At work a few weeks ago I had an idea for a recontextualizing of TFA’s backstory that might be doable in a fanedit?
Not sure if you’re into the expanded universe but the official canon portrays a very similar scenario. The New Republic was split in two parties: there were those who appreciated the old regime and wanted a centralised government and more powerful military, and there was the faction led by Leia that favored liberty and autonomy of individual planets. Some of Leia’s political allies backed the Resistance, while many opposing Senators eventually defected to the First Order.
Although I try to ignore EU materials, I am aware of it, and it was something I had in mind. But it’s different in that the First Order is explicitly from the not-Leia faction, instead of the not-Leia faction just sort of being sympathetic to the First Order. Well, sorta. I haven’t read much of the New EU, but it seems pretty self-contradictory on the origins of the First Order.
I always got the implication from the sequel trilogy, Mandalorian, and the stuff I have read that it was a minor terrorist organization that broke out and got big in the events of the ST, which the Centrists (god awful name wtf Lucasfilm) were weakly opposed to at best, but more realistically secretly in favor of. But according to Wikipedia the First Order are Centrists who seceded from the New Republic? I don’t know. They seem more like a military junta than an actually sophisticated political order, like what a bunch of ex-Senators might establish.
Plus, the connection between Mon Mothma’s faction and restoring the Old Republic isn’t something that’s there with the Centrists in the New EU, especially considering the full name of the Rebel Alliance is the “Alliance to Restore the Republic” and everyone is just down with that.
Which is also a big plus in doing this for me is in doing away with that. The Republic is depicted as incredibly corrupt system and it’s no shock the Empire rose out of it. You shouldn’t be shocked that the Empire comes back after trying to restore it. Even if you ignore the prequels, something had to have gone very, very wrong for the Empire to come about, even if you imagine some outlandish backstory completely foreign to the one George Lucas’s prequel trilogy gave us.
Weimar Germany didn’t fall to the Nazis out of nowhere, the Roman Republic didn’t fall to the Roman Principate out of nowhere, Napoleon didn’t come out of nowhere, and should the United States become a fascist dictatorship (not quite there yet), it’s not going to come out of nowhere. And it’s not as simple as the people handing over power to a huckster, all these things were the culminations of many centuries of deep-seeded problems. Hitler, Caesar, Napoleon, etc, just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
It’s something I wished Episode 9 would address, instead of failing to learn their lesson a second time, setting up a Third Republic to inevitably fall to fascism a third time. But the cynic in me thinks that a movie saying that liberal democracy is predisposed to fascism might raise a few eyebrows at Disney and with the higher-ups in Lucasfilm, especially in the current political climate. Despite what alt-right weirdos on Youtube say, Disney and Lucasfilm, and Hollywood at large, are very averse to putting anything too political in movies these days, especially something that might hit that close to home.