Yes, Mon Mothma is a very minor character. Especially before the Andor show, which arguably gives her too much screentime anyway. General audiences wouldn’t freak out, they would say “who is she supposed to be?” You would have to develop her for a little while before you make it a big twist.
I’m not too familiar with the Yuuzhan Vong but I think that’s the kind of direction you have to go if you don’t want to repeat the Sith and the Empire again. Lucas’s idea of underworld criminal elements filling in the power vacuum left by the Empire is also good (though I’m iffy on it having Darth Maul.)
Being that this is Star Wars, I don’t believe there are ‘minor’ characters anymore. That’s why every scene in the Mandalorian has some kind of callback be it an alien, a piece of hardware etc. We even had the cantina guys repeat their '77 dialogue in Rogue One!
It would be so easy to generate a nostalgic connection to Mothma in ep 7. One early appearance in an RoTJ-esque outfit, with Leia saying “it’s so good to see you my friend - we’ve missed you terribly” would bring a rousing cheer and establish a ‘between films’ connection that would fuel the Ben Solo thread. Maybe he attended university in the Bothan system and stayed with the Mothmas?
The criminal underworld thing is plausible of course, but as much as we hate to admit it we do want the Sith and Empire again! Of course we do. Casual audiences definitely do. Again, the Mothma idea at least gives credence to the notion of a reconstituted status quo rather than the obvious ‘uh, the Empire grew back’ thing of Zhan’s novels, the Dark Horse comics, and the sequels. Again, it leaves the OT victory entirely intact whilst presenting the sinister idea that one of the lovely characters in the Rebel briefing room was actually a baddy with a future axe to grind…
Yes that kind of thing sucks, it’s something people both fans and outsiders complain about all the time. Seemingly every single character in the Mos Eisley cantina was given their own fleshed out backstory and adventures. Sometimes minor characters are just minor characters. The fondness some people have for minor characters out of universe does not mean they suddenly had more screentime retroactively added to the movies. Easter eggs are not the same thing as main characters.
“Uh, the Empire grew back” is not at all what happened in the Zahn books or the comics. The Empire is described as being on the back foot, fracturing into groups of warlords, not what it once was but not completely destroyed either. It makes perfect sense. The Empire starts winning in the Thrawn books because of Thrawn. He’s a singular, once in a generation military genius who lets them consistently win battles for the first time in a while, and he makes good use of technology like cloning, and various aliens. They also have help from a powerful dark jedi.
That makes so much more sense than Mon Mothma being a secret bad guy and rebuilding the Empire in secret, unless you basically made her into a Thrawn figure. That’s much more “Uh, the Empire grew back.”
I don’t disagree - indeed the fan service thing is annoying to me too (I never want to hear another Gonk Droid in my life!) but at the ‘nicer’ end of that scale is the fact that minor characters can and have been much loved (like Boba Fett as I mentioned in another reply and the ongoing disappointment regarding his demise, or a character like Wedge who is highly regarded). I think Mothma falls into that latter category - certainly enough for Lucas to include her in ROTS (edited out in the end but still…) and for writers to include her in Rogue One/Andor.
I’m not at all claiming that Zhan’s books or the comics are bad. I’m just saying that all they can really do is create a ‘new’ bad guy and/or a ‘new’ Empire. So really it’s just more Star Wars for the sake of more Star Wars, which is fine I guess. In a sense you’re right - I am positing Mothma as a ‘Thrawn figure’, but at least one where we go “damn, she was there all along!” rather than “well, there was another bad guy who we never heard of that has now emerged etc etc”. That’s just more appealing to me, but to each their own.
The specific individual we hadn’t heard of, just like we hadn’t heard of 99% of the imperial leadership, but the star destroyers and infrastructure were out in the open. The Mothma thing where it’s reversed and the Empire rebuilds without anyone noticing makes less sense.
Especially because there are plenty of ways you could sabotage the rebellion long before the second Death Star, if you were its main leader. Forgive the hacky comparison but if you were FDR or Winston Churchill and working for Hitler, there would be some serious differences in how the war played out before 1945. You could just give the Empire the location of Yavin or Hoth, for example.
I didn’t mean ‘she was there all along’ to mean she was a spy or a baddie all along. I meant it in the sense that we’d seen her in RoTJ. Her actual conversion to the Empire/Palpatine could’ve been recent by RoTJ’s standards. None of us had seen or heard of Mothma prior to RoTJ - and there was no Rogue One or Andor. She was a blank slate at that point - basically just a nice rebel lady who was delivering some DS plans. As far as I can tell she wasn’t at the Endor celebration either, even though the space lobsters were! I just think it would be cool to have a connecting thread to the OT - which would make it feel a little more like a genuine Episode 7 rather than just more Star Wars.
For example when we watch Obi Wan talking about Luke’s father in ep 4, we now see all these huge implications in Obi Wan’s discomfort. Of course none of those implications existed at the time, but now the saga is richer for it. It’s a similar thing when Yoda says “there is another” or when Leia and Luke Force-connect at the end of Empire. These moments now have weight that binds the episodes, even though the intention at the time of writing was otherwise. In this instance the RoTJ briefing scene, when viewed through the lens of the 9-film saga, would now carry this kind of pre-emptive foreboding that would give the ‘new’ trilogy a sense of continuity to its predecessors.
So she wasn’t in the alliance at all until shortly before ROTJ, but became the leader of the whole thing immediately? I wasn’t even referring to Andor or anything like that, I’m saying that just within the context of ROTJ by itself, she’s clearly the leader in some capacity. On the other hand, if you think that she could plausibly be just some common woman they appointed to deliver the briefing, there wouldn’t be any interest or shock value in her being a traitor.
So why can’t a leader become corrupt? Didn’t Dooku start out as a good guy? The interesting thing is that we never saw Mothma in the previous episodes at all - she wasn’t on Yavin, she wasn’t on Hoth. RoTJ showed the Rebels basically coming together, presumably from far and wide given all the new faces, for one last battle - so we have no idea where she operated from or in what capacity. She was a blank slate, irrespective of her rank (not that any rank was actually alluded to in the film beyond ‘here’s an important rebel lady’). All we know is that this important rebel lady delivered the false information - as intended by Palpatine - that lead the rebels into a trap. I’m merely suggesting that she was in on it, rather than just being a dupe along with everyone else, and that, like Dooku, or Grievous, or Darth Maul, or Anakin Skywalker, she had been offered power in exchange for aligning herself with Palpatine’s evil designs.
The information wasn’t false though, it was completely true. It could be used as a trap because it was a tempting target. Palpatine takes credit for it himself. No one in particular had to deliver the information within the Alliance, other than the Bothans that found it out in the first place. She’s just giving the briefing, so she’s not introducing any deception right that moment.
Again if she’s a total blank slate and we assume that she’s not the main leader and she’s just some woman delivering the briefing, then the twist wouldn’t have any meaning or impact. At most it’s just “Oh, it’s her. Weird.” You’re relying on the context of her being some variety of fan favorite character, but those don’t exist in a vacuum. In the EU, Disney canon, and the ROTS deleted scenes, she’s high leadership from the start. That’s why people would care. You can have her as a blank slate or you can have her as a popular character turning heel, but you can’t do both.