Lit The Evil Empire, or, rather, a commentary on what Legends did to the Empire

Some of that felt like a combination of outside factors, like the War on Terror, and internal factors like Zahn 's constant drive to rehabilitate Thrawn post TTT, and the ill-considered drive to imitate the PT in both the fall of Jacen Solo and the failure of democracy.

You can't help but wonder about the personal politics of the creators, given the franchise wide drive to rehab the Empire of all kriffing things.

It especially stings in the Legacy books, considering that the Fel Empire continued to use the Palpatine Empire's symbols and structures, allied with the Sith against the Jedi and GA, and then was taken over by the Sith. At some point, Marasish Fel should have said to herself and the galaxy "this was a huge mistake and I am disbanding the Empire."

As much as people criticized the ST for the First Order as Empire Redux, the EU was worse and we had Empire Redux in two eras on opposite sides of the timeline simultaneously. And it was "good" post Palpatine. Despite, again, multiple genocides happening under it's flag!

 

I think it was a combination of Pelleaon and then Fel trying to moderate the Empire's excesses, plus the brutality of NR/GA leadership that transformed the Empire's image. You had Fey'lya, who seemingly was willing to appease the Vong advancement (although that turned out to be he was trying to play for time to get a better defense ready); Omas, who tried to control the Jedi to appease the Chiss. And then we get to the really bad GA leaders: Caedus, Daala and Abeloth: a Sith Lord, a former Imperial admiral connected to the Death Star, and a monstrous dark side entity.

At that point, it seemed that the GA had become more like the Empire than the Empire itself.

 

Of course, the worst people in the Empire also allied with Sith Lord Darth Caedus and helped to unleash a nanovirus to kill the Fett line!

There's no justifiable narrative reason to rehabilitate the Empire. Use it to show how fascism, authoritarianism can appeal to the masses due to the failures and excesses under democracy? Sure, fine. But it's still a structure that leads, inexorably, to evil. Roan Fel ultimately turned to the dark side, and he was also too stupid to refuse alliance with the Sith and prevent his Empire from joining the Sith.

The Empire should have been dissolved in the wake of the destruction of the One Sith and their reign over the Empire and the galaxy.

 

Hopefully. Hopefully the Empire worship of HoT and parts of NJO and post NJO will be looked back on as shameful. But this is also something that has infected the fandom. A lot of 'fans' (actual fan knowledge will vary I bet some will be minimal), they will talk about how much better the Empire would do against the Vong, how bad the NR is and so forth. It is becoming a truism.

Part of it also came from the end of the cold war and the 'evil empire' of the real world becoming 'good' (at the time).

Legacy does show the felpire as bad, or at least not goo, but Legacy also lionise military dictatorship, the only politician in the Triumverate at the end is maybe Sia.

Part of it comes from having military sci-fi authors. Mil-sci-fi tends to lionise the military and demonise politicians, see Mass Effect a pretty progressive game trilogy, that STILL has the only good leadership be military.

Here is a map showing some imperial atrocities




Edit:
To me making the Empire the moral equivalent (or superior) of the New Republic, is frankly anti-Star Wars and insulting. The die-hard loyalists of the genocidal regime, well they have good people really, they are fighting for order, even though they are the rebels now.

I also think part of it was the lingering 'clean wehrmacht' myth and the lost cause. The military are good, so if the military run things that is good.

Assuming democracy survives the next few decades, the whitewashing of the Empire will be looked back on as a weird thing, like some behaviour in silver age comics

 

The most charitable interpretation is much of Legends reflects the assumption that everyone knows Nazis are evil, as are totalitarian empires. And, until the last 15 years, the Nazis assumption was probably so. The US wanting to be an empire with all the power and none of the responsibility? That's been running far longer.

Up until the prequels, you could argue their lack led to the idea of appealling, benevolent Imperial ideals of order and security. Which the wider world, over time, unknowingly mirrored. One common strand to both Legends and post-2014 is it's all a con. The only difference is the viciousness of it. Post-2014 is overtly nastier, but Legends floats the far more subversive notion that, if asked if they want to hand over their individual rights to the state, thus becoming free of any responsibility for anything, many would say yes.

Thus we get to: If you actually believe this stuff is good in real life then you're a dangerous idiot. Problem is there's a lot of them. Is it one for fiction to solve? No, as fiction can't do it, real life problems require real life solutions.

It could be argued that, like the decades of relative peace in OT-ST, which saw the New Republic flirt with dangerous ideas, Legends exploration of totalitarianism reflects its era.

 

There is also that some authors seems to think that the protagonists has to fight against the authorities even when they supposedly are the authority or are working for them. And therefore has the Republic and/or the Jedi order as ineffectual or antagonistic as possible so our heroes can not just fight the bad guys but also be cool and fight "the Man" at the same time.

 

There's a reason I headcanon the Galactic Federation Triumvirate as an emergency provisional government that only exists to restabilize the galaxy after the Sith screwed everything up. A few years after Legacy in my head canon they dissolve and pave the way for a reestablishment of the Galactic Alliance (or better yet, a New-er Republic). This is my headcanon for a simple reason: the idea of the Empire effectively winning sits very poorly with me. It always had. The other members of the triumvirate also annoy me. Gar Stazi can claim to represent the Alliance all he wants, but he's military. And the Jedi shouldn't be on any governing board. The Triumvirate is a military hunta. Let's call a spade a spade.

I shouldn't have to point and say "that's bad." It should be obvious. And that's the problem a lot of authors and readers have.

I think there was just this innate assumption at the time these Legends books were written on the part of the authors that people knew democracy was better than the alternative to the point where it didn't have to be explained. That it was self evident.

Apparently that assumption was made in error.

I want to preempt any and all ideas that the authors themselves were pushing a pro-authoritarian message. I don't think they were. There was pushback in the text itself against the idea that the Empire would have done a better job handling the Yuuzhan Vong, for instance. Han makes it clear that the Empire would have handled the Vong even worse than the NR did, because their focus on superweapons would have crippled their ability to wage an effective war. Indeed, it is the Rebel-esque tactics the NR and the GFFA undertakes that help turn the tide of the war.

And while there is some whitewashing of the Empire post Yuuzhan Vong War, it should be noted that the Empire is never depicted as some happy utopia we'd want to actually live in. The Moffs in Legacy of the Force, Fate of the Jedi, and the Legacy comics are consistently shown as backstabbing, treacherous and power hungry. So the Empire never makes a full heel-face turn.

I feel that the sour takes on the NR and the GFFA in the texts are a general byproduct of our culture's large scale disillusionment with all government institutions of all stripes during the political malaise of the 90's and during the Global War on Terror. People felt exploited and lied to after a great national tragedy was utilized as an excuse to make policy decisions that ultimately did more harm than good. The writer's attitudes shouldn't be construed as anti-democratic, but anti-establishment. Even before 9/11 during the supposed golden age of the 90's there was a lot of simmering anti-government sentiment.

The problem wasn't the authors. The fans took certain arguments made by some characters at face value and ignored the refutation the texts make of those arguments. They just take Thrawn at his word that the Empire was better equipped to handle the Vong, when all the evidence from other texts, and arguments from other characters, show that that is objectively false.

The NR's leadership isn't as abysmal as fans make it out to be. Ponc Gavrisom was a competent leader, as were Mon and Leia. Even Borsk, I insist, wasn't terrible in his first few years in office. He just wasn't a war time leader.

It feels to the reader like the characters, and by extension the New Republic and the Galactic Alliance, are lurching from one crisis to the next, and that there's never a moment's rest. But when looked at objectively a great many of the problems our heroes faced in Legends were small fry, regional police actions that were resolved fairly quickly.

From a galactic perspective, the Almanian Uprising, the Black Fleet Crisis, the Second Imperium, and the Corellian Insurrection are minor regional dustups that had the potential to flare up into a problem with galactic consequences. Your average galactic citizen wouldn't have been affected all too much by it as it played out. The threat to the galaxy wasn't the immediate crisis, it was the crisis snowballing out of control if it wasn't contained. The problem, as I said, is perspective.

 

The Empire really should have collapsed long before the Legacy comics.
I can accept the NR/IR signing a treaty in 19 ABY, though the war should have ended years before that.

 

I would say the inept NR/GA was Del Rey era. The NR throughout Bantam is a remarkably competent government, extremely stable despite the frequent Remnant assaults. The Remnant was just that, a small Imperial holdout that was being forced to concede defeat. The treaty was basically the NR offering them a dignified, slow end.

The YV War shifted the narrative significantly.

 

I wonder how deliberate it was that one of the first NuCanon books, Bloodlines, had the moral "The Empire was bad from start to finish. It doesn't get any better if you take Vader, Tarkin, and Palpatine out of the picture. The entire idea is intrinsically rotten. You can't fix what was broken from the start. Stop trying."

It does feel like a bit of a take that the Del Ray era of Legends.

 

That was set arguably right from the start in A New Dawn. Count Vidian was a total monster right from the off. True, the book gives us Sloane as a "good" Imperial, but her arc is serving a system that screws her over.

 

Didn't the New Republic/GA use Star Destroyers more than any other Capital ship NJO series onwards?
Mon Cal ships excluded?
Getting Imperial ships to bolster their fleet and deny the Empire using them early on, especially in a war filled Galaxy with new threats popping up, makes sense, but give us, some variety!

 

All the major ships at some point were NR Star Destroyers. I thought liberated SDs were great in DE, but I think using them after that was a bad idea. Especially when they started building new SDs for NR/GA use.

One would think the NR would want a clean break to signify that they are different. Different from the Empire and the Old Republic that crumbled into the Empire. Both of which used iterations of the Star Destroyer.

 

Ding ding ding, exactly this.

It's also, weirdly, only Star Destroyers, they didn't keep the TIEs or shuttles.

Capture and use as necessity? Sure. As standard? No.

 

As a relic I might be, I will abide by the fact that the Empire turning good was ultimately a good thing, and I'll keep reflecting on that status quo within my mind. I want to see Stormtroopers and Imperial officers save the Galaxy, because that is what would very much happen in the real world. The Empire is definitely not a Nazi Germany equivalent, certainly it can be portrayed and shown that way in some cases, and there's a case to be made for it, but that's one of many, many inspirations that the Empire has, and some of them end up hitting close to home.

Simply going by both the Legends and Disney continuity, it becomes apparent that there are people who support and like the Empire.

I actually think that with certain things going on, we might see a more moderate Pellaeon-led Imperial Remnant, after all. And it might even be temporarily taken over by the First Order. There's going to be a lot of recontextualizing, and outright retconning with Ahsoka. Will Disney get rid of the ST and proclaim it a failure? Nah, but it definitely isn't going to be limiting itself, and it shouldn't.

That said, I don't think democracy's down for the count either. There was likely a period between Dorvan and the Triumvirate where the GA functioned decently well, and I think there's room for the creation of a Third Galactic Republic post-Legacy, one that fixes up on the flaws of its two predecessors, and genuinely becomes better, competes with the Empire, and so on.

 

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/New_Class_Modernization_Program
Looking at this, there are some cool designs here, though looking at appearances the vast majority of them are Black Fleet Crisis or RPG/guide books.
I do like their takes on Star Destroyers though. The Nebula and Endurance class ships.

 

Obligatory, Borsk Fey'lya did nothing wrong, it is the correct in-universe step to weaken the power of the military and the Jedi and do pro-nonhuman policies in the wake of the Empire's actions.

Now, that said. Yes, it is absurd. It drives me insane that the actual end to Legends is rule by a monarch, a theocrat, and a military dictator in a regime that has no interest in democracy. But... the Nazi thing is where I think that the issue is at it's crux. It is a Nazi equivalent. They're wearing SS and Wehrmacht uniforms, literally in Feldgrau. They're literally called Stormtroopers. Lucas just said it. It is clearly, obviously, transparently true. And the myth of the 'Clean Empire,' is just as much a myth as that of the Clean Wehrmacht, and coming from the same places. People think that the Nazi aesthetic is cool, they want to feel edgy, so they bought the lies of Speer, Galland, Manstein, Halder, and so on. It wasn't the fault of the Stormtroopers! They were just misled by Himmler and Hitler, and so on. And it worked! A Nazi officer was the head of the United Nations!

But the Clean Wehrmacht myth wasn't really dispelled in academic circles until well into the 90s. It really still isn't dispelled in the general public. (And as the last generation of Holocaust survivors are dying off, probably never will be. Holocaust denial rates are going up!) So, we had people who looked at the Nazi-equivalents in our setting, and applied the generally accepted theory of mind about them. And given that, given that the aesthetics of the Empire are cool, and that ROTJ neatly removes Space Hitler and Space Himmler, it is a natural consequence of that Nazi apologia, prevalent of the time that the Empire is rehabilitated.

But also, I blame Zahn. He really liked his creation, and his creation was basically Space Donitz. If Thrawn was as smart as his character is supposed to be, he'd have shown up out of the Unknown Regions and gone "****, looks like we lost. I give up!"

 

I confess, I am usually a pretty strong Zahn supporter...but the "clean Wehrmacht myth" and its connection to Star Wars really feels uncomfortably close when reading Allegiance, which pretty clearly has the "regular Stormtroopers good, ISB evil" parallel. And then to a lesser extent, you have Jade as the nominal good Imperial Force User dealing with Vader, the obviously evil Imperial Force User.

Admittedly the Thrawn Trilogy and other books had Mara realize pretty fully that the Empire was inherently awful and she was thoroughly ashamed of her past, but still.

Glad I'm not the only person who felt Borsk, for all his grandstanding and oportunism, wasn't intrinsically awful. At least, until after the Yuuzhan Vong War started.

 

At least give them all a notable new paint job, instead of showing them in classic Imperial grey.

 

Ooh, I have some thoughts on this because I think it's at least related to a trend I'm pretty interested in. I feel that the apologia for the Empire in the Del Rey era is just one symptom of pop culture, in general, being pretty enormously cynical in the 2000s, like due to all the (totally understandable, of course) feelings of grief, rage, and helplessness that accompanied 9/11 and the subsequent never-ending wars in the Middle East. You can find plenty of examples from the era outside of Star Wars - I think Marvel Comics' storyline Civil War is an excellent reference case, a story about people who are usually friends or at least respectful colleagues suddenly deciding to murder each other in the streets over politics. In video games, you had the gritty military shooter genre. On TV you had shows like Law and Order SVU and 24, with coldhearted protagonists who could easily be jackbooted villains in another work but who are treated as a necessary buffer against greater evils. In sci-fi and horror films you had the trend of the villain being more an unstoppable force than a character, who frequently triumphs over good because there's no real way to fight back.

In general, there was a trend of '00s pop culture having the message that the world is cruel, and you need to be cruel to survive it (a term I've heard used for the trend that I really like is "Noughties Nihilism"). In that greater cultural environment, I think it makes total sense that a viewpoint like "maybe the Empire had a point after all" would come to have an appeal.

Relatedly, some trends that are popular today seem (to me, at least) like a reaction against uncomfortable aspects of Noughties Nihilism. Like, you do still see the "unstoppable force" type of horror movie occasionally (ie. anything with Ari Aster's name on it) but for the most part horror has gone back to having distinct villains that can be fought back against and even defeated (ie. anything with Jordan Peele's name on it). Heck, one very clever one I saw recently flips the unstoppable force premise on its head by having the intangible, inscrutable being (a poltergeist haunting a house, in this case) be the hero and the villain be an utterly ordinary, if loathsome, human being. Video games about shooting stuff are still around, but now most of the popular ones are heavily fantasy-based and tongue-in-cheek (Borderlands, the Doom revival), clearly not applicable to any real-life people or conflicts. The traditional whodunnit has come roaring back in the mystery genre as more people have qualms with the gritty cop show. And, of course, that brings us back to Star Wars, which now invariably sends the message that no, the Empire did not have a point after all.

Apologies that this turned into a TED Talk, I just geek out about stuff like this for some reason.

 

Also most of his actions in the Vong war aren't that bad, the main reason the NR losses is Viqi.

Also Stackpole goes hard into the Clean Empire stuff, his X-wing books have the bad imperial be an intel officer, not a normal military officer. And his NJO book, dark tide 2 makes the Empire out to be better than the NR.

Even Alstone (RIP) is a part of this, Solo Command has the NR team up with loyalist imperials against the 'evil' rouge warlord.

 

I don't really think Legends makes the Empire out to be as good as fans think Legends makes the Empire out to be.

Thrawn, as far as the trilogy goes, isn't a good guy. He exterminates cultures, he murders his subordinates. Those are unambiguously good. After his death, characters make excuses and say he fought for the greater good. That's not a winning argument unless you're someone who is inclined to think that those arguments about the greater good can apply in real life, too.

The Empire backslides into a petty authoritarian fiefdom even after the Pellaeon-Gavrisom Treaty. It's not depicted a great place to live, especially if you're an alien, and even during the Vong War there are Moffs proposing that if they simply wait out the New Republic's collapse from interspecies diversity then they can come sweep up the pieces.

Throughout the Bantam era we repeatedly have the Empire or ex-Imperials engaging in worse and worse crimes with weapons of mass destruction quickly going from a last resort method to a first line of revenge against the Republic and the Skywalkers. These are people who are actively plotting to kidnap children every few months.

The Del Rey era is a little different, but the Empire still features as villainous overall. I won't defend a lot of the apologia (especially from Zahn), but I will point out that my conception of the Denningverse was that there was no formally independent Empire anymore. Subsequent rereadings make me rethink that idea.

Do I mind that the Skywalkers (via the Fel branch) inherit the Galactic Empire? Not at all. George Lucas apparently has a Platonic view of Republics and their dictators. In real life, authoritarian governments often morph into other forms. My preferred interpretation of the Legacy era is that the Empire is (or was, before Krayt) on its way to becoming less and less of a state, and more of a non-state powerbase like how the Vatican evolved out of the Western Roman Empire and how the Bank of England evolved out of the British Empire. Can the Empire be redeemed?

Probably. I remember watching this movie where a child-killing necromancer cyborg got redeemed minutes after threatening to turn his own daughter over to Satanic forces in the universe.

I think fans like to tell the story that Legends got a little fashy when really there is no shortage of Legends making the Empire out to be more cartoonish and less nuanced than the OT. At the same time, there's no shortage of Imperial protagonists too (Mara Jade, Kir Kanos, Jahan Cross, Soontir Fel), but it's not like they're all the same or support the Empire for the same reasons. There are also elements of the Empire that do look better when you consider the dual structure of it all, where you have the explicitly Dark Jedi/Sith agencies and orders competing with and eventually breaking off from the military-aristocracy branch.

 

Re: Naughties Nihilism and the mention of 24.

I was listening to the Andor reviews on It Can Happen Here podcast and a point was made that Dedra Meero would be a Jack Bauer type.

 

States change, policies change as personnel changes. I don’t believe governments have some sort of inherent “evil” essence or goodness. The Byzantine empire of Justinian’s day and that of the Palaiologos dynasty are two entirely different creatures.

Same with Palpatine and Fel Dynasty. Russia in 1917 is not the Russia of 1700 which isn’t the Russia of today.

China in 1949 and China of 2025 are the same official government-wildly different personnel and policy.

I do think this will probably color perception of legends. That said, I have never had an issue with the empire’s moral evolution. States are ultimately just a bunch of people working together-like any institution. Change the institution and the policy changes as well. (Yes there are systematic continuities but that’s a bit more complex than is warranted here).

I do think if any thing the old EU was right to be pessimistic about how strong democracy is. Democracy is insanely vulnerable-to the pressures of war time, to corruption, to varying interest groups, to demagoguery. It’s not a guarantee that any state will retain democracy or that it won’t become a hollow exercise. That said, I concur that this will affect how the old EU is perceived in the future.