Originally Posted by
godisawesome
But it’s not just the OT that plays up the evil of the Empire and makes that a point of clarity - it’s also literally ALL their expanded universe stuff in the Disney era.
That nihilism doesn’t exist whenever you give one of these writers a chance to write a story with Tarkin (because old school Star Wars fans always have a hard on for Tarkin) committing atrocities on almost everyone around him, or a chance to write something with Operation: Cinder, or anything else that’s set in the OT, where they want to have Saturday Morning Cartoon levels of evil, but played seriously.
They fundamentally go out of their way to make the Empire an inescapably more terrible government than the Republic whenever they’re writing with the real Empire. And even the most cynical depiction of the Old Republic makes it clear that it’s not the Empire - largely because that nihilism you note ceases to exist once they want to emphasize the Empire being evil.
They only get “nihilistic” when they get lazy - and the vaguely anti-democratic messaging isn’t intentional, it’s just that laziness expressing itself right up until they bring back some imperial villain and have him start torturing puppies on screen or something.
The fact they’re lazy about the New Republic *is the problem* - because it’s lazy and contributed to the lackluster writing that plagued much of the ST, and seems to be again being used to avoid spending more time writing smart villains on Disney+.
Hell, when they write good villains, it ends up with stuff like Mayfeld being retraumatized by his old commanding officer and shooting him for it, because of how obviously evil the Empire was compared to everything else - and Mayfeld’s supposed to be the arch-cynic, beyond the casual Galactic citizen. Might be a sign of where that episodes writer didn’t fall back on laziness as Filoni and Favreau did in The Mandalorian Season 4 and Ahsoka.
Weirdly, Legacy wound up having the Galactic Alliance Remnant become a major player and implied Victor of the war organically instead of the planned Fel Empire being the main heroic faction - the writers seemed to just find it more fun to right straight up heroes and the morally grey Fel Empire wasn’t good enough to fit the main heroic mold of the story, and thus they had the Emperor go bad.
They defiantly seemed to become enamored with making the government the baddies after ROTS, though, so you’re right about that - and it’s a sentiment that likely survived the jump from Lucas to Disney.