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ThrorII
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 Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2020 11:26 pm Post subject: Fall of the Republic as per WEG Star Wars |
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There are some striking similarities between the 'official' version of the fall of the Republic and Rise of the Empire and the 'WEG d6' version, as well as some VERY distinct differences.
I'll like to cite a few of them, and encourage you to join in.
Palpatine's Rise to Power (Imperial Sourcebook, pgs 7-8)
First, unlike the prequels, there is no "Ruusan Reformation" The Old Republic is THE Republic - lasting a thousand generations.
Second, like the prequels, the Republic was mired in bureaucracy and corruption prior to Senator Palpatine's election to President (Supreme Chancellor in the prequels). The mega corporations had undue influence in the Senate.
Thirdly, unlike the prequels, systems TALKED about secession, but there was NO galactic secession. The breakdown of the Senate affected individual systems heavily - civil unrest was rampant.
Forth, unlike the prequels, the Clone Wars were sometime in the past and were not tied to the formation of the Empire (possibly and apparently even before Palpatine's election as President).
Rebel Sourcebook (pages 8-12)
Unlike canon Star Wars, it appears that President Palpatine was the de facto emperor for some time before actually declaring himself Emperor and declaring the New Order.
The Ghorman Massacre in canon is stated as occurring 18BBY (1 year after the founding of the Empire). However, in WEG Star Wars, it appears that the massacre occurred while the government was still known as the Republic. Tarkin is described as a Republic Naval Captain and a Republic starship lands on Ghorman.
Mon Mothma is very outspoken about the incident, and Bail Organa is sitting on various Republic Committees and is diverting assets to Mon Mothma for a coup to preserve the Republic. Finally, The "Emperor" (note quotes) sends ISB agents to arrest Mon Mothma.
The wording of the entire incident strongly implies that the Ghorman Massacre was the "event" that signaled to the galaxy the transformation of the Old Republic to an oppressive regime. It seems that a period of time passed between the massacre and the attempted arrest of Mothma. The quotes around "Emperor" and the statement that the ISB were 2 minutes late to arrest her seem to imply that the declaration of the Galactic Empire and New Order occurred AFTER the massacre, and near contemporaneously with the attempted arrest of Mothma.
Imperial Sourcebook (various pages)
Pg. 57
The Dreadnaught predates the Clone Wars and was a Republic warship. Unlike the prequels, the WEG Star Wars Republic had a viable star navy.
Pg. 60-61
The Victory Star Destroyer was built during and for the Clone Wars. The Victory II didn't come off the assembly line until the end of the Wars. Victory Star Destroyers would have been the 'face' of President Palpatine's Republic.
Pg. 41
Unlike the prequels, the Republic Navy was similar to the Imperial Navy, just smaller in scale. They protected against piracy, patrolled the spacelanes. They had warships, including star destroyers and dreadnaughts.
Pg. 44
The Republic Army had degraded to the point of being a "poorly trained police force with fancy uniforms". Every system was basically on their own and controlled the army units on their planet. |
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Whill
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| Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2020 2:35 am Post subject: Re: Fall of the Republic as per WEG Star Wars |
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| ThrorII wrote: | There are some striking similarities between the 'official' version of the fall of the Republic and Rise of the Empire and the 'WEG d6' version, as well as some VERY distinct differences.
I'll like to cite a few of them, and encourage you to join in. |
Thanks for posting this recap, Thror! I haven't read those books in while, and it is nice to see it all in one place. I have added a lot of continuity to the Clone Wars (plural) in my SWU, while not contradicting the films. This stuff was all influential.
| Quote: | Palpatine's Rise to Power (Imperial Sourcebook, pgs 7-8)
First, unlike the prequels, there is no "Ruusan Reformation" The Old Republic is THE Republic - lasting a thousand generations. |
Unlike a lot of 1st gen SW fans, I had no problem with this retcon. It's kinda corny to have the word "Old" in a government name, so it make more sense to me that there were two prior Republics, and "old"and "new" were originally used to differentiate. It was important to Lucas that it be established that the current Republic was the result of the Republic recovering from the oppression of the Sith that had temporarily taken over the Republic 1000 years ago. Back then, the Ruusan Reformed Republic would have been called the "new Republic" and prior Republic would start being referred to as the "old Republic". It doesn't really make sense to keep calling the reformed Republic the "new" Republic 1000 years later, so it was just the "Republic". A couple decades into the Empire, some people would probably start lumping the newer Republic in with the older and just call it all the Old Republic (as Obi-Wan had in ANH).
| Quote: | | Forth, unlike the prequels, the Clone Wars were sometime in the past and were not tied to the formation of the Empire (possibly and apparently even before Palpatine's election as President). |
And before WEG, in Marvel Star Wars the Clone Wars were a long series of conflicts, the last of which having occurred within a few years before ANH.
| Quote: | Rebel Sourcebook (pages 8-12)
Unlike canon Star Wars, it appears that President Palpatine was the de facto emperor for some time before actually declaring himself Emperor and declaring the New Order. |
Actually that is like Legends and Canon. Supreme Chancellor terms are 4 years with a limit of 2 terms. Palpatine had been Supreme Chancellor for 13 years before officially declaring himself Emperor. The Republic constitution was amended so he could stay in office. AotC and RotS also made a big deal about all the "emergency powers" the Senate had given to Palpatine over the years. Palpatine was a de facto emperor for some time before he officially declared it. And Legends even canonized the title of President as being another title of Palpatine's.
| Quote: | Imperial Sourcebook...
Pg. 60-61
The Victory Star Destroyer was built during and for the Clone Wars. The Victory II didn't come off the assembly line until the end of the Wars. Victory Star Destroyers would have been the 'face' of President Palpatine's Republic. |
The EU canonized the Victory class as being produced towards the end of the Clone War and seeing some action before the war ended. It doesn't mean it was the only star destroyer - They had multiple star destroyer classes simultaneously, and of course the Victory was just not seen in the film. I'm pretty sure Disney canon has also canonized the Victory class SD but probably with less details about it.
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ThrorII
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| Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2020 12:10 pm Post subject: Re: Fall of the Republic as per WEG Star Wars |
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| Whill wrote: | | Quote: | Palpatine's Rise to Power (Imperial Sourcebook, pgs 7-8)
First, unlike the prequels, there is no "Ruusan Reformation" The Old Republic is THE Republic - lasting a thousand generations. |
Unlike a lot of 1st gen SW fans, I had no problem with this retcon. It's kinda corny to have the word "Old" in a government name, so it make more sense to me that there were two prior Republics, and "old"and "new" were originally used to differentiate. It was important to Lucas that it be established that the current Republic was the result of the Republic recovering from the oppression of the Sith that had temporarily taken over the Republic 1000 years ago. Back then, the Ruusan Reformed Republic would have been called the "new Republic" and prior Republic would start being referred to as the "old Republic". It doesn't really make sense to keep calling the reformed Republic the "new" Republic 1000 years later, so it was just the "Republic". A couple decades into the Empire, some people would probably start lumping the newer Republic in with the older and just call it all the Old Republic (as Obi-Wan had in ANH).
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See, my problem with it is that it wasn't a thing until 1999-2000 because GL couldn't bother to either review his old material or didn't bother to have Ian correctly say his line. The whole reason for the RR is to correct Ian's line in the movie. That's lame... |
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2020 12:13 pm Post subject: |
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In a lot of ways, what I find fandoms run into is somewhat sloppy world-building; not necessarily bad, but worlds that aren't Tolkien-level-thought-out, and so start to groan under their own weight. The longer a setting is "active", the more time there is to introduce problems.
(This is not just Star Wars, btw; you see it a lot in YA settings, like Hunger Games and Harry Potter)
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MrNexx
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| Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2020 1:02 pm Post subject: |
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Ok, the way I put this is getting to me, so let me expound.
World-building for a single piece of media is pretty easy; you can leave a lot of questions unanswered, just because they don't affect the story overmuch. What kind of fuel is used in the Millenium Falcon? In 1977 Star Wars, it does not matter, because it just is... the specifics of the fuel aren't important.
The longer you go, though, the more questions you have to answer. The specifics of the fuel in spaceships doesn't particularly matter in the OT, despite 6+ hours of films about it.
But when you start to expand, you start having to answer questions. ESB had to start talking about health care in the Rebellion, because we have main characters injured as part of the plot, and so we get Bacta Tanks and cybernetic hands (in addition to Lobot's cyborg brain); both were hinted at by C-3PO in ANH ("C-3PO, human-cyborg relations"), but didn't need to be developed until they were.
And it comes back to timelines.
In ANH, we know that Ben Kenobi fought in the Clone Wars, so they were within one human lifetime... though we don't know what they were, beyond that. We know that there were a thousand generations of Jedi knights... though, at that number and in that unit, we might as well say "many", as he may have been rounding or exaggerating, but the number was later taken to be literal. But the sketch of a timeline we have in ANH gets a lot less useful when you start writing TPM, because you have to start filling it in. And any time you're touching it, you introduce the possibility that you'll throw in a detail that doesn't fit with the rest.
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Whill
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| Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2020 8:54 pm Post subject: Re: Fall of the Republic as per WEG Star Wars |
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| ThrorII wrote: | | Whill wrote: | | Quote: | Palpatine's Rise to Power (Imperial Sourcebook, pgs 7-8)
First, unlike the prequels, there is no "Ruusan Reformation" The Old Republic is THE Republic - lasting a thousand generations. |
Unlike a lot of 1st gen SW fans, I had no problem with this retcon. It's kinda corny to have the word "Old" in a government name, so it make more sense to me that there were two prior Republics, and "old"and "new" were originally used to differentiate. It was important to Lucas that it be established that the current Republic was the result of the Republic recovering from the oppression of the Sith that had temporarily taken over the Republic 1000 years ago. Back then, the Ruusan Reformed Republic would have been called the "new Republic" and prior Republic would start being referred to as the "old Republic". It doesn't really make sense to keep calling the reformed Republic the "new" Republic 1000 years later, so it was just the "Republic". A couple decades into the Empire, some people would probably start lumping the newer Republic in with the older and just call it all the Old Republic (as Obi-Wan had in ANH).
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See, my problem with it is that it wasn't a thing until 1999-2000 because GL couldn't bother to either review his old material or didn't bother to have Ian correctly say his line. The whole reason for the RR is to correct Ian's line in the movie. That's lame... |
When AotC came out and Palpatine said his line about "this Republic which has stood for a thousand years", fans immediately went into bash mode stating that Lucas misremembered Obi-Wan's line in ANH describing the Jedi and Republic as over 1000 generations old. At the time and in years since then, I thought that may have been the case.
However, I no longer think that. I feel sure Lucas didn't misremember and it wasn't that he didn't "bother" to be correct. In TPM, it was stated by a Jedi Master that the Sith had been extinct for about 1000 years. In RotS, Mace Windu told Palpatine that the oppression of the Sith would never return. In the supporting publications, these statements were qualified as meaning that the Sith actually took over the old Republic 1000 years ago. The Sith's downfall a 1000 years ago was in part because the Jedi Order had not been destroyed. The actual "revenge of the Sith" includes the Sith taking back over and this time destroying the Jedi order (nearly) completely. So the event that happened 1000 years earlier wasn't just the destruction of the original Sith order. It was a reformation of the government that had allowed the Sith to take control and oppress the galaxy.
Palpatine's full AotC line is "I will not let this Republic which has stood for 1000 years be split in two." 1000 years ago, there was a civil war that the Sith temporarily came out on top of. In the 1000 years since the Sith were defeated, there weren't any galactic civil wars until The Clone War with the Separatists. IMO Lucas is very intentionally having Palpatine refer to the post-Sith-Wars Republic. Yes, publishing called the 1000 year ago event the "Russan Reformation", which took power away from the Supreme Chancellor and reinvested it in the Galactic Senate. That completely supports the significant plot point throughout AotC and RotS that the Senate is giving more and more power back to the Supreme Chancellor, returning the Republic to what allowed the Sith to take over the galaxy in the first place (which of course is exactly what happens again).
Obi-Wan's statement in ANH is broad strokes, and he is the king of vague statements being true from certain points of view. We are talking about a galactic government that is thousands of years old, so there is a lot of room in his statement for more details. It is extremely unrealistic that the Republic would not change in 25,000 years. Retcons don't just change things. They also expand continuity with more details than previously known. I do not at all see Palpatine's statement in AotC as contradicting Obi-Wan's statement in ANH.
So there is of course no issue with you disregarding prequel continuity in favor of WEG if you so choose for your SWU. I genuinely thanked you for posting this here, but I hope that your purpose in doing so wasn't just to bash the prequels and lament Lucas turning the Dark Side or some such. That is so 2002. I'm sorry, but that is what would be "lame". In 2020 we've got bigger colo claw fish to fry!
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Last edited by Whill on Sat Jun 15, 2024 12:39 am; edited 1 time in total |
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ThrorII
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| Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2020 10:03 pm Post subject: |
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Not at all!!
The purpose was to compare and contrast "WEG" Star Wars with "Offical" Star Wars. Seeing what the implied setting was compared to what it developed in to.
This kind of devolved in to a pseudo prequel hate, which wasn't the intention.
I really just wanted a discussion of where WEG took things and what that implied about the universe. |
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Whill
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TauntaunScout
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| Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 1:34 pm Post subject: |
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| MrNexx wrote: | | In a lot of ways, what I find fandoms run into is somewhat sloppy world-building; not necessarily bad, but worlds that aren't Tolkien-level-thought-out, and so start to groan under their own weight. |
Yes. But also.
If you followed me and my friends around for a few weeks and filmed me, and then tried to edit the footage into a cohesive 2 hour story about the events of those weeks, the finished film would show "inconsistencies" either in the world of 21st century Earth, in the story, or both.
A lot of supposed plot holes regarding quirky bits of dialog would be accepted in real life all the time. We all accept a certain level of inaccuracy in speech because we all know what the person really meant by our fully immersed context. |
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Darklighter79
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| Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 1:59 pm Post subject: Re: Fall of the Republic as per WEG Star Wars |
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| Whill wrote: |
Unlike a lot of 1st gen SW fans, I had no problem with this retcon. It's kinda corny to have the word "Old" in a government name, so it make more sense to me that there were two prior Republics, and "old"and "new" were originally used to differentiate. It was important to Lucas that it be established that the current Republic was the result of the Republic recovering from the oppression of the Sith that had temporarily taken over the Republic 1000 years ago. Back then, the Ruusan Reformed Republic would have been called the "new Republic" and prior Republic would start being referred to as the "old Republic". It doesn't really make sense to keep calling the reformed Republic the "new" Republic 1000 years later, so it was just the "Republic". A couple decades into the Empire, some people would probably start lumping the newer Republic in with the older and just call it all the Old Republic (as Obi-Wan had in ANH).
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There's also AotC Sio Bibble's 'there hasn't been a full scale war since the formation of the Republic'.
Formation vs reformation. Maybe it had fallen more than 1000 yrs ago, there was a dark time of oppression and then it rose again after end of Sith war?
First Republic (c.25,000 BBY - 1000 BBY) - "Old Republic"
Second Republic (1000 BBY - 19 BBY) - "High Republic"
Third Republic (4 ABY - ) - "The New Republic"
?
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Whill
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| Posted: Sun Jan 12, 2020 4:02 pm Post subject: Re: Fall of the Republic as per WEG Star Wars |
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| Darklighter79 wrote: | There's also AotC Sio Bibble's 'there hasn't been a full scale war since the formation of the Republic'.
Formation vs reformation. Maybe it had fallen more than 1000 yrs ago, there was a dark time of oppression and then it rose again after end of Sith war?
First Republic (c.25,000 BBY - 1000 BBY) - "Old Republic"
Second Republic (1000 BBY - 19 BBY) - "High Republic"
Third Republic (4 ABY - ) - "The New Republic"
? |
Yes, something like that.
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Yora
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| Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2020 12:23 pm Post subject: |
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I was just reading the Imperial Sourcebook, and I was really surprised how the story matches the movies almost exactly, except that there is no mention of the Clone Wars. But even then the Separatists are still included. The movies only added to it, but don't seem to have changed or removed anything.
As a German with great interest in history, I did notice that this description of the Empire seems to be directly an apologetically based on the Nazis.
COMPNOR is basically the Party.
SAGroup is the Hitler Youth.
CompForce is Waffen SS.
ISB is GeStaPo.
And they even did Kraft durch Freude with the SAGRecreation!
I'm usually not to squeamish about these thing, but this is getting a bit close for comfort. But that someone did the research and decided to include KdF gave me a good laugh. 
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2020 1:01 pm Post subject: |
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This may interest you, then.
COMPNOR Expansion
It's a re-write of the COMPNOR Chapter using the SS, Gestapo etc as a template to expand things like Coalition for Improvements and CompForce.
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