The "new republic collapsed in 2 days" really ruined ST setting

[Slowpokeking]

We can see most of the series/EU don't want to resolve around ST or post ST era because it's too stupid.

How did they even come up with such idea. Even the old republic had to take Palpatine decades to change to empire. Even the empire took the rebels years to finish off. The new republic simply died after a capital was blasted? And TLJ further nailed the coffin.

[Frontier]

They just had to replacate the OT setting as much as they possibly could even if it completely undermined everything the protagonists' achieved.

[ChrisIII]

Part of the issue was that the fleet was basically mothballed except for a small defense force. (Resistance fleet is largely made of decommissioned Republic ships, and was more of a semi-independent militia focused on the First Order)

The Empire lost it's core leadership but had enough fleet intact to hold out until Jakku-Gideon and others later are mainly warlords doing most of their own thing, with Hux's faction eventually becoming the First Order.

[Jokerz79]

Even Lucas was going to have Luke fall from grace in the Sequels trilogy. In his treatments Luke was going to be off training his New Jedi Order which would have been children because Lucas was determined to have Luke reinstate all of the flaws of the Old Jedi Order such as Jedi must be trained as children and no marriages. Lucas' Sequel Trilogy Luke was not EU/Legends Luke. His nephew world kill his students and Luke would go off to an island to live in seclusion until the protagonist of the new trilogy a young female tentatively named Kira in some of the treatments would convince him to come back. A lot of what we got in the Sequel trilogy with Luke as sloppy as it was also what Lucas had in mind for the character.

The New Republic fell in Legends and became the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances a play on Galaxy Far Far away.

It's like when people complaining about a cloned Palpatine in the Sequel trilogy while praising Legends ignoring Legends also had a clone Palpatine back.

[Frontier]

Even Lucas was going to have Luke fall from grace in the Sequels trilogy. In his treatments Luke was going to be off training his New Jedi Order which would have been children because Lucas was determined to have Luke reinstate all of the flaws of the Old Jedi Order such as Jedi must be trained as children and no marriages. Lucas' Sequel Trilogy Luke was not EU/Legends Luke. His nephew world kill his students and Luke would go off to an island to live in seclusion until the protagonist of the new trilogy a young female tentatively named Kira in some of the treatments would convince him to come back. A lot of what we got in the Sequel trilogy with Luke as sloppy as it was also what Lucas had in mind for the character.

The New Republic fell in Legends and became the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances a play on Galaxy Far Far away.

It's like when people complaining about a cloned Palpatine in the Sequel trilogy while praising Legends ignoring Legends also had a clone Palpatine back.

It all comes down to execution in the end. And the Sequels just didn't have it.

[Jokerz79]

It all comes down to execution in the end. And the Sequels just didn't have it.

Oh, I'm under the opinion that TLJ was like a bomb set in the middle of a trilogy that instead of building off what came before blew it up and TROS was a watchable IMO shit show that tried to resemble the mess TLJ made.

The Sequels Trilogy is the post child for how not to make a trilogy.

But I also think there is hypocrisy in some of the attacks the Sequels get.

[godisawesome]

Even Lucas was going to have Luke fall from grace in the Sequels trilogy. In his treatments Luke was going to be off training his New Jedi Order which would have been children because Lucas was determined to have Luke reinstate all of the flaws of the Old Jedi Order such as Jedi must be trained as children and no marriages. Lucas' Sequel Trilogy Luke was not EU/Legends Luke. His nephew world kill his students and Luke would go off to an island to live in seclusion until the protagonist of the new trilogy a young female tentatively named Kira in some of the treatments would convince him to come back. A lot of what we got in the Sequel trilogy with Luke as sloppy as it was also what Lucas had in mind for the character.

Actually, what I've seen suggests this:

- Lucas conceived of two Solo kids (he asked Abrams where Anakin's "grandkids" were in a public meet and greet), and another dark sider who acts as the Jedi Killer and seduces the Solo boy to the dark side (Hidalgo reported the initial male lead was split into Finn and Kylo/Ben, who was combined with the Jedi Killer, and later Darth Talon from Legends was revealed to be a version of this character), and apparently the Jedi Killer was working for another villain ("Uber" according to one report, Maul in one of Lucas's confirmed drafts), leading the Solo girl to find "Colonel Kurtz" Luke and be trained by him. There was also one other big thing I'll bring up later... but also, LFL seems to have tried to cover this up a bit, cancelling the Rinzler book about TFA's making, and obfuscating a lot of stuff n a clearly self-serving manner.

- Abrams was the one who divided the male lead role into Finn and Kylo, combined the latter with the Jedi Killer, and replaced Uber/Maul with Snoke... while apparently removing the female lead's Solo heritage in favor of a mystery box, and *maybe* suggesting making her Luke's kid instead, but still keeping the "she will be trained by Luke."

- Johnson then decided Rey should have no significant parentage, demoted Finn, decided that Luke wouldn't train her but instead just further his midlife crisis arc, killed off Snoke, and sort of tried to make Kylo a combination main protagonist and main villain. LFL supports him because they really don't care about anyone but Ben Solo, not even Rey.

- LFL panics at seeing no Ben Solo hero moment in Collin Trevorrow's script, demand another new villain, Trevorrow can't make it work, then Abrams gets brought back after Johnson refuses to make the last film himself, and brings back Palpatine, simultaneously to give Ben Solo a villain to turn against and to give Rey someone important to be related to.

But the biggest thing for this thread that changed was this:

- Lucas had the villainous faction be the criminal underworld merely supplemented by ex-Imperials, instead of a recreation of the OT conflict with a major Imperial faction. this part only got revealed with the reveal of Maul having been involved at one point, but fits with how the earliest, Lucas-commissioned concept art (which actually shows Darth Talon) didn't have major Imperial elements until later.

I still think LFL made/supported some decisions out of a "loyalty" to Lucas in their POV - especially regarding how Rey could have been a Skywalker, since Lucas had inconsistent issues with Luke getting hitched and having a kid, having supported it from a business perspective for the EU, but voiced personal dissatisfaction later.

...But I also think LFL also themselves rejected his general outline because they wanted an OT style Empire vs Rebels set-up - a stereotypically Gen X fan desire.

[Bruce Wayne]

Even Lucas was going to have Luke fall from grace in the Sequels trilogy.

His nephew world kill his students and Luke would go off to an island to live in seclusion until the protagonist of the new trilogy a young female tentatively named Kira in some of the treatments would convince him to come back. A lot of what we got in the Sequel trilogy with Luke as sloppy as it was also what Lucas had in mind for the character.

That's not true. The whole idea of Luke's student becoming the Jedi-Killer, which later became Kylo Ren/Ben Solo was from when Arndt and Abrams were working on the movie and by that time Lucas was off the film. The Star Wars Archives. 1999–2005 book which has interviews by Lucas regarding the sequels has none of these plot points. The main takeaways from that book was that the "Darth Vader" of the Lucas's sequels was "Darth Talon" from the Legacy Comics and that the Snoke/Palpatine figure was Darth Maul running the Shadow Collective and from the Art of TFA book, there were already Jedi presumably trained by Luke emerging in the New Republic with Darth Talon going after them. In addition, Lucas really seems to frame the ST focusing on Leia as the key figure trying to stitch back the Galactic Republic as its leader.

The Story Group was supposed to help deal with stuff like this…

Because Abrams wouldn't listen to them so they basically got cut out in TFA/TROS and in TLJ they were basically yes-men for Rian Johnson. Overall the Story Group was just a bunch of middle managers like the Marvel Creative Comittee (that had Quesada and Bendis and Perlmutter as members) at Marvel Studios that Feige later cut out.

[Grunty]

It's kind of funny, that even given the advance in FX tech the B-wing (Which wasn't used much in ROTJ due to it filming poorly due to it's thin profile) still didn't do too much in any of the new films, apart from having a resemblance to the Leia's transport in TFA (and the ship Finn and Rose use to get to Canto in TLJ) and later when it finally does show up in ROS, only shows up as much as it did in ROTJ and doesn't really do much except get destroyed. The Y-wing actually gets more to do (especially Zorri's).

This is likely a combination of being more difficult to put in scene and not meeting the "nostalgia quota" as much as the Y- and A-wing.

In terms of being more difficult to put into scenes. The vast majority of space fighters in Star Wars not only stick to a center cockpit design, but moving parts like those of the X-wing are actualy quite rare and tend to be rather simple.
Which makes the B-Wing's much more awkward and therefor potentialy more bothersome to put into scene, even with the help of modern FX not requiring the handling of the fragile physical model anymore.

And since it didn't have as many memorable scenes as the A-wing in ROTJ or appeared in the previous 2 movies, there is less "pressure" for the creators to bring it back for the sake of nostalgia, which then creates a bit of a vicious cycle.

Of course there's the one in REBELS but that doesn't seem to do much either afterwards with Pheonix Squadron mainly sticking with A-wings).

It could be argued that Rebels actualy made it worse, by imply that the awkard shape is the result of being designed around a mini-death star style focus array laser cannon which could take out small capital ships in a single shot, but couldn't be put into mass production.

So for some reason the Alliance engineers then just slapped some regular blaster and ion cannons into the positions of the arrays and put the specialized design it into mass production anyway, even though the same effort could have gone into building a modernized version of the much more rugged and stable looking Y-wing by replacing the Clone War era components with those they would make for the B-wing.

Meaning that rather than just expand on the history of that odd looking fighter briefly seen in ROTJ, they gave it a backstory which marked it as failed special design pushed into service anyway.

The old EU made it a powerhouse and a cool backstory in the X-wing series of games though.

It was basicly marketed to sell the second expansion pack and rather than giving it players right from the start, they had to go through some difficult missions to secure the first batch for the alliance, after which the players could finaly fly them.

Ironicaly, by the time of Tie Fighter the B-wing became relatively "normal", especially once the absurdly overpowered Tie Defender and Missile Boat were given to players.

Meanwhile the stylish and impressive but overshadowed Tie-Avenger has yet to become canon.

I think it’s completely rational and understandable to treat source books as “over-writable” or ignorable by other “higher-ranking” material… to a point. Past that point, if someone is just ignoring everything, willy-nilly, then it begs the question why you can’t just ask them to be either a little bit accommodating (which can sometimes be done by a few simple exchanges of dialogue), or maybe just don’t both creating ancillary material that will be ignored.

The ST saw this happen on a fairly grand scale - TLJ so arrogantly ignored everything it didn’t care about from TFA that it sort of burned multiple characters and spin-off material away, like that Poe comic, while TROS then did something similar to the developments of stuff like Bloodline.

With the Imperial fleet at Endor, the only thing we know is they lost the battle and didn’t avenge the Death Star’s destruction. They’ve at least been consistent on that. Why they retreated or failed to avenge Palpatine, we don’t know, and is subject to change.

Similarly, we know that there was apparently a thread-bare, if effective, garrison on Starkiller Base in TFA, and that in TROS, the First Order lacks the strength to conquer the Galaxy unaided… but somehow in between there, TLJ showed a First Order large and strong enough to supposedly be “weeks” away from securing major systems while objectively being so stupid they Three Stooged their way into losing half their now much larger fleet.

The Story Group was supposed to help deal with stuff like this…

Indeed there is a differnce between disregarding secondary or tertiary information sources if they are in the way of writing a story for the "primary" sources and disregarding basicly any canon including on screen ones.

Furthermore the more secondary and tertiary sources are disregarded the more it harms the enjoyment of the dedicated fans who bother to read those and it's usualy these people who maintain IPs and keep them relevant between releases.

So at best any creator should weight on what should be disregarded and what should be aknowledged even if modified.

[godisawesome]

That's not true. The whole idea of Luke's student becoming the Jedi-Killer, which later became Kylo Ren/Ben Solo was from when Arndt and Abrams were working on the movie and by that time Lucas was off the film. The Star Wars Archives. 1999–2005 book which has interviews by Lucas regarding the sequels has none of these plot points. The main takeaways from that book was that the "Darth Vader" of the Lucas's sequels was "Darth Talon" from the Legacy Comics and that the Snoke/Palpatine figure was Darth Maul running the Shadow Collective and from the Art of TFA book, there were already Jedi presumably trained by Luke emerging in the New Republic with Darth Talon going after them. In addition, Lucas really seems to frame the ST focusing on Leia as the key figure trying to stitch back the Galactic Republic as its leader.



Because Abrams wouldn't listen to them so they basically got cut out in TFA/TROS and in TLJ they were basically yes-men for Rian Johnson. Overall the Story Group was just a bunch of middle managers like the Marvel Creative Comittee (that had Quesada and Bendis and Perlmutter as members) at Marvel Studios that Feige later cut out.

What do you think about the early ST stuff I’ve got in one of my posts up top? The one where it looks like Lucas *had* moved on to having Anakin’s grandkids as the main characters?

Though to back up your point about her, Darth Talon’s place as a “Jedi Killer” villain under Maul seemed to get far enough developed it even moved into some early “video game as a prologue” areas with Maul (which I’d bet you might know about, but I just love this demo):


And as to the Story Group stuff, I feel like they should get judged a little bit regardless of their place as middle managers, since the one real area where they *did* have power, in spin-off material, they seemed to suck at it. They let Marvel Comics follow up on Poe’s characterization from TFA when someone in the story group had to be aware of TLJ’s script - implying either apathy about the differences, or ignorance of them (which actually seems somewhat likely, given how LFL “subconsciously” discarding much of TFA’s stuff would fit better with their lack of forethought even with stuff they liked about TLJ.)

[ChrisIII]

There is an interesting publicity shot of a squad of B-wings blowing up a Star Destroyer (Implied I think to be Vader's from ANH and later Rogue One and Obi-Wan before he upgraded to Executor). I've read this was possibly based on a sequence planned for the film but left out because they couldn't make it work.

As noted the Avenger isn't really given much to do in canon, although it's prototype (and that of the Interceptor)- Vader's TIE has certainly been used many times, and the TIE silencer has a similar silhouette (Funny thing it looks closer to the lower-res versions of the Avenger than the upgraded versions that used X-wing vs. TIE fighter graphics.

[Bruce Wayne]

We can see most of the series/EU don't want to resolve around ST or post ST era because it's too stupid.

How did they even come up with such idea. Even the old republic had to take Palpatine decades to change to empire. Even the empire took the rebels years to finish off. The new republic simply died after a capital was blasted? And TLJ further nailed the coffin.

If you examine the decision making for blowing up Hosnian Prime (HP), you'll find that originally that Abrams wanted to blow up Coruscant instead and HP was a compromise which makes sense since the visuals for HP is a very faithful reproduction of Coruscant from the PT.

I think from the pov of someone like Abrams who isn't knowledgeable about the lore that the decision to blow up Coruscant and the sudden collapse of the Republic kind of makes sense in that he probably thought the Republic was synonymous with Coruscant and thus destroying Courscant=no Republic if you are not terribly knowledgeable about the lore.

They just had to replacate the OT setting as much as they possibly could even if it completely undermined everything the protagonists' achieved.

I think this is a good observation.

If anything the Sequel Trilogy needed to sell that Han/Leia/Luke were failures and fuckups to sell Rey as a protagonst (who would finally defeat the First/Final Order and Kylo Ren and Palpatine). Han was a failure as a rebel, a father and husband. Luke failed as a Jedi, a mentor and a teacher. Leia failed as a general, a parent and a politician.

The decision to basically retcon the ending of the OT and ROTJ was to recenter the story conflict of SW between the Empire (now FO) vs Rebels (now the Resistanc) as compared to say how the prequels and novels were more the Jedi vs Sith (the Kotor comic, Legacy comic, LotF novels).

If they hadn't done this, the Disney Trilogy would probably had to figure out how to tell a story where the New Republic was still going strong with the heroes of the Rebellion backing it up with the Jedi slowly being revived under Luke. That was probably a much more daunting task that Disney and Abrams were probably not up to and werent interested in doing (since that was in the pitches Lucas sold to Disney).

[ChrisIII]

The Legacy comics did largely recycle bits of the Rebels Vs. Empire story, although with the twist that there was Empire was split between two factions.

Remember the Republic pretty much also fell in the NJO, with a new alliance formed in the later novels.


LOTF also largely stuck to a lot of OT and PT "Civil War" stuff.

So basically the franchise as a whole was already retreading familiar ground after trying the Jedi vs. Alien invaders stuff with the Vong and the Killik.

The heroes did have at least 25 years of general peace (apart from the skirmishes we've seen with Gideon, Thrawn etc).

It's only about five years before that things start to collapse in large part to Snoke/Palpatine and FO sympathizers starting to make their move. The resistance was formed in part because the Republic did not take the First Order seriously (although she did have several allies in the Republic government).

[Bruce Wayne]

The Legacy comics did largely recycle bits of the Rebels Vs. Empire story, although with the twist that there was Empire was split between two factions.

The Rebel side in Legacy was not the Fel Empire, but rather the military remnants of the Galactic Alliance and they were an after thought and wasn't even mentioned in the story bible and had to be slowly introduced in fill-in stories. The main thrust of Legacy was the conflict between Cade (Jedi) and Darth Krayt (the One Sith). It was very much a Jedi v Sith with the various factions of the Empire more to highlight how complicated the situation had become and to see how elements of the Empire were themselves slowly reforming to become more benevolent and how even the moffs weren't monolithic about collaborating with Krayt.

LOTF also largely stuck to a lot of OT and PT "Civil War" stuff.

Again the main arc was centered on Darth Cadeus/Jacen and his fall to the dark side and his death. It was much a Sith vs Jedi story more than a classical OT story especially given how much the political elements were an after thought. You can look at media like R1, Rebels and the various rebellion flavored short stories from the 90s to see how the Rebels vs Empire stories (which often times feature force users) were different from Jedi vs Sith themed stories like Legacy/LotF/Kotor. If anything I'd argue that Jedi vs Sith themed stories (including the prequels) usually emphasized the long cycle of struggle between the Jedi vs Sith.

[godisawesome]

The weird thing for me about this whole "the New Republic must fall and we must restart the OT conflict!" is:

A) Abrams actually comes off as one of the less obsessive about mimicking it (which is shocking considering he's still 100% behind the idea), and...

B) It's like the only thing that literally every major creator seems to agree on, with Filoni and Johnson being, if anything, even more invested in trying to make the New Republic an impotent non-factor.

LFL and its associates couldn't agree on anythign else about the ST: Abrams wanted Rey as the clear main character and Finn as the male lead with Kylo as the villain and an effective First Order, Johnson wanted the whole thing to be a Hipster Saturday Morning Cartoon based around Kylo as his Gary Stu Villainous Protagonist, and LFL couldn't give a damn about anything but making Kylo EVEN MORE of a Gary Stu and wanting him to be a/the hero. (Remember kids: Kylo is the blackhole at the center of the ST, not Rey.) But *EVERYONE wanted the New Republic gone and the Empire back fighting Rebels.

Abrams arguably started somewhat more nuanced than the others, since his First Order in TFA is a lean and hungry force still scared of the New Republic Navy and seriously harasser by the tiny Resistance, and thus dependent on Starkiller Base to actually begin their offensive, and are undermanned enough to find the Resistance strike force genuinely scary. TFA actually ends somewhat somberly regarding the situation, but suggests that the First Order is nowhere near dominating the Galaxy yet.

That's a functional situation, or at least a salvageable one.

Johnson then insists the First Order already reigns in the opening crawl of TLJ, immediately retcons the First Order Fleet in size while also retconning their intelligence and energy-level into a bloated, slow group of idiots (very much in a parody of the OT), shows a Galaxy with about as much emotional reaction to Hosnian Prime's destruction as Johnson himself has towards Kylo's crimes (read: none.) He then also has the Resistance reduced to twelve dudes and tries to have them outright re-christened Rebels in a misguided attempt to abuse nostalgia as Abrams does (say what you will about Abrams, but he's competent at exploiting nostlagia.) Johnson even commissioned that Bloodline book to try and retcon the size of the First Order into a large Galactic faction, while TFA's First Order was explicitly a hidden and small group in the Unknown Regions.

That's not functional, nor exciting.

Then TROS comes in and re-retcons the retcon so the First Order is again too small to conquer the Galaxy itself, even if the Resistance is still small... and basically sets about making a new "First Order from TFA" faction in the Sith Fleet and by replacing TLJ's version of Hux with a TFA!Hux-esque character in Pryde (literally every line Pryde has save one would fit perfectly with TFA Hux as well.) He then also shows that the Galaxy could rally to overwhelm the Sith forces with sheer numbers with the right motivation (lazily excused by Lando.)

That's still dysfunctional, but seems to work for some people.

Now you've got Filoni doing a generally competent if still painfully formulaic version of the "New Republic is toothless and stupid, and the heroes have to outfox the bureaucracy before the Empire gets too many dudes" situation. And I think the reason is pretty clear - it's the easy, lazy way to do a familiar formula without taking risks and without having to strain themselves by studying politics, culture, and stuff like that.