The New Star Wars Vomit

Disney has announced a slew of new Star Wars series. 9 new ones, plus The Mandalorian makes for 10 in total. There was a time in my life where this would have excited me, but now I honestly don’t care, because I have zero faith that any of these will take risks or have consequences. Let me go down the list.

EDIT: Disney has since added some detail about these series. I’ve kept my original comments, but added notes on what they will be about and whether I was right (spoiler: I wasn’t wrong)

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The Myth of the Worthless Imperial Fighters

When I recently re-watched Star Wars I wasn’t just keeping track of Stormtrooper deaths. I was curious if the stock Imperial fighter, the TIE Fighter, was also always a piece of disposable junk.

TL;DR: no, it was not, but please keep reading anyway!

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The Myth of the Worthless Imperial Troops

In The Mandalorian there are multiple references to how worthless Stormtroopers are. Bill Burr’s character, Mayfeld, is a former Imperial sharp shooter. Mando isn’t impressed. He retorts “Hey, I wasn’t a Stormtrooper!” Later we see two scout troopers who literally cannot hit a rock 2 meters away from them. In the third episode of the second season (I’ll be vague to avoid spoilers) a character says that Stormtroopers “couldn’t hit the side of a bantha”.

As that episode progresses we see a handful of characters kill easily forty or more Stormtroopers directly. Granted, these characters are implied to be elite mercenaries, but still the message is clear: Stormtroopers are worthless cannon fodder and of no real threat to our heroes.

Has this always been the case?

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Following Through on a Plan (Star Wars OT)

A common device in many narratives is the plan that goes sideways and the protagonists have to improvise to make it work. Maybe they have to cut the wire to the alarm to get into the diamond vault, but… there’s no wires. They’ve moved them, or replaced it with a new system! Now what?

Where this device falls apart is when the author doesn’t give any thought to how the plan would have gone if it went as originally intended. On a recent re-watch of Star Wars I got to thinking about this. How would each of the Star Wars Original Trilogy movies have played out if the plan went without a hitch?

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