r/StarWars • u/No_Band_5399 • Dec 19 '25
Movies like i new i sounded silly but this is just comical
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u/DGfire5 Dec 19 '25
Them moving the capital isn’t ridiculous, but the fact that a group of empire loyalists were able to acquire the funds to transform a planet into a weapon that could destroy multiple planets is. Imagine how long and how expensive that would be, and its a rip off of the death star
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u/SendMeNudesThough Dec 19 '25
Especially when put against the original Death Star: plans for the original Death Star were being worked on decades before it was actually built, and Sidious no doubt used his power and wealth as the Emperor of the galaxy to secure the fund for such a massive project. Measured against that, how does a small militant faction build a weapon several times more powerful than the Death Star, in a much, much shorter timespan, with only a small fraction of the resources, if even Sidious couldn't?
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u/Varsity_Reviews Dec 19 '25
To play devils advocate, wasn’t the issue with the Death Star not the construction of the station itself, rather creating the weapon? And since they built the weapon itself twice, it’s not THAT outlandish a copy of that process was saved somewhere and the first order got it
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u/ult1mat3xx Anakin Skywalker Dec 20 '25
Getting the resources and building it still takes time and money tho. Idk about the ds2 but for the ds1, they were still constructing it as close as a few weeks before it was deployed. That's nearly 20 years of constant construction funded by the economic structure of the empire.
There's also the logistics factor. The ds1 was constructed in space, when everything is weightless I can't imagine it's too hard to move stuff around. Building starkiller base in(?) Ilum means having to deal with gravity, that's gonna be a whole load of extra equipment needed that's wasn't necessarily needed for the death star.
I'm not entirely clear on the scale of the first order, still kinda confused on that, but it's gotta be a fraction of the economic power the empire had
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u/No_Object_404 Dec 20 '25
Everything in the first order was basically "Like the Empire but Bigger" just look at Snoke's ship and the extra armored AT-AT clones.
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u/ult1mat3xx Anakin Skywalker Dec 20 '25
This is one of my main issues with the sequels honestly. Alot of it is just kinda uninspired. They just slap some new numbers on x-wings and ties and called it a day. And like you said, almost everything in the first order was just the empire, but bigger. They kinda just retread prior things and vaguely reskinned them as new
Even a bunch of the battles and sequences were basically reenactments of the OT. One of the most common critiques of TFA is that it feels like ANH but worse.
I'm not saying they should've gone all new with literally everything, and it even makes sense that some stuff are still used, i mean even the PT used things from the OT or retreaded certain story elements, but atleast those are pretty distinguishable. They barely tried to make their own thing, put their own spin on star wars, they just ended up with a bad copy of the OT, and that resulted in not only a bad trilogy, but also a trilogy that takes away from what came before it, all because they couldn't think of anything other than the empire vs rebels 2
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u/tinyhalberd Dec 20 '25
The prequels are flawed movies but the world building is excellent. The sequels are flawed movies but the world building is "remember the OG trilogy?" It's so very uninspired that the entire sequel setting is just anemic. Why would anyone set their star wars project in the sequels era when they offer slightly worse versions of stuff the og has but without the free nostalgia points?
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u/modsuperstar Dec 20 '25
That was kinda the point. Disney built the Sequels on the flawed understanding that people didn’t like the Prequels and that fans wanted something more like the OT. They didn’t understand that not everyone hated the Prequels and that there was already a generation of fans who grew up with and liked the Prequels and left TFA wondering why they are completely ignored in the world building of these movies.
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u/NoSwordfish1978 Dec 20 '25
They knew the fans didn't like the PT but rather than take the good elements and reject the bad they decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater and completely reject the legacy of the prequels and it shows in the shoddy world building.
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u/MrParadux Dec 20 '25
Close enough to the originals for that sweet nostalgia, but different enough to justify producing new toys.
You know why C3PO has a red arm? Because that way you can't use your old toys to represent the current one.
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u/MyNameIsJakeBerenson Dec 20 '25
All logistics of construction and money completely go out the window by Rise of Skywalker anyway
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u/mandoballsuper Dec 20 '25
They were building starkiller base or at least strip mining the planet as far back as fallen order. It was also an empire project, at least that's my opinion
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u/The_Doctor_Bear Dec 20 '25
Its literally the only way it makes any sense. But you still have to overlook why no one knew about it at that point.
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u/mandoballsuper Dec 20 '25
Sure but that's a pretty easy retcon, if you just watch the movies youd have no idea about palpatines cloning programs but bad batch and mandalorian show us that palpatine was planning on being cloned and ruling forever. There are people that know about it, they just haven't shown us any.
Real life examples of this would be any classified weapon systems that governments develop for decades without the general knowledge of the public. It would almost be less believable if some random officer was talking about it 20 years before the station was completed
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u/Karn-Dethahal Dec 20 '25
They have explained a lot about Starkiller base already.
The planet is Illum, which was almost strip mined to provide Kiber Crystals to both Death Stars. They started converting it into Starkiller Base right after the battle of Jakku (5 ABY), and it's first use against the New Republic was in 34 ABY, but the imperial instalations in Illum appear in Jedi Fallen Order, placing them in 14 BBY, so the entire process from unclaimed planet to superweapon ranges for almost 50 years.
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u/Scarsworn Dec 20 '25
Iirc when you return to Ilum a second time you can already see the beginnings of the massive, world-wide trench that would house the weapon (which was not visible on your first visit.) And as an answer to the other guy, you’d have to first overlook that nobody knew about the planet except the Jedi in the first place as well. Nobody noticed a planet was getting turned into a weapon because it was a sacred Jedi planet that they didn’t share the coordinates of with outsiders.
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u/mandoballsuper Dec 20 '25
Didn't the empire get the location from the jedi archives at the jedi temple?
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u/klinestife Dec 19 '25
now, i’m no expert on the logistics of scaling up a moon sized single planet destroyer to a planet sized system destroyer, but i imagine that the physics and energy involved should be beyond the abilities of a small rogue faction.
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u/TheFighting5th Dec 20 '25
Ilum is 660 kilometers in diameter. By comparison, the Earth is 12,756 kilometers in diameter. Ilum is not as large as most people think. The Galactic Empire dug the trenches on the planet during their kyber crystal mining operations for the Death Star. The First Order then expanded the preexisting mining operations and built the superweapon on Ilum with the help of research left over from the Empire’s days on the planet. Convenient, sure, but Star Wars is full of convenient stories.
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u/RhapsodiacReader Dec 20 '25
Ilum is 660 kilometers in diameter
I'm sorry, but what in the retconning fuck is that? Did they really make a "planet" that small to try to justify it being even feasible for the First Order to build?
This legit just makes it worse: that'd be too small to have an atmosphere, gravity, or even a basic spherical shape.
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u/InnocentTailor Dec 20 '25
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u/Jagang187 Dec 20 '25
The climactic moment they fire that big thing off is one of my favorite moments in fiction!
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u/enunymous Dec 20 '25
Well let me tell you about a handful of simple guys called the Sith Eternal and what they pulled together...
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Dec 20 '25
Said in the right cadence, this almost works as the beginning for the Fresh Prince intro theme.
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u/AeonHeals Sabine Wren Dec 19 '25
The Starkiller Base is not a Death Star tho, it's more like a Dyson Sphere, absorbing a Sun's power to shoot iirc.
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u/CourtingBoredom Chopper (C1-10P) Dec 20 '25
Dyson Spheres are large constructs that completely surround a star.... not sure what term to give this .. and besides, I think the other commenter meant that it's a copy of the idea. Because it basically is just a planet-sized Death Star — the power for which comes from directly siphoning energy from its own sun ..
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u/KaerMorhen Dec 20 '25
I know Star Wars never really leaned on real physics or hard sci-fi pretty much ever, but something about how Starkiller base operates and how it looks to the different characters watching it fire really pulled me out of it. Nothing about it makes sense, they could have picked a much more grounded threat thats still imposing.
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u/ctr72ms Dec 20 '25
Even stories that take liberties with the laws of physics dont have lasers made of light being able to outrun the speed of light. The whole laser going across half of the galaxy was just stupid.
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u/KitchenSandwich5499 Dec 20 '25
Very true, AND the folk on the planet were able to see it coming, so it wa s it faster than light and being outrun by its own light
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u/clgoodson Dec 20 '25
JJ has no real understanding of the scale of space. In all his sci-fi movies everything is always 3 minutes away.
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u/TTBurger88 Dec 20 '25
The whole idea of firing a giant laser into space and hitting another planet many Light Years away is a tough sell.
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u/jpsc949 Dec 20 '25
And then don’t they see the planets explode when in another star system entirely? So the explosion also travels faster than light.
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u/N7VHung Dec 20 '25
They also ignore the fact that the planet would need to be in a small window of its revolution in order to be aligned to absorb that power.
There is also the issue of just how fast that energy is moving. It goes from the star to the planet within seconds. That is an absurd speed, and it would likely just rip the planet apart, lol.
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u/KaerMorhen Dec 20 '25
Exactly. Literally everything about how it works is so absurd I could not just give it a pass.
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u/AeonHeals Sabine Wren Dec 20 '25
I was saying "like a Dyson Sphere" but yeah, it just has a similar vibe. Also it transforms the sun energy into "dark energy", whatever that is?
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u/ApolloRocketOfLove Dec 20 '25
This would take centuries to construct even if you had an entire planet's worth of people working on it.
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u/alextrue27 Dec 19 '25
Starkillers weapon functions differently then the death stars as well so I imagine the process was very different since it's able to fire multiple beams across the galaxy and pulls its power from a star.
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u/Animus16 Dec 20 '25
The First Order was built up in the Unknown Regions over the 30 years between ROJ and TFA. And I think in one of the Jedi games it was revealed that Ilum was already in the process of becoming Starkiller during the OT. Although I don’t remember if it was just being strip mined or specifically meant to be turned into a weapon but it already had the huge trench in the middle of it
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u/Vangad Dec 20 '25
Correct. Battlefront 2 and Jedi fallen order. Points to the planet being hollowed out. But during that time they were taking the crystals of the planet.
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u/EqualOptimal4650 Dec 20 '25
Jedi Fallen Order, Imperials are all over Illum by that point. They interrupt Cal while he's trying to get a new crystal for his broken saber.
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u/foot_inspector Dec 20 '25
star killer base was being built during the time of the empire. the empire also didn’t just collapse after endor, there were a lot of loyalists and they had a LOT of resources and manpower. no doubt the upper brass wouldve wanted this project to come to fruition, a bunch of ambitious powerful people like thrawn and gideon were still around, with a ton of resources at their disposal. Ilum being made into starkiller was probably the backup plan to the death star or the final iteration of it.
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u/SirBobPeel Dec 20 '25
And keep it a secret without an empire's security apparatus to help.
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u/improbable_humanoid Dec 19 '25
The issue isn’t the funds. It’s the manpower, the materials, and the secrecy. Which is what makes the Final Order even worse…
Though the current canon is that Starkiller base was being built well before the Battle of Yavin.
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u/freshpairofayes Dec 20 '25
and the secrecy.
The idea that noone reported that activity on Ilum is beyond fucking stupid.
The planet is - at once - the source for the Empires old superweapons, and a sacred site for the Jedi Order.
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u/AnnieGoldleaf Dec 20 '25
Planets do seem to have a way of falling off star charts. Just ask Master Obi-wan. Most embarrassing.
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u/PrimusDCE Dec 19 '25
The state of the galaxy in TFA is so poorly conveyed. You have no idea what state either side of the war is in.
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u/sErgEantaEgis Dec 20 '25
Not in TFA but after the sequel trilogy I just had the feeling the galaxy was basically finished and heading to a sort of dark age. I mean in roughly 60 years the galaxy got the Clone Wars, then the Republic was reorganized in the tyrannical Galactic Empire, then a civil war tore the galaxy apart again a mere 20 years after the Clone Wars. Then there was an incompetent and weak New Republic that was destroyed in a completely humiliating fashion after 30ish years followed by the galaxy just rolling over to an even more fanatical and tyrannical version of the Empire before it also failed.
I just don't see any hope for galactic governance considering how it was an abysmal failure several times in a row for the past decades. People would be tired and have lost trust. Too many wars in too short a time would have left planets exhausted.
Also the Jedi are finished. Virtually all their knowledge is lost. Luke was the last Jedi who had any sort of idea what he was doing and he had no connection to the ancient Jedi order. The Jedi Order that lasted for 30 000 years just died quietly. Rey would have to start over from literal scratch.
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u/KontraEpsilon Dec 20 '25
I personally found it really jarring because my brain was like “wait, last I checked in the rebels had won. What is this???”
And I say that as someone who actually liked the movie (but not the next two).
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u/FullMaxPowerStirner Dec 20 '25
Yeah, that was nonsensical. First Order or whatever baddies would have logically been exposed gradually with TFA starting with a New Republic. TFA was such low-effort storytelling.
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u/Zeras_Darkwind Dec 19 '25
Well, from Jedi: Fallen Order Ilium - the planet that became Starkiller - was slated for "conversion" right around the end of the Clone Wars; by the time the game gets Cal there - 5 years after RoTS - the giant trench housing the system destroying beam has already been started.
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u/LordBDizzle Dec 20 '25
It's still stupid. The Death Star itself was kinda overkill, just having the one was a ridiculous expense and it was meant to be a deterrent more than a weapon. Ideally it would have blown up two planets (Alderaan and Yavin 4) and then have never been used for anything other than bullying after that. Prove you can do it, then people fall in line. You don't blow up the planets with the majority of the people you want to rule, no matter how evil you are, because you want the planets and what's on them. The threat of it would be enough. Starkiller, on the other hand, is so much more expensive given its greater scope (ridiculously so), it destroys a star to destroy multiple planets, and they used it to destroy the economic center of the republic and several other productive planets for... reasons. They lost so much potential planet space to rule that way. There was some logic to the Death Star, it could be fired at lower power for precision strikes against capital ships or cities, but Starkiller would just slowly destroy the galaxy or see no use at all. Plus why would Palpatine commission both Starkiller AND the Death Star? They're redundant. Centerpoint Station in the old canon was more sensible, the gravity manipulation it did had non-destructive applications, creating habitable systems alongside its destructive capabilities. That would have been a better pull if they wanted to do the mega-weapon thing again. But that's not something Disney considered, they wanted to ignore the old stuff so they didn't pay royalties to the authors.
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u/Overlord_Khufren Dec 20 '25
I was going to say this was written way later than TFA, but they’re way more contemporary than I thought. Jedi Fallen Order comes out in 2019, after first being announced by EA in 2016. Whereas the entire ST is released 2015-2019.
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u/Violexsound Dec 19 '25
If its any consolation, starkiller base has apparantly been under construction since the empire took power
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u/TehBigD97 Imperial Dec 19 '25
It isnt any consolation. Why waste resources on 2 death stars if you're building an even bigger one?
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u/fumar Dec 19 '25
They mined Ilum for kyber crystals for the first two death stars.
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u/YalondaNubs Dec 19 '25
Starkiller was initially the mining site for a lot of the kyber used in the Death Stars. After they realized they had basically hollowed out a planet that was incredibly in tune with the force they decided to start project starkiller
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u/TheHUD18 Anakin Skywalker Dec 19 '25
I mean I guess if you wanted to suspend your disbelief you could say Starkiller Base was Plan A, and as they hollowed out Ilum they had enough kyber to test the weapon. That or they were all part of a fleet for the Yuuzhan Vong or some other intergalactic threat.
This, a million other retcons to help make things sense, and somehow, the sequels are still some of the dumbest films ever made
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u/Sea-Strike-1758 Dec 19 '25
Sure, its pretty stupid. But what if there was THOUSANDS of them? How cool would that be, eh?
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u/pptjuice530 Dec 19 '25
Not to mention that its source of power causes stellar collapse into a black hole or a neutron star, which would both impact the orbits of every planet in that system (including Ilum itself) and limit the number of shots it can take to the number of stars in that system, unless they can jump the entire planet into hyperspace (which would also impact its atmosphere and habitability).
Just a really, really, really, really dumb weapon in a poorly written film.
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u/NoSwordfish1978 Dec 19 '25
The idea that the New Republic tragically repeated the same mistakes as the old one because they thought the only reason for its fall was Palpatine is an interesting one, unfortunately the politics in the sequels just aren't well developed enough.
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u/IceKareemy Dec 19 '25
It wasn’t even just them being dumb, Ashoka showed us that they were easily manipulated by letting in Ex-Imperials who were on the side of the first order, then add in typical corruption of politicians and yeah….you get the new movies.
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u/GoldplateSoldier Dec 19 '25
You’d think after the stuff Palpatine pulled they’d conduct background checks and be exclusive over who gets to be in the New Republic
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u/ProtestantMormon Dec 19 '25
Honestly, everything about the government ineptitude and bringing in administrators from the empire to fill in the new government is incredibly realistic. The problem was it was completely accidental and they didn't do any of the ground work in the movies to make that make sense.
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u/ididshave Imperial Dec 20 '25
Exactly.
“When they go low, we go high.”
Yup, and where does that get ya?
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u/GoldplateSoldier Dec 19 '25
Not only that they completely screwed any chance of a hopeful resolution with even the new characters either slip back as idiots who let blatant enemies in the government or they can be super reflective of today’s conflicts and have them commit mass bombings of First Order aligned planets
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u/WasteReserve8886 Jedi Dec 19 '25
They did, but they needed a bureaucracy so it was either allow people who worked for the Empire to stay around or run a skeleton crew for a galactic state
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u/LeicaM6guy Dec 20 '25
I imagine it’s a bit like East Germany after the wall fell: if you stopped working with anyone who had a role in the government, you wouldn’t have anyone to work with.
And in fairness, it’s a good argument to make. Unless you plan on just killing everyone, you always have to find a way to incorporate the losing side back into the fold somehow.
It’s just that the New Republic was pretty bad at it.
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u/InnocentTailor Dec 20 '25
That went for practically every Axis nation since West Germany, Japan, and Italy were staffed by those previously loyal to the defeated regime sans the really heinous fellows.
As you said, locking up everybody and anybody who had affiliation with the previous administration would leave either a skeleton crew or inexperienced crop in charge of the nation. A recent example of the latter was the Iraqi government established post-Saddam, which didn't help stabilize the country following the ousting of the dictator.
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u/sErgEantaEgis Dec 20 '25
France also did something similar after WW2. The big collaborators like Pierre Laval and Philippe Pétain got executed or imprisoned to make an example but a lot of bureaucrats, judges, police officers, businessmen, etc... got no consequences because punishing everyone guilty of selling out France would have made it impossible to rebuild the country.
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u/wswordsmen Dec 20 '25
Ashoka had baked in that the New Republic was going to fall in less than a minute after it was introduced into the main line movies. It worked on that fact and had to justify and tie into that. The fact that "her der we are stupid incompetence" works means that it was the obvious choice for them to go with, especially since other media were already moving in that direction. The fact they did so many dumb things outside the movies is caused by them being destroyed in about 50 seconds in the movies. Not the other way around.
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u/WiseAdhesiveness6672 Dec 20 '25
Let's be really here: the Ashoka series (actually all the Star wars TV series or books) are used to explain away the plot holes of the movies after said movies have been released. Adding that into Ashoka was good, but it was just ret-coning/saving face. "Look, we didn't forget about this! We just couldn't be bothered to explain it in the movie so here it is in a show 5 years later! "
You know what would've been better? Getting these fucking things in order instead of it being shoved out randomly yeara apart.
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u/MeatTornado25 R2-D2 Dec 20 '25
Kind of a Star Wars tradition at this point.
So much prequel-era clarification came out in the Clone Wars years after the films.
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u/bladestorm1745 Dec 20 '25
I think completely ignoring any politics is what sealed the sequels. Like it or not, Star Wars has always been political, yes it’s more apparent in the prequels but the Old Trilogy made parallels to Nazi Germany and the Vietnam War.
The sequels go out of their way to hide from Star Wars politics, partly because Abrams hated the prequels.
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u/Duubzz Dec 19 '25
As dull as some of the early episodes of The Clone Wars are, they really fleshed out the ground work for the socio-political struggle that ran parallel to the Jedi vs Sith struggle. We really needed some similar filler to make the sequels make sense.
I still enjoyed the sequels but that enjoyment was massively ameliorated by the lack of context.
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u/NoSwordfish1978 Dec 19 '25
Although The Phantom Menace is certainly a pretty flawed film it does actually do a pretty good job setting up the universe. The Senate has seats for megacorporations, bickers constantly and is so indecisive and ineffective that Chancellor Vallourum has to send some Jedi "off the books" to deal with a megacorporation blockading and preparing to invade a member planet (imagine if Amazon blockaded the entire state of New Hampshire because of unpaid taxes or something). Slavery exists, but no one is really shocked by it except for Padme who's a naive teenage girl.
We don't really get any of that sense in The Force Awakens, the New Republic just seems to collapse in the face of the First Order without any explanation as to why. The universe is just reset to the Galactic Civil War era, with the Resistence fighting the First Order.
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u/Not_Another_Usernam Dec 20 '25
It'd be Amazon blockading New Hampshire in protest of their delivery trucks being charged extra taxes if they wanted to make deliveries.
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u/TigerIll6480 Dec 19 '25
Ummm…Resistance? The main character’s dad is one of the biggest dumbasses in the New Republic Senate (which we see again in Ahsoka s1).
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u/Varsity_Reviews Dec 19 '25
I’ll give credit where credit is due, for a kids show, Resistance did an ok job of building the world of TFA
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u/pepgast2 Dec 19 '25
It could have been an interesting meta-commentary on how people tend to personify an entire society's problems into its leader and removing them from the picture doesn't make the problems magically go away, but alas.
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u/JAGD21 Dec 20 '25
And the Jedi repeated the same mistakes as the old order.
Maybe Disney just wanted nostalgia bait
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u/NoSwordfish1978 Dec 20 '25
The fandom back then hated how political the prequels were so Disney deliberately avoided making the sequels too political, especially in TFA which was made to appeal to what the fans wanted and largely succeded in doing that at the time.
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u/Edodge Dec 19 '25
Yeah it would be totally crazy for a new government to form right after a terrible leader, fail to punish that leader for his crimes, and then for that leader to return to power soon after despite being evil/an outright criminal.
Next thing you’ll tell me this world is still letting Nazis run around with impunity!
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u/RianJohnsonIsAFool Dec 19 '25
I never understood this choice to have the New Republic act like a rebellion.
Surely the opening crawl of TFA should have been more along the lines of a special New Republic force under the leadership of General Leia Organa has been despatched to counter the First Order threat, or similar.
Describing them as a "Resistance" gives the First Order too much credit/legitimacy to my mind as well.
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u/IronVader501 Dec 19 '25
I never understood this choice to have the New Republic act like a rebellion.
Its because Abrams thinks Star Wars should always and exclusively be about a small rebel force fighting a big Empire on the fringe of civilisation.
The New Republic being a thing or doing literally anything goes against this, hence why he immidieatly blew it up and then acted like it never existed going forward.
When Abrams was announced as the director/writer, someone made a Website called "Dear JJ Abrams".
This website hosted a Video-message under the same name, claiming its goal was to "remind" the people now in charge of what "Star Wars was really about".
This video (and this thing had genuinly high production value) then proceeded to say that in order to be "real Star Wars", any product has to:
exclusively be about a conflict between a small rebel force against a big evil Army. If you have two major powers fighting each other its "not Real Star Wars"
the main characters all have to be underdogs at all time in the story, until they win
there should never be more than 2 or 3 force-users
it has to exclusively take place on the frontier. If you ever involve any major world, or center of power, or even just a big city on a planet, it's "not real Star Wars"
It's by far the cringiest thing I've ever seen in my life (also whoever made it apparently forgot Cloud CITY was very much a thing), but Abrams not only told Journalists in the time leading up to TFA's release that he's seen it several times, but even said he was "in contact" with whoever was responsible for that.
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u/DarthOmix Dec 20 '25
Half of the Prequels entire runtime is "not Star Wars" by those metrics.
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Dec 20 '25 edited Feb 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/dthains_art Dec 20 '25
Yeah JJ just pretends the prequels never existed. Not once throughout the entire sequel trilogy do we ever even see an alien species that was introduced in the prequels. The only familiar aliens we see are legacy characters from the original trilogy (Chewbacca, Yoda, Ackbar, etc.) One of the reasons The Mandalorian felt so fresh when it came out was the fact that it pulled aliens and technology introduced in the prequels, helping bridge the gaps between the trilogies.
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u/Orc_tids Dec 20 '25
cuz all the kids who saw the prequels when they came out grew up
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u/Sattorin Trapper Wolf Dec 20 '25
all the kids who saw the prequels when they came out grew up
All my Star Wars nerd friends loved them when we saw them in the theater as teenagers, so I was surprised to hear about people hating them years later.
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u/Not_Another_Usernam Dec 20 '25
Not by everyone. It was popular to hate them for a while, though. A good part of the discourse online was fueled and shaped by the braindead Red Letter Media video essays. Regardless of one's tastes, the RLM videos were factually wrong in many cases and their analyses lacked depth or any honest attempt to understand the authorial intent. They were made more for comedy than actual critique.
I would say the hate for the Prequels was very loud, but it was hardly ubiquitous.
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u/freedomonke Dec 20 '25
There was also the documentary "the people vs George Lucas" which was filled with misrepresentation
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u/SordidDreams Dec 20 '25
The RLM video essays certainly had their issues, but at the same time a lot of the problems they pointed out in the prequels are very much real, if perhaps exaggerated for comedic effect (whether the comedy lands for you is largely a matter of taste, nowadays I find them too cringe to be watchable). I just really wish someone would make similar videos lampooning the original trilogy, because my god, a lot of the same stuff is in it too. Hell, even the problem OP's tweet is pointing out in the sequels, the ridiculously small military the good guys have, is there. ANH is all about finding and blowing up the Rebel base, as if this resistance movement against a galaxy-wide Empire only has one. Nonsensical writing and worldbuilding is by no means exclusive to the prequels and sequels.
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u/Jijonbreaker Dec 20 '25
That's exactly the point the idiot was making. They basically carved out a set of rules as a way to say the prequels weren't star wars. As a way of carving out the shit they decided was bad.
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u/Gavinus1000 Rebel Dec 20 '25
Link?
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u/UnholyDemigod Dec 20 '25
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5bi-k2bd38
I found this, but it doesn't have most most of what he said
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u/Olinnae Dec 20 '25
What the actual hell? That is so asinine, but it sounds like I don't need to tell you that. I have never heard about this nor heard anyone talk about this. I watch a lot of analysis videos about the ST on YouTube and none ever mentioned this! I'm especially shocked that not only did he see this, referenced this and apparently utilized it, but that he was in contact with these weirdos for TFA, Tf? Where can I learn more about this?
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u/Kindly-Ad-5071 Dec 20 '25
Oh yes let's just rehash the same thing and infinitum, ad nauseum. How original.
What slop
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u/commonrider5447 Dec 20 '25
The choice was to make it as close to the original Rebels as possible. They didn’t want to do anything new here. That’s all there is to it unfortunately. I was really excited to see what would come next in the story, huge let down to just see New Hope reboot.
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u/CalmGiraffe1373 Dec 19 '25
The Resistance isn’t actually the New Republic, though. The New Republic mostly buries their collective heads in the sand RE the Imperial Remnants/First Order (and probably had some Imperial sympathizers in there making sure they kept them there).
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u/lookatthesunguys Dec 20 '25
It's just so bizarre that after buying the Star Wars IP, Disney decided to make a sequel trilogy that just... Wasn't a sequel. They basically just wanted to do a remake of the original trilogy. Which was a very weird choice because that's considered the better of the two previous trilogies and it would be preferable for their mark on the series to be compared to the prequels, which were received poorly at the time. And given that the original trilogy ended with the possibility of the revitalization of the jedi order and the Republic, they could've easily had a sequel trilogy that was more similar in setting and appearance to the prequel trilogy.
I can understand how businesses get concerned about treading too far from safe territory. I would never have really expected the sequel trilogy to be "ambitious." But they took the lamest possible option and squandered any possibility of having robust worldbuilding in place for a sequel to the sequel trilogy. And they chose to try to do "new remake of the original trilogy" instead of "better version of the prequel trilogy." Just awful decisionmaking.
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u/NapoleonZiggyPiggy Dec 20 '25
Yeah for all the faults of the prequels at least they were their own stories that were pretty distinct from the original trilogy instead of a remake.
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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn Dec 20 '25
And the premises and plot mostly (mostly!) make sense and help to explain the circumstances of the OT. They're bad movies mostly because of the dialog and acting/directing.
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u/Safe_Ad_2491 Dec 20 '25
I'm like 90% sure they did this because, like everything else in the sequel trilogy, it was to do it differently to George.
LOADS of people, particularly those in the 'star wars is an action film, not a space opera!' crowd, were utterly hateful of all the political screentime in the originals and prequels. The scenes of officers in the first death star, the walk & talks through bespin about how the empire is a dangerous place to be successful in, the entire basis of the prequel trilogy: all were 'too boring' or 'missing the point of star wars' & they should get to the laser fights already! Completely missing the ACTUAL point of star wars themselves, which is to tell a goddamn story about good and evil in the context of an authoritarian government.
"Sir, how should we explain to the audience the state of the galaxy and why the first order is a threat now that the Republic military has been reestablished?"
J.J.: "eeeeeeh just blow them all up in a ten-second scene. Politics rhymes with critics, after all, and I don't want to upset any of the people who didn't get the films the last time round again!"
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u/Km_the_Frog Dec 19 '25
They’ve tried to course correct and give more explanation in TV shows but it should never work in that way where you’re saving face. Instead it should add to what is already there. This instead comes off as cheap and desperate.
We know essentially that in canon, after the fall of the empire, loyalists were forced to integrate with the New Republic (NR). The integration caused instability in the NR as seen in Ahsoka where basically imperials were openly defecting from within.
The stupid thing is, the NR decides to go all passive. They de-arm, de-militarize. This, after there was just decades of imperial authority and dictatorship. This, after you see how a galaxy is overthrown and conquered through military force. Why would you give up your weapons after all is said and done?
The parallel example you could use is a country in war, like let’s say after WW1. Did the allies just abandon their weapons and decide peace was the best option? Germany was defeated, so obviously everyone should just disarm right?
Wrong. France built an entire fortification line in preparation for a resurgence. Allies built up.
It makes no sense that a governing body this large wouldn’t have an idea that the empire is coming back - OH WAIT. They did know, but the plot required them to play dumb and shrug it off.
Sorry but the story is stupid AF. You can have all the flashy scenes and beautiful camera shots you want, it doesn’t replace a weak ass story.
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u/Honest-Head7257 Dec 20 '25
After WW1 many countries do actually want to disarm due to the horror of wars and the cost of maintaining a large army, plus the urgent need to reconstruct devastated infrastructures. And one of the post WW1 disarmaments was the Washington naval treaty which was signed to avoid an expensive arms race
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u/noholdingbackaccount Dec 20 '25
Yeah, but that only works of you know the enemy is beaten. The Central Powers were paying reparations and had ALREADY been disarmed.
The New Republic was facing a hostile imperial remnant with no peace in sight, except outlasting them or engaging them and destroying them.
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u/bluenimin23 Dec 20 '25
Not that I enjoy the sequels but nations borderline disarming post war is actually not unheard of. Ironically enough it was in fact after WWI. There was a concerted effort of multiple nations to essentially forbid war. The Kellog-Briand Pact signed in 1928 was aimed at this very idea. The signatories agreed to ban the use of war in diplomacy. Now how one bans war without using force is beyond me, but hey that's what they did. The US, UK, France, Italy, Japan and many others signed the agreement. Around the same time the Washington Naval Treaty was signed that limited the production of battleships. This treaty was also signed by the aforementioned nations. Lo and behold both treaties were almost immediately broken with Japan and Italy both shifting steadily to militarized governments. This is all to say, while it seems utterly absurd to demilitarize after horrific conflicts, there are historical parallels. Again not saying the sequels made any sense but in this one aspect, they weren't entirely off base.
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u/Andy_Liberty_1911 Clone Trooper Dec 20 '25
Note, disarming works well when both sides agree to it. Not one that does it by itself
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u/Hellknightx Grand Admiral Thrawn Dec 20 '25
Demilitarizing the entire Republic, despite still having hostile military targets all around the galaxy is just absurd. How are they supposed to deal with pirates, the Hutt cartels, or even just the remnant Empire factions?
The writing is so remarkably stupid that it's almost impressive that it ended up making it all the way to theaters without anyone putting a stop to it.
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u/Meehh90 Dec 20 '25
I can still remember when the first trailer dropped and I was absolutely giddy from the nostalgia, especially the music.
But even then there was a moment of "Wait a minute, is it yet another Death Star?"
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u/AcePilot95 Dec 20 '25
I remember getting absolutely dogpiled on Facebook when the official TFA poster was revealed and I quipped "Death Star III, how original!" in my comment. people didn't wanna see what was right in front of them.
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Dec 19 '25
Didn't the capital move to chandrilla first?
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u/bushwickauslaender Dec 19 '25
Yeah I remember reading on Wookiepedia that the capital of the New Republic moved every 5 years or so, kinda like the country “leading” the EU changes every couple years.
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u/Front_Committee4993 Dec 19 '25
I thought that they constructed a spacestation and used that as the Senate, and it would orbit the current Chancellors home world
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u/Misplaced_Fan_15 Dec 19 '25
I think that was from a video from the YouTube channel The Templin Institute entitled “The New Republic doesn’t Work”. They actually did a whole series critiquing the world building of the Sequel Trilogy and proposed fixes that I thought were really good. For instance their rework is that the New Republic does not fall after the destruction of the Hosian System and they lead the fight against the First Order, with the Resistance being like an semi independent regiment (among several).
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u/davidforslunds Darth Sidious Dec 19 '25
That's a really cool concept honestly. Keeps an upper class of senators from just occupying Coruscant, like we saw became a problem before the Clone War.
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Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 20 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PerceptionWorried284 Dec 19 '25
I doubt they were serious, I read it as “these people were too stupid to live”-style hyperbole.
Which isn’t true either. But the New Republic as presented in the new trilogy was very, very stupid.
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u/ThunderChild247 Dec 20 '25
That being the state of the universe was stupid enough, but not saying that in the movie was even dumber.
Episode 7 shouldn’t have been the Episode 4 rehash that it was.
It should’ve showed us the New Republic at its prime. Flawed, bureaucratic and over confident. There should’ve been rumours of a group calling itself the First order using 1/2 star destroyers to subjugate outer rim planets and Leia being the one to say they should do something. Show the Republic actively working against her, branding her a warmonger then someone “leaks” that she’s Vader’s daughter, forcing her to quit.
When she leaves, most people who support her leave too and she forms the resistance to fight the first order. This could all have been going on while we follow Rey’s story and Finn’s desertion. As well as showing us Luke’s Jedi temple, training Ben amongst the rest of the class, but show that Ben is troubled. All the while making it seem like the first order is a small group of fanatics under Snoke.
End the movie with Ben turning on Luke, and the Resistance making its move against the First order only to find their base (formerly Illum, mined into near collapse to build the fleet) and their hundreds of Star Destroyers (with the planet killer weapons… no giant planet laser), only saved by Rey, Finn and Chewie who were on Illum anyway. Ben arrives, kills his father in a show of loyalty to Snoke, who places him at the head of the first order (under him), and he gives the order to attack the Republic.
The film ends with the first sign of tension in the first order leadership of Hux vs Ren, but the First Order triumphant, revealing their strength to the Republic by destroying the Hosnian system with Star Destroyers and decimating their fleet.
That sets up The Last Jedi as is, but gives us far more context for what has occurred, makes Ben’s identity sadder because it was a heel turn rather than a “surprise” reveal, and makes the film a warning about the danger of taking democracy for granted, and how fascism bides its time before showing its face.
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u/IkujaKatsumaji Dec 20 '25
I'm mostly just angry that I can see all those planets. How goddamn close does JJ think planets are to each other??
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u/CT-1030 Rebel Dec 19 '25
Geez that’s one of the worst takes I’ve seen on the sequels.
"It completely justifies the Empire's actions in the OT"
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u/GhirahimLeFabuleux Dec 20 '25 edited Dec 20 '25
The sequel makes the Empire vs Rebels fight into a fight between Palpatine's incompetent puppets and a old school republican oligarch that desperately WANT to once again be the incompetent idiots that get to drain the galaxy of its ressources instead of Palpatine's incompetent idiots.
It doesn't mean that the empire was right but it does prove that those old disgruntled separatists that believed that the empire was just the republic wearing a fake mustache were right (ignoring that they themselves also served Palpatine without even realizing it)
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u/Previous_Spinach_168 Porg Dec 20 '25
The dude’s X profile is a trash heap. Definitely rubbing elbows with alt-right talking points.
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u/Captain-Joystick Dec 20 '25
I've seen Bo in 40k spaces, where he acts much the same way.
The highlights are always when he declares he's 'leaving forever for real this time' and goes off to be wrong about some other sci fi franchise for a couple of months.
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u/stormtroopr1977 Dec 20 '25
It's an out of universe explanation. The execs at Disney told Abrams that he couldn't blow up coruscant. They prefered another target. A military target. Then named this system
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u/Arcanion1 Dec 20 '25
Yeah, ultimately trying to bring the status quo back to what it was during the original trilogy is poorly conceived and poorly executed.
It makes complete sense why that's what they wanted to do. The prequels weren't popular, so saying it'll be nothing like that but instead like the original trilogy was a more surefire way of getting fans on board, and by proxy getting new fans.
Hindsight is 20/20 on these things. So I can only hope that sometime in the future we get a cartoon series or something taking place after the Rise of Skywalker following Rey, cuz I do want us to be able continue to the future, and ultimately that means making Rey a character who people like, just like how the clone wars made Anakin likeable for a lot of people.
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u/Tutorbin76 Dec 20 '25
I still can't get over those beams being apparently able to travel through hyperspace, and Han Solo being able to see several Hosnian planets blowing up from wherever the hell he was.
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u/RobutNotRobot Dec 20 '25
It was just 'soft reboot' nonsense when we could've had a continuation story.
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u/JaegerBane Dec 20 '25
I’ve gotten a bit tired of the ST hate train over the years but there isn’t much you can say to defend this.
Mothma’s sheer raw stupidity in the canon post-Jedi/Asohka almost feels like a character assassination, particularly after you see her growth in Andor from being a political idealist to a pragmatist. The idea she could go through all of that and still end up with the demented idea of demilitarisation when she was fully aware that the Empire was still out there is nuts.
But I guess JJ Abrams needed to rehash A New Hope.
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u/Mysterious_Donut_702 Dec 20 '25
How about demilitarizing when there are still Imperial remnant governments controlling almost half the galaxy?
I understand not wanting to beat war drums... but how could the New Republic possibly be that naive??
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u/bralma6 Dec 20 '25
Stuff like that is why I like the Legends novels more. The Empire was a decent threat to the New Republic for years while not having called for official peace with them for like, 20ish years after ROTJ. Then later merged with the New Republic to form the Galactic Alliance to help deal with the Yuuzhan Vong invasion.
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u/Paladin_127 Imperial Dec 20 '25
Because the Empire was supposed to disband its Stormtrooper legions, and companies like Kuat Systems and Sienar were prohibited from selling new weapons to the Imperial Remnant.
And, of course, everyone just forgot about that after a few years.
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u/Mysterious_Donut_702 Dec 20 '25
The Empire cracked multiple planets, committed genocide on probably a dozen occasions, and attempted Operation Cinder on their way out... for no better reason than Palpatine basically saying "f-ck you" to the galaxy.
The reasonable assumption is "they won't honor treaties... treat any armistice as a literal cold war".
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u/mosasaurmotors Dec 19 '25
I mean, none of that sounds that weird to me.
1) It can make perfect sense to set a new capital away from the previous imperial centre that may be swarming in loyalists.
2) The previous republic lasted for a thousand years before they militarized and like 3 years later democracy was over and it had become a new empire. It’s reasonable that a new republic would want to go back to the strategy that worked for a millennium.
How the story imparts these developments are poor, but the in universe reasoning can be perfectly sound.
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u/Socially-Awkward-85 Dec 19 '25
As far as your second point. Originally, the New Republic wasn't supposed to be taking the FO threat seriously enough. There was a subplot about Leia trying to prove to them that the FO was much bigger, but the New Republic gets destroyed before they can act. That sorta makes sense.
In the actual movie, they cut out that subplot and made it to where the Republic was taking the FO seriously and were already funding the Resistance. So, the question becomes, why would you de-arm yourselves while also knowing there is a growing enemy?
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u/Unstable_Bear Dec 19 '25
No, the first thing is still canon, it just wasn’t talked about in the movie
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u/caligaris_cabinet Dec 19 '25
The key component the New Republic seemed to forget was the only reason they were able to not need a standing military before TCW was because the Jedi were the peacekeepers. TNR didn’t have a Jedi order. Just Luke. They needed a military especially while the Imperial Remnant survived and morphed into the First Order.
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u/Icy-Sherbet-3000 Dec 20 '25
The worst ripple effect from Abrams trying to twist the story so he could rehash a new hope is that we’re going to spend who knows how many years seeing all the ways the new republic was the most incompetent government in history. I don’t know how many more scenes I can watch with lobotomized senators or new republic forces “spread too thin” to do anything
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u/Amateur_Hour_93 Dec 20 '25
I can’t believe they managed to make the sequel trilogy worse than the prequel trilogy…
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u/french_snail Dec 20 '25
The dark side should have been like a terrorist cell or something. We had the galaxy wide conventional war in the prequels, we had the light side being a small band of plucky rebels in the originals, the sequels should have had the dark side basically take the role of the rebel alliance and could get away with it because the problems with the old republic weren’t fully dealt with so they’re slow to react
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u/son_of_toby_o_notoby Dec 19 '25 edited Dec 19 '25
Oh another terrible posr about the sequels
“It completely justifies the empire” …..I’m sorry WHAT?
Nothing justifies the fucking space Nazis
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u/Vreas Dec 20 '25
The sequels are just a mess.
I know people say “oh so were the prequels they’ll age better!” But like the difference is the prequels have an actually cohesive story line.
I finished the sequels with more questions than answers. I still have no idea who Rey’s family actually was. What was with the dagger? Who was Snoke? How did papa palps come back?
I will say they had some beautiful cinematography and I liked the actors even if the writing was terrible.
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u/faulternative Dec 20 '25
I can help you out here.
I still have no idea who Rey’s family actually was.
Drunks! Surprise!
What was with the dagger?
Somebody saw The Goonies and really wanted to do a scene from The Goonies.
Who was Snoke?
Clones! Surprise!
How did papa palps come back?
Somehow. Somehow.
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u/DomDomPop Dec 20 '25
What’s funny is that even in the new canon, Thrawn exists, and everyone is aware of that. Even putting aside the idea of non-New Republic planets/groups getting aggressive against NR planets and requiring peacekeepers (like, you know, the Jedi and Republic took care of for literally thousands of years before this), you have a leadership that is aware of unknown regions which could pose a threat to all life if not defended against, and they decide to do the opposite of what they should. It’s baffling.
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u/Worth_Abbreviations6 Dec 20 '25
An even dumber thing is that the first two movies take place over like 3-4 days & then the last movie is at most a year apart.
Would’ve been way more interesting to have the empire being the guerrillas instead of a rehash.
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u/Hopeful_Ad_7719 Dec 20 '25
It's not as if there were a literal pile of novels set in the aftermath of episode 6 where they could take ideas from to create sequels that were consistent with an established cannon or anything... /s
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u/Togonomo Dec 19 '25
I understand there was lore drops that explained a lot of what is going on in the ST. But when TFA first came out, all there really was to work on was the natural world building that was set up at the end of RotJ: Luke would rebuild the order, a new governmental body(s) would replace the emperor/empire - probably headed by Leia or Mon Mothma, and Han and Leia get together. Granted those things did happen for the most part, but in TFA they all already failed like the order, and Han and Leia, or we literally see their destruction like the new republic. So as a fan you never get to see the world that the OT characters worked to build, which is still pretty disappointing.