's the same job busting the same creeps.

Then, a decade or two later, the New Republic takes over from the Empire. Lots of fireworks uplevel as people celebrate the overthrow of the Emperor, but here in the underlevels the situation hasn't changed one bit; there are still the dealers, there are still the victims, there is still the job.

Is this cop a former Imperial now working for the Republic? Or is he just a cop who's kept his head down and kept on his job , avoiding the uplevel politics and nonsense to try to make his own little corner of the galaxy just that much brighter.

Same with smugglers. The spice run is illegal under all three governments, so from the perspective of the smugglers it doesn't matter who's in charge; all three will confiscate your cargo if they catch you, and all three can be bribed, avoided, or flat outrun.

Heck, even Luke had ambitions to go to the academy and become a Tie fighter pilot in Episode 4. Because he wanted off of Tatooine, and the Imperial Navy was his way off of it. His attitude didn't really change until his family was directly killed by stormtroopers. How many other farmboys on their on Tatooine who didn't get a personal visit from Darth Vader's minions, and wound up flying TIEs?

We can't discuss real-world too much here, but wherever you find a government overthrown, the odds are good that a large part of the day-to-day functions are still being run by holdovers from the old government. Because they're the ones with the skills to do the work , and they often have a loyalty to something other than the flavor-of-the-month regime on top. The job, after all, doesn't change all that much for most people.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Mechalich]

I hope they explore this further because the assumption that just because people are former imperial doesn't mean they were fanatically loyal to the Empire.

Imagine you're a cop on Coruscant assigned to the vice beat. Your job is chasing death stick dealers. There were death sticks under the Republic -- Kenobi was approached by just such a dealer. When the Empire takes over, the dealers are still there , and with them the damage they cause. Your office changes and so does your label, but it's the same job busting the same creeps.

Then, a decade or two later, the New Republic takes over from the Empire. Lots of fireworks uplevel as people celebrate the overthrow of the Emperor, but here in the underlevels the situation hasn't changed one bit; there are still the dealers, there are still the victims, there is still the job.

Is this cop a former Imperial now working for the Republic? Or is he just a cop who's kept his head down and kept on his job , avoiding the uplevel politics and nonsense to try to make his own little corner of the galaxy just that much brighter.

Beat cop is too low level. Same with a stormtrooper or a com tech, or any other individual who's in the employ of the Empire but has no authority and simply obeys the daily agenda. The key is the mid-level officers and bureaucrats, with good examples being basically every Imperial of consequence in Andor. That's city prefects, planetary governors, secret police supervisors, factory managers, even prison wardens. All of these people have real authority, on some scale, and because they got promoted at some point within the operational history of the Empire that evidenced at least superficial loyalty to the Empire's startlingly cruel methodology. A guy like Vanis Tigo the jerk captain who gets himself appointed Prefect of Ferrix as a sop to his ego, is exactly this kind of character.

He's a vain, arrogant jerk interested primarily in his own self-aggrandizement, but he does run the city and control an administration of probably over one hundred people. And, because the Empire embraced direct control by military governors through the threat of force, there's nothing behind him if that administration vanishes. If the Imperial administration just leaves, the result is an extremely chaotic power vacuum. This was shown in Mandalorian, via the backstory of Cobb Vanth, where this happened on Tatooine, and in fact basically the entirety of Book of Boba Fett is about Boba figuring out how to fill such a power vacuum.

Now, in cases of regime change many people of this stripe are salvageable for managerial purposes. They'll happily abide by new rules to 'play nice' with the public in return for retaining their position and saving their own skins. However, they won't have any loyalty to the new regime and will almost certainly be looking for an opportunity to cash out and get away to some place where they aren't worried some vindictive Senate might someday pass a law having them barred from work or even executed. This leads to massive corruption. And, apparently, the various remaining Imperial warlords still have enough money to make that corruption work for them.

That's a key point of New Republic failure. In the real world this kind of corruption and instability is generally fostered by some external source, not any loyalists to the old regime, because those loyalists are usually broke. This gets weird. Apparently Morgan Elsbeth has the kind of money necessary to suborn the shipbreaking operations on Corellia and make off with a huge amount of materiel under the table. How? She's a fugitive from New Republic justice, why haven't her assets been seized?

Perhaps the great hidden Sith financial network, which was essential in bringing Palpatine to power in the first place, is still in operation. Certainly that makes things like the rise of the First Order and, shudder, Exogol, make more sense (not much overall, but more). That's maybe possible, though I feel like a vast web of white collar crime doesn't really play well as an explanation in Star Wars.

[Infernally Clay]

Yeah I have to agree that it's a little odd how the Imperial remnants and loyalists seem to have a near-limitless supply of money. Moff Gideon alone clearly had the resources to build an army of killer robots as well as fund his research into cloning all while supplying and employing an awful lot of Stormtroopers across multiple active bases and lest we forget he also had a pretty big starship too.

By himself perhaps you could argue Gideon simply ran off with a lot of the Empire's money as soon as he saw which way the wind was blowing, but he isn't exactly the only one. Each member of the council he met with had similar resources to him and some were implied to have even more. Then there's Morgan Elsbeth, who can apparently afford two Jedi mercenaries as well as a massive ship apparently capable of jumping between galaxies.

Now, the most logical explanation is that the Empire stashed all their cash sometime after Palpatine's death but that would mean the Rebellion did an absolutely terrible job of going after all that money even though they would need it if they were ever going to fix the mess the Empire made of the galaxy. I mean, we're talking about the money necessary to govern a galaxy and fund the necessary humanitarian projects to alleviate suffering caused by the Empire. Surely no one just shrugged it off?

[Peelee]

Yeah I have to agree that it's a little odd how the Imperial remnants and loyalists seem to have a near-limitless supply of money. Moff Gideon alone clearly had the resources to build an army of killer robots as well as fund his research into cloning all while supplying and employing an awful lot of Stormtroopers across multiple active bases and lest we forget he also had a pretty big starship too.

By himself perhaps you could argue Gideon simply ran off with a lot of the Empire's money as soon as he saw which way the wind was blowing, but he isn't exactly the only one. Each member of the council he met with had similar resources to him and some were implied to have even more. Then there's Morgan Elsbeth, who can apparently afford two Jedi mercenaries as well as a massive ship apparently capable of jumping between galaxies.

Now, the most logical explanation is that the Empire stashed all their cash sometime after Palpatine's death but that would mean the Rebellion did an absolutely terrible job of going after all that money even though they would need it if they were ever going to fix the mess the Empire made of the galaxy. I mean, we're talking about the money necessary to govern a galaxy and fund the necessary humanitarian projects to alleviate suffering caused by the Empire. Surely no one just shrugged it off?

Morgan Elsbeth built the ship out of stolen components.

[Sapphire Guard]

At what point do we just go 'none of this makes any sense' and give up?

[Errorname]

Beat cop is too low level. Same with a stormtrooper or a com tech, or any other individual who's in the employ of the Empire but has no authority and simply obeys the daily agenda. The key is the mid-level officers and bureaucrats, with good examples being basically every Imperial of consequence in Andor. That's city prefects, planetary governors, secret police supervisors, factory managers, even prison wardens. All of these people have real authority, on some scale, and because they got promoted at some point within the operational history of the Empire that evidenced at least superficial loyalty to the Empire's startlingly cruel methodology. A guy like Vanis Tigo the jerk captain who gets himself appointed Prefect of Ferrix as a sop to his ego, is exactly this kind of character.

Yeah. Low level grunts are generally too numerous to prosecute, and any surviving big names will probably not recover from their high-profile defeat. The ones you've really got to watch out for are mid-level guys with ambition and skill, especially if they're diehards for the cause. If you've ever defeated an enemy military, look out for surviving officers who started low and rose through the ranks quickly, those are the guys you need to lock down and deal with because they will cause you problems

At what point do we just go 'none of this makes any sense' and give up?

Rise of Skywalker putting a major plot point in the Fortnite crossover was where I tapped out

[Mechalich]

Morgan Elsbeth built the ship out of stolen components.

The Eye of Sion was built primarily out of chunks of scrapped Imperial warships on Corellia that were taken apart and then conveniently lost off the books and given to Morgan Elsbeth. So they were stolen via fraud. However, that still takes money, and lots of it. All of those components have a massive value on the black market and there's no reason for the various people on Corellia who are all on the take for this scheme to give them to Morgan for free. Sure, residual loyalty might buy a better rate than selling this stuff on the black market to the Hutts, but it doesn't cut it down to nothing. I mean, there's still the costs involved in hiding this stuff from customs, shipping it halfway across the galaxy, and so forth. Someone, with deep pockets, is bankrolling this.

Now, the most logical explanation is that the Empire stashed all their cash sometime after Palpatine's death but that would mean the Rebellion did an absolutely terrible job of going after all that money even though they would need it if they were ever going to fix the mess the Empire made of the galaxy. I mean, we're talking about the money necessary to govern a galaxy and fund the necessary humanitarian projects to alleviate suffering caused by the Empire. Surely no one just shrugged it off?

It appears that the New Republic never really centralized their control of the galaxy. Since a huge number of Imperial governors and functionaries remain in control of their various worlds, they retain all the assets they once held and there's nothing to stop them from siphoning off some portion of that to fund remnant warlords if they want. It also seems that no effort was made to alter the economic status of the traditional aristocracy (and since Star Wars economics maps to something like the year 1920 in the real world, landowning aristocrats control a huge portion of the galaxy's wealth) and since many imperial officers were members of said aristocracy, they may have simply stashed their wealth with their families.

It all boils down to a turnover in the central government of a massive state with highly distributed assets without any sort of purge (violent or otherwise). The people in power are basically the same as before, with really only rather modest shifts in temperament and ethics at the very, very top. The few characters who come from outside this power structure, like Hera Syndulla are already being sidelined.

[Infernally Clay]

So, really, what the Rebellion probably should have done was burn the Empire to the ground and create a new system of government that no ally of the Empire would be part of - even if it meant every position within the new government would need to be filled with someone new and every world that wanted to join the New Republic would have to elect a new senator first.

Maybe that's where the Rebellion went wrong, after all. What did they really do besides strip the military leaders of the Empire of their authority and dismantle their fleets? The government itself, the bureaucracy, is still the same after all and most of the people who served the Empire just ended up serving the New Republic without any consideration seemingly given to the idea that any these people could be pro-Empire and are likely actively working with the Imperial remnants to return the Empire to power.

Sure, the expendable folks that supported and worked for the Empire might get put through rehabilitation and reconditioning, stripped of their names and positions and given risk-free menial labour to keep them occupied and make the New Republic feel like it's being compassionate and proactive but the ones that are most dangerous, the ones who accrued power and authority under the Imperial banner, seemingly got to keep it in the New Republic.

[pendell]

So, really, what the Rebellion probably should have done was burn the Empire to the ground and create a new system of government that no ally of the Empire would be part of - even if it meant every position within the new government would need to be filled with someone new and every world that wanted to join the New Republic would have to elect a new senator first.

Maybe that's where the Rebellion went wrong, after all. What did they really do besides strip the military leaders of the Empire of their authority and dismantle their fleets? The government itself, the bureaucracy, is still the same after all and most of the people who served the Empire just ended up serving the New Republic without any consideration seemingly given to the idea that any these people could be pro-Empire and are likely actively working with the Imperial remnants to return the Empire to power.

Don't think it's possible. Everyone who graduated with a degree in bureaucracy , and everyone who has experience in it, would have had to swear loyalty to the Empire. There is no pool of trained personal you can use except Imperial loyalists.

Pre-ST, the Rebel Alliance was the creation of former senators (Baal Organa, Mon Mothma, the Committee of Ten Thousand) so the expectation was the Senate would step back in where they left off, and let institutional inertia handle the rest. The Republic is something that has existed for a thousand years; the Empire existed for thirty. That is a lot, and I mean a lot of institutional inertia for the Empire to overcome.

Since the Disney era, it seems like the Republic didn't make any serious effort at governing at all. They beat the Empire, dismantled their navy, and expected the age of peace and enlightenment to begin again. Meanwhile, Luke completely failed to rebuild the Jedi Order and retired to an isolated planet to mope. With such an obvious power vacuum in the galaxy, they were practically begging for some two-bit wannabe Xim the Despot to step into the vacuum and take over.

Funny thing about Imperial money -- it seems like there's a lot of money floating around the galaxy which never finds its way to the New Republic. Remember the last Jedi? There's this whole planet of arms dealers, making all kinds of sales for weapons, but none of its going to the Republic. It's almost as if the Republic is a joke, with all the other factions of the galaxy re-arming to renew old quarrels which were suppressed during the Republic era. A galaxy-wide Game of Thrones. And what's the Republic doing about all of this?

And yet this isn't entirely implausible. Historically, it's a lot easier to Depose The Evil Tyrant than it is to build a new society in the Tyrant's place. Historically, the most common outcomes are either devolution into decades of civil war or another tyrant in the old tyrant's mold: It's what society is used to, after all.

Building a stable democracy on the ruins of a dictatorship is hard. It has been done. You would think it would be easier for the Republic , given they have centuries, if not millenia, of existence as a democracy. But it's as if the New Republic completely failed at the job, same as Skywalker did, even harder than they did in Legends.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Mechalich]

So, really, what the Rebellion probably should have done was burn the Empire to the ground and create a new system of government that no ally of the Empire would be part of - even if it meant every position within the new government would need to be filled with someone new and every world that wanted to join the New Republic would have to elect a new senator first.

That would have been going too far. Now, this is admittedly a complicated problem - forum rules preclude use of examples, but um, recent world history has a lot to say on this subject. The trick here is that the new regime needs to do everything possible to align the personal goals of necessary retained representatives of the old regime with the political goals of the new regime. The New Republic should be structured such that it is in the best interest of former imperials to support the New Republic for their continued employment, prosperity, and security using a combination of carrots and sticks.

The Empire's broadly non-ideological nature should make this easier than many real-world examples would be. The Empire wasn't really devoted to anything beyond the imposition of order. There's no huge religious or cultural barriers to overcome with the possible exception of prejudice against non-humans but that one can be solved by allowing each species to produce its own leadership and in any case doesn't appear to be the area where the New Republic has problems (all of the prominent Rebellion-turned-NR aliens appear to be on the right side of this, from Hera to Ackbar to Chewie). Sure, former Imperials may retain a dislike of the Jedi, but there are so few Jedi remaining that this is basically a non-factor and the handful of Jedi who are out there - Luke and Ahsoka most prominently, are genuine galactic heroes who should have personal popularity through the roof.

Maybe that's where the Rebellion went wrong, after all. What did they really do besides strip the military leaders of the Empire of their authority and dismantle their fleets? The government itself, the bureaucracy, is still the same after all and most of the people who served the Empire just ended up serving the New Republic without any consideration seemingly given to the idea that any these people could be pro-Empire and are likely actively working with the Imperial remnants to return the Empire to power.

The real problem is that these people have a reason to want to return the Empire to power. Again, because the Empire was broadly non-ideological, that reason is going to be connected to issues of prosperity and security, to the general perception that life was better under the Empire. Obviously that doesn't apply to everyone - humans only at the very least - but for it to have already taken root, given how bad life under the Empire really was (ex. Andor, Andor, and Andor a third time) suggests that the New Republic has really, foundationally, failed in the central responsibilities of a government.

The primary issue seems to be security. The galaxy, as seen in these TV series, is routinely portrayed as tremendously lawless, the NR military completely overstretched and unable to protect systems even in strategically important locations, and the vast Imperial war machine being chopped to pieces despite it being perfectly useful to handle this issue. We also know that in Disney canon the New Republic signed a Military Disarmament Act prior to achieving peace with the Empire. This speaks to a fundamental failure to understand why Palpatine came to power in the first place. The Old Republic failed because it lacked the resources to preserve peace: it had no army and an insufficient number of Jedi to act in place of an army (whether or not they should be doing that) and it allowed semi-independent regional authorities to build their own armies within the state, which, as history tells us, is a really, really, good way to cause a civil war. The New Republic is repeating this mistake. It's unilateral demilitarization was effectively a deliberate choice to create a massive power vacuum and ignore the consequences.

Seeing as Mon Mothma proposed the Military Disarmament Act and strongly championed it, it is regrettably necessary to say that her Disney canon incarnation is, actually, really bad at running the galaxy (Leia, notably, opposed the act, so we have Leia being correct and Mon Mothma being wrong pretty much from moment the post-Endor celebration ends. This is not implausible. Mon Mothma being almost completely wrong about the fundamentals of galactic politics is perfectly compatible with her successfully steering the largely symbolic politics of the rebellion - history has more than a few examples of this sort of thing too - it just, well...it sucks from the out-of-universe perspective. Mon Mothma appears in RotJ for 26.5 seconds, but it's a steely-eyed performance by Caroline Blakiston that exudes quiet competence, and more recently Genevieve O'Reilly has been so good in the role in recent years that it just hurts to be forced to dump the blame for the New Republic's failures on those white-robed shoulders.

[ecarden]

I mean to be fair to Mon Mothma, it seems like she's trying to prevent the rise of another Palpatine, at which she succeeds. And the Republic isn't fully demilitarized. We're straight up told its stronger than the First Order and given the First Order could conquer the galaxy in a matter of days/weeks, that has to have been pretty strong...which makes its total collapse confusing...

I mean, the broader problem is that the Empire somehow has fanatically loyal revanchists a generation later, but the New Republic appears to have been entirely forgotten the moment its fleet blows up?

You'll notice the Resistance isn't an alliance to restore or create anything, it's just the Resistance, with as far as I can tell no civilian component at all?

[Tyndmyr]

At what point do we just go 'none of this makes any sense' and give up?

Rise of Skywalker putting a major plot point in the Fortnite crossover was where I tapped out

Yeah, pretty much same here. At this point, my caring in Star Wars is pretty low. Something to chat about when no more interesting film is available to discuss, but I certainly feel fairly little interest in actually watching most new Star Wars projects.

If someone still derives enjoyment from it, cool, good for them, but it's definitely not something that's leaning on coherency and good worldbuilding, and a Fortnite crossover was obviously never even intended to be that. It was intended to make money.

That would have been going too far. Now, this is admittedly a complicated problem - forum rules preclude use of examples, but um, recent world history has a lot to say on this subject. The trick here is that the new regime needs to do everything possible to align the personal goals of necessary retained representatives of the old regime with the political goals of the new regime. The New Republic should be structured such that it is in the best interest of former imperials to support the New Republic for their continued employment, prosperity, and security using a combination of carrots and sticks.

CCP Grey's youtube video on the nature of power would probably work to illustrate this. It's sufficiently abstract to avoid the problem of running into real world
examples, and is fairly well suited to discussing fictional power structures because of its neat examples.

One could argue that the New Republic is overly idealistic, for instance, and fails to properly identify who the correct power players are to essentially pay off with financial and political power, which results in them not keeping it. Thing is, that usually just results in a coup, and someone else taking a whack at it.

It's hard to justify keeping the status quo of essentially having imperials around with tons of resources....but also not taking over....but also the creation of the New Order, which is basically also a cloned Imperial Army....for like thirty years or so. When you have massive regime change, yeah, sometimes it doesn't take, but when it fails, it tends to rapidly change again, not just sit there in a quasi failed state.

I can buy a New Republic that has a ton of problems, but I think it suffers a great deal by writers who want to keep the problems more or less the same.

[gbaji]

I mean to be fair to Mon Mothma, it seems like she's trying to prevent the rise of another Palpatine, at which she succeeds. And the Republic isn't fully demilitarized. We're straight up told its stronger than the First Order and given the First Order could conquer the galaxy in a matter of days/weeks, that has to have been pretty strong...which makes its total collapse confusing...

Pretty much this. Mon Mothma's real mistake is thinking "we can go back to what it was like before the Empire", when in reality you have to go through a few extra steps to get back to a more or less demilitarized central governing Republic. There are just too many weapons floating around, and too many systems with a "I have to defend myself" mentality. In theory, and in the absence of residual Imperial movements, this could work just fine. Every system is its own soveregn territory, and the Republic and Senate are just means for them to redress concerns between those systems.

But they really needed to maintain a Rebelllion level military for a lot longer to get to that stage without civil conflicts. And since they didn't do this, it left a lot of systems isolated, but still not capable of deffending themselves against even a smallish Imperial movement. Most systems will fall to a single Star Destroyer. And the Imperial folks have the advantage that they can basically pick and choose where they go, and who they swoop up into their grasp. It's not shocking to see them gain a lot of resources over this time period. And heck, a good amount of this may have seemed legitimate to these systems. If you don't have much of a military yourself, and some former Imperials show up with some ships and say "pay us X% in taxes, and we'll protect you from other systems/bandits/whatever that might prey on you", it's going to seem like a good deal. And if you're really clever, you actually stoke the conflicts between systems in the first place, and then step in and offer "protection" to all of them. It's basically free money for these guys (and IIRC was touched on in Resistance a fair bit).

All of which could be avoided if the Republic actually had both the forces and the will to step in. The details are a bit vague, but it feels like the Republic failed to even adopt the most basic "we'll use our fleet to protect any member system against attacks by any other, including member states". This is usually the most basic starting point of a Republic though, but it appears like they didn't do this (unclear if this was an intentional failing, or just writers who know nothing of politics). The reality is that, had they adopted this, it would not only have seriously limited the FO's ability to gain power, but would also have acted to encourage more membership in the Republic itself (join the Republic and you'll be protected from all those nasty warlords and raiders and whatnot out there).

Which leads me to my personal assumption, which is that Mon Mothma incorrectly assumed they could (and should) immediately move back to the "Republic has no fleet, but depends on member systems to defend themselves and provide forces on occasion when needed" model. This was how the Old Republic worked, but they had thousands of years of relative peace to settle into it. Coming right off of two galactic conflicts, this was probably a foolish idea. But I could see how an idealist might want to do it anyway. Which, yeah... explains how they ended up being powerless to prevent the rise of the FO.

And yeah. Also explains why these various Imperial remnants can generate so much cash. They are literally running massive protection rackets.

[ecarden]

So, on the above point, I think part of it is that it's real ambiguous what the Republic's borders are? I don't think we ever see any sort of unambiguous assault on Republic territory (prior to the Hosnian system getting blown up and oh boy do I have thoughts about making the elected representative of a people who are going to be genocided, and one of exactly two citizens of that system who get a name in canon, in a manner exactly paralleling Alderaan be a douche-canoo).

But most of the galaxy doesn't seem to rush to rejoin the New Republic and so you've got a bunch of folks patrolling 'neutral' space? Which isn't crazy, I mean, if you treat space like an ocean, than presumably inhabited planets 'claim' some area around it as sovereign territory, but not the entire system? But, like, what are they patrolling for? Shipping safety? Catch raiders attacking people who aren't part of the Republic?

[Mechalich]

Which leads me to my personal assumption, which is that Mon Mothma incorrectly assumed they could (and should) immediately move back to the "Republic has no fleet, but depends on member systems to defend themselves and provide forces on occasion when needed" model. This was how the Old Republic worked, but they had thousands of years of relative peace to settle into it. Coming right off of two galactic conflicts, this was probably a foolish idea. But I could see how an idealist might want to do it anyway. Which, yeah... explains how they ended up being powerless to prevent the rise of the FO.

This is probably part of it. I also think that Mon Mothma - who showed up in the Senate as a young idealist teenager and only really matured as an adult under the Empire - bought into the Republic's propaganda regarding itself. For example, they didn't actually have 'thousands of years' of peace. They had roughly 800, from 1000 BBY to ~200 BBY, and even that peace was largely dependent upon letting various nasty forces in the galaxy do whatever they wanted so long as they kept it confined to the Outer Rim. The Old Republic, like many crumbling states throughout history, had lots of territory that it nominally controlled on the map, but was in reality the property of various local warlords.

The Old Republic also had a bunch of Jedi, and while their numbers were monstrously insufficient, they still did a lot of work tamping down the worst crises and bailing out the Republic. 0.1% of the number of Jedi the government needs is still better than statistically no different from zero Jedi, which is what the New Republic has. The Empire replaced the Jedi with a truly massive security apparatus - the ISB and related agencies. The New Republic has, so far as I can tell, nothing at all. There's just a hole in the government bureaucracy.

Ultimately, the decline of the New Republic in the Disney canon does make sense, with some massaging, it's just that it requires Mon Mothma to really, really, mismanage the situation and for various other characters - most recently Hera Syndulla in Ahsoka - to fail to stop her from doing so. It's not an unworkable story, but it is an unfun one. 'The good guys beat the bad guys and then made a bunch of stupid choices' is a perfectly plausible series of events, but it makes for a deeply unsatisfying story. That's the real problem.

[ecarden]

Ultimately, the decline of the New Republic in the Disney canon does make sense, with some massaging, it's just that it requires Mon Mothma to really, really, mismanage the situation and for various other characters - most recently Hera Syndulla in Ahsoka - to fail to stop her from doing so. It's not an unworkable story, but it is an unfun one. 'The good guys beat the bad guys and then made a bunch of stupid choices' is a perfectly plausible series of events, but it makes for a deeply unsatisfying story. That's the real problem.

I disagree with a lot of the rest of your comment...but this is right on the money. It's not that the story is impossible, or even unlikely it's just, yeah, the OT heroes won the war but lost the peace is just not fun at all.

And I really wish Star Wars would stop rubbing our noses in the unfun parts of its own canon? Like, seriously guys, the New Republic isn't going to fall for two decades, you could give it a period of success followed by collapse, or successes in some areas, with assumed failures happening off screen to balance it out (it's a big galaxy!).

Or just...move forward?

[Sapphire Guard]

I think perhaps it's inaccurate to talk about mistakes as though there is a perfect path. There aren't any easy answers, just tradeoffs. It may well be that there wasn't a choice about demilitarisation, maybe what we had was chunks of the alliance going 'I've fought long enough, I'm going home.'

The NR appears to have a massive staffing problem, leading to things like that automated prison ship with one staff member. Some people have to be purged, but purge all the Imperials and there's no one left to run the government.

Recent media seems to lean towards 'the core worlds were unaffected' which seems unlikely as they seem to be the heart of the rebellion, and also where Imperial writ is strongest.

They can't staff the Imperial fleet, they also can't leave all this dangerous gear lyng around. Local fleets take care of problems where possible, but there is a central fleet if needed. But there are a ridiculous amount of demands on its time, and the TV shows tend to be about the times the fleet can't show up, because it's harder to write a story if your lead can just call the fleet to solve the problem.

[Mechalich]

I disagree with a lot of the rest of your comment...but this is right on the money. It's not that the story is impossible, or even unlikely it's just, yeah, the OT heroes won the war but lost the peace is just not fun at all.

Indeed. Worse, it's significantly less fun than the Legends version. I mean, many of the post-RotJ Legends stories are both dumb and bad, but they tend to be fun. Dark Empire, notably, plays many of the same story beats as the ST: Palpatine back from the dead, the Empire with giant planet-destroying superweapons, and bizarre Force-power chicanery, but it's fun! Lando leads an assault on the Imperial Citadel in giant battle droids! R2-D2 crashes hijacks the Eclipse II and smashes it into the Galaxy Gun! Han Solo shoots Palpatine in the back!

If you gave me the choice between re-reading Dark Empire and rewatching the ST, even if it took the exact same amount of time, I'd choose Dark Empire every time.

And I really wish Star Wars would stop rubbing our noses in the unfun parts of its own canon? Like, seriously guys, the New Republic isn't going to fall for two decades, you could give it a period of success followed by collapse, or successes in some areas, with assumed failures happening off screen to balance it out (it's a big galaxy!).

The Disney canon novels seem to be the problem here. Those books - notably Aftermath and Lost Stars - involve the New Republic making a bunch of documented and subsequently canonical unfortunate choices more or less immediately after Endor.

From an EU perspective, the Legends EU was built on the foundation of the Thrawn Trilogy - which is really good. The Disney EU is built on the foundation of the Aftermath Trilogy - which is catastrophically bad. Now, the Legends scenario was largely a matter of luck, Timothy Zahn's style was well-suited to Star Wars and frankly the Thrawn Trilogy rises above pretty much everything else he's ever written by a significant margin. The Disney scenario, by contrast, demonstrates the same cavalier attitude as with so many of their Star Wars projects: they hired a modestly successful YA novelist who'd begged to write for them on social media with no Star Wars experience. How does that happen? There was one chance to establish a framework for everything that happens between 4 ABY and 30 ABY and Disney just brushed it off as unimportant.

There's just no sense of franchise management from Disney. Disney Star Wars has individual projects that are good, bad, or mediocre, but the connections aren't there, and the universe feels disjointed and disparate, resulting in something that is manifestly lesser than the sum of its parts.

[Flashy]

There's just no sense of franchise management from Disney. Disney Star Wars has individual projects that are good, bad, or mediocre, but the connections aren't there, and the universe feels disjointed and disparate, resulting in something that is manifestly lesser than the sum of its parts.

Absolutely exactly this. It's a problem running through almost all of the Disney era Star Wars content, but it's probably most dramatic in the sequel trilogy itself. There are things to like and dislike about a lot of specific choices, individual tastes may vary about TFA and TLJ, but when you consider the three together it's absolutely insane that Disney allowed two directors to have a back-and-forth argument about what Star Wars is supposed to be about through the medium of their numbered main-sequence expansion trilogy, seemingly with no idea that was what was happening.

[Errorname]

So, on the above point, I think part of it is that it's real ambiguous what the Republic's borders are? I don't think we ever see any sort of unambiguous assault on Republic territory (prior to the Hosnian system getting blown up and oh boy do I have thoughts about making the elected representative of a people who are going to be genocided, and one of exactly two citizens of that system who get a name in canon, in a manner exactly paralleling Alderaan be a douche-canoo).

But most of the galaxy doesn't seem to rush to rejoin the New Republic and so you've got a bunch of folks patrolling 'neutral' space? Which isn't crazy, I mean, if you treat space like an ocean, than presumably inhabited planets 'claim' some area around it as sovereign territory, but not the entire system? But, like, what are they patrolling for? Shipping safety? Catch raiders attacking people who aren't part of the Republic?

Admittedly Star Wars has always been bad at geography. It's very difficult to get a sense for where everything is in relation to each other or figure out the bigger strategic picture in any sort of detail just from the onscreen information. But the thing is older Star Wars was a lot better at the vibes, they could broadly sketch a political or military situation that was plausible enough you weren't asking too many questions. The Sequels made a botch of things because they copied the original scrappy guerillas fighting the evil empire thing and copy-pasted it onto what should be a radically different conflict.

Just making "The Resistance" into "Outer Rim Rangers" or something would have helped a lot but that would have meant coming up with new visual signifiers and new faction iconography, and J.J didn't want to make new toys for the sandbox he just wanted to keep playing with the old ones

[LibraryOgre]

Absolutely exactly this. It's a problem running through almost all of the Disney era Star Wars content, but it's probably most dramatic in the sequel trilogy itself. There are things to like and dislike about a lot of specific choices, individual tastes may vary about TFA and TLJ, but when you consider the three together it's absolutely insane that Disney allowed two directors to have a back-and-forth argument about what Star Wars is supposed to be about through the medium of their numbered main-sequence expansion trilogy, seemingly with no idea that was what was happening.

I might well steal this; I've often said that it is clear that they didn't have an outline, or even much of a bible, and that crippled the series.

[gbaji]

I disagree with a lot of the rest of your comment...but this is right on the money. It's not that the story is impossible, or even unlikely it's just, yeah, the OT heroes won the war but lost the peace is just not fun at all.

And I really wish Star Wars would stop rubbing our noses in the unfun parts of its own canon? Like, seriously guys, the New Republic isn't going to fall for two decades, you could give it a period of success followed by collapse, or successes in some areas, with assumed failures happening off screen to balance it out (it's a big galaxy!).

Yeah. On the one hand, you need some level of adversity to allow for heroics and whatnot. So I'm not adverse to the idea of stories involving a less than perfect New Republic, and problems associated therewith. But it does feel like they really went too far with that idea. It's like they went about building a new government and not a single person actually had any clue what that should entail. Which just seems a bit surprising to me.

Heck. I'm not even opposed to the (somewhat reasonable) plot lines involving various Imperial remnant factions popping up to do "bad things". It's just so darn one sided. If we assume it's a big galaxy, and if we assume that those who formed the core of the New Republic were just idealistic idiots and failed to take necessary steps to make this at least somewhat a viable organization, there should be lots of factions, some big and some small, who decided "we want nothing to do with this". Sure. Some of those would be Imperial aligned (or worse), but where the heck are the systems full of former Rebellion (or Rebellion adjacent) folks who, when the Empire fell and the New Republic was proposed, decided to take their ships and go home instead?

There should be a number of other factions in this otherwise fractured galactic system, who are not at all Imperial, but have merely staked out their own areas of control and influence. These folks may not want to join the New Republic, but you'd think they would be willing to take some actions against the Imperial factions too. Yet, it's like they just don't exist or something. We do, at least, get the Mandalorians, but only because we've got a series set specifically about them. Could at least mention maybe some political overtures to "the flugelhiem conglomerate", and "the pigglesworth alliance", and the "<insert silly named interplantetary organization here>". There should be dozens, if not hundreds of these sorts of self-forming groups of systems out there, if we are to assume that the New Republic just so epically failed to get them onboard itself.

But they're just... missing. So I suppose for me, it's not just that the New Republic's failings create a power vacuum that the FO eventually fills. It's also that there appears to be nothing else out there filling it either (ie: competing with the FO). Realistically, there should be.

[Mechalich]

Yeah. On the one hand, you need some level of adversity to allow for heroics and whatnot. So I'm not adverse to the idea of stories involving a less than perfect New Republic, and problems associated therewith. But it does feel like they really went too far with that idea. It's like they went about building a new government and not a single person actually had any clue what that should entail. Which just seems a bit surprising to me.

Heck. I'm not even opposed to the (somewhat reasonable) plot lines involving various Imperial remnant factions popping up to do "bad things". It's just so darn one sided. If we assume it's a big galaxy, and if we assume that those who formed the core of the New Republic were just idealistic idiots and failed to take necessary steps to make this at least somewhat a viable organization, there should be lots of factions, some big and some small, who decided "we want nothing to do with this". Sure. Some of those would be Imperial aligned (or worse), but where the heck are the systems full of former Rebellion (or Rebellion adjacent) folks who, when the Empire fell and the New Republic was proposed, decided to take their ships and go home instead?

There should be a number of other factions in this otherwise fractured galactic system, who are not at all Imperial, but have merely staked out their own areas of control and influence. These folks may not want to join the New Republic, but you'd think they would be willing to take some actions against the Imperial factions too. Yet, it's like they just don't exist or something. We do, at least, get the Mandalorians, but only because we've got a series set specifically about them. Could at least mention maybe some political overtures to "the flugelhiem conglomerate", and "the pigglesworth alliance", and the "<insert silly named interplantetary organization here>". There should be dozens, if not hundreds of these sorts of self-forming groups of systems out there, if we are to assume that the New Republic just so epically failed to get them onboard itself.

But they're just... missing. So I suppose for me, it's not just that the New Republic's failings create a power vacuum that the FO eventually fills. It's also that there appears to be nothing else out there filling it either (ie: competing with the FO). Realistically, there should be.

Splinter groups of this nature ought to break down on species lines as well. The central leadership of both the Rebellion and the Empire was Humans, and specifically humans from the Core Worlds (though admittedly, the majority of the humans in the galaxy live in the core and colonies), but a lot of military contribution to the success of the Rebel Alliance came from non-Humans. Now, this largely happened offscreen due to the constraints of filming the OT but there should absolutely be certain species who, having suffered heavily under Imperial occupation have gone 'the only good Imperial is a dead Imperial' route. Now, Mon Calamari or Wookiees aren't especially vengeful species but Bothans and Twi'leks are. As are certain members of the former CIS who, once freed from the control of the Empire, are presumably allowed to start building and supplying the galaxy with armaments once more.

And even if these groups don't splinter off from the New Republic, they should represent a huge pro-vengeance block within the Senate. Really, sending someone like Hera off with a fleet on a wild goose chase to find Thrawn should be politically ideal. Also, since Hera Syndulla appears to be the highest-ranked Twi'lek in the New Republic she should actually have more clout that she does. Twi'leks are the second most populous species in the Star Wars galaxy by a huge margin. The 'Twi'lek vote' cannot be ignored in anything resembling a democracy.

[Errorname]

Yeah. On the one hand, you need some level of adversity to allow for heroics and whatnot. So I'm not adverse to the idea of stories involving a less than perfect New Republic, and problems associated therewith. But it does feel like they really went too far with that idea. It's like they went about building a new government and not a single person actually had any clue what that should entail. Which just seems a bit surprising to me.

But they're just... missing. So I suppose for me, it's not just that the New Republic's failings create a power vacuum that the FO eventually fills. It's also that there appears to be nothing else out there filling it either (ie: competing with the FO). Realistically, there should be.

Every problem with Disney's post-OT canon can be traced back to bad fundamental worldbuilding choices made during Force Awakens that the following two movies exacerbated.

If you have the heroes build a New Republic or New Jedi Order that's worth a damn because it's all going to get blown up come Force Awakens. If you give Luke Skywalker a cast of memorable likeable proteges, whoops they've all gotta die now. If you come up with a cool distinctive New Republic fighting force they've all gotta get blown up so they can be replaced with the old Rebellion again. It requires a willingness to commit to building a world and characters just so it can get burned down, and you don't even have the prequel thing of it being the tragic backstory of some of the most iconic movies of all time because the thing you're building to is the Rise of Skywalker.

I joke about Filoni doing the "send all the characters I like to the timeout zone" trick from Rebels again, but honestly if I was in his shoes, yeah I probably wouldn't want to sacrifice a bunch of characters I'd spent my career developing for the sake of the J.J Abrams Star Wars movie.

[gbaji]

On the one hand, you are correct, that every bit of worldbuiding in this time period is "doomed" due to the ST. But on the other, there is still the potential of telling good stories in this space. Also, you can kinda salvage a bit of the ST, by perhaps actually spending some time telling the audience why the galaxy was so fractured leading up to the events in the ST itself. Telling us both why the NR failed to attract sufficient support to be able to fend off the growing Imperial movement (which ultimately leads to the FO), and also telling us why other (presumably anti-Imperial) factions also maybe just stayed in their own corners through all this and didn't stop it from happening.

Do that right, and you might... just maybe... salvage the ending of the ST. No. Not the silly fleet at Exogol, but the whole "we finally managed to convince all these other groups to come help when it really mattered" bit. With the correct setup and political bits in there, you could make a case that a large portion of the galaxy wasn't willing to fight for the New Republic, but was willing to fight to prevent a new Empire rising with enough power to threatent them all. It's a tough path to follow, but IMO, at least laying some groundwork on this concept in these in-between series could go a long way. Which is why I think they really do need to spend some time in this space. Show us other factions, and other systems, and that they've got lots of ships, and military capability, but perhaps due to historical opposition (CW era Separatists?), or just simple "we don't want to sign up to take orders from another galactic anything", they don't get involved in the stuff shown to us in the ST (well, until the last minute).

This was very much a whiplash moment in the film series, but another thing you could soften with a bit of storytelling to set up the history in the first place. I think we, the audience (and perhaps even the writers as well), tend to overly focus on the binary aspects of this. It's Rebellion vs Empire. It's Jedi vs Sith. And that's exactly what we got a repeat of in the ST, which leaves us with this whole "why the heck isn't annyone helping" (cause our binary view tells us that anyone opposed to the Empire/FO should therefore be supporting and defending the New Republic, right?0, and then magically everyone in the galaxy shows up at the end of RoS. Um... Ok. Where did that come from? Show us *why* there were a ton of systems who decided they weren't picking either of those sides, and you can explain why that happened in the films.


And heck. Even the "ST means everything we talk about is doomed to fail" is also a result of our own binary thinking. Why is "New Republic will fail' a doomed result? Maybe the best way forward for galactic peace *isn't* the New Republic? So... maybe let's tell some stories about things other than the New Republlic. Unfortunately, while there's been a lot of stuff about the NR failing, there hasn't been so much showing us other factions growing in power, gaining influence, learning to fend off and defeat threats, etc. And yeah, a lot of that is still that same binary thinking that the writers are stuck in and the audience just expects. Not sure how you break out of this mold, or even if it's possible.