Originally Posted by
sarahtasher
An obscure game, Battlefront 2, is about to launch and one of it's selling point is an unique Imperial perspective
It's not exactly a new thing (one of the best Star Wars videogame, TIE Fighter used the same approach), but in the legion of comics, books, games of both the old and new canon, Imperials that are not caricatures of lunatics are quite rare-the prequel novel to BFII cast the titular Inferno Squad in quite a dubious light. There have been numerous attempts to cast the Imperials as not saturday morning villains, to give them a shade of grey. It was more or less successfull across the board, as those Imperials were isolated amongst a sea of raving monsters
(SWTOR tried very hard to cast a ''decent Imperial'' for some of their classes-but it still meant ''critical quest make you someone just doing your job, side quest basically ask you to kill 10 refugees with butterfly bombs'')
This thread suggest that a more useful approach would be to cast some shadows on the Rebels, who are, especially in a world of gritty retcons, still amazingly, shall we say, ''clean'' as insurgencies go. (a fairly good recent comic arc, Sunspot prison, had Leia refusing to swoop to the Imperial level. Okay, it's actually an interesting point, but it does not deal with the fact the Rebels somehow manage to avoid all accidents coming along with revolutions.
While some works try to deal with issues in realist way (example : Imperial loyalists or Human in generals being hunted down by vengeful partisans and eleventh hour resistance fighters after the collapse of the Empire was a minor plot point of the Corellian trilogy before ''SUPERWEAPON'' popped up), the vast majority of both new and ancient lore put such problems under the rug, except for the general point of the incapacity of the New Republic to deal with any issue.
One thing that struck me across both the new and old canon is that the patriotic Imperials always call Rebels ''terrorists'', a term that would help the Imperials look a little more sympathetic to modern readers/players/movie goers
(The other side of the pro-Imperial argument, ''that the Empire brought peace and order'' is essentially impossible to salvage. While Imperials might believe it, the reader know that most of the chaos in the Galaxy is related to various team-building exercices between Sidious and Vador).
Unsurprisingly, most of the storylines about this are in fact yet another evil scheme by Palpatine for propaganda purposes. But what does not help at making ''credible Imperials'' is the fact that this charge is quite hollow. The Rebels are avoiding the kind of attacks that real life insurgencies (both sympathetic to readers and unsympathetic ones) use. They are called terrorists matter-of-factly by Imperials for attacking the Death Star, while the same Imperials that we are supposed to sympathize with (Inferno Squadron) are a-okay with Alderaan being blown up.
(To be quite honest, making a terror-like group for Rogue One, the Partisans, and having them cast as the Arabic looking scapegoat of the Alliance was, well, super cheap.)
For a desperately outgunned insurgency, the Rebels always seems to favor direct confrontation with the Imperial war machine-we always see X-Wings and Y-Wings swooping over Imperial warships, never doing what insurgents usually do-hitting soft targets (except, of all things, in the cartoon Rebels). For very obvious reasons, Disney and Lucasfilms are wary of casting the designated good guys as terrorists. To the point that (correct me if wrong), recent lore still indicate that for instance the A-Wing that rammed the Executor in Return of the Jedi was not a kamikaze but a crippled ship (while back in the eighties, the ROTJ novelization flat out said that the Rebels used fireships amounting to suicide ships-the unarmed rebels transports filled with explosives at Endor).
That's understandable, but why Imperials keep using ''terrorists'' to describe them, even for propaganda purposes ?