Lit Imperial Racial & Gender Barriers in the New Rebels Era Continuity

I'm going to kick the Gundark Nest a little with this one, but I'd like to see how people feel.

Rebels & New Dawn Spoilers below:

Spoiler

To me the original Empire always represented the worst things about humanity, it was all kinds of evil rolled into one big demonic package. It is a simplistic view to be certain, but something about that worked really well. Now the EU made subtle changes to this over the years, making the Empire a slightly more inclusive organization - but still maintaining the general illusion of a group who discriminated against pretty much everyone minus a few exceptional cases.

I find the diversity of the Imperial cast in a New Dawn(plus clips we have seen from the soon to air Rebels series) to be a departure from what is presented in the Original Trilogy. There we don't see a single Imperial female or a single Imperial representing any group beyond those with a light skin tone.

I would have preferred to see lead in work moving towards the OT keep to that form on some level. Sort of showing how diverse things were during the Old Republic, leading up to the fall of the Republic, and then how much things changed as the biased, white, human centric Empire tightened its grasp.

Now, suddenly, the Empire is a positive example of ethnic and gender fairness - potentially more advanced than we even are in our own society(if the reports of predominantly female Stormtrooper squads are accurate).

Of course Science fiction has often held to the ideals that society should have, nothing wrong with that, but to me this new direction represents a retroactive political correctness that is really not needed.

Part of the point of the Empire is that they were wrong, they were not the nice people representing racial & gender equality - that was what the Rebellion was about from a visual perspective(although admittedly it didn't come across that great either, but it did go out of its way to show Lando as a general and Mon Mothma as its political leadership)

The Empire didn't have any of those things on screen and I've always felt that was a deliberate bit of story telling from George Lucas. Now that seems to have been tossed out of the moving Star Destroyer.

Or was/is my perception completely self created and never a notion that anyone else had?

 

The Empire being randomly sexist always came off to me as a really lame and over the top way of making them more evil. I'm glad it's gone.

And are you suggesting that the empire also discriminated against dark skinned humans? Because that's just dumb. They've got plenty of alien races to oppress.

 

I've actually never considered this before, but reading your post, I can completely buy it. After all, Lucas was writing this in the early/mid 70s. The Rebels are supposed to embody the hopeful countercultural/protest culture of the time, the Empire is the conservative establishment epitomized by Nixon. It's perhaps an unusually subtle thing to expect from later-day Lucas but I do like the interpretation.

I guess to expand from the point of the OP slightly, I do hope that the new EU doesn't hold to the "Empire are xenophobes" trope the EU went with because as a kid watching the OT, I honestly never got the impression the Empire was any more pro- or anti-alien than the Rebels.

 

There was nothing EU wise to support Imperial discrimination against non white people.....

But, visually, just look at the original trilogy and tell me how many people of color and how many women you see representing the Empire on the screen?

 

I think the feel and look of SW is mainly of the time it was done. I have zero problem not seeing many female characters. I do wish there were more aliens, however. The Empire is basically however you perceive it. Many feel it's just the image of 'evil' and that it's not 'inclusive'. Okay, it wasn't on screen but that may not strictly be 'storytelling' but the era.

For many years now I have seen that Star Wars is very narrow and stilted in what it attempts to convey and I don't buy it. I don't believe the Empire is irredeemable as some seem too nor do I hold the Jedi or Rebels are righteous.

Personally I don't think Political Correctness belongs in Star Wars at all. Tell it as the artists envision it don't cater to special interests.

 

Well, it's certainly not unique to you. But I've said all along that I'm pretty sure Lucas's actual intention in making all the Imperials white human men was to present them, in contrast to the (ROTJ) Rebels, as homogenous - not to imply that they were literally discriminatory against anyone else. The "LU" choosing to make the Empire anti-alien and sexist always struck me as a misinterpretation, and I agree with Kablob that the latter was kind of stupid - note that it seems to have been seriously dialed down if not outright retconned during recent years. And the PT, with its depiction of a cosmopolitan and apparently prejudice-free galaxy, made it really hard to believe in from an in-universe perspective. So I'm glad that it's being largely undone, because I think it was mostly a mistake.

 

I always had the conception that discrimination against other ethnic groups within your own species would cease to make sense once you meet another sentient species. If anything, the "natural" reflex would be to strengthen the bonds between all Humans (regardless of the skintone), and the remaining discrimination tendencies would shift toward the aliens. Then again, it's just my feeling.

 

I'd be inclined to suggest it makes the Empire more sinister, not less.

Likely won't have the book for a week though.

 

Frankly, the lack if females in the imperial military is more because it was made in the 1980s than any overarching message about the Empire. Heck, there were rebel female pilots who were cut out of the Battle of Endor because they were worried about how audiences would react.

 

Robimus: I absolutely 100% agree.

It's a classic social engineering tactic of regimes to stir up divisions between people, and it doesn't matter what those divisions are because the leadership isn't doing it because of some particular ideology; we're not talking about the KKK here. No, stirring up hatred of any sort gives people motivation to seek power and dominance, so if a dictator can tell the people who serve him, "You're like me. You're strong. We're better than everyone else, and we should show them by dominating them," then that dictator is giving his servants a reason to be personally invested in their service. Otherwise, the dictator is relying on his ideology to keep them in line, but that ideology is self-serving, and it does not inherently appeal to the masses of people necessary to run an Empire. When you take that hatred out of the equation, you're just asking them to exist as a part of a hateful regime, but not be hateful themselves. It's not believable. Asking these soldiers to serve the Empire without giving them anything, without giving them a reason to justify the nasty, prejudiced parts of themselves (as an easy alternative to the idealistic, judgmental world outside that regime who tells them they should make an effort to be better people), is DRASTICALLY less realistic. What you're asking for when you ask for diversity in the Empire is that people just are. Just people walking around on screen, with no explanation for their complicity in this visibly-horrible regime.

But this generation wants social revolution without having to get their hands dirty. They want change, but they want it so indiscriminately that they're going so far as to want this "everybody's a good little happy person" form of diversity in their bad guys, which completely neuters any meaning those bad guys present, any legitimate representation of actual, believable oppressors. It's nothing short of a menace and it stymies the power of art---even simple art for young people like this.

 

It's just visual shorthand. The Empire looks like Nazis, therefore they're evil. I don't think we were supposed to believe that the Empire actually had a policy of literal racism. Sexism is more believable but seems beside the point.

 

Very interesting post, Jello. I agree in part. However I also found the Space Nazi label pretty basic in itself along with the insistence of many the Empire is racist or sexist.

 

Very interesting points, Robimus

I suppose there's pros and cons. Making the bad guys embody positive social demographics does, like you say, make them less, well, bad. On the other hand, though, does hiding them behind that politically correct veneer communicate a more contemporary message: that even when the monster wears a human face, he is still a monster?

It's a bit like Palpatine and Sidious. The former EU Empire was akin to Sidious, being very outward about what was wrong with it; whereas this NEU Empire wears the external goodly facade of Palpatine, and plays up the "good" parts that appeal to GrandAdmiralJello and other Imperial fans, with it appearing to be a nice, inclusive institution-- but hiding its wrongs. So, yeah, I enjoy both depictions of the Empire, but can maybe see why the NEU's Empire could prove more relevant to today's climate, with threats facing people today often arising from within their own societies, and no longer as black-and-white as the days when it was just about Nazis or Russians.

It'll be interesting, actually, to see how the Rebel characters who began in the Imperial are portrayed this time. After all, Luke wanted to join the Imperial Academy originally, so the Empire must have "looked good" enough to him.

 

Why the quotes? Nobody has said that here. Nobody's arguing that.

Personally, my argument it that it's an imperialistic tactic. If you're going to argue, at least argue against something people are actually saying.

This is a false dichotomy. There's zero logical basis for saying that it's ineffective for not being thrown into the light; seeing the less awkward depictions of speciesism early in life and then growing up to identify that sterile ethnic/gender uniformity as one grows older is a perfectly valid way of exposing that idea as it becomes more appropriate. You're basically arguing that subtext is and invalid facet of narrative discourse.

So how exactly do you rationalize the actions of the Nazis? Because that was an instance of what you're describing: The exploitation of an emerging trend in Europe---albeit a trend of prejudice. Why wouldn't Palpatine leverage another division into a form of hatred, to become appealing to the core world's noble houses of ethnic-majority patriarchal models? It could have been anything, but white males are the only thing Palpatine could successfully leverage, because that's what he was.

I don't want this stuff to be directly dealt with, but I think it would undermine the subtext already established surrounding the Empire if it were changed. I also can't help but maintain that any Empire fan has a major conflict of interest in this argument, so most of these rationalizations are suspect for me...

 

So you're actually saying there's no place in classical epic mythology for a big obvious evil? That seems awfully silly. There's a way for that evil to exist as a status quo, and all those big obvious evil things actually add up to something that makes sense if you break it down psychologically---and there's no argument to be had there, because it has happened in real life. Each of these possibilities has internal harmony, it's just a matter of which you prefer. Neither is more inherently logical than the other, but personally I think the big obvious evil IS what we've seen on screen, and there's no getting around that.

 

Also, if we're going with the Empire = Space Nazis, there were no shortage of women who were quite enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis.

JJM may have added a fresh coat of shiny new paint, but underneath, the Empire's values are still going to be as rotten as they've ever been.

 

Tut, tut, Jello, it's actually in support of your argument that the Empire's sexism doesn't make coherent sense! Well the first line was....

If you're referring to the second.... you do recall you did say the Empire was evil some time ago and no one has forgotten it?

 

And there's room for that here, but we're not seeing supporters, we're seeing officers on duty.

But again, that's subtext---like you said, Jello, flavor---and it all changes when you're forced to expand the universe and address these issues. As subtext, it works and makes sense. Maybe this is more a flaw of having an EU more than an actual problem with the portrayal, but I'd still rather maintain that portrayal than retcon it because it feels icky to elaborate upon.

 

Ah! The good old days of West End Games!