Why it' so hard to have credible Star Wars Imperials that are not villains.

[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 ?

[kyoloco]

good point...im sure there are good nazis around somewhere...

[Sormine]

An obscure game, Battlefront 2, is about to launch

What? Obscure?

[Varitok]

Its not hard to see that a lot of imperials are tricked with pure propaganda into thinking the people (Who keep stealing things and blowing up their structures) are terrorists. A lot of them have never been allowed to see their plight and from their perspective it really is just baseless terrorist attacks that are spun by their media. Same thing happens in real life.

[Deleted]

What? Obscure?

Yeah you probably haven't heard of it. The franchise is pretty niche.

[Zeta333]

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 ?

The expanded universe didnt have the problem your talking about.

[Rustedsaint]

There are a lot of reasons why the empire survived so long and even came back as the first order, kinda similar to how the Nazi continue on
Step 1 keep you support base happy, while they could be blowing up planets on one side of the galaxy, they were also helping with natural disasters on the other side. Doing this give you more sympathy

Step 2 blame the other guys for everything going wrong, imperials were better at controlling information. And let’s be honest allot of rebels werent good people .(hell rogue one showed them killing their own informer, not to mention all the books/comics) plenty of innocent people were killed by the rebellion for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[Heladys]

good point...im sure there are good nazis around somewhere...

The dead ones.

[sarahtasher]

Obscure was deeply sarcastic.

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The expanded universe didnt have the problem your talking about.

When the Rebels bombed a civilian target in the EU ? Levied contributions ? Executed sympathizers ?

[Cosmic Janitor]

What? Obscure?

sarahtasher.

Anyway, the only thing SW:BF2 currently is promising is a micro-transaction shit show. A unique imperial perspective is certainly not on that list.

[Post]

I knew who the OP was going to be before opening the thread...

[mickybrighteyes]

good point...im sure there are good nazis around somewhere...

I know this is a joke... but it seems someone is ignorant of how more than a few jews escaped the camps.

[sarahtasher]

Inferno Squadron is godawful as making Inferno Squadron looks sympathetic : they infiltrate a rebel terrorist cell and the actual terrorists are way more sympathetic than them-Imperial poster girl is the one pushing for bombing an Imperial school

The Imperials, FTR, are Nazis, a characterization that only keeps growing. They are also backstabbing Nazis (hello Sidious and Vader) and Nazis with a pathetic track record at winning. I was just saying that it's pretty hard to make them look remotely sympathetic, so maybe another approach would be to cast the Rebels as less holier-than-thou ?

[Wildberry]

Uhh. why is sarahtasher of all people advocating for sympathetic white supremacy? Why advocate for their enemies to be less sympathetic? Beating Nazis is the ultimate moral good!

[kyoloco]

I know this is a joke... but it seems someone is ignorant of how more than a few jews escaped the camps.

traitor nazis?

[belfpala]

That's understandable, but why Imperials keep using ''terrorists'' to describe them, even for propaganda purposes ?

You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists. It's a much easier message to sell than, "your overlord has created plans to kill all of you unless you step in line."

[eillas]

Sarah, did you read the Thrawn novel?

[Zeta333]

Obscure was deeply sarcastic.

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When the Rebels bombed a civilian target in the EU ? Levied contributions ? Executed sympathizers ?

shit happens in war.

[Surfd]

I am sort of confused as to why you feel like there should be a "need" to paint the Imperials as sympathetic, or decent or whatever. The empire, as a whole, was modeled off of pretty much the WORST aspects of every kind of Fascist, militaristic, Iron fisted dictatorship tropes you could scrape the bottom of the barrel for. Sure, the average "imperial citizen" was probably a fairly normal person. But you can be pretty much guaranteed that anyone associated with the Imperial military with a rank above "expendable lightsaber fodder" was probably about as sympathetic as your average Waffen SS Officer. It would take very little time at all as an operating member of the Imperial Forces to realize exactly what kind of organization you were working for.

[Mormolyce]

Star Wars has a very straightforward black and white morality - the Imperials are villains period.

The closest they come to being sympathetic is in Empire where you see what it's like being a workaday Imperial officer - ie pants-shitting terror that Vader will decide that you've failed him and choke you to death. Which was really more to illustrate that even from the point of view of the privileged within the Empire - high ranking Imperial officers - the Empire is awful.

Some of the expanded fiction has attempted to advance a more nuanced view of the Star Wars universe - some successfully, some not.