Lit From Endor to Exegol - The State of the Galaxy Discussion Thread (Tagged Battle of Jakku Spoilers)

It's pretty much established in the Empire's End. It outright talks about how the Empire oppressed anything alien. It's further established in Thrawn that the Empire promulgates such beliefs...regardless of where they take root be it Core or Rim. The Propaganda book establishes that the Empire reintroduced slavery and had sentient species such as Wookies declared to be non sentient so they could be enslaved. You can argue that it was only Rim Worlds that displayed an anti alien bias but even if so, (which I do not agree that it was) the Empire itself spread that bias in an attempt to forge humans as a whole into a useful and willing army. If one denies it, I'd say they were only being polemical.

It's been a while such I've read my various Star Wars guides but I'm pretty sure it was established for Legends, that such human snobbery originated in the Core despite its cosmopolitan nature. Whether or not that made sense is another issue. It was reason why human dominated worlds like Kuat and Brentaal seemed to have no trouble with Imperial rule. It simply did not affect them negatively (certainly, in contrast to Coruscant, they were not portrayed as cosmopolitan) . In the current canon, that snobbery seems to be completely absent be it Core World or Rim world until the Empire shows up.

Yes...as pertains to Legends Empire, most certainly he would. However, I have never disagreed that the Legends Empire was all that. I do disagree that that the canon Empire shows much of that multifaceted complexity. It may exist but so far it has not been shown to us. In fact, as you point out, the Empire is an aberration. It's supported by the post Endor Star Wars stories. Planets can't get rid of it fast enough. Something that is the pillar and keeper of galactic culture is not rejected by the body so easily.

Also, rejecting Coruscant in the new canon only shows how comfortable the majority of the galaxy is with not having the planet be the center of galaxy. It is not seen as essential to the legitimacy of representative government. The only thing Coruscant is important to in the new canon after Endor is the Empire. Which is why it's rejected.

This is in contrast to Legends in which all the galactic governments felt they must rule from Coruscant in order to be legitimate before the eyes of the people...from the New Republic to the Galactic Alliance. Apparently in canon, Coruscant is just not that important to the denizens of the galaxy.

In Legends, the Empire did have deep historical roots. Some of those roots were provided by the fact that i ruled Coruscant which was seen as deeply significant to Galactic culture in Legends. Historical roots is why the Empire in Legends stayed around longer and was even defended by citizens.


I can hear an argument that the Empire in Legends is a conservative movement and that the Alliance in Legends is revolutionary. In Legends there are good arguments for that. Not in current canon.

 

But it WAS essential to the Old Republic, which is my point. The Old Republic and the Empire are BOTH rejected by the New Republic because they are closely associated with each other.

Or it's just a sour point for some separatists worlds because Coruscant was seen as emblematic of the corruption within the Republic in later years. It says something to me though, that a galaxy is okay in having a galactic government without Coruscant.

You look at the Coruscant being essential to the Old Republic and you like to believe that the Empire represents the Old Republic. Therefore, in your mind a rejection of Coruscant is a rejection of the Old Republic. It's nonsense and flies in the face of everything the canonical Alliance claims to be.


This explains everything, from why the Empire fell so quickly (it just wasn't around that long) to why the Empire is still essentially a conservative institution (the canonical Empire takes into account galactic cosmopolitanism and more closely resembles that which came before).


And yet that does not stop it from encouraging anti alien sentiments.

The OOU word from the Story Group is that the canon Empire is not institutionally anti-alien. Anti-alienism exists by virtue of anti-alien individuals (who will use the official authority they have to further their biases).

I know this applies to women in the Empire but as it pertains to aliens.... the way things are written in Empire's End and Propaganda would seem to disagree. It would be hard to read those excerpts any other way.

But! To each his own. Enjoy your your dour looking, 1984-ish new canon Empire.

 

The problem with Separatist movements is they're never remotely as "clean" as people expect them to be. Plenty of the Separatist movements had minority or even majority populations which did NOT want to leave the Republic. In Planet of Twilight, Leia is like, "Well if the majority says not to join the Republic, you can't do anything."

That was a rather simplistic handling of democracy.

Plus, as we know, Dooku set everything up so the Jedi thought they were preventing a first strike (which they were) while making it look like they started the war.

 

I think you could argue that the Rebellion is both a counter revolution and a revolution. In regards to the Imperial Revolution they are counter revolutionaries, howeve more broadly they are revolutionaries in their own righ - they decentralised control of their galactic state, enabled democratic elections of the Senate, ended the old galactic state and established a new one to succeed it. They were less revolutionary than the Empire, but they were also revolutionary in their own right.

 

Forgot to comment on something earlier:

The Core Worlds are cosmopolitan but I would argue that the Empire is not. Not only is new canon seeding the idea that the Empire was spreading certain types of anti alien resentment with books like Empire's End and Propaganda but it's giving us another good reason why so many worlds ended up rejecting the Empire so soon after Empire: it's an alien idea being imposed on formerly cosmopolitan worlds. The Empire is xenophobic and draconian and has no historical roots in canon core world culture.

Again, this is in contrast to Legends where we have books like the Essential Atlas which explain that human high culture found its roots amongst human dominated core worlds. Which partly explains why in Legends, these world are not so quick to throw off the Empire; the Empire in Legends has cultural roots in the Core Worlds. The Empire, as far as I can see in canon, does not.

It was also established that core worlds, in Legends, had their traditions of military conquests, empires, and central governments. Again, this provided historical roots for the culture of the Empire. None of this has been heavily reestablished in the new canon.

In Legends, the Empire had history behind it. Even when it was revealed that it was only 24 years old, they then established that the culture that the Empire relied on was older still which explained why the Empire was fought for and remained around for as long as it did.

In the new canon, the Empire has no historical leg to stand on which explains very well why planets reject it so quickly after Endor.

 

The short version is Legends bent over backwards to show how the Empire was the same while canon is making it clear it was different.

Honestly, I'm inclined to think the Legends EU was also relentlessly forgiving to the Empire when it should have been condemnatory. It was inconsistent in many places too because while the Empire is very much a non-cosmopolitan system in canon, we don't have mass relocations of the alien population of Coruscant to a ghetto either.

Yet.

 

CWCC seems to me to be a term that the Empire and groups with similar feelings towards nonhuman races could very easily turn into a dogwhistle, the same way the idea/phrase "Western Culture" has seen a particularly ugly turn in recent political happenings.

 

Yeah, CWCC sounds like a softer phrasing for HHC.

 

This is a really fascinating topic to me, as it touches on a lot of the things I study in real-world history (ideas of legitimacy, the relationship between states and religion, etc), but I guess my overall feeling is that, in the New Canon, at least, we really don't have a good enough sense of what the Old Republic looked like to really be sure about these kinds of questions. All we've really seen of the institution is TPM onwards, by which time, as we know, the Republic was already pretty far gone, facing huge governmental and military crises that were (seemingly) pretty unprecedented in its history. I don't think this makes much sense as a baseline to establish what's revolutionary or not: any more than, say, we can get a picture of the ideal Roman Republic and breaks from it by looking at the time of Marius and Sulla or the Civil Wars. There's a lot of history and tradition in the Old Republic that I would expect to be much more foundational and important from a broader Galactic perspective.

What were the core (pun intended) parts of the Republic's ideology and public image over time and space and different regions? I'm honestly not sure we can say just yet. Some kind of democratic-Republican legitimism? Law and order? A particular cultural or legal tradition? There's actually nothing in the New Canon as far as I can tell, contra Jello, that even necessarily rules out an explicitly religious, Force-based ideology as a source of legitimacy for the Republic during some or all of its history. Maybe the Jedi and the Church of the Force were far more key to the history of the Republic as an institution than was the case in Legends.

Even given what we know now, based on what you look at or emphasize, it's possible to paint extremely different pictures of the transition from Republic to Empire to New Republic. Jello's picture is basically one that focuses on Core World Traditions and Culture and the importance of Coruscant; this may be a perspective of some people in the Core Worlds at this time, but it's hard to tell how far it goes. Certainly, this is not the Roman Empire, based on the rule of a single city over the rest of the world: it's the Galactic Republic. On the other hand, Matthew seems to be centering things on a broadly democratic/Republican system as the basis of legitimacy; this perspective certainly seems to be one that exists in Canon, but again, it's hard to know, as yet, just how decisive it really is.

I certainly have some thoughts & perspective of my own on this, but I have to go teach kids to read Sallust in Latin. For now, I'll just say that I really hope this is something that gets explored more in Canon, as it is a really fascinating topic with a lot of room for interesting development. Too much of the OR stuff in Legends was just the Prequels with a coat of paint.

 

Well, we don't know. In Legends, the Republic fits as the predecessor to the Empire culturally, we don't really know if its the same in New Canon. We don't know if the Republic resembles the Rebellion or Empire more, culturally, and we have yet to find out. If the Republic is absolutely nothing culturally like the Empire, then its quick demise does make sense. But as GrandAdmiralJello has said, there's also examples of Core Worlds Classical Culture being brought up in the works, and let's not forget the Elder Houses, who are implied to have held a substantial amount of power in the past. There's as much references to the Empire being a lot like its predecessor in New Canon as there are to counter that, so I guess we have yet to see.

And hey, maybe the First Order under Sloane was actually a Fel Empire of sorts, supporting Core Worlds Classical Cultures that its seeing as the New Republic stamping on galactic traditions, which is the reason the Centrists are drawn to it. Unfortunately though, Snoke has been subverting it and turning it into a COMPNOR-lite Empire much as Krayt engaged in a coup against the Fel Empire. I personally have a theory that the 'First Order' name stands for it being the 'first galactic government', as in it considers itself to be representing the old traditions of the Old Republic and Empire vs the revolutionary New Republic.

 

I think it's possible to overthink the Empire as an organization. The Empire began as a reformation of the Galactic Republic but was constantly changing and progressing as an organization. Palpatine did his very best to widdle away at the freedoms, powers, and positions of the Old Republic while replacing them with ther own. It was a creatively sterile organization, though, with the Propaganda Book implying that it was culturally as well as artistically suppressive. Grand Moff Tarkin had a "graffiti" artist who was Pro-New Order murdered for the fact he was too radical in his designs.

In the Legends EU, particularly Fragments from the Rim (which I need to get back to reviewing), it was notable Compnor's biggest job wasn't actually the ISB or Imperial security but the day to day censoring and destruction of dissident art.

One of the canon short stories indicates this is still true as he states the Empire has been doing MASSIVE amounts of editing to the galaxy's art and architecture simply because so much of it was influenced or Pro-Jedi so that whole swaths of past culture are being wiped out or rewritten.

 

Well yeah, by preserving Core Worlds traditions, I mean those favourable to the regime. Core Worlds traditions... vary a lot, there's the Corulag-type of Core Worlder, who fits with the Empire perfectly, and then there's the Chandrilan, who definitely doesn't.

 

In the original depiction of Corulag in Legends, the whole point was Corulag didn't HAVE traditions. They'd embraced High Human Culture and Imperial culture because they'd been the odd man out for a blank slate.

 

I likened it to the Core Worlds being Europe and Palpatine saying, "Okay, now we're going to be clear that you're all Imperials now and none of your histories or culture matters from now on. Just be vaguely Austrian."

 

My point was not that Coruscant was not associated with the Empire; my point is that the Empire is not equated with core world culture. Yes, the Royal Academy on Coruscant has balls and encourages students to read up on Core World culture...because it is hosted by a Core world.

Balls happen on a core world because it is a core world. Imperial courtiers wear core world dress because they come from the core worlds. It's not proof that the Empire represents the core worlds anymore than Eriadu Imperials on Eriadu in Eriadu dress prove that the Empire represents Outer Rim culture.

The Royal Academy is also the same place that tells recruits:
"Can you stop thinking of yourself as a native of your home planet and begin thinking of yourself as an Imperial first? An Imperial only? Can you accept that protecting and serving the world you came from is best accomplished by strengthening the Empire to which it belongs?"

Balls and core world culture will continue under the New Republic. This is not what the Empire represents in the new canon nor is it what made it popular in Legends. The Empire of Legends was supported by Core Worlds that had a strong history of militarism, strong central authorities, and human elitism. The Empire in Legends took those cultural inclinations and magnified them times a thousand; that is why it was supported.

None of that is established for Core Worlds in current canon. Coruscant is the one we see the most and it is supposedly considered one of the most corrupt by the time of the prequels. Yet, we see in the Clone Wars that up until the wars the planet was concerned with public education, health care, and universal utility provision for its citizens. If this is typical of most Core Worlds then it is hard to see where the Empire would be drawing cultural and historical support. Alderaan and Chandrila are even more concerned with the welfare of their people. We know nothing about Kuat and the smattering of other core worlds that have shown up in canon. In Legends, Alderaan and Chandrila were essentially oddities amongst Core worlds. In canon, core worlds in general seem to be pretty "chill". From the evidence we have, we cannot assume that Core Worlds are pillars of Imperial support like they were Legends.

And as far Coruscant goes, it is not as important as it was in Legends: in Legends, all the galactic authorities gained legitimacy from ruling the planet.

In canon...whatever it seems.

Makes you wonder what planet served as the capital in the Old Old Republic.

Legends Empire could say that it was the Core Worlds and that could be accepted. Canon Empire cannot lay claim to that and is one reason why Core Worlds rejected the Empire along with the rest of the galaxy.

 

Only if the Core Worlds in canon are necessarily associated with humans.

 

They restructured sections of Coruscant so the architecture was more severe.

 

Or what the Empire considers "classical culture."