Speculation the political crisis in Episode VII?

Yeah, in another thread I was saying Leia as the Hillary Clinton analogy makes a lot of sense in that 1) Leia would probably be a senior stateswoman by that point in time, 2) you could recast Carrie Fisher and not need her for any action roles, and 3) it would be a strong statement about the role of women to have a female chief of state

@Poli-Sci Jedi Frankly I can't help but imagine that, as the child of the Chosen One, she would have to have some hybrid Jedi/political role. Leia's got a foot in both fields by birthright.

Yeah, that's what I was going on about in my blog post about Leia. I think making her a political/Jedi hybrid is a lot more interesting than just making her a generic action hero. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of the books and comics are just making Leia an action hero.

I minored in Poli-Sci (was a Criminal In-Justice major). Perhaps, that's why I am more tolerant of the Senate machinations than others . . .

@Poli-Sci Jedi I think we're going to have to accept that Carrie Fisher in a lightsaber duel is going to become for the 2010s what Yoda in a duel was for the 2000s.

Plus, I'm wondering how Arndt/Abrams are going infuse the ST version of Leia with older Fisher's unique personality: namely, her quirkiness and her sense of humor. Imagine an older, matronly Leia who was as playful and ornery as ESB Yoda.

I like the idea of a Al Capone type Character as the head Baddy. Have an Underworld leader who has a voteing block of the Senate under his thumb, the Jedi could have a splinter group that breaks and is our force user enemy for the trilogy, grouping with The Godfather.

So like Palpatine but with a thick accent

So like Palpatine but with a thick accent

LOL! As long as hes not a force user, probably more on the lines of Xizor

True. I always thought Xizor was underutilized in Shadows of the Empire. He was more of a playboy than a real threat. There's definitely room in the Sequels for a morally ambiguous Underworld villain.

At the same time I feel a lot of books have also downplayed her badass side and are too quick to throw her behind a desk and turn her into a Padme clone. And ultimately there lies my problem with the EU. Leia can only be a Jedi, or she can only be a polititian. It has to be one or the other. She's constantly flip-flopping between the two roles over the years that she never ends up being very good at either.

Not sure if you saw my reply to your other post:

@agentkrycek I agree with that... up until New Jedi Order. At the beginning of NJO, she's no longer a politician and suddenly is more interested in being a Jedi. It's kind of odd in a way because she becomes chief of state when she's in her early 30s, and then a Jedi in her 40s. Being chief of state is kind of an important position but there are only a few novels that cover Leia during that time period. Moreover, in New Rebellion she actually takes a leave of absence to go rescue her kids.

I agree that part of the problem is balance. There's no reason Leia couldn't have had a career as both a Jedi and politician throughout the EU. Her characterization, especially since the early NJO, has been for me a bit slipshod. I'm reading Fate of the Jedi now and it's not even clear what her role is anymore. She's just babysitting Allana. It'd be in my opinion better at least to make her a Jedi Master and give her a more defined role in the story.

Although being a chief of state can be pretty badass. Margaret Thatcher was pretty badass. Leia in the Black Fleet Crisis books declaring war on the Yevetha was pretty badass. As I said in my blog post, I think what should have happened is that the EU should have made Leia's rise in politics more gradual, letting her be a field agent first involved in fights on the ground and then transition her slowly into a position of political leadership. However, the EU rushed her character. She was already chief of state by 32 or so and had nowhere to go from there.

The transition is not an easy one, and most definitely not going to be quick. If we go strictly by what we know by the end of ROTJ, the Emperor's death was celebrated throughout the galaxy.
However, it is very likely that one or more things might happen:
1) there are still regional governors.
- some will give up their power and accept to either be part of the new order or lose their seat
- some will not give up and use whatever means they have at their disposal to defend their seat, thus creating more problems.

2)bureaucrats who served under Palpatine may still be there and some may want a bit of revenge for the destruction of the Empire

3) not everyone joined the Rebellion to get rid of the "evil" emperor.
Some may want to speculate this moment to get more power and influence. This is very possible because, just as in real life, some may be hiding something behind their good intentions.

4) crime lords will most likely flourish, now that they won't be facing a power-hungry dictator, but a small group of people who are more concerned with political reorganization rather than fighting crime and keeping order

Talking about a transition at a galactic scale, it may take years, if not decades before everything is back in place. And even then, traitors will still exist. The emperor's death did not magically get rid of all evil and corruption in the galaxy. Even members of the Rebellion and/or of the new order may try to take advantage of the situation.
Problems can still exist within the new order, political leaders wanting more than they are given (control over star systems for example)...some may even give in to the Imperial Remnant's demands just to get the power and influence that the new order was unable to supply.

1) The role of the regional governers depend on how many years pass between Episodes VI and VII. I don't think they will still be around 40 years after RotJ. I guess we'll see.

2) Well, the Communist bureaucracy in Hungary transitioned fairly efficiently into the democracy. The bureaucrats' interest is stability above all else: keeping and increasing their jobs and taks, by which they increase their power over a state. Then again, this is Star Wars, not Eastern Europe.

3) Yeah. Actually, my theory is that the villains could be 'insurgents', maybe a sort of terrorist army made up of Imperial remnants, trying to incite the rebellion of alien races against humans perhaps. Wouldn't make sense, the Empire was all-human, but I think it could be interesting.

4) Oh yeah, crime organizations must have been the big winners after the Rebels when the Emperor died, a bit like the maffia after the hanging of Mussolini.

I don't think SW is going to go into petty race wars coming out of RoTJ. That would be really counterintuitive to the galaxy's culture and infrastructure. Like you said, those in power are going to be interested in stability above all else...without having to declare someone a dictator and ruling out of fear.

If they're going to continue with SW being modern mythology borrowing from real history, the ST is going to probably follow the template of the Cold War the same way the PT and OT paralleled the two World Wars, that is, a period of extended relative peace where no shot has been fired by the two emerging superpowers out of the threat and fear that the other guy has just made a bigger gun and if anyone fires SOOO much will be lost on both sides. (I just realized Lando is going to be the JFK/MLK that died off-screen between trilogies.) I think the ST is going to begin with the analogue to the fall of the Soviet Union, a faction represented by the remnants of the old Empire that don't believe in a return to democracy that the Alliance represents. It was the end of the Cold War when the world started to go boom boom again: All those weapons sold by both the U.S. and Russia to how many countries or militant/insurgent groups within those countries to fight battles with each other on their behalf since they couldn't outwardly do it themselves. Hell they didn't even have to sell a lot of those weapons. It was much cheaper for both sides post-WWII/etc. to just leave weapons lying around then ship them back home. Besides weapons, there's going to be that void in balance between superpowers that results in the remaining superpower to becoming increasingly totalitarian and self-destructive since there's no one to keep them in check, while others jockey and position themselves to fill that void (China).

You're right. Organized crime and terrorism are going to be the HUGE winner. Look at all the smaller nations, developing nations through insurgent risings, the increased use of religious rhetoric to justify causes...all armed and financed as results of the Cold War. A SW analogue to the Cold War works extremely well to explain away the gap in time between the OT and ST. Whomever the big bad is of the ST is going to represent evil while completely looking like the benevolent good guys. That's the lesson learned by those in power post-World Wars - it's really important to look like you can't be villainized. Other lessons remain from every era, CONTROL the media/control what people think, why they think what they think, and distract with entertainment, preservation of the ideals and traditions of a golden age of peace and prosperity even though reality is anything but, that gets perverted over time into a form of nationalism and jingoism, ironically unrecognizable as the very thing they fought against in the past. Actually...race/civil/class wars would be the natural outcome from that particular climate wherein we'd have to get our Gandhi/Mandela-based heroes from.

Tan, interesting idea with the Cold War analogy. I guess I could see a "cold war" scenario between the Republic and Imperial Remnant or the Republic and some new alien race. But I agree with you about the villain - he's going to have to be morally ambiguous, at least at first. He cannot simply be pure evil. I think the movie is going to have to have more moral ambiguity than the OT, but perhaps not as much as the PT.

I don't know if this is appropriate for a Star Wars forum, but I could see a villain who is kind of like Sauron from Lord of the Rings when he was in Numenor and called himself Annatar. He transformed himself into a beautiful person and pretended to bear gifts for the Numenorians, all the while trying to undermine and convert them. I wouldn't be surprised if the villain in the ST takes that from - somebody who looks too good to be true, and eventually is revealed to have other motives.

I also just realized, if the ST goes this route, that the Galactic UN will replace the PT Senate scenes as the one where everyone is standing around yelling and begging for money err I mean "foreign aid"...hopefully with much better dialogue...but it can't because that's the whole point, they have to represent pointlessness.

I wouldn't be surprised - in a way, a galactic government is probably going to be much less centralized than even most federal countries. I would expect planets to take most responsibility for their own governance. I'd expect the ST government to look kind of like the European Union in that respect, highly decentralized and leaving each country/planet with significant sovereignty. After Palpatine, the heirs to the Rebellion are likely to be wary of centralization.

It makes sense. Even if Luke went into high gear pumping out Jedi, these planets and systems would have to deal with decades of governing without the safety net of Jedi guardians.

But I think that plays into the issue of the ST galaxy just not trusting Jedi or The Force.

That was part of the Old Republic's problem after all. The Old Republic had a centralized government with a galactic Senate, but no centralized military. The Jedi were too few to keep the peace. The Old Republic wanted it both ways, where Senators could reap the power, prestige, and corruption that came with centralized government, without providing the military protection and services that should come with it. Remember, this was a government that couldn't even ban slavery. Then, with Palpatine, things became too centralized and local autonomy was equated with being a Separatist.

Question for the thread: In the OT, Lucas took a romantic view of politics, i.e., democracy was good and the totalitarian empire was evil. In the prequels, Lucas took a much more ambiguous view, i.e., democracy could become corrupt and the line between democracy and dictatorship (or good and evil) was much narrower. In the Sequels, do you think Abrams will try to recapture the innocence and youth of the OT or try to reflect modern American politics like the PT, or some happy compromise in between?

I feel like the OT style towards politics would make the most commercial sense and is the type of storytelling JJ Abrams seems to like based on Star Trek and Super 8. However, is such an idealized view of good and evil relevant in America in 2015?

Did Europe magically resume it’s pre-WWI existence in 1918? What about after WWII? What about the Middle East after the big wars? Soviet Union? Africa?


Before the Empire became the Empire, a number of Core Worlds joined the Confederacy of Independent Systems, aka the Separatists. After ruler ship by the Empire, the Empire an extension of the Old Republic government, how many of those worlds are going to be the first in line for reunification into a New Republic?


I foresee many independent systems, as well as Alliances between small numbers of worlds. This actually would be good for storytelling as it would make for fertile background story material, and yes, an excuse for the “war” in the stars.

Nice thoughts!

Our current society isn't interested in black and white, clear cut issues. It's all about individual rights and receiving a perceived "fair share".

Something we haven't seen in SW is religious fanaticism. It might be too heavy for Disney, but would prove to be a daunting challenge for the heroes to face blind adherents to a religious cause than white cookie cutter soldiers in scary masks.

Yuuzhan Vong.

"The Alliance to Restore the Republic"