Lit CIS uniforms

I was looking up references and I realized, there seems to be no standard uniform for CIS officers.
Just about every CIS commander wears something unique. Asajj Ventress is supposed to be a Separatist officer but she wears that skintight top and skirt combo. Grievous wears his body and a cape on top of it. Durge wears bounty hunter armor. Lok Durd wears a fancy robe. Riff Tamson has a white jumpsuit.

So what's the deal? The Republic has consistent uniforms, as shown with Yularen and co.

 

Astute observation.

My first thought was that the Separatist cause (cause is really too strong a word, deal is more appropriate) is largely one of selfish greed. Even though it's a Confederacy, the entire Separatist Council is made up of greedy and selfish individuals. I don't see much unity of cause, principle, morality (except maybe total amorality), pride, honor or anything abstract that would merit a uniform. It's a group of people in it entirely for themselves.

My other thought is that droids don't wear uniforms, and they make up almost the entire military.

 

I kind of figured the only guy that would wear a Separatist uniform would be Lux's father.

 

I'm sure they have some type of uniform, we just usually see droids instead of soldiers. In TCW the only flesh-and-blood Seps we see (IIRC) are the Umbarans, and I guess they're wearing Umbaran military uniforms, not Separatist uniforms. So I don't know. Although as a sidenote, MedStar does state the troopers wear uniforms, specifically black and purple.

 

Given the inherently decentralized nature of a Confederacy and the relative lack of organic soldiers in the CIS, it makes sense to me that they would not establish an official uniform and instead have their soldiers and officers where the uniforms of their previous organizations.

(For a Watsonian answer anyway - the real answer is that CIS officers appear scattered about in minor works and the artists never coordinated to create an official uniform.)

 

My impression has always been that with the vast bulk of the CIS military comprised of droid soldiers and automated war machines, the organic minority would be a collective of militia, mercenary, and independent military commanders drawn from the various member states and conglomerations that rallied to the CIS banner. These varied units would bring their own uniforms, armor, or other combat gear to the fight rather than be bound to an all encompassing standard Confederacy uniform.

Edit: Otherwise known as almost exactly what MercenaryAce said...

 

Good responses everyone.
Sometimes I wish the Confederacy had been conceived as a "good alternative" instead of serving the interests of soulless corporations - but there's no room for that in Star Wars
It makes fanfiction hard because my favorite PT characters are Dooku and Grievous.

 

You might want to pick up Shatterpoint, MedStar and League of Spies, which do offer pretty compelling reason why people would indeed favour the CIS.

 

Unfortunately, a lot of grassroots political organizations are bankrolled and suborned by soulless corporate plutocrats in real life too.

 

It kind of makes sense in-universe, though, since the Separatists are all a big sham designed to scare people into Palpatine's arms. The more one-dimensionally evil they are, the more they're serving the purpose they were created for.

Shatterpoint was one of my favorite novels in terms of showing how regular people on a given planet reacted to the Clone Wars. As you might expect, their take on it has nothing to do with the big ideals of the Republic and the Confederacy - they don't really care about that, what they care about is their civil war, but the Reps and Seps are a source of arms and support if you join their "side," so, why not?

It's a way to mix it up that's more interesting to me than the straightforward "Honorable Enemy" stories we got with Pellaeon or Rogriss. The people just have completely different priorities from the "big picture" guys like the Jedi or Dooku - but they found a way to fit the Clone Wars into their agenda.

Never read the other two books, though.

 

Are the short stories, like "League of Spies" still able to be purchased? Getting additional infprmation on the motives of the Separatists would be nice.

 

I liked Trench's outfit. In fact, Trench is one of the best Confederates, in my opinion.

 

Ah yes, the spider man. His coat is lined with fur.
TCW was all about the moustache twirling villains though. Like was the CSI command all a bunch of sadists?

 

No clue really, they used to be on the Star Wars website for a while, but since it was reformated got lost, though you might be able to find them with a little googeling.

Ah lot were apparently, properly picked especially by Dooku and Griv (and thus by extend Palpatine) to make the CIS seem like more of a evil force the Republic must defeat.

 

That's one thing I always liked about the CIS, that as soon as you got outside of the faceless corporations and their faceless droids, the actual *people* backing the Seps were super diverse and had interesting backgrounds to them. The Nosaurians, the Jabiimi Nimbus commandos, the Mandalorian Protectors, etc are all so ridiculously different in the look of their gear, how they fight, the reasons why they joined the CIS...and that was cool.

 

Maybe I've been looking at too many Imperial propaganda posters lately, but it would have been interesting if the Separatists intentionally decided to go without uniforms, perhaps during a decision that was reached shortly after the war began. That is, in recognizing that they indeed represented a bunch of disparate factions from the get-go, they decided to use this toward their advantage rather than work against it. They saw the Republic as this single ancient corrupted body defending itself with armies of uniform organic soldiers, identically dressed to the point they lost all semblance of identity (this goes for both the clones as well as the Jedi). So in reaction, perhaps the Separatists thought that by having droids fight for them, they could allow the top organic military leaders to maintain their "humanity" (or "Neimoidianity" or "Gossamity" or "Muunity" or what-have-you). Maybe they took pride in being a disparate lot from a bunch of different planets and organizations rather than be one unified whole like the Republic.

Unfortunately, most of what we saw in the EU (including TCW) was the Separatists in a case-by-case basis. A corrupt official or officer here. A group of rebellious upstarts on a backwater world there. CIS Shadowfeed and TCW's one episode there with the Sep parliament was the only time we saw a large group of Separatists trying to decide on something together. And in the movies, the only things they decided to do was 1) go to war and 2) ...um... move their council meeting? (Does that even count?)

Compared to the Imperials, Rebels, and Old/New Republic, the overall mindset of the Confederacy -- what they saw of themselves -- has been explored far less frequently.

 

But again, that makes sense since the entire Confederacy was a smoke screen.

The way I see it, the True Believers in the Separatist cause (the people who weren't in on the plot and thought it was actually supposed to be real) weren't that many - a gaggle of psychopaths like Grievous or Durge and corrupt businessmen like Gunray or Shu Mai. Those guys followed the Sith's lead, and used an artificial army to do all the grunt work for them. After that, you have a whole bunch of smaller, planetary-level movements that hopped on board the Separatist bandwagon for their own reasons, but that's what they were - their reasons. So the case-by-case approach made sense to me.

 

I understand what you're saying, and I don't disagree with it. But my point is that there's currently this blurry area of disconnection between the corrupt Separatist leaders and the case-by-case individuals we see in the EU. Occasionally we see Average Joe Separatist living on backwater Planet X give his/her opinion about why they're a Separatist. The leaders are all doing it for money or cuz they're evil or whatever. But those aren't the same things. How are the Separatists publicizing themselves to their own side? Not what the Republic thinks -- we know that. But take a look at that one TCW episode with the Parliament for example -- Ahsoka goes to this Sep planet, and for once you see a LOT of Separatists doing something together. You get to see what life is like for a major sep world with tons of people, not say, backwater Jabiim. And shockingly, we see Separatists interacting with war droids in a manner completely at odds with how the Republic perceives them. But unfortunately, that's one of the very, very few times in the EU/TCW we ever got that.

 

Sure; but the vibe I got from most Clone Wars material was that Average Joe Separatist doesn't think in terms of the Separatist cause so much as he does his own local cause which happens to be affiliated with the Seps. So in his own head he's not Average Joe Separatist, he's Average Joe Zygerrian, Average Joe Balawai, Average Joe Jabiimi, etc. Which fits with all the talk of secession and "independent" systems.

I'll have to go back and watch the TCW episode with the parliament, but IMO it's no accident that it only appeared once - it doesn't seem to have a lot of power.

 

The interesting thing about the Separatists is that they were so diverse, culturally, but their ultimate leader was a man who couldn't even stand near-human aliens, let alone ones that looked like Trench. I wonder if it's coincidence that most of them get killed off as soon as possible...Palpatine gets rid of the alien "problems" all at once, while turning the human and near-human aliens in the Republic against the more alien-looking aliens. The Muuns, Neimoidians, Gossams, Skakoans...how many of them were seen much of after the Empire took over? Not many, that's how many!

 

Thanks. It's a shame that they're so hard to find. Some sound really good. Especially since some of the authors include Zahn, Stackpole, and Allston. Too bad they didn't release a collection; I'd think it would be worth purchasing.

 

They need to release old Hyperspace articles in some form too :/
The whole "CIS wanted to emphasize their individuality" reminds me of a certain anime where the magical girls all had unique outfits because they were striving towards individual goals instead of working as a team.
The Grievous in my head is not as hammy as the one in TCW or RotS and he gave speeches saying that "you think I was altered against my will but look at what the Kaminoans did to the clone troopers".

 

That Greivous thing is amazing; I want to read it so bad. It fits my view of him and sounds like a great war speech.

 

I have a whole universe where everyone in Star Wars has their genders swapped (save for the Fetts) and my female Grievous makes the speech.
One of the Separatist arguments is that their droids can't commit certain war crimes like flesh and blood troops. Something tells me that clone troopers were bad news for local women.

 

Yes all those good-looking polite young men and not one interested in dating. Most be terrible for the self-image and moral among the native women