Lit Imperial Distinctions-the legends and Canon empires

That's the impression I got from the Aftermath Trilogy. He was definitely planning on using that fleet for something. And if he had succeeded, the galaxy would have been undefended. I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure he mentioned returning to conquer it.

 

Yes, he was planning on using it to conquer the Unknown Regions.

If you question my logic, I point out Gallius Rax was entirely capable of conquering the galaxy with the Imperial Forces he was already Emperor of.

Gallius plan was to murder 90% of all Imperials with a tiny remnant escaping under his control but he controlled tht 90% already

 

I never read the aftermath trilogy and so maybe I'm not qualified to comment-but nothing about what I hear of it really satisfied my SOD of imperial defeat in a year. Legends was realistic in that regard and true to RL history.

As opposed to apparently some imperial officers maniacally scheming to exterminate their own faction and then conquer the Galaxy for whatever reason.

 

It's a nice philosophy, but you can't take away the uniforms so easily. There's still such a thing as a right side and a wrong side. These Imperial soldiers aren't throwing down their weapons and surrendering. They're still fighting, and for the wrong side. When the bad guys kill other bad guys, it's not really a tragedy, at least in my opinion. I'll save my tears for Alderaan.

Except these ordinary people are still willing to kill innocent civilians on the orders of the now-dead Emperor. They may be ordinary, but that doesn't make them good.

Now this point is one that I can truly appreciate. I agree with you completely on Garrick Versio's final moments. The trace of that good man, who told his dying wife the secret of their daughter's false defection in spite of operational secrecy, is still there. At the end, he realizes what he's become and resurfaces. But, it's not enough to achieve true redemption. He doesn't make real amends for his crimes, which is why he pays for them by going down with his ship. You could say that at the end, Garrick realized that while his daughter could forgive him, the Galaxy wouldn't. Which is why he doesn't go with her.

I'm glad to see that we can agree on some points, at least. Garrick Versio's end and his final scene with his daughter are quite reminiscent of Vader with Luke on the Death Star. Perhaps the fact that Del and Iden use what Garrick taught them to serve the New Republic redeem Admiral Versio in another, symbolic, way.

I must say, you do make some good points. Perhaps in this heated debate, I've forgotten that at the heart of the matter, we are both still fans of Star Wars, and there is room for both of our viewpoints within the overall themes of the Saga.

You're right that Jakku was a deception, though as it yielded thirty years of peace, I can't argue much with the outcome. I also agree with you that the Emperor did deceive the honourable men under his rule. There were good men and women under the Empire, who genuinely believed they were doing the right thing. But they weren't.

But, you have given me some food for thought here. About Rax's deceptions and the use of conscripts at Jakku. That particular battle may not be as cut-and-dried as I had originally thought. I may have to read it again. But I do stand behind my point that the end of the Empire as an organized, opressive force in the known Galaxy was a good thing. The Galaxy is better off without it around.

 

I got the impression from the books he planned on returning, but I need to reread the books to be sure. You're right, he already controlled the Empire and so could have conquered the New Republic. However, I think he was so loyal to Palpatine he couldn't fully circumvent the plan. He modified it for his own benefit, but kept the majority intact. He was raised to carry out the Contingency; it didn't make strategic sense, but he believed it was his destiny. He also truly believed it was necessary.

 

It's possible Rax wanted to cull the potential power-hungry of the Imperial Remnants and set up his own state, without anyone there being to oppose him to his right to the 'Imperial mandate'. Maybe he also planned on ending the New Republic and having a chaotic Galaxy, with himself having an isolated territory loyal to himself, and just run with that and overall not give much of a damn about galactic control.

 

I'm curious (And you may have said this but i forget) I wonder what Rax would have done if he won, just stay in the UR and leave the known Galaxy alone...Come back one day and reconquer the known galaxy....Would have been interesting to think what would have happened if he won.

 

On the general topic of exactly what the plan is at Jakku, see the last section of my reply to JediKnight75...

Why? Rae Sloane may be many things, but she's no fanatic. General Borrum is an old soldier who has a soldier's belief in hierarchy. Obdur, bizarrely, just seems to want to make people happy. What unites them is that they're the sort of Imperial that Rax wants to get rid of.

And Randd was never let into Rax's plan - he may even have been recruited initially using Rae's scripted "Grand Admiral Sloane" persona, and he's certainly not privy to the real plan at Jakku - he fights the battle "straight", then bugs out and pulls back what's left of the fleet to his own territory in the Exterior.

Nash is damaged, understandably. But he's not a bad person at core. My thinking is that his loyalty to the Empire is potentially a basis for healing him, if that loyalty can be directed to a better purpose (the purpose he already believes in). What better alternative is there?

IMHO, Nash's strident statements of support are essentially declarative rather than based on action - for that reason, I don't think we can infer that Nash has actually committed atrocities; he believes in the system, and is trying to rationalise the evidence that some people in high places are doing egregiously wrong things (as opposed to Ciena, who is more consciously aware of the wrongs and trying to work out her best response, or Eli Vanto, who is tasked by Thrawn with figuring out the nature of the wrongs as the basis for a response).

I do agree that the plan is one of reconquest, but I think a process of rebuilding is built into the plan - Bren Hux's indoctrination program is not something that can produce an army immediately.

A couple of other details - when Hux left Jakku, the coordinates for the Eclipse were transmitted to the ships of twelve other "Imperials considered loyal". We don't really know who they were, but one thing we do know: they were selected by Palpatine. Not Rax, not Hux, not Sloane. Palpatine.

The question of exactly what was supposed to be in the former Empire when the FO was ready is the big unanswered question. Jakku is presented as a plan to destroy the NR fleet (though I can't immediately find that made explicit on the page?), but Rax makes no effort to destroy the New Republic as an organization, and allows them to gain control of the remains of the Empire's industrial base. Is that deliberate, or just an oversight? Of course, the rise of the NR cannot be a predetermined element of the plan, but if not the NR, who was the Empire supposed to be fighting at Jakku?

I suspect that there are no hard-and-fast answers to these parts, and of course, Episode IX may retcon the origins of the FO completely.

Well, then, we disagree on this. I don't accept your argument that the "wrong side" equates automatically with "the bad guys" - in fact, whether by the intent of the authors and the story group or not, I'd argue that the contrast here underscores that the bulk of the Empire are not "the bad guys", because the way that the bad guy are behaving actually emphasises that they're on different sides.

Innocent civilians? On Jakku? You've lost me...

We pretty much agree on this, although maybe I wouldn't be so hard-and-fast in my interpretation of some details. Perhaps that's just a matter of phrasing, though?

I'm not meaning to be "heated" - and while I've laid out some continuing points of disagreement in this reply, I'm certainly happy to leave off the discussion, as I think we've covered everything and made our opinions clear.

I'm not convinced that Jakku was necessary for peace, or that the largely unnarated period between 5 ABY and 34 ABY was necessarily free from conflict. I would also emphasise that men and women who find themselves in the "wrong" uniform, for one reason or another, are capable of doing the right thing (whether or not that includes defection)... this is not simply about people who're deceived or naive, though there will be a lot of them, this is about people who try to do their best in a difficult position, and ordinary conscripts trying to get by when the other guy wants to shoot them.

This is really the nub of where we disagree - I think that "the Empire as an organized force" is not automatically "oppressive". We basically have different views on how systemic the "oppressive" element is.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I imagine that if you were a middle class or rich human in the core the empire probably wasn't that much of a boot in your neck. You probably had to fill out more paperwork(flimsiwork?), maybe a higher tax rate, more bureaucratic hoops to get a job or to enroll your children at school, etc... As well as a higher security presence overall in day to day life.

The same would apply to the galaxy's periphery-Hutt space rarely saw the empire unless it wanted to make a show of force to remind the Hutts who actually was the stronger, and remote world's unconnected from galactic society or in the unknown regions were of course unaware of the empire entirely.

And even in places like the mid rim and expansion region imperial heavy handedness likely depended heavily on where one was exactly. Not every system saw the same imperial garrison as Kashyyyk for example. I'm sure some world's likely had to little to no imperial presence because their local and sector authorities worked cooperatively with the moffs in charge of them.

The empire doesn't have enough troops to put its boot on everyone's neck. A lot of people likely rarely saw a stormtrooper or an SSD in their entire lives.

 

I'm making a brief aside here (had meant to the other day and then got sidetracked), to say THANK YOU and how much I totally agree. I hate the lazy "Wehrmacht, Good Germans, SS, Bad Germans" narrative in WW2 fiction and pop culture narratives. It's not universal, but it's damn well widespread enough. (One of the reasons I love Hogan's Heroes out of all reasonable proportion is that it doesn't do this and instead portrays both Wehrmacht and SS as a shower of bastards constantly tripping over each other's plots - the closest thing to a "good German" being draftees like Schultz who're just trying to keep their heads down and make it through the war alive. It's probably not a coincidence that that show was full of actors who'd either lived through, escaped from, or at least had family/friends in Nazi Germany, and had a lot of influence on how the story was shaped).

And yes, I do love the fact that NuCanon has taken a couple of opportunities to deconstruct the "honorable patriotic soldier selflessly doing their duty" archetype that, in the old EU, would've been "good Imperials" (Cienna Ree and Sloane).

 

Unless:

* You were an alien then in Legends, you had to register with the government and have travel papers.
* Unless you were an alien on Coruscant, then you were shunted off to the ghettos.
* Unless you were Alderaanian.
* Unless you were from the planet Dentaal
* Unless you were accused of a crime.
* Unless you had something the Empire wanted
* Unless you liked art which was unapproved by COMPNOR
* Unless you were a cop and found you were not allowed to do anything about friends of the Empire and had to work with the Empire's goons

The Empire didn't change things on the macro-scale alone they also changed things on the tiny scale. We don't get much about COMPNOR but they censored all art, supervised by the police force (See Corran Horn and Kirtan Loor), and also affected all economics with the Empire nationalizing many of the corporations or forcing private businesses under their megacorps.

In canon, we see they've turned Corellia into a hellhole.[/QUOTE]

 

I don't think anyone takes the "good Wehrmacht" canard seriously anymore. But the empire isn't Nazi Germany.

 

We do indeed disagree on this particular point. Best to probably just leave it at that. We have different points of view on this subject and there's nothing wrong with that.

Yes, I think that's the crux on which we disagree. I do think that the Empire, as a whole, is not a good thing. But as you say, it's best to just leave things here. This has been quite an informative discussion.

 

Which Empire?

 

The ANH cutscenes really emphasise this with regard to Tatooine.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this question is irrelevant to the discussion, not least because there's no equivalent of the SS in the Empire. The bad people and the good people and all the mediocre people are all in the same uniform.

Without getting into specifics about Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, I also want to emphasise that the Empire, as a vast and diverse place, which was until twenty years earlier a well-established democracy and which most people in the GFFA recognize as the legitimate government, is a basically different sort of setting....

"Grand Admiral" Sloane repels me - and I think she's meant to. I don't think she's a deconstruction, though, because she seeems too ignorant of what's going on around her - she lacks either agency or threat (more on this in a bit).

I'm still not quite sure what to make of Ciena. Lost Stars gives us four Imperial types, all of whom I think are supposed to be broadly "sympathetic" - the defector (Thane), the reluctant soldier (Ciena), the justifying loyalist (Nash), and the actual patriot (Berisse) - and expresses their characterization by their varying responses to the Empire's enthusiasm for big round battlemoons; but, perhaps in a reflection of the general timbre of the reboot material, this novel doesn't give us a voice that was quite prevalent in the pre-reboot material - the Imperial who recognises the wrong and opposes that in some sense without defecting.

That always seemed to me to be the most likely response, and also one that can produce a whole range of reactions - some will have more room to express their opinion and act on them, some will be heavily exposed to the climate of fear and moral censorship, some will have pressing immediate responsibilities, and their attitudes to the Rebellion may vary widely. Regardless, their psychological agency, their conscience, makes them more sympathetic, more heroic - and the fact that they are faced with other concerns, right or wrong, which keep them in Imperial uniform, helps to emphasise the humanity and relatability of "the other side", and underscore the real danger that good people face...

These should of course be juxtaposed with people who are less sympathetic (Daala is actually an excellent example of an unambiguous - utterly Tarkinist - antagonist who manages to not be a two-dimensional villain) - but there, you can have symmetry with similar people who're only averted from being bad guys by being on the right side (JA3 actually did this, too)...

Just like immigrants in our own societies, you mean?

And there are some liberal western countries where this is now a huge issue.

"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it".

I get the sense that COMPNOR generally failed completely to stop people from listening to Deeply Religious or Red Shift Limit...

For every Kirtan Loor there's also a Rostek Horn, though.

And Loor is an interesting figure, as while he's clearly a bad guy, and a nasty piece of work, he's also a dysfunctional loner whose Imperial uniform is his only real armour, who generally provokes contempt from those he works with, and who has enough principle that he eventually baulks at being told to commit terror attacks against kids.

Go to The Krytos Trap and reread the scene between Vorru and Loor which prompts Loor's defection - Loor, being Loor, has... patterns, if not principles, which he uses to justify his actions, and which while they regularly allow him to do utterly immoral things as "part of the job", also provide him with the ability to recognize, and feel repelled by, other wrongs that cross those lines. That's really well-characterised.

EDIT: also, Loor's Imperial Intelligence, not COMPNOR.

Is that the Empire, or corrupt corporations and organized crime profiting off the Empire...?

Well, that depends on what we do with our points of view, but if we've settled for explaining ourselves to each other and then getting on with trying to be nice, I can get behind that.

I wouldn't say "the Empire, as a whole" is "a good thing" - my point is that the Empire is not just a list of wrongs. The Empire as a whole is simply the uniformed arm of the vast, complex society which produced Han, Luke and Leia, and all the other Rebels...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Daala's main problem is that she truly believes in the rightness of the imperial cause without the competence, shrewdness, or patience to see her vision or at least her ideological preference work within reality.

Pellaeon can imagine the empire being welcomed by the Galaxy once the NR collapses-Daala has to make that happen, not wait for events to let that happen.

 

Because the NR will never collapse and Pelleaeon is deluding himself.

 

It did-Pellaeon's prediction was right on the money.

"If we're destroyed—if we all die—the concepts and ideals of the New Order die with us. But if we surrender, we can keep those ideals alive. Then, if and when the New Republic self-destructs, we'll be positioned to rise again. Maybe then the galaxy will finally be ready to accept us."

Everything he said came true.

He was truly the greatest statesman of legends.

Let's toast to the foresighted, the wise, the prudent admiral Gilad Pellaeon-savior of the empire whose patience, humility, and far sighted wisdom proved correct even if he did not live to see it.

 

This right here is why I can't get behind Pellaeon. "Accept us"? The organization that subjugated and enslaved aliens at every turn. The organization that built numerous superweapons to keep rebellious systems in line. The organization that, time and time again, committed war crimes, and would continue to do so well after the Emperor was dead? That organization? Why would anyone 'good' or 'redeemable' keep those beliefs alive, let alone try and bring those back onto a galactic stage?

 

No it didn't. It arose stronger as the Galactic Alliance.

 

The GA withered and died in the debacle of the Ossus project and the Sith imperial war.

 

Maybe if the Empire would stop undermining the Alliance at every turn after their defeat, they wouldn't have as many problems? I mean, it's really easy to say that something will be destroyed while actively trying to destroy it. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

It won the war and the Empire joined it, finally becoming the irrelevant petty state that it always should have been.

 

As for Pellaeon-he was talking about a government that prioritized order and security over whatever it was exactly the GA and NR offered.

He was arguing that the NR's self destruction would allow the Galaxy to see the empire not as it was under Palpatine but as a savior government to make things right.

 

Order, Security, Censorship, Slavery, Oppression, Etc...

Order and Security are just words used to get around what they really mean.