Lit Were the Empire ends and the Remnant begins?

So thanks to a AWESOME tangent on the Mandalorian thread by our own @Thrawn McEwok we got into a huge debate about when exactly does the Empire (Founded by Palpatine) end and the Remnant begin, and if there is a direction continuity between the two or not.

Since it dominated that thread but we had to go back to talking about the Mandalorian I decided to take it upon myself as suggested by the Mods to start a thread on the topic.

So, I guess the question was sorta, were does the Empire (Started by Palpatine) officially end as a entity and the Remnant started by Daala and Pellaon begin and if there is a continuity between the two as legitimate successor state to the Empire>

 

I think where the empire ended was with the defeat of Thrawn and the cloned palpatine, also with the end of the superweapons and the remnant is with what few empire admirals and nobles remained along with the little millitary they had left. Of course this is my opinion and is open to insights and other opinions. I would be glad to hear from other star wars fans.

 

THANKS FOR THE INFO!!!!!

 

Lol....Maybe I should have titled it better to fit with the tangent in the Mandalorian thread....Oh well ;p

 

Also, the Remnant started shortly after the end of Darksaber when Pellaeon united the Deep Core originating fleet with the Rim remnants.

 

Xammer's got it. Read all about it here: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Remnant

Before the Atlas and Warfare, I think it was widely assumed (or even widely understood) that Darksaber was the birth of the government that came to be known as the Imperial Remnant. But the Atlas described Pellaeon bringing Daala's fleets out of the Deep Core and pledging them to protect the surviving Imperial Rim factions, provided that they join his Empire. Warfare went on to describe it in more detail, and it also named mentioned a faction called the "United Warlord Fleets," which our own McEwok confirmed in the endnotes was the name for Daala's Darksaber forces.

The Atlas's retcon, as well as its explicit placement of the Pentastar Alignment on a galactic map, tidily accounted for the Remnant being in the Outer Rim in Specter of the Past instead of the Deep Core. Many fans assumed for a long time that Zahn was a team player who was taking Darksaber into account by having Pellaeon as the leader of the Empire, but, nah, Pellaeon leading a crumbling Empire in the Outer Rim is basically unbroken Zahntinuity from the end of The Last Command. It kinda needed the Atlas's explanation.

 

I'm surprised at the brevity of Jello's response.

I would probably put the end of the original Empire at the fall of the final Ruling Council at the end of Crimson Empire II. There was some form of continuity until that point; afterwards there was only the Imperial remnants.
It is interesting to note that Pellaeon apparently launched the campaign to take Orinda was because it had temporarily been the Imperial capital after the fall of Coruscant.

 

Sorry to double post, but I want to correct myself --- it was actually 2000's The Essential Chronology that first described Pellaeon taking Daala's fleets out of the Core, where he "hooked up with existing Imperial fortress worlds and used his considerable fleet to carve out a well-defined Empire," and it also explicitly stated that "Pellaeon absorbed the remnants of the Pentastar Alignment."

I dunno if that would have been enough to state that the Imperial Remnant per se wasn't created until after Darksaber, but in any case the Atlas and Warfare made it explicit.

 

There's very little overlap, really. The members of the IIRC in Crimson Empire that were also on the "Byss council" during Dark Empire are Xandel Carivus, Burr Nolyds, Feena D'Asta's clone (obviously illegitimate), and Sarcev Quest, who didn't appear in the comic but was supposedly on the council at the time it was being led by Carnor Jax.

It's funny, I just realized - the Crimson Empire fell at least partially because of Nom Anor. So, in the end, the Vong defeated the Empire.

 

Imperial forces loyal to the Emperor probably did not officially end since Legacy era still had Emperors and the Imperial military was still powerful and legitimate .

Imperial Forces loyal to Emperor Palpatine probably began to fade after Crimson Empire II or III following the devastation of the Dark Empire series and Carnor Jax's(and allies) treachery against the Clone bodies.

The Imperial Remnant were kinda a loose term for just remaining Imperial military forces, often they were led independently rather than united behind one leader or "Emperor". Often if there was one leader, it did not last long. Often the Remnant forces were allied or easily taken control by Dark Jedi like C'Boath, Jax, Jerec and Desann even from military Imp warlords/dictators types.

 

Short answer? @Jeff_Ferguson and I have very different views on this.

Long answer?

The first point I want to make is that the "Imperial Remnant" designation is an unofficial and external one used by the New Republic, not the official name of what remains, officially, the Galactic Empire (a point made most explicit in Destiny's Way, chapter 12). If anyone can find any examples of Imperials using the "Remnant" terminology even informally, let me know.

The second point is that the idea of a clear "constitutional" distinction between "the Empire" and "the Remnant" is one that I've always regarded as misleading, and one which has always seemed to me to be countermanded by Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future. As I pointed out in the initial discussion, the authority of the Moffs and other Imperial officers and officials is not abolished or rescinded by Endor or anything subsequent, and the Moffs and other officers and officials who continue to act on their own existing authority (as opposed to the ones who overstep that authority and become warlords) imply the survival of the Empire as a system rather than just an idea. Indeed, Moffs who think like the officers we see in that ANH conference-room may regard the disappearance of the central hierarchy as the consummation of the transformation of the Republic into the Empire.

We see "loyalist" Moffs and officers of this sort in 19 ABY in Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future. We also see that they retain a relationship with the central bureaucracy and archive system that was moved off Coruscant. This to me seems to be clear canon. More on that below, though.

The only question I think is relevant here is whether, after the removal of Palpatine and the disappeareance of the Ruling Council, there are remaining constitutional mechanisms to appoint new senior personnel - the part we know about the Empire's idea of lawful authority is that the citizens are represented by the Senate, the Senate delegated powers to Palpatine, Palpatine empowered the Advisors to act as spokesbeings and the Moffs to act as regional governors, then an Advisor speaking on Palpatine's behalf anounced the indefinite dissolution of the Senate and that the Moffs were delegated full authority within their individual sectors; but in the absence of Palpatine and the collective voice of the Advisors which is the Ruling Council, how are replacement Moffs appointed, and how is Pellaeon promoted to Supreme Fleet Commander and then Grand Admiral? The answer, in practice, is that the Moffs vote in committee - a Mofference, in short; but is this a legitimate source of authority, or an improvised one?

If you don't know what a Mofference is, this might not be the thread for you.

That is basically the question on which questions of continuity stand. Is the Moff Council a valid Mofference doing things a Mofference can validly do? As things stand, canon does not appear to offer an answer one way or another.

If there is a date which I think is meaningful, that is 19ABY, when the Empire signs a peace agreement with the New Republic that acknowledges the New Republic as the legitimate rulers of the majority of the GFFA.

The Empire then proposed planetary plebiscites to allow systems to swap between the two governments, but whether these were held is not entirely clear (this is an interesting question, but one that's getting a bit off-topic).

Now, two asides.

1. The Pentastar Alignment

One topic of discussion relates to the exact territorial limits of the Alignment, a warlord faction which was centred in the same area where the Remnant was subsequently centred. Jeff lays a lot of emphasis on the line on the map which delineates a border for the Alignment in 4-12 ABY, and argues that everything which remained under "Remnant" control by 19 ABY had been part of the non-loyalist warlord territory of the Alignment in this period, and thus that there could be no "loyalist" continuity in that territory; but this a line-on-the-map which includes space that was certainly controlled within that period either by non-Alignment forces - either by the New Republic or directly by Thrawn and other loyalists, and as such, my view is that this is a line which clearly does not exclude loyalist presence, and a line which needs to be interpreted in terms of exact meaning.

We also know that the Alignment as originally formed in 4 ABY did not cover this entire territory (not least because only one other Governor allied himself with the Alignment's founder, Grand Moff Kaine).

In adition, the Alignment is a complicated political construct. Grand Moff Kaine had two forms of authority - his existing status as Imperial Governor of Oversector Outer, with oversight of some sort over all the Moffs on the Outer Rim, and his role as warlord of the Alignment, a smaller territory with a radically reorganized government, led by a junta of senior Imperial officers and corporate CEOs, which claimed to derive legitimacy from Kaine's authority as Grand Moff, but was designed in practice as a new and self-perpetuating political system, which needed no further reference to the Imperial central authorities.

Although Kaine innovated as a "warlord" in the Alignment, he did not cede his parallel status as "loyalist" Grand Moff. Grand Moff Kaine can thus claim to have authority in areas which are not subject to his new Alignment junta. Although nowhere explicitly discussed, this dual authority is canon, and as such - speculatively - provides a possible explanation for Kaine being attributed authority in "loyalist" space where he had no actual control as a warlord.

In short, I do not regard the line-on-the-map as excluding a loyalist presence. Quite apart from the fact that systems like Generis, Garqi and Barramorra are known to have been loyalist.

Is that map subject to multiple possible interpretations? Yes. That's just sensible, when different fans have different interpretations of canon, and when they also have various popular-fanon and headcanon POVs (in my headcanon, for example, the Pellaeon in Darksaber is a clone or an imposter - though Sulumar is not. Obviously, this is not relevant to this discussion)...

But what I don't understand is how Jeff thinks his interpretation of the line on the map can fly without all sorts of intrusive retcons that render any idea of a coherent narrative continuity irrelevant...



2. Why is this so complicated in the first place?

The continuity of the Empire between 9 ABY and 19 ABY is a shotgun marriage between individual stories that didn't always line up well in origin.

Now, I'm the sort of fanboy who wants to retain the integrity of each narrative - not least in order to avoid confusing people with unnecessary retcons, or alienating that one passionate fanboy whose favourite piece of canon is some deeply obscure piece set in a random warlord faction somewhere, but I also think that when you're coming up with retcons, ones that are based on attempting to retain as much as possible are both more interesting and more "neutral" than imposed solutions which contradict some aspects for the sake of simplicity.

Simplicity really isn't my thing. Maybe that's why I'm writing this bit that follows. Like I said, a shotgun marriage between individual stories that didn't always line up...

The end of the Thrawn trilogy presents the Empire in 9 ABY as being weakened by the defeat at Bilbringi and the subsequent loss of momentum and by Rukh's attack on Thrawn, but as a continuing presence in the Galaxy nonetheless - "The Empire's still out there".

Then Dark Empire happened - this comic-book series was originally written as a stand-alone story with no reference to the Thrawn trilogy, set in the months immediately after Return of the Jedi, but the next novellist, Kevin J. Anderson ("KJA"), opted to incorporate the Dark Empire narrative into his backstory after the end of the Thrawn trilogy, and set up the Jedi Academy novels accordingly. This retconned timeline portrayed the Empire actually renewing the offensive and winning after Bilbringi, before collapsing into civil war, and the wreckage being taken over by a mad clone of Palpatine and his secret fleet. Then the mad clone handed the Imperial military to Luke, who was pretending to be a bad guy, and promtly fought them into the ground in order to destroy them, and as a result of the stress at butchering so many people, really did become a bad guy for a couple of issues. This was, to say the least, divisive.

Whether or not this particular plot-point was changed by the decision to include Dark Empire, KJA portrays a situation in 10 ABY where there are still systems loyal to the Empire, but little sign of leadership. Admiral Daala and her four ships are portrayed as a radical, Thrawn-class threat.

The next novel in the continuity, Barbara Hambly's Children of the Jedi, has lots of references to Imperial "warlords", and a few to "Governors" - in the most detailed description, Luke refes to "six, maybe ten major fragments, ruled by warlords and Governors". There is also a reference to a major warlord named "High Admiral Harrsk" operating in the Mid Rim, near Belsavis.

KJA's next novel, Darksaber had a vague reference to "Imperial authorities" controling "fleets" and at least one shipyard, but the narrative is focused on the squabbling warlords, the most important of whom, including Harrsk, are now said to be based in "the Core Systems", generally assumed to be the same area where the mad clone and the secret fleet had been based, and tells a story about Admiral Daala uniting twelve warlords' fleets into a single force; Daala quits at the end of the novel and the direct sequel Planet of Twilight (written by Hambly) presents her as lurking around on the Rim with what's basically reduced to a small flotilla of pirates, and introduces a local Moff still controling an enclave of his Outer Rim sector with a fleet of ISDs...

... but, in the Black Fleet trilogy novels by Michael P. Kube-McDowell (K-Mac), Daala is presented as being once again in command of the Imperial forces in "the Core" in 17 ABY, and this idea was then run-with in the Cracken's Threat Dossier RPG suppmement, which gave this faction the name of "the Imperial Core" (none of the Bantam novels actually locate them in the "Deep Core"! Not sure about the Dark Empire comics...)

All this represents a running-retcon shuffle of a sort - the first of the Black Fleet books appeared just four months after Darksaber and the publication schedule after that was insanely tight, so the books must have been written concurrently. I'd imagine that when K-Mac was working on those books, Daala was scripted to retain command in the Core at the end of Darksaber. The idea that she resumed command was still implicit in Cracken's Threat Dossier, which also appeared before Planet of Twilight, the first source to depict Daala leaving the Deep Core - but Planet of Twilight also seems to have undergone some substantial re-plotting, based on the preview blurb which presented the opponents as more of a conventional "warlord faction".

Confused yet?

Zahn then showed up and solved the problem simply by having Pellaeon ride the Chimaera over everything like a big pointy steamroller (still my favourite scene in any Star Wars novel. Never explain.) - Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future respond to the narrative confusion by relocating Imperial territory back to the Outer Rim and depicting an area in which the Moffs have retained control of their sectors in the face of New Republic victories.

In my personal opinon, the real question is not so much how we navitage from Darksaber to Specter of the Past in practical terms - The Essential Chronology simply stated that Pellaeon took the bulk of Daala's fleet to the Rim, which seems straightforward.

No, the real questions are, 1. whether there were still "loyalist" Moffs on the Outer Rim through this period (to me, Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future provide a clear canonical YES to this question, and both Children of the Jedi and Planet of Twilight also refer to governors as distinct from warlords), and 2. whether the system which the "Remnant" subsequentlty used to appoint replacement Moffs and a Supreme Fleet Commander was based on good "Imperial" legal precedents (I know of no canon evidence to clearly decide this one way or another, but the idea of a Mofference is not an innovation)...

As to Daala, we have to imagine that Daala reassumed command in the Core at a date between 14 ABY and 17 ABY.

And then... as early as 1995, before Darksaber, KJA had introduced an Imperial faction called the Second Imperium, which remained hostile in 23 ABY - this was later rectonned to be a rogue faction continuing after the Rim Moffs made peace in 19 ABY; The Essential Continuity implied that they were associated with continuing warlord factions in the Deep Core and essentially run by Daala's former bodyguards, so in WARFARE I took the opportunity to more-or-less explicitly establish the Second Imperium as the successor of Daala's "Imperial Core", with Daala herself acting as their fleet commander off-the-page.



Unconfused at all?

[Well, that was a fun way to multitask for an hour while watching some complicated TV! ]

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Very Informitive thanks ^^^^^

 

@Thrawn McEwok

I think for me (And I feel like I'm just adding more confusion than saying anything but I'll give it a shot) the legit Empire leaders would be those who derive there power from the instituions of the Empire.

So if one controlled "Bastion" and Imperial Ruling Council, would they be a legit continuation of the Empire because those are Imperial Institutions that outlive a single person.

At least that's what I think again could be wrong.

But Warlords like Zsing and Pentistar alignment aren't institutional regimes they are personal regimes meaning once the Warlord i dead...That's it...Empire is over, unless they had a succession plan, that's kinda it....At least that's how i think of Warlordism.

But when Thrawn died the "Empire" and the institutions (Bastion, Ruling Council, Highcommand) live on.


Not sure what i'm trying to say here but I hope we to continue the interesting discussion.

 

Ow, my head.

Where does the line of succession on Coruscant fit into all this? As I recall, the X-wing comics and novels established a line of succession on the Imperial throne - though not all (any?) of them had the title of Emperor, effectively being Acting Emperors - with Sate Pestage succeeding Palpatine, Paltr Carvin succeeding Pestage, and Ysanne Isard succeeding Carvin (until she's chased out by the Rebels, at which point she stops being the boss of anything except her own immediate little fleet, and is removed from the equation soon thereafter in any event). That's what I always had in mind as "the Empire [the formal, official, Palpatine-created thing] ending."

 

@Thrawn McEwok , thanks for elaborating on the Pentastar Alignment, and also perfect timing. As it happens I just read the "Blaze of Glory" short story from my Tales of the Empire book on the ride to work this morning, which features them in the background as the Bigger Bad (or the clients of the story's villain, at least). And I was just thinking that they actually sound like the most interesting warlord faction we've seen by far (possibly second to Zsinj). It's too bad that according to Wookieepedia, they don't seem to have a lot of stories written about them.

 

"Imperial Remnant" was the canonical term for a government that Pellaeon brought into existence in 12 ABY, and which was much later replaced by the Fel Empire. The name used by the omniscient narrators of sourcebooks, Essential Guides, and Encyclopedias --- in-universe they called themselves the Galactic Empire or the True Empire, but it wasn't Palpatine's Empire.

Like Jello, I'm tired of exhausting walls of text. Suffice it to say that dems da facts according to (Legends) canon.

The line of succession can be found here --- that is, who led the Empire after Palpatine and when they did it. Whether Thrawn was the 'official ruler' of the Empire is debatable; his entry in the New Essential Guide to Characters claims he was but later sources say that Ars Dangor and the Ruling Council gave him control of the Imperial Military. But the Atlas also says that "a group of Moffs and fleet commanders" took the reigns of the Empire after his death, which is drawing on continuity from the Dark Empire Sourcebook.

Carivus was the last ruler of the official, Palpatine-created thing. After the Crimson Empire fell, Daala and Pellaeon reunited a bunch of warlords to create a new Empire in-name-only.

 

At the top, a question for the whole thread. Do both of the first two series of the Crimson Empire comics come chronologically before the Jedi Academy novels? And if so, what's the basis for that dating?

Next, two jokes and a question in response to Jeff, so he doesn't have to scroll through the longpost that follows...

Neither Voren Na'al nor Paul R. Urquhart is an omniscient narrator.

A discussion about Mofferences should be fun.

This is a point of contention.

To keep this short - what I'm not following is how you interpret the fact that the "Pentastar Alignment, 4-12 ABY" line on the map encloses systems that are canonically controlled by loyalist Imperials and/or the New Republic within this period? Do you just retcon all those references away, or what?

Serious question. This isn't about arguing, but about understanding...

Not sure if that's aimed particularly to me, but thanks - @Havac and @Trip had some excellent longposts in the original thread, as well...

I think that's a very concise summary of the distinction, yes. Institutions, official status, limits of authority, distinguish a loyalist from a warlord.

Of course, there's a lot of ambiguity - for example, the Alignment attempts to establish new institutions and at least on paper outlasts the warlord by a year or two, whereas some loyalists are crossing lines for various reasons - but the distinction in principle is important, "warlords and Governors", to quote Luke Skywalker in 14 ABY.

Welcome to my GFFA.

That's another pretty good question - there'd certainly be a "legitimate" argument (pun intended) that the Empire fell three years after Endor, when Isard ceded Coruscant to the New Republic, or even earlier, though the previous events are (unsurprisingly) a little complicated...

Pestage as Grand Vizier is effectively the equivalent of a vice-president and thus becomes at least informally the regent after Endor. This part was introduced in the 1993 Dark Empire Sourcebook, as part of the backstory for a retcon trying to tie together the end of the Thrawn Trilogy and the start of Dark Empire, and subsequently elaborated in the X-Wing: Rogue Squadron comics.

I recall at least one comic describing Pestage as "interim emperor", and he's actually called "the new Emperor" in the Essential Chronology, p. 68 (though strictly speaking, this is not objective narration, but represents the POV of the New Republic's official historian, writing about twenty years later, and "Voren is an idiot" is an all-purpose retcon ).

In practice, Pestage has little actual power, and realising he's just a target for usurpation, flees, and power is seized by General Carvin, along with two civilian politicians, forming a triumvirate called the Tribunal. The legality of this arrangement is never really discussed, and may be very dubious. Very rapidly after this, Isard overthrows the Tribunal and becomes the de facto dictator, although in principle and presentation terms still acting on her established authority as Director of Imperial Intelligence. She's occasionally referred to informally as "empress", though she never asserts the title herself. She may have initially planned to install Admiral Krennel as emperor, doing the military stuff while she did the actual ruling, but he opted to set himself up as a warlord on the Rim instead. All this in the months after Endor. This part in the X-Wing: Rogue Squadron comics (1998).

Isard then governs for about three years, until she allows the New Republic to capture Coruscant, and subsequently relocates to Thyferra as a warlord. This part in the X-Wing: Rogue Squadron novels (1995 - the comics were written after, as a prequel!).

In the background throughout all this is the Ruling Council, a committee of aides and officials which Palpatine created to do all the boring government stuff like issuing written orders, and who thus provide executive legitimacy after Endor. Pestage is, I think, their chairman, Carvin and his co-conspirators are members, Isard reports to them. The retcon to explain what happens between the fall of Coruscant and the Thrawn Trilogy, and to provide some sort of continuity of Imperial government in this period, is that the Ruling Council relocates/reassembles at Orinda (the one on the Mid Rim, not the one across the Bay from Marin County), and stumbles onwards as a notional government, headed by the guy who was Palpatine's official spokesman, which sets them up for their role in the pre-existing (1993!) retcon that links the Thrawn Trilogy to the start of the Dark Empire comics...

Just to add confusion (and I'm mentioning this more for fun than thoroughness), the 1998 X-Wing: Rogue Squadron comics quite clearly show Pestage being murdered a few months after Endor, while the earlier Dark Empire Sourcebook had him decamping instead to Byss and re-emerging under the crazy clone Palpatine. This, at least, is what happened according to the New Republic's official historian. The generally-accepted retcon is that the Pestage on Byss was a clone, but I think that may just be fanon. Alternatively, Voren is an idiot.

I've been meaning to re-read "Blaze of Glory" just for fun on the back of this discussion - always liked that story. The Alignment was probably the best-developed of all the warlord factions, with interesting ideas that make for a fun addition to the continuity. As @Jid123Sheeve said above, warlords are generally force-of-personality types, while the Alignment, as well as having an interesting warlord, has a government structure, an élite of individuals, a distinctive constitution and ideology, and a well-developed identity as a place... even getting glimpses of that setup gets people's attention...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Why that retcon? I mean instead of having it so that the X-Wing Pestage who was killed of was a bodydouble, there for just that kind of situations?

 

I thought the dead Pestage was the clone but I’d have to check the sources for explicit statements.

 

@Thrawn McEwok

At risk of adding more walls of text...Eh I want it ;p

But....what's the Mofference and when did that first appear, I know the Council of Moffs but never this.

 

Let me offer a counter-case. Does this complicated chain of who, exactly, has the technical legal authority in the chain of succession, matter in the grand scheme of things? If you're a white human dude from, say, Anaxes, with a clipped British accent and a big spaceship shaped like a triangle, a horde of guys in white armor, and that Imperial spoked wheel, and you're oppressing the planet you're over, does it matter the technical sovereignty of the people you're working for? The Second Imperium, the Fel Empire, Thrawn's military dictatorship, the classic Galactic Empire; they're the same thing. As much as I like this legal nitpicking - I get paid for it, after all! - at the end of the day, the lived experience of the actual people doesn't change. The Remnant is the Empire. There is no line you can point at and say "this is where the Empire ends."

 

Oh I'm sure I mean for us it's fun but for the people on the planet it's just .....Same stuff, different day.

Or I guess it's more "The more things change the more they stay the same"