ST The First Order-Resistance Conflict

I imagine in IX, there'll be enough time where both sides have recovered from their losses.

 

Well, you'd be right. Sorry, I totally misread the last part of that post.

 

It's dramatically pleasing to me right now post-TLJ because:

This is the lowest the resistance or rebellion has ever been. Like 40 people total.

The Rebellion always had hundreds upon hundreds of people, at the minimum, trying to remove the Empire from power.

The Resistance was purely made up of people Leia got. This sets up Leia as the lynchpin of the good guys in the sequel trilogy. Bigging up her importance.

Even the Rebellion in the OT never had 1 person as the figurehead. It was made of many people, Mon Mothma, Bail, and others.


I know when Episode IX resumes, there will have been a time skip where their numbers are now bolstered.

But I look forward to stories, novels, etc. telling how these 40 people managed to keep surviving, gain allies, and recruit members during that time.

Right now the Resistance/new Rebellion consists of 3 galactic civil war veterans: Leia, Ematt, and Nien Nunb. Thirty-five relatively younger members without armaments and an armada. With just the clothes on their backs. One ship. One Jedi-in-training, with a broken lightsaber. And ancient texts. A few droids at most.

Ten at most, other members scattered around like Snap, Pava, Statura.

Oh, and one veteran of the galactic civil war PLUS the clone wars: Chewbacca.

 

Agreed. I'm expected a minimum of a three year time jump. If the time jump is that long or longer, I would love to see a TV series one day that fills in the gaps. Maybe even an animated one so the actors could come back to voice their characters.
Kylo Ren needs to find an actual world as the headquarters for the First Order. I would love to see Vader's Castle on Mustafar, or the Imperial Place on Coruscant. Heck, just something new even. After the loss of the Supremacy and multiple First Order ships, I would like to see a new dreadnought serve as Kylo's flagship. A flagship bigger than the Executor, but smaller than the Supremacy.
As for the Resistance, they need to find allies and militias around the galaxy. The New Republic was largely demilitarized and lost almost all its fleet and senators in TFA. I don't think the New Republic exists anymore.

 

I still don’t understand how most of the galaxy would so easily lay down their own militaries. If the New Republic wasn’t willing to arm itself, I am surprised that many other worlds didn’t see this as an incentive to create their own armies to defend themselves. I feel like the ST has largely shrunk the galaxy as opposed to making it much larger. I find it interesting that the First Order could show up on Jakku, the site of the Empire’s defeat and nobody seemed to bat an eye. They were already boldly encroaching on known space before using their super weapon. I could see many worlds deciding not to restore the Republic due to it failing in so many ways, but I don’t think those worlds would be so willing to have another empire cruelly rule over them.

 

There is some backstory that many planets didn't rejoin the New Republic when the Empire was defeated. They decided to stay independent.

The backstory of Commander D'arcy, has her homeworld, as one of those planets.

 

Wasn't there some peace treaty with what remained of the Empire? If I had to guess, mutual disarmament was probably part of the treaty.

 

There's like 15-20 people left in The Resistance aboard one ship with NO heavy weapons of equipment whatsoever. It's going to take more than a couple of years to even to begin to rebuild into an effective fighting force. And given that the FO still has overwhelming military and technology advantages, they'd have to be the biggest bunch of idiots in the Galaxy to let that happen.

But then again the ST is terrible when it comes to scale and timeline, so that's probably what will happen.

 

@Thrawn082 Just you wait. There will be a 2-3 year time jump and there will suddenly be tons of Resistance, new ships, a base, a giant statue of General Leia (that speaks!). It will be like nothing ever happened!

 

In ancient times, military leaders would flee with a band of survivors, and manage to raise armies and forage (rob villagers of food) - Hazdrubal against Scipio Africans in the Second Punic War certainly escaped big losses, and raised armies before winter and was battle ready next season IIRC (approx). So raising armies/systems isn't really unbelievable.

I'm more concerned with the resolution - a non-burn everything down resolution. I want FO to be split between hardliners and moderates, ie people who admire early Empire with a Senate/Republic from history, I want Kylo to try to do his own way without Snoke's corruption, I want Finn to be a leader of a mutiny, I want legions of stormtroopers fighting each other like Roman legions did in struggles for power between leaders.

Most of all I want a resolution that is different to the OT, because that ended up with apologists and people digging TIE fighters and stormtrooper uniforms, becoming these Nazis. I want the Moderate FO leaders to join the Republic, on Coruscant, at the end, and see a glimpse of new hardware not rehashed by the OT, made up of both forces' hardware, war criminals brought to justice, Kylo atoned through big personal sacrifices for the Light side. How's that for subversive instead of "we blew 'em up again, for reals this time"

 

I agree it wouldnt be believable at all.

20 people dont make a rebellion and cant defeat an organisation that has endless resources.

I dont know how they will show resistance winning without feeling like , hey good guys always win in the end.

 

I agree it wouldnt be believable at all.

20 people dont make a rebellion and cant defeat an organisation that has endless resources.

I dont know how they will show resistance winning without feeling like , hey good guys always win in the end.

 

30 people blew up the first Death Star.

 

That is true. In general defeating the Empire wasn't that hard. It didn't require that many people.

 

Finn will cause a Stormtrooper revolution right before Hux has finalized his preparations for a coup against Kylo.
Finn and some stormtroopers will kill Hux and Rey will take care on Kylo.
That's my prediction

 

It wouldn't be believable, nor would it tie in thematically very well with TLJ. Remember the arc words: "We are the spark that will light the fire..."

If the Resistance takes down the First Order, that would make them both the spark and the fire. I don't see that happening. The fire needs to be something far larger. A stormtrooper revolution would fit, but not just a stormtrooper revolution. A revolution that sweeps up everyone and everything.

 

Because the knew it had been sabotaged and where to hit the Achilles Heel of that station. Do I now have to assume that every FO Star Destroyer comes with a design flaw waiting to be exploited to make that theory work?

 

I don't think it's far-fetched that the ranks of the Resistance would swell following their escape from Crait. That's the whole message of the movie's ending. Luke's sacrifice has spread far and wide. Hope has been brought back and the spark has been ignited. And these are the people and their survival helped the galaxy know it (it's precisely why the FO wanted to annihilate them all). Do we really need to see broom boy pick up a weapon and announce to the camera that he's going to join the fight?

The Resistance in Episode 9 isn't going to be the Resistance of TLJ... how many there used to be has no relevance at all.

 

I don't understand why 'hope' had to be 'sparked' anyway. It was literally only a few days ago that The First Order was a distant faction before blowing up the Hosnian System. It's not as if the Galaxy has been under their boot for years while The First Order did whatever they wanted.

If the people of the galaxy are that apathetic that they lose all hope because of one attack, rather than it galvanising them to take real action, then why should viewers care?

Surely the threat to people's families and way of life is the spark that would propel them in to action. The French resistance didn't need a mythical sacrifice to motivate them to fight against the occupying Nazi forces. The British didn't stop fighting WW2 because their cities were being blitzed while continental Europe was being conquered. Even if a major strike took out the government and the majority of the military, are we to believe that all local militias, law enforcement and military veterans wouldn't start to coordinate, recommission mothballed military equipment and naturally oppose the aggressors?

TLJ gives me the impression that people in the GFFA would prefer The First Order governing the galaxy than rallying behind a small bunch of misguided idealists.

 

Starkiller weapon was the FO's detterent for ruling. And the galaxy's civilians saw them put it to use on Hosnian Prime.

Rather than fall as victims, they choose to submit to the FO. Unaware there's still a military force out there, that could even stand up to them.

It's probably still chaotic enough where most planets don't know that Starkiller base was destroyed.

So everyone giving in to fear of the FO's wrath, makes sense.

 

The rebels never "defeated" the Empire though. The Rebellion was never about that. The Empire wasn't some extragalactic force that came in and destroyed the Republic. It WAS the Republic. The Rebels plan and the Empire's response to it was laid out in the original film. They could never defeat the military might of the Empire but maybe they could show the galaxy that it didn't have to live in fear of the regime and accept it. The victory at Endor and the death of the Emperor wasn't meant to be a final defeat of the Empire, it was to inspire the galaxy to rise up. Thus the Empire wasn't defeated, it was transformed back into a Republic.

The whole point of the Death Star was to create an atmosphere of fear. For 19 years, even as the Emperor ruled, he still had to deal with the Senate. He still had to placate them to an extent while gradually consolidating power in order to avoid a galactic uprising. The dissolution of the Senate, giving power to the governors, could only happen once the Death Star was complete because the Death Star was meant to cause so much fear that nobody would ever dare oppose the Emperor again. He would no longer have to deal with the Senate or pesky Rebels because nobody would want to risk entire worlds being destroyed. Tarkin said as much to Leia when she basically told him that the more the Empire seized control, the more worlds would resist.

I think that's why Lucas put the galactic celebrations in for the special edition of ROTJ. It was to show the galaxy rising up because of the Rebels victory at Endor, thus causing the Empire to collapse, paving the way for the Senate to be recalled and the Republic to be restored.

That's why this whole First Order business and the war against the Resistance makes no sense. It isn't the First Order that would have gained the resources of the collapsed Empire, those resources would have gone to the restored Republic. Even if a few Imperial Star Destroyer captains refused to accept the transformation of the Empire back to the Republic and disappeared into the Unknown Regions, the likes of Leia, Mothma and Ackbar would never have simply let them go, never would have allowed them to build up another force and never would have never would have allowed them to gain a foothold. They certainly wouldn't have signed a peace treaty that allowed the First Order to run rampant across the Outer RIm.

This idea that the Republic, with a galaxy full of resources would let the First Order grow, kidnap children and attack worlds with impunity is ridiculous, as is the idea that they would secretly fund a Resistance to fight the First Order. They wouldn't need to fund anything. They have the resources to dismantle the First Order themselves. The whole thing was just a contrived mess that Abrams and Kasdan came up with because they wanted to repeat the Empire vs Rebels conflict and left it to novels and comics to try to explain this nonsense, which itself is ridiculous. You don't need the side material to explain anything about the other films. You can watch 1-6 without ever reading any of the novels and get everything you need, whereas Episode VII, instead of logically following on from the previous movie the way the others did, was instead a sequel to a movie we never got to see, a movie where the hopeful future promised in ROTJ was destroyed offscreen (until the character assassination of Luke Skywalker in TLJ).

Even if you allow for the existence of the First Order and the events of TFA, apparently the entire Republic fleet, which the First Order was afraid to battle directly, was at Hosnian Prime? Give me a break. TFA implied that the First Order didn't have a huge fleet, otherwise, they wouldn't have had so much trouble fighting the Resistance. All their hopes lay with Starkiller Base which destroyed Hosnian Prime and with it, the entire Republic fleet which was apparently parked in orbit instead of...you know...patrolling the galaxy, stopping attacks by the evil First Order. But it turns out that the First Order does have a fleet it can use to conquer the galaxy, even though it couldn't handle the Resistance up to a few days earlier. So there's no Republic fleet, the First Order is suddenly as big as the Empire, the Resistance is tiny and no worlds have planetary defence forces.

The whole thing is a convoluted, contrived, nonsensical mess, originating from people who had no knowledge about Star Wars beyond seeing the original films as kids and wanting to rehash them, undermining ROTJ in the process and followed up by a guy who decided to throw out whatever world-building the previous guys did and to destroy the legacy and arc of the saga's greatest hero.

All of this could have been avoided if the characters and the galaxy progressed logically from where ROTJ left off and if the writers had made Episode VII a new Episode I with the introduction of a genuinely new threat that threatened to undermine 30 years of hard earned peace instead of rehashing an old threat that rose to prominence between trilogies. It also could have been avoided if Kennedy had insisted on there being an arc for the directors to follow across the trilogy rather than giving each one license to do whatever they felt like. Of course there was one but then she and Abrams conspired to stab Lucas in the back, which, while cruel, might have worked out if there was an idea in place that was better than whatever he'd come up with. Turns out there was no idea at all.

Rant over.

 

Sure, makes sense.

But it doesn't make sense then that most planets don't know a massive WMD base was destroyed, yet news of a Jedi doing a Force trick in the middle of nowhere spreads through the galaxy like wildfire.

 

Unless they change that premise and take some inspiration from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, i.e. have the Resistance survivors reassemble with the help of New Republic patrol ships not in orbit, I don't think the next movie can work.

Didn't Gareth Edwards (Rogue One) say something like Star Wars is 90% based or inspired by our history?

 

Kay... We don't know either of those things. We don't know if news of SKB being destroyed has or has not spread throughout the galaxy (because we don't care), and we don't know how long it's been since the showdown on Crait that news of Luke has spread far enough to reach the kids on Canto Bight. Because that isn't the reason that scene exists. No one cares about the 'logistics of news traveing throughout the galaxy.' All that matters is that the legend of Luke's heroics has spread to the galaxy's youth, particularly the opressed youth, to inspire hope and the drive to become legend themselves.