Star Wars prequel questions

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Separatists implies a civil war of various systems leaving the Republic but we never really see that. We see a droid army on Geonosis in AotC and on RotS we see a meeting which includes the Trade Federation and the Banking Guild.

A lot of Star Wars feels like Lucas had an idea and then immediately lost interest in it once it was committed to paper.

 

[pukunui]

Nah, the Separatists aren’t in that film. It’s just the Trade Federation blockading Naboo. Pretty small scale.

Dooku and the Separatists are introduced in the next film.

Also… Separatists implies a civil war of various systems leaving the Republic but we never really see that. We see a droid army on Geonosis in AotC and on RotS we see a meeting which includes the Trade Federation and the Banking Guild.

I know you dislike animation. However, The Clone Wars animated series does a fantastic job fleshing everything out between Episodes II and III. The Separatists have their own government and everything.

There's another facet to the Clone Wars that hasn't been mentioned yet: with the exception of Dooku, the Confederacy of Independent Systems was run by money-grubbing alien CEOs. By cooking up a war in which they were the face of the "bad guys", Palpatine was able to sway public sentiment in the Republic-turned-Empire against both aliens and corporations. This in addition to turning public sentiment against the Jedi and droids in general. Old Palps was playing 4D chess during the Clone Wars.


One EU concept that I'm glad Disney has left in the dustbin is the idea that Palpatine did everything out of the goodness of his heart in order to protect the galaxy from the Yuuzhan Vong, whose coming extragalactic invasion he had foreseen through the Force.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

His clothing isn’t that dissimilar to that of the Lars family and even the sandpeople. I am 100% sure that the original intent not be that that was a Jedi uniform.

Desert hermit robes are single-breasted, Jedi robes are double-breasted. Totally different.

 

[Deset Gled]

I think the issue with this is that prior to TPM, the Republic doesn't have an army. When Palpatine manufactures the droid army threat, his campaign is to build the Republic an army to defend against it.
...
There isn't another army until the Rebellion comes along 20 years later.

There's no standing centralized army. But we see the army Naboo has. If even 10% of the planets shown in the Senate are packing that level of heat, it stands to reason there's an awful lot of distributed firepower that could be organized on short notice. In the ANH books and radio play (canon when TPM was made) it's noted that the snub fighters they use in the Battle of Yavin are older than the Clone Wars, so they have to be around somewhere. And that's all without bringing the EU into question (which was in a weird state when TPM came out), which would tell us that there's fleets full of Dreadnaughts, Z95 Headhunders, and lots of other artillery somewhere.

But the bigger consideration is the enormous potential the Republic has. Remember, the economic powerhouse of the Republic is what became the Empire, and managed to build the entire fleet in ~20 years. Including the Executor and two Death Stars. No, we never see exactly what the Republic could have churned out on short notice. But that's kind of the point of what I said before. Palpatine doesn't want to have those resources destroyed in war before he comes to power. He wants to rule it. Which is what turning the Trade Federation against the Jedi let him do.

 

[Morrus]

But the bigger consideration is the enormous potential the Republic has. Remember, the economic powerhouse of the Republic is what became the Empire, and managed to build the entire fleet in ~20 years. Including the Executor and two Death Stars. No, we never see exactly what the Republic could have churned out on short notice.

But we do. It churned out two massive entire armies—a robot one and a clone one—complete with starships and stuff. The Trade Federation, etc, are part of the Republic .

 

[pukunui]

The Galactic Republic is weird. It has no standing army, despite not controlling the entirety of the galaxy (the Outer Rim is mostly independent and who knows what's in the Unknown Regions!), and yet it allows planets, corporations, and others to have their own private armies.

When the Jedi talk about being peacekeepers, they're mostly going around stopping people from using their private armies against each other - something they fail to do in TPM. That's when the lightsabers come out and the Jedi switch to what Anakin calls "aggressive negotiations".

You could probably argue that the Trade Federation, using its seat in the Senate, has justified its private droid army as a means to defend itself against pirates in the Outer Rim and such. But due to the rampant corruption in the late Republic, they've started using it to bully small worlds like Naboo.

 

[jian]

It’s pretty clear to me that the Galactic Republic, despite the name, isn’t a single government, but a membership organisation more like the UN. As such, it doesn’t have a standing military of its own but can request peacekeeping forces from member planets for emergency operations. The Jedi, similarly, are requested for investigative and peacekeeping (mostly mediation) activities but aren’t the Republic’s military or law enforcement arm.

That’s no way to run an Empire, so Palpatine manufactures a conflict so that he’ll have two armies - one Separatist droid army and one clone Republic army. Once he’s done this and ensured that he has absolute control over both (because one is composed of droids and the other of clones) then he’s free to set them on whoever he wishes to conquer them.