Star Wars Setting

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Describing even the cursory information on the sheer number of characters, amount of history, and various factions in Star Wars is a massive undertaking, and one that cannot be folded into another page. As such, here is a summary of things who either are influential, Awesome, Fail, hilariously meme worthy, or all of the above.

Main Characters

• Luke Skywalker: All-round good guy and idealist, despite being a complete idiot, Luke wishes to learn the ways of the Force to defeat the Emperor and save the galaxy. A Jedi prodigy, he can lift heavy ton space fighters with just his force powers, though he struggles with doubts. Although he starts all brash and teenage and shit, by the conclusion of the trilogy, Luke is well on the way to becoming a wise and powerful Jedi ready to rebuild the Order. Mark Hamill observed that Luke's role in Star Wars is that of the comedic "straight man"; a bland Abbott in a galaxy of Costellos.
  • In Legends continuity, after Return of the Jedi Luke worked to restore the order and trained many generations of Jedi including his niece Jaina and nephews Jacen and Anakin as well as his future wife and son. About Luke's family? Long story short, Luke met a woman named Mara Jade, a former Force-using agent of the Emperor who sought to avenge him by killing Luke. But he and Mara were forced to work together to survive a death world before Luke freed her from Palpatine's lies and Mara joined the Jedi Order, where the two eventually fell in love, married and had a son - Ben Skywalker. Before and after this, Luke destroyed massive remnants of the Empire over and over again and also fought off an even bigger threat in the form of an extragalactic invasion by Force-resistant space Cenobites called Yuuzhan Vong, where he defeated many including their best fighter. Years later, Luke nearly turned to the Dark Side after Mara was murdered, but overcame the temptation though he violated the Jedi Code by attempting to murder her enemies in revenge. Following this he killed a resurrected Palpatine repeatedly and took on his most dangerous single foe in the form of a Force-Cthulhu called Abeloth (who was so dangerous Luke had to make a temporary alliance between the Jedi, the Republic and the Sith to defeat her). After this he continued to be a great hero until he died in an unspecified manner some time before the Cade Skywalker era, but still existed as a Force Ghost who guided future Jedi.

• Han Solo: Dashing rogue and space cowboy who somehow shoots his way out of debt to the mob, ends up a general, and bags himself a princess. Not a bad series' work. His ship, the Millennium Falcon, deserves a mention too for being as iconic as he is. In pre-Disney continuity he was once a Swoop (flying motorcycle) racer turned Imperial Officer who shot his superior that was beating a Wookiee to death and gained a lifelong friend in said Wookiee - Chewbacca. He also had three kids with Leia pre-Disney with two sons called Anakin and Jacen and a daughter called Jaina.

• Princess Leia: The regulation piece of lady crumpet in the movies, Princess Leia was a leader in the rebel alliance and (spoiler!) Luke's long lost twin sister. Also both a capable soldier and politician. Her being forced to wear a metal thong by an overweight space slug named Jabba the Hutt has since cemented her role as sex idol to legions of adoring fan boys, while her general door-kicking deadshot sarcastic asskickery made her a feminist icon as well (this was back in the 80's when the two could be the same). With her home planet and entire adoptive family destroyed by the Death Star, she became a General although somehow retained her princesshood (yes, she's now a Disney Princess). In the pre-Disney EU Leia became a full-on Jedi warrior in the and had three kids with Han, one of whom had a daughter of his own.

• Obi-Wan Kenobi: If, at any point, in any work of fiction, the hero has an old master/father figure who teaches him part of what he knows, makes sure that he will grow up to be a virtuous and decent hero, but ultimately dies fighting a great evil to buy the hero time to escape, then returns as a spirit guide for the hero later, the Internet has probably accused that character of ripping off Obi-wan Kenobi. The prequels show him as a young Jedi and a deuterotagonist to Anakin Skywalker, acting as his master, teacher, partner, and dear friend before their eventual falling out ends with Anakin losing most of his major extremities and organs and Obi-wan hiding out in a cave waiting to turn into Alec Guinness. In hindsight he was a fucking moron to expect Anakin stay sane with his mother separated forever from him and doomed to slavery in a shithole planet. Certainly this won't torment the kid's thoughts about her, what's that? Tuskens tortured her to death? We are the Jedi, we do not take reve- oh well he went Sith. So much for Jedi and their wisdom. He is a great source of memes within the SW fandom, as well as jokingly referred to as Jesus due to his hairstyle in Episode II.

• Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker/"The Chosen One": The black-helmeted face of evil and the most well known villain from Star Wars (and arguably the most recognizable character in cinema, full stop). Has become an iconic and memorable figure due to his menacing, robotic appearance and ultra-deep, wheezy respirator voice. He is (spoiler!) secretly Anakin, Luke's fallen Jedi father, thus allowing him to be able to say the most memorable line in the film series, "I am your Father!" Abaddon wishes he could be this sinister. His children eventually manage to rekindle the spark of human decency in his heart, and he redeems himself by giving up his own life to save them and destroy the Emperor. Hates sand. Fun Fact: his portrayal required four actors in the original trilogy: body, voice, face and a stunt double. His scene at the end of Rogue One, where he goes absolutely berserk and tears some puny rebels to shreds, is probably the best in the movie, and one of the best in Star Wars as a whole. It ends with him standing in open space, something originally intended for the original film and the original reason he was designed with the armor in the first place. The scene was well received, so Disney decided to have him go berserk again in the Star Wars: Rebels TV show (several times) and the video game Jedi: Fallen Order, before giving Maul a scene like it in Clone Wars. To this end, Vader’s recent portrayals (which have taught both neckbeards and the new generation of fans alike to be fucking terrified of him) have led many to claim that the changes to his character is the only thing Disney got right in their ownership of Star Wars (well, that and The Mandalorian. And the Clone Wars(*cough* Grievous)). Hreeeeee-kchooooooosh...

• Padmé Amidala: The future Darth Vader's waifu who spends most of the prequel trilogy being a hopeless idealist (though still has enough presence of mind to keep a blaster handy when diplomacy fails). Swaps out outfits and hairstyles at a near constant rate. Get's choked by Vader and dies giving birth to Luke and Leia, which ironically Vader was trying to prevent in the first place after seeing a vision. Way to go, dumbass. Haven't you read a work of fiction with that kinda prophecy in it before? Much more skubby than her daughter, largely on account of the writing for her love story with Anakin being poorly received, as well as Natalie Portman's performance being divisive.

• Qui-Gon Jin: Liam Neeson as a Jedi. As such, he had a particular set of skills, skills to recognize a Sith plot, and would've uncovered and exposed Palpatine if it weren't for Darth Maul's sword going through his gut. In life, Qui-Gon was known to be a gadfly who frequently disagreed with the dogma of the Jedi Council, instead putting his trust in The Force and eventually discovering The Chosen One in a little slave boy on Tatooine. Was the master of Obi-Wan, and tried to teach Anakin the basics from beyond the grave. Qui-Gon had learned the secret of immortality before his death, and passed on his knowledge to Yoda in a spiritual journey, and later to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Thanks to him, he was able to preserve the legacy of the Jedi long after the purge.

• Ahsoka Tano: An orange, female togruta jedi padawan that helps tell the story of growing up. When she was first introduced in the skubtastic Clone Wars movie, she was basically annoying beyond belief and attached to the notoriously reckless Anakin Skywalker. However, she began to grow on fans, eventually becoming a fan favorite. Initially, she dressed only a little better than a Dark Eldar wych, raising serious moral questions about a girl her age dressing that way, but this issue was resolved in season 3 of the clone wars. Her character grows from beyond the simplicity of an (un)amusing wisecracker, much like her master, into a wiser, kinder woman, whose actions speak louder than her words. In the penultimate season of the Clone Wars, she leaves her master and the Jedi order, and some believe that she unintentionally caused Anakin Skywalker to fall to the Dark side (It certainly denied him the title of master since the standard way of gaining that is to raise a Padawan to knight). She reappears in Rebels, where she acts as an agent coordinating rebel cells, and takes on the wise guide and teacher for Ezra and Kanan, two other jedi who are fighting the Empire. Thought to have died in the second season, she is revealed to have been saved, and was alive even up to season 2 of The Mandalorian.

Disney Main Characters

• Rey: Protagonist of the new trilogy. Most people either think she's a sloppily written Mary Sue and wish-fulfillment character for the writers' female-empowerment fetish or that she's a fine protagonist and the former group is just being salty about new things and/or a bunch of Neckbeards and /pol/s. The sequel trilogy's Jedi and maybe the most immediately competent of the three (the others being Luke and Anakin). What invited critique in the first place is the fact she is readily bestowed new, often unexplained abilities as the means of moving the plot forward, and the few failures she has either turn to successes, or have next to no consequences. While it was foreshadowed she would have piloting skills with the pilot memorabilia in her home from which the audience was supposed to infer she knew how, Disney had to later specifically point out "she literally plays flight sims anytime she isn't working, that's the shit on her table". But since the memorabilia didn't look like a flight sim, some viewers concluded this was an asspull by Disney. To the credit of the writers however, the foreshadowing implies X-Wing obsession so it makes sense that she royally trashes the Falcon trying to escape TIE Fighters with it (like everyone else who played the old X-Wing video games). She also has fucking god tier Force talent, able to pull off Force techniques that took the previous protagonists years to learn such as the Jedi Mind Trick. The sequel semi-explained this with an actual asspull by suggesting the Force balances itself and with only one remaining trained Force user below a master left alive she pretty much got cheat-coded to be at his level as Light Side opposite...although that ignores Luke not gaining the same cheats and the Force users left alive in the Disney EU who have no Dark Side opposites while also relying on information from that same EU (the trippy metaphysical Force entity kind) so it only works if you turn off your brain and give up. Apart from all that, Rey is a scavenger who grew up parent-less in a wreck on a desert planet, earning from the scraps of old Rebel and Imperial machinery. While she's been seen using the Light Side of the Force for the most part, the Dark Side allegedly tugs a great deal in her. She also has a vision of herself as a Sith with a double-bladed red lightsaber similar to Luke's tree vision on Dagobah. Due to a spate of leaks, numerous details were revealed before the release of the film such as her being Sheev's grandaughter and the fate of her parents; Rey's parents hid her on Jakku because they were being hunted and were killed shortly after leaving. After Rey joins forces with Kylo to defeat Palpatine, she actually dies... only to be brought back to life by Pokémon tears true love's first kiss Kylo Ren using the Force to give his life to save hers, and the two share a kiss before Kylo dies. She ends up on Tatooine and with the last of the Skywalker line dead (by technicality, the Force powers always came from Palpatine so it just means Shmi's bloodline is dead) Rey, while gaining no new personality to speak of, takes the Skywalker last name as her own since she will never know her actual last name now. As one might expect from a character touted as a strong female protagonist, Rey is propped up by failures of men, sometimes turned failures after the fact for the purpose of redistributing their successes to her. Because of this Rey remains the only character alive with any Jedi training.

• Finn: A First Order Stormtrooper (serial code FN-2187) who has doubts about the First Order after a battle where he has to shoot innocent civilians and ends up defecting to the Resistance, allowing him to actually aim worth a damn. Finn ends up carrying The Force Awakens thanks to the acting talents of John Boyega. He probably would have made a much better main character than Rey because at least he has a fucking reason to go on a space adventure and undergoes actual character development. He’s basically Kyle Katarn, only he didn’t get to steal the Death Star plans or become a Jedi. The second movie unfortunately rendered Finn a character without an arc, as discussed below. Had a really cool scene where he fights a former squadmate with a lightsaber, before said squadmate beat him with a big electric stick. He also had a second cool scene where he attempts to fight on a trained dark Jedi (not a Sith) with that same lightsaber before getting badly injured, showing tremendous fucking balls (and implying that Kylo Ren, after being shot by a laser crossbow that flings stormtroopers in the air, is about on par with a pissed off Stormtrooper with a lightning sick). Revealed to be Force-sensitive in Rise Of Skywalker, and finds an entire division of Stormtroopers on Endor who quit the First Order as a group the same way he did as an individual; the leader of them replaces Rose as his love interest, despite the same movie implying heavily he has an unrequited love for Rey (later in an interview JJ said he was trying to say he was Force-sensitive, while some fans think his knowledge that she is Palpatine's grandaughter was what he was supposed to say which meant a "why didn't you tell me" plot would follow). Ends the franchise as the general of the ground forces of the Resistance, a famous galactic hero, and probably going to be trained as a Jedi. So yeah, Finn is canon Kyle Katarn from start to finish.

• Poe Dameron: An X-Wing pilot and one of the best pilots in the Resistance who gave Finn his nickname. Poe is the son of an ace pilot and an elite Rebel soldier, who was seemingly conceived in an Ewok hut during the Yubyub song and grew up with a holy Force tree in his yard that was a gift from Luke. Gets captured by the First Order but gets rescued by a defecting Finn and they both escape using a TIE Fighter. Assumed dead by Finn after crashing the TIE Fighter, though ends up coming back shooting down an entire squadron of TIE Fighters. Its never really stated why did he leave Finn behind in the crash site, how did he leave the planet or why did he pretty much abandon his mission of trying to find BB-8. As such he's barely in The Force Awakens. This is because the original script George Lucas proposed for Force Awakens used Poe as a means of Finn escaping, whereupon Finn takes it on himself to complete Poe’s last mission and eventually replace Poe in the Resistance. After Poe’s actor lamented that he dies in every movie, Poe was made to survive the crash and Finn gained a fearful coward who becomes a hero subplot, which unfortunately left both characters with nowhere to go for character arcs. Poe is far more important in The Last Jedi, but not in good ways. He disobeys orders and leads an attack on a First Order capital ship which not only results in the destruction of most of the surviving Resistance small fighters, but delays their escape long enough for the First Order flagship (so large it is essentially a giant capital city for the First Order) to catch up with them and massacre the Resistance. Poe then mutinies when the now-comatose Leia’s subordinate Holdo is put in charge of the Resistance (Ackbar was killed before that because his Voice Actor died, leaving Holdo as highest ranking officer) to enact his own plan using Finn...which fails, resulting in the deaths of most of the rest of the Resistance and the loss of their last capital ship. Poe’s counterattack also fails, and by the end its only thanks to Rey and Luke that anyone survives. By the end, there’s barely enough Resistance left to fill up the Millennium Falcon, although the First Order got it just as bad thanks to Holdo’s last act. In short: Poe is Magnus the Red tier of fuckups (for the same reason too, not being trusted with the truth but with even less justification). OR ALTERNATELY : Poe actually scores a massive victory for the Resistance as he destroys a massive dreadnought that would have wiped out a base on the ground and then some with a squadron of a dozen bombers and one fighter to protect them at the price of said bombers that were so stupidly designed they would basically kamikaze as their payloads are dropped gradually meaning the first explosion would start a chain going all the way up to the bomber itself. So basically, Poe destroyed a massive enemy asset at the price of some worthless ships but he still gets demoted because he had the common sense to not follow the order to retreat as the bombers were already hovering over their target and were completely defenseless in the first place and would have been even worse off during a retreat. This order makes so little sense, it's safe to assume it was only put in here so Poe could disobey it and the audience would understand he's a hotshot who doesn't respect the hierarchy while he was in the right in terms of tactics and strategy and it's already a miracle he got the raid to succeed. Essentially, claiming Poe fucked up is like saying blowing up a pillbox full of enemy soldiers and loads of ammo stockpiled in it with a single grenade is "fucking up" because you maybe probably possibly could have saved the grenade for later and made even more damage. If Poe hadn't had the dreadnought destroyed, it would have with ease one-shotted their ships and their base if they would have even got there (especially as the First Order could track the resistance and therefore the Dreadnought would've simply followed them and blown them up immediately). Not to mention that the bombers where the worst designed starships to date. No big loss there. In other words, he is the only reason they survived. Revealed to be a former Spice smuggler who had a criminal crew in Rise Of Skywalker, which is the bulk of his character development for most of the movie since he otherwise just banters with Finn and Rey. He gets friendzoned by his ex twice (his abandonment of their crew really screwed them over and she decides to forgive him for it, so its not like its out of nowhere to not want to shag) and leads initially the small Resistance fleet before the combined forces of the militias and pirate crews and Rebel veterans suddenly show up, meaning he lead the biggest navy in the entire setting and does it well which mostly makes up for the stupidity of the Last Jedi "character arc".

• Luke Skywalker has become a grumpy old man who just wants the Jedi Order to die with him since he's been disillusioned in people not being shitty now that his shitty-feeling self is considered the least shitty person in the universe. He also tried to kill his nephew because he had a bad dream. (something many fans, and even Mark Hamill himself considered out of character for Luke). It takes a direct Force-powered intervention from Leia as well as Yoda's Force ghost telling him "don't worry, we both fucked up and the kids still love our toys legends" to get him to nut the fuck up and help stop the First Order by embarrassing Kylo Ren in front of everyone. It got to the point where he tried to burn a sacred tree with contained the last books about the Jedi code. Yoda appeared as a Force ghost and told Luke the Force weren't limited to buildings or writings, destroying the tree which supposedly contained the last books about the Jedi code and history which turns out to be because Rey had already stolen said books and the destruction of the tree prevented Luke from discovering that fact, ensuring the Jedi will continue regardless of Luke's faith crisis. Of course the old codger gets to become a Force Ghost that resides mostly on Ach-To, so lets see if we won't see our boi Mark again in some future movie or series.

• Han Solo has, unfortunately, suffer from how Harrison Ford always went back and forth on wanting to continue the franchise, mostly because he thoroughly hated Solo and wanted him to die pretty much from day one, only to be thwarted in Empire and again in Jedi by the character's popularity. Ford agreed to return for Episode 7 when Disney finally gave him his wish, having Solo fail to redeem his son Ben and getting a metaphorical and literal lightsaber through the heart for it. Post-Disney Han's origin is covered in a solo movie named Solo. It's generally considered skub.

• Leia manages to somehow survive getting shot into space using her force abilities in TLJ, probably the most ridiculous part of the film (which is no mean feat considering the rest of the film). Due to the death of her actress Carrie Fisher (given the amount of cocaine and partying she'd done over the years it was amazing Carrie lived as long as she did) Leia only appears in Episode 9 using altered unused footage from Episodes 7 and 8 along with some dubbed lines, where she's shown training Rey then just dies by fading away.

• Dinn Djarin: the titular Mandalorian from the series of the same name. Dinn belongs to a radical sect of the Mandos called the Children of the Watch, who follow an uber-conservative version of the Mandalorian Creed in which they must not allow anyone to see their faces. Dinn is still an honorable, if reserved and standoffish warrior who works for the Bounty Hunter's Guild in the post-Endor galaxy. He ends up breaking one of his contracts when he's hired to kidnap a young Jedi child named Grogu (aka Baby Yoda) and turn him over to the Imperial Remnant; Dinn instead chooses to be the child's protector and deliver him to whatever Jedi remain in the galaxy. During their adventures he bonds with the child, and eventually learns that not all Mandos follow his extreme version of the Creed, eventually removing his helmet for Grogu's sake as they tearfully part ways. But then, Disney remembered that this duo were breakout stars that gave the franchise a massive shot in the arm, so they ended up reuniting shortly after during Din's latest team-up with Boba.

• The Bad Batch: Officially known as "Clone Force 99", they're a Special Ops squad made up of clones with genetic defects that give them a tactical advantage. Initially introduced in the Clone Wars series, before getting a series of their own. Because of their unique traits they were partially immune to their Inhibitor chips and thus didn't initially obey Order 66, later getting on Tarkin's bad side for being too disobedient and getting branded as traitors. Crosshair betrays them as his inhibitor chip still works; they're joined instead by Omega, the only known female clone of Jango Fett, and apparently part of a contingency plan where she and Boba Fett were to become the new gene template for the clone army. The clones witness the rapid transformation of the Republic into the Empire as they live on the run, likely to include the "decommissioning" of the clone army as a whole. Members are:
  • Hunter: Team leader, his "trait" being enhanced senses. Hair and red headband, knife skills, and being a badass commando make his Rambo inspiration obvious. Becomes a father figure to Omega and the moral compass of the team, protecting them from their former brothers and an empire that wants them dead.
  • Wrecker: Team bruiser and man-child. Is super strong, loves a good fight, and wears bulky black and red armor with skull imagery. Though sometimes a victim of the Worf effect, he's generally allowed to be fairly cool. In keeping with his gentle giant image, he takes a shine to Omega sooner than many of the others.
  • Tech: The brainy one, which is conveyed by Dee Bradley Baker giving him an English accent. Also more mellow and less abrasive than most of the other squad, getting along fine with the "regs" who the Bad Batch as a whole often disdain and dislike working with.
  • Crosshair: Vindicaire Assassin in Star Wars, being a cold-blooded sniper with incredible aim who wears black armor and is fanatically loyal to his fascist employers. With special reflectors he can make his blaster bolts ricochet off of solid surfaces. The team's asshole, he unsurprisingly betrays them in the aftermath of Order 66, though he still cares about his former teammates in his own way, even saving Omega in the Season 1 finale. Wants the rest of the Bad Batch to join him in working for the Empire.
  • Echo: Originally a regular Clone Trooper, he was one of the titular rookies in the fan-favorite Season 1 episode, and by the end of the series was the only one still breathing. Now is a member of the Bad Batch, the cybernetic modifications he got while a prisoner of the Separatists making him more than ordinary Clone.
  • Omega: A barely useful waste of...(sees giant mouse giving evil eye)...uh, I mean, sweet, endearing kid who befriends the Bad Batch and joins them on their adventures. Revealed to be a female clone of Jango and currently the only known one, making her effectively the Bad Batch's cute little sister despite technically being OLDER than them. Main source of Bad Batch's Skub. Also blonde despite being a Jango clone, likely a subtle reference to how Jango's sister in Legends was blonde. That or she's got some of Maketh Tua's DNA thrown in.

• Cal Kestis: Young "Luke Skywalker"-type hero and ginger; the main character of the Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor vidya games. Was in hiding after Order 66 on a scrapperyard before being found by the Inquisitorius and taken on a planet-hopping treasure-hunting adventure with former Jedi master Cere Junda and the small-time smuggler Greez. Cal has the ability to use Psychometry, a Force-power that allows him to absorb memories and thoughts connected to items (a Force power made famous by Quinlan Vos), which has made it difficult to live with the lightsaber of his dead mentor. Personality is fairly stock for a Jedi, but does manage to fuck up two Inquisitors, battalions of Stormtroopers, Purge Troopers, vicious fauna and flora and the occasional bounty-hunter with nothing but a scratch on him. Has a thing for ponchos.
  • The sequel has Cal getting estranged from his friends, working with the more radical elements of the rebellion like Saw Gerrera. This changes when he hears of a world called Tanalor hidden in a Warp Storm, and begins a chase against the Bedlam Raiders, their tentacly leader and an abino Dark Jedi. As a result Cal dips into the Dark Side more than once. Between that and fighting the Empire, Cal has basically been turned into an aspect of the Eternal Champion wtih a more severe and driven personality to match.

• Cere Junda: Another Jedi who survived Order 66, she and Cal join forces on account of him being a student without a master and her being a master without a student. Has a fairly dark backstory, having been captured and tortured by the Empire, and with her Padawan having suffered the same and blaming Cere for it. Come the sequel, she's effectively become a female Mace Windu, having gone bald and become a one-woman army who shreds through dozens of Stormtroopers, Scout Troopers, and Purge Troopers and keeps winning even when AT-STs show up. It takes Vader himself to take her down, and even then she gives him about as good of a fight as Obi-Wan did more or less. She almost manages to get a mutual kill against Vader, but is unlucky enough to miss the finishing blow.

Side Characters

• C-3P0 and R2-D2: Two robots trapped in a sexless gay marriage who are the only minor characters to have been in all the movies so far, and even in stories like The Old Republic outside of their millennia of existence will usually have an equivalent. C-3P0 is the shiny golden humanoid robot who constantly fusses about keeping the furniture clean and worries that his pies are getting overdone in the oven while R2-D2 is the brash, brave husband figure who swings into action regardless. He looks like a salt shaker next to the Dalek's pepper shakers, although is he more a plucky rabbit to their rabid wild cats. He's also an angry motherfucker; in Revenge he iced two battledroids by setting them on fire, and his killcount throughout Clone Wars raises the question why the Republic isn't using R2's instead (explained nx the fact that Anakin never resets his memory and thus goes from Servitor to AI). The robots mostly have comedy roles in the movies, since they might threaten to upstage the human actors if they became too useful, though R2 has an electric cattle prod and serves as the party's computer skillmonkey, while C-3P0 saves the day with his mad linguistic skillz at least once per film in the original trilogy. They starred in their own cartoon series that was surprisingly good. In the pre-Disney EU the two are rarely joined as they are in the films. R2 frequently joins Luke on adventures, giving him someone to talk to during otherwise solo adventures, providing a Doctor Watson like figure even if the droid doesn't add much to the conversation. C-3P0 on the other hand stuck with Leia and assisted her in her duties as mother and head of state. In post Disney continuity the writers don't seem to know what to do with them and they're mostly just there; at least until Rise of Skywalker, where C-3PO's l337 tranzlation skillz are again important to the plot. Both are occasionally funny.

• Chewbacca: The original furry in space, the dog you can have a beer with in the space Winnebago. Nothing sexy about him; he is just hairy, huge, knows how to pilot a space ship, fix stuff, fire a fucking space crossbow gun, and generally get shit done which strangely makes him the coolest furry ever. Best friends with Han, has a family that we can all agree did not appear in the terrible Christmas special that does not exist (he got a much more badass family in the Galactic Battlegrounds games, so go with that). Hates Trandoshans like all Wookiees, since Trandoshans are almost always assholes and are particularly assholish to Wookiees. The prequel trilogy revealed he's REALLY FUCKING OLD thanks to Wookiee lifespan. In post-Disney lore, he is one of the few characters who has lived through the entire saga, including the Clone Wars, the rebellion against the Empire and the resistance against the First Order. In the post-Disney continuity he ultimately generally ignored in endings and the plot overall (ironic that he was the first major character who died in the pre-Disney lore and he's one of the few still alive in post-Disney lore).
  • In the pre-Disney continuity he was a slave that the then-Imperial Han saved, then he helped Han save the galaxy. He was also tough as nails having survived numerous injuries and abuse that would've killed most Wookiees, and Wookiees are already tougher than humans. His actual death was getting mooned to death by extragalactic space cenobites - as in they used a gravity manipulation device to smash a moon into the planet Vector Prime while he was accidentally trapped on it. He was hailed as a hero across the galaxy (with the boast among Wookiees that Chewbacca was so tough, it took something that can wreck a planet to kill him) and the fanbase cried or raged at his death; even the authors who killed him off went on record to say they were sad about his death and only did so for the sake of plot.

• Lando Calrissian: Suave, charismatic, and an expert con artist, this guy is the original pirate king in space. He betrays Han and co. when Vader invades his city, later regrets it, and then atones by saving the cast from the Empire as well as the populace of his city at the same time, then helps save Han from the mafia, and finally leading the fleet that blows up the Death Star 2.0. Consistently one of the only two film characters to maintain his original actor in the EU, with Billy Dee Williams showing up for video games, audio dramas, promotional shorts, and the occasional malt liquor ad.

• Yoda: Ancient wise grand master of the Jedi Order who a tiny green alien is. Never named, his species was. Because of his size and age, most assumed just a harmless old teacher he was, your nice old granddad like. His pulling out a lightsaber and engaging a Sith Lord in combat at the end of Attack of the Clones, one of the most surprising and popular fights of the series is. Incredibly powerful in the Force, he is, rivaled by the likes of Anakin Skywalker and Darth Sideous. Became a big franchise mascot he did, despite a surprise for the audience he was meant to be in his first appearance, ruining it for future generations. A unique way of speaking, he has. A very popular target for parody, it has become (though the original trilogy indicated it was just one of many things he was doing to annoy Luke as a test, since he doesn't talk that way to Obi-Wan). A symbol of the Jedi Order's blindness and rigidity in the prequel era, he was. But had a spiritual reawakening, after his journey following the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn. Even after death, a wise mentor he became.

• Wedge Antilles: The anti-redshirt. Has almost no lines in the original movies but somehow survives all of them, even blowing up the second Death Star with Lando. In the EU he is one of, if not the best starfighter pilot in the galaxy, and co-founder of the über elite Rogue Squadron along with Luke. It also establishes he was the son of humble (mobile) gas station owners who got killed by pirates. After tracking down and killing the pirates, he tried to live to a normal life, but failed when Imperials killed his alliance sympathizing girlfriend. Eventually rises to General after realizing his refusing promotions was screwing the career of everyone under him. Has a weakness of being more of a tactician than a strategist, which extends to his personal character which often fails to see the big picture. The other character to maintain his original actor in most EU works.

• Admiral Ackbar: Giant tactical fish who has the need to point out obvious traps in memetic fashion. Leads the rebel fleet in the sixth film. Dies in the eighth. He has a huge fanbase despite only appearing in a few scenes across the entire film saga and is one of the meme-faces of the fandom alongside Obi-Wan, Anakin and Palpatine. His survival and high rank made him quite prominent in the EU's New Republic works. Pre-Disney was much of the same except he died during the Yuuzhan Vong War (the same war that led to Chewie's death in the Legends).

• Jar-Jar Binks: Solely exists to fuck up everything (and we do mean EVERYTHING) at the worst possible moment. This guy is so hated by everyone in and out of universe that his actor received severe backlash - including death threats, and he even considered suicide because of it - even though he had nothing to do with the writing while also sympathizing with fans' complaints and Lucas shitcanned his role down into a very brief cameo at the end of Episode 3. He's actually something of a tragic figure representing someone good who tries to act to save the galaxy but ended up ruining it instead. All of this only gets more palm-to-head-worthy since Jar Jar was created as a fun kids characters, rather than anything truly important... But of course, neckbeards gotta rage. Got a depressing meta style sendoff in the Aftermath book after Disney got the rights, which is a shame since it was hinted at in the Clone Wars series that he would marry a powerful alien queen who thinks he's a sex magnet. No really.
  • To those wondering why Jar-Jar is so hated, there's a multitude of reasons. Firstly, he's a clear "comic relief/child appeal" type character, speaking in a heavily accented language, being clumsy and bumbling, and just generally being clearly intended to appeal to the little kiddies and annoying the older watchers. Secondly, he has a bad record of making decisions that end up causing great problems for the rest of the characters... as in, this guy was one of the people who proposed they make Palpatine the Supreme Chancelor, so he is, from a certain point of view, the guy who let the Empire come into being.

• Mace Windu: The original only black dude in space (because everyone forgot about Lando), he was the hardest-as-nails Jedi master of the council during the prequel trilogy and the best swordfighter in the Order, hence his unique purple lightsaber. That, and Sam Jackson wanted his own color to stand out. If Anakin hadn't interfered, he would have killed Darth Sidious and none of the original trilogy would have taken place. His subsequent anti-climatic death in the movie is regarded with annoyance by his fans. His mastery of the Force allows him to channel his anger and enjoyment of battle into his combat style without being corrupted by the Dark Side, basically getting as close to the Dark Side a Jedi can get and still be a Jedi. He can also detect what he calls "shatterpoints", which lets him detect weaknesses to either mess people up in combat or exploit the "for want of a nail" proverb to turn situations to his side. Has a novel, Shatterpoint, which is pretty much Heart of Darkness IN STAR WARS.

• CT-7567/Captain Rex: If the Clone Troopers are the equivalent of Guardsmen, then this guy is the equivalent of the likes of Gaunt and Straken. The defacto second-in-command of the 501st Legion under Anakin Skywalker, he fought in nearly every major engagement during the Clone Wars, leading his men through hellish battles like on Geonosis at the beginning of the war and on Mandalore at the end. He has a strong sense of morality and cares for the lives of both the men under him and the officers above him, which meant that he often came into conflict with asshat commanders like the Jedi knight Krell (who treated their troops as little more than disposable cannon fodder). He even managed to face off against dark-side Force users and live- something very few non-Force users are able to accomplish (To get a better picture of what this is like, imagine a sergeant in the guard facing off against a Chaos Space Marine, and living). After the war and his beloved Republic's transformation into the eventually-despised Empire, he and two other clone commanders went into retirement on a backwater world, fishing for worms the size of skyscrapers on an old walker they converted into a mobile home. He was brought out of retirement by a combination of the rebels of Phoenix Squadron, his old friend and commander Ahsoka, and the Empire being their usual backstabbing, overreactive selves, and so resolved to bring down the corrupt regime and restore the nation he had served out of pride (although most clones were programmed to follow the Republic, and specifically the Chancellor, many ended up choosing instead to follow the ideals of the Republic rather than the people in charge, and some even managed to overcome Palpatine's programming via removing the chip he had planted in their heads during the cloning process). To that end, he participated in many Rebel missions. Making him the old man you see with Han Solo's commando group in RoTJ was toyed with, but ultimately rejected due to the character already having an identity in the EU and him having the wrong ethnicity.

• Aayla Secura: The space waifu of many a generation of star wars fanboys. A hot Twi'lek jedi chick who dressed skimpy and kicked butt. She was such a popular side character that Lucas took notice of her and added into the second and third prequel movies. Her reason for ditching the traditional jedi robes and showing her midriff was to show pride in Twi'lek culture, as her race tends to be viewed primarily as slaves rather than as an important part of the galaxy. Much like Ahsoka, she wasn't entirely defined by being a hot chick, but had other redeeming characteristics that made her likable, like being mechanically inclined, kind, wise, and somewhat mischievous. Much like Captain Rex, she had a great relationship with clones under her command, and it was rumored she and her Clone Commander had a romantic attachment to each other. Suffers from two tragedies: her death in Revenge of the Sith was brutal, and Disney hasn't done anything with her character since they acquired the franchise. In pre-Disney continuity, Aayla and Jedi master Kit Fisto were rumored to have a romantic attachment to each other.

• Mon Mothma: A former Chandrilan senator and the political leader of the Rebel Alliance. She even had a movie appearance (the woman that presented the plan to take down the second Death Star in Episode 2) so that means, she is still canon! She, Padmé and Bail Organa were the heads of a small movement in the dying months of the Republic that sought to keep Palpatines power in check. The EU depicted her as a capable politician who managed to secure a lot of undercover support for the Rebellion, but had a bad habit of thinking too highly of herself, especially when Organa died when Alderaan was destroyed. This alienated Barm Gel Iblis, the leader of the Corellian faction of the Alliance, as she frequently put military matters on her to-do list while having no experience in that field (also kind of puts the Battle of Endor into a new perspective, an obvious trap that the Rebels only got out of due to sheer fucking luck). What she did after Endor in the canon timeline is unknown, in the EU she became the first chancellor of the New Republic after the Rebels managed to liberate most of the core worlds, including Coruscant, from the Imperial Remnants.

Disney Side Characters

• BB-8: The R2-D2 replacement and mascot of the new trilogy. Poe's buddy robot, started out as the plot device that the First Order was after in The Force Awakens, saves Finn and Rose's asses twice by taking down prison guards and piloting an AT-ST to attack Stormtroopers in The Last Jedi as well as Poe's in the comic. Saves Rey in Rise and reactivates a small antique droid companion that can speak Common AKA English, giving him his own C-3PO.

• Maz Kanata: An orange alien who knows a lot about the Force. In her backstory she was a Force-sensitive that’s somewhere in Yoda-tier age, but was never trained as a Jedi and instead used her talents to survive among the “third faction” (Hutts, smugglers, mafias, Mandos) while remaining as friendly to the “light side” factions as Hutts are to the “Dark Side” factions. Apparently also a supreme badass, judging from her brief appearance in TLJ. Definitely fucked Chewbacca and somehow survived. She procured Anakin’s/Luke’s blue lightsaber from the depths of the Bespin gas giant simply because she wanted it, and gave it to Rey in Force Awakens as well as some grandmotherly advice to her and Rey. She appears briefly to give the heroes contact information for a codebreaker in The Last Jedi. Joins the Resistance proper for the final movie, but not actually doing much onscreen other than spending some time with Leia.

• Saw Gerrara: Originally a member of the Space Viet Cong, this guy doesn't fuck around. Torture civilians? Check. Massacre entire patrols of Imperials? Check. In fact, his methods were considered so extreme that even the Rebel Alliance wanted nothing to do with him. Strictly speaking, he's a pre-Disney character as his first appearance on-screen was as part of the Clone Wars TV series; his first episode airing the same month that Disney acquired the franchise, making him one of the few characters to make the transition from the small screen to the big screen. Though he gets deaded within the first 30 minutes of Rogue One and does absolutely nothing of any value other than hinder the protagonists long enough to pad the run time, he has a lot more of his back-story filled out in the Rebels TV series. He was played by actor Forest Whitaker, so at least there's that.

• Sabine Wren: One of the main protagonists from the Star Wars Rebels show. A Mandalorian woman with a flair for art, explosions, and kicking Imperial ass, she is probably one of the most recognizable characters from the animated side of Disney canon. At first, she was a patriotic Imperial, designing weapons for the Emperor and his vassal ruler for Mandalore, Gar Saxon, until Gar decided to test one of her weapons on a group of Mandalorians, leading her to be labeled an oath-breaker by her people and cast out from her home-planet of Krownest by her mom. She then spends the events of the TV-series with her new surrogate family, the crew of the rebel freighter *Ghost*, and eventually recovers an ancient sword revered by her people, leading her to reconcile with her past, her birth family, and her people. Now, after the Battle of Endor, she is on a quest with Ahsoka Tano to find her 'totally-not-boyfriend', the Jedi Ezra Bridger, and Grand Admiral Thrawn, as they disappeared into the Unknown Regions following the events of the series finale. Was considered "another Disney female Mary Sue" until she acquired some nice depth in the last season of Rebels, however event before that their are several good moments with her such as her getting captured by Sith Inquisitors and used against Ezra and her fights with Kanan. Overall she is a very likable character and one of the better characters in Rebels.

• Amilyn Holdo: An overbearing, purple-haired “Rebel hero” and one of the key admirals of the Resistance. If you don't like the direction the Disney canon is going in, this character is your Jar Jar Binks and probably is to you even if you do approve/tolerate it. Her only role was to basically die in style but unfortunately she was pretty forgettable and nobody actually cared when she was atomized, even if it was a really fucking cool death. Tie-in material tried to fix this; the only real requirement for joining the Resistance was "didn’t think Leia was crazy for thinking the First Order was going to perform Star Wars 9/11”, and Holdo was only the captain of a small frigate before her battlefield promotion due to the entire chain of command other than the other frigate commander dying or being incapacitated by a single torpedo blast to the bridge of the Resistance flagship. As a matter of fact, her "super-duper secret plan" ends up getting most of the Resistance killed after Finn and Poe fuck it up, due to the fact that she decided to not tell the freshly demoted highest ranking pilot who had just lost the resistance the last of their bombers her plan, causing him to mutiny, and she only partially redeems herself via FTL ramming their command ship into the First Order command ship, destroying most of the FO fleet, which is briefly visually spectacular but fluff-wise highly.... take a guess. In the original script there was a subplot about there actually being a First Order spy aboard with the audience knowing in advance that there was a plan that spy could have ruined, but in an absolutely stunning display of terrible choices none of it was even filmed and the story was not changed to cut the references to that dropped plot.

• Rose Tico: A maintenance worker who acts as a tagalong for some of the most boring and annoying parts of The Last Jedi. After losing her sister in the beginning of the movie, she catches her idol Finn (who has apparently become something of a celebrity within the Resistance over the course of the week or so since he defected) trying to desert ship in order to warn Rey not to rendezvous as they were being chased by the First Order's fleet since Leia had given her a beacon indicating a rendezvous point (something that is entirely forgotten about for the rest of the movie, since Rey doesn't even use it to meet up with the Resistance at the end). She later went along with Finn to the Gilded Age planet to find the expert capable of helping them deactivate the First Order's tracking system, and despite literally growing up on a planet like that she still thinks its a great idea to just park their fighter on a luxury beach and run straight into a casino full of arms dealers wearing their military uniforms which results in the two being arrested and meeting a random criminal who sells the two out to the First Order because he overhears them literally explain their entire situation, despite the aforementioned "growing up as either a slave or a poor servant, its kind of unclear" backstory which means she should probably know more than the guy who literally only knows life as a Stormtrooper about shit like that. Her lust for Finn's BBC drives her to cockblock his heroic sacrifice on Salt Hoth before confessing his love for him at the worst possible moment in a plot point that will likely go nowhere. Also delivers the worst line in the entirety of the franchise: "That's how we are going to win. Not fighting what we hate, saving what we love." Which is even worse because Finn was not fighting a hated foe since he has no hatred towards his enemies and was instead just sacrificing himself for the people he loves. This quantum singularity of bullshit led to a substantial fraction of TLJ's backlash being directed at her actress despite the fact that she had nothing to do with writing any of it. Said backlash also basically single-handedly torpedoing whatever reputation the Star Wars fandom had with the greater public prior to this. Was an interesting character- how some heroes could come from unlikely places- that got handed shit writing in a movie that was way too crowded with a huge ensemble to begin with, and almost zero development. In The Rise Of Skywalker, instead of giving pithy speeches about love and being oppressed she spends her time doing actual ground crew technician work between battles, when characters are meeting to plan their next move she speaks like a high-ranking member of the Resistance (by process of elimination, but still), and the most important thing; she actually gets to participate in a battle and shoots some motherfuckers in an attempt address the "her figures don't sell" problem. The plot point of her being in love with Finn is not addressed, like in any way at all, and she has very little screentime so she's pretty much been simultaneously upgraded/downgraded into being the Wedge to Finn's Luke. That last part didn't go over well with a lot of people given her bigger role in VIII, leading to accusations that IX was pandering to the /pol/ crowd by giving Rose so little to say or do. Despite (or maybe because of), getting shafted in the movies proper, the actress has proven fairly game about reprising her role in voice-acting for various projects.

• Torra Doza: D.Va in Star Wars. No seriously. Young female, wears a blue and white bodysuit with gloves, is a pilot, likes video games, cheerful personality, she's got it all...except for being in something that's actually popular. Unfortunately, Torra had the bad luck to be a character in the widely reviled Star Wars: Resistance, which basically guaranteed a status as Skub at best and hated at worst.

• Merrin: Hot Nightsister goth babe who is actually the last survivor of her people after the Separatists wiped them out in the Clone Wars cartoon. Initially manipulated by Taron Malicos into helping her, Cal Kestis is able to get her to side with him, at which point she joins him. As a Nightsister, she can use the Force in ways the average Jedi and Sith can't, making her a powerful ally. Swings both ways, but eventually partners up with Cal in the sequel after much, much, MUCH ship-tease.

Villains

• Darth Sidious/Sheev "Can't Peeve the Sheev" Palpatine/The Emperor: A creepy old wrinkly dude who sits in his badass evil throne constantly screaming "Just as planned!" And occasionally frying fools with force lightning. And the irony about him is that he hails from one of the setting's biggest pacifistic paradises, Naboo, yet still turned out completely evil. About on par with Nagash in terms of plain assholery (not to mention being crazy powerful). Built a giant planet-destroying weapon, then built another, bigger one as a trap when the first one blew up. He is very clever, managing to scheme and outwit everyone in the prequel trilogy (not particularly hard, given that every good guy in the prequels was written to be a complete dunce), moving them all into place so he could take over the galaxy (although he still needed a big superweapon anyway to hold onto said power) in the original trilogy and even manages to make everything move to his design in the sequel trilogy. Chews so much scenery they had to resort to computer-generated imagery. He is the Senate. His survival in the third Disney film was so baffling and unexplained that even the characters had to admit that it made no sense; then again, he was only brought back because Disney had no other choice, having killed off Snoke too soon and Kylo Ren not being a credible enough villain on his own.

• Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin: Tywin Lannister IN SPHESS (although, given that Star Wars came first it might be more accurate to say Tywin is Tarkin in Grimdark Fantasy). Ruthless, ambitious, and cold, Grand Moff (Governor) Tarkin is the epitome of all that is Imperial in the SW Universe, and represents all the non-Sith elements that makes the Empire so evil. Started out as a career officer in the republican navy, became promoted by Palpatine after he put down early resistance movements against the Empire with ruthless efficiency (including literally crushing protestors with a Star Destroyer). The Clone Wars also showed that he briefly served under Anakins command, where their philosophies showed be to quite compatible (Tarkins cold pragmatism combined with Anakins fierce determination to get the job done at any cost) and became the basis of a deep mutual respect for one another. Also happens to be one of the few characters outside of the force users to figure out that Vader was Anakin on his own. His idea of ruling pretty much comes down to "They can hate me as long as they fear me", which is symbolized ultimately by the Death Star. However, he uses the stick far too often and hardly uses the carrot, and this policy backfires on him horribly when he destroys Alderaan, a Core World and one of the founders of the Old Republic- for instead of cowing the galaxy into submission, it, along with the Battle of Yavin which saw himself and his battle-station destroyed, galvanized half the galaxy into openly declaring for the Alliance. Before the Prequels rewrote the origins of the Imperial superweapon programs entirely, he pioneered the idea of weapons like the Death Star and worked hard to lobby political support from Palpatine and the military for their construction, and was the man in charge for a great number of military R&D developments until his death.

• Jango and Boba Fett: Father and son, though the son is actually an unaltered clone of his father. Badass, mostly-silent mercs who get shit done and come from a line of Spartan/Viking/Māori warriors in space called Mandalorians. Mandos are real hardasses who can go toe-to-toe with Jedi, and the Fetts were no exception. Sadly, both had very anticlimactic deaths, though Boba survived his in the EU, through the power of being too popular with the audience to kill permanently, later having his survival added to Disney Canon. With both of his former employers dead (Jabba and the Empire), and having just survived a fate worse than death and separation from his father's armor, Boba seems to have had time to reconsider his past decisions. He becomes an honorary Tusken after helping out a Tusken tribe that kept him alive, and after getting his armor back from Din Djaren, decides to take Jabba's old position as crimelord of Tatooine. Despite being Jabba's number one enforcer for years, he finds the job a lot harder than it looks, fending off Hutts and local gangs while trying to live up to his Mandalorian heritage and sense of honor. Both of them, especially Boba, are long-time fan-favorites, but there is also a very vocal and obstinate faction of haters who never shut up about Boba Fett's falling into the Sarlaac and his limited role in the movies proper. No matter how many times Boba's survival and numerous showings of badassery outside of the movies are pointed out, you can count on the Fett haters to stick to their guns as stubbornly as an Imperial Guardsman down to his last lasgun rounds. Sadly, the underperformance of Book of Boba Fett has ensured that the Fett-bashing is likely to continue, with Boba's softer characterization being one of the main points of contention.

• Jabba the Hutt: Obese slug who is a cross between a Mexican drug cartel kingpin and Mafia crime-boss. He runs his criminal enterprise from an old palace-monastery on Tatooine. A /d/eviant at heart, likes to fap to hot alien chicks dancing for him until they try to escape, then faps even harder when he feeds said chicks to Rancor. His power is such that the Republic, and later the Empire, had to negotiate with him to be able to have some influence in the Outer Rim, because even Sheev Palpatine knows that you don't do shit in the Outer Rim without dealing with the Hutts first. Gets strangled to death by a bikini-wearing Leia with her own chains, because symbolism. In short, he's one of Slaanesh's despite looking like one of Nurgle's.

• Thrawn: *Star Wars Creed, if Creed was also a philosophical blue-skinned, red-eyed alien who loved art. Originally introduced in the pre-Disney EU/Legends, Thrawn was so popular Disney soon brought him back into the Disney canon (with a few tweaks to his story). Thrawn was renowned for being one of the few high-ranking aliens in the Galactic Empire and one of the Emperor's best subjects. He originally served as a member of the Chiss Ascendancy, but after being backstabbed (Disney canon retconned this into a ploy; he's still loyal to the Chiss, but pretended to be an exile so he can use the Empire as a buffer state) he signed up with the Galactic Empire and worked with Darth Vader - having met him back when the latter was still a Jedi - and even the Emperor himself. In his tactics, Thrawn notably employed his analysis based around understanding the philosophy and art of his enemies, and was a very capable commander. Always one step ahead of his opponents, Thrawn would frequently outplay both rebels and political rivals by anticipating their actions well in advance, sometimes even using their own plans against them. Literally the only things that can stop Thrawn are things he can't anticipate or control like The Force (and he even found an effective countermeasure for the Force in the form of some Force-resistant Sloths) or spontaneous insubordination. Thrawn quickly became very well-liked with fans, to the point many considered him the best thing to come from Star Wars since the original trilogy.
  • He also set up a vassal Empire called "the Empire of the Hand" to combat an alien menace encroaching on Chiss territory that was considered a threat to the Empire; pre-Disney this was the Yuuzhan Vong (AKA the Far Outsiders, AKA the space cenobites who killed Chewbacca by dropping a moon on him), post-Disney it's Vong-knockoffs called the Grysk. Pre-Disney Thrawn was killed by the betrayal of his Noghri bodyguard but he is alive and well post-Disney, and was last seen when Ezra used the Force and space whales to yeet Thrawn's ship into the unknown regions with all of them on board. His actual name is the near-unpronounceable Mitth'raw'nuruodo. With his philosophical nature and fetish for art collecting, he's probably a deliberate ripoff of M'Quve from Mobile Suit Gundam, but good luck getting Zahn to admit it.
  • Out of all the Empire's elite command, Thrawn stands out not just for being a tactical genius, but also for being a stone-cold pragmatist without falling into Tarkin's genocidal dickery or Vader's open disdain for his own men. He prefers to handle situations with subtlety and long-term success rather than with violence or cruelty for short-term gains (though he'll use the latter if he thinks it's required). Had he not been saddled with working for such an openly tyrannical dictatorship, he could easily have been a more heroic (if ruthless) military leader when faced with an actual threat to the galaxy at large.

• Gilad Pellaeon: The Watson to Thrawn's Sherlock, Pellaeon was a veteran Imperial Navy Officer in the Legends canon with a career stretching from the Clone Wars to the Vong War. Well liked in-universe and out for being a reasonable, fair-minded person with a sense of honor. Basically the complete opposite of guys like Tarkin. As such, he often gets the role of "Token Good Imperial", with the implication that Thrawn was setting Pellaeon up as his successor.

• Count Dooku: An elegant, charismatic, gentlemanly Sith lord and master fencer who had dreams of liberating the galaxy from Republic control, but didn't expect his partner in crime to be a backstabbing douchebag (seeing how he was a full-blown Sith Lord by the time of Attack of the Clones, he really should have seen that coming). Was born as a planetary noble, but gave it all up when he became a Jedi, only to get it all back when he gave up being a Jedi to lead the secessionist movement against the Senate's corruption. In spite of all his unethical activities, including assassination plots against virtuous Separatists while actively promoting war criminals in the CIS military, Dooku genuinely believed that the New Order was going to wipe away corruption in the galaxy, and that even the Jedi would have a place once enough of them saw things his way. Turns out, Palpatine had been playing him just like everyone else during the Clone Wars. Hates Anakin/Vader for not being a gentleman.
  • In the novels he's also an alien-hating human supremacist who believes the Empire's purpose is to establish humanity as dominant in GFFA; He'd do well as a citizen of the Imperium if he just changed which Emperor he revered. While actually a very cool villain in the EU, because he was so underdeveloped and underused in the movies proper, most younger or more casual fans (IE: anyone who hates or doesn't care about the EU), tend to dismiss him as boring, making Dooku the "unfavorite" of Palpatine's three apprentices despite being played by Saruman himself, Sir Christopher Lee (RIP).

• Darth Maul: Horned Sith primarily concerned with bloodshed and fighting. He'd do well as a Khornate Champion. Had his legs cut off then was brought back more badass than ever, making him obsessed with getting revenge on Obi-Wan, as well as Sideous for casting him aside. He creates a massive criminal syndicate and even conquering the Mandalorians to create a small army that posed a serious threat to Sidious' plans; that is, until he was utterly stomped by Sidious himself, then gets killed in a duel with an elderly Obi-wan almost 18 years later. Wields a sick-looking double-bladed lightsaber, doesn't actually gets a single line in the first film dubbed in by a different actor, and played by famous martial arts master Ray Park. He was a silent badass in the movie but for some reason he was made very talkative in the animated series. The EU gave him a backstory as the scion of a species of Sith-aligned Force witches that The Clone Wars later made canon. The director of Solo picked him out of a hat to be the leader of the nefarious criminal gang Han gets stuck working with, which is not unreasonable given his previously established connections. Despite being a rage-filled maniac, the TV shows gave him a lot of depth, as he recognizes that there are bigger forces at play in the universe, and by the time of his death, puts his hope in the Skywalkers finally defeating Sidious.
  • In the Legends canon, he was resurrected by some Dark Side cultists very shortly before A New Hope and sicced on Darth Vader so the writer could have an excuse to give the fans the fight they'd been clamoring for since 1999. Vader sent Maul back to the grave, but not easily. Then his brain was salvaged by some mad scientist and kept alive (somehow), with Maul interacting with the world in a limited way through holographic projections. Luke Skywalker pulled the plug on it though, letting Maul finally die for good.

• General Grievous: An alien cyborg even more fucked up than what Darth Vader would become (being a robot body that was a canister for his eyes, brain, and vital organs), Grievous was the Supreme Commander of the Droid Army during the Prequels and the Clone Wars TV series (both versions), and a sadistic Jedi hunter. His competence is usually portrayed two totally different ways; in the 2D animated TV series (created by the same guy who made Samurai Jack), and other EU material created prior to the second Clone Wars cartoon, he is portrayed as an awesome, unstoppable killing machine who roflstomps Jedi left and right, can even outduel experienced Jedi Masters, and is only bested by Mace "The Ace" Windu. In the third film and especially the CG Clone Wars show, he is an incompetent, froth-mouthed imbecile with a record of failure that even Abaddon would laugh at hysterically and a win/loss record in combat that would make an Avatar of Khaine shake its head in disgust. Sadly, the latter was what Lucas originally intended him to be - even if the former is way more awesome. By the end of the Clone Wars, Grievous and his atrocities against civilians became the public face of the Separatist cause (while Dooku kept Grievous actions a secret from his allies); The death mask of Grievous became a potent symbol in Imperial propaganda in order to associate resistance to the Empire with the horrors of the Clone Wars - just as Palpatine intended. Ironically, in Legends the Empire gave copies of GG's mask to some of their secret weapons (Terror Troopers and Terror Biodroids namely).
  • Actually has a somewhat-tragic past in Legends: he was a great and virtuous hero on his primitive planet, but Dooku arranged for the Separatists to shoot Grievous' shuttle down and harvested his shredded body to repurpose him into their general/assassin. Dooku also lobotomized Grievous in way that reduced him to a raging killer. When Grievous recovered, Dooku then pinned blame for the shuttle crash on the Jedi and Republic, turning him into the OG raging murder-machine we all know and love. In all, a considerably more grimdark past than his other versions.
  • In the second Clone Wars cartoon, his backstory is kept vague, but Grievous claims he deliberately chose to become a cyborg in order to become better at killing Jedi (and actually becoming extremely good at it, at least in the first CW, where he cuts down four Jedi with ease). Hated being mistaken for a droid, being compared to a droid and all Jedi - especially Obi-Wan Kenobi. His competence ping-pongs around even more violently than before: Grievous loses to a barely-trained Padawan, can't definitively outduel Adi Gallia despite killing her easily in the original canon, and getting taken down by the fucking Gungan army under Jar Jar and Captain Tarpals in a couple episodes while committing on-screen genocide against the Nightsisters and going toe-to-toe with the likes of Kit Fisto and Obi-Wan in other episodes. He was voiced by one of the folks at Lucasarts, who submitted his audition under an alias to make sure he'd get a fair shake. Along with Anthony Daniels, he reprises his role more often than most other Star Wars movie actors.

• Clone Troopers: The predecessors of the Storm Troopers. These soldiers were vat clones of Mandalorian bounty hunter Jango Fett cloned in large numbers, trained from birth in combat and clad in environmentally sealed suits of their famous gleaming white full body armor. Despite being genetically engineered to be perfectly obedient automatons, the Jedi they served under encouraged their individuality, and they began giving themselves names and unique tattoos and haircuts. But when Palpatine activated their inhibitor chips via Order 66, the clones' autonomy was completely overridden (the effect appears to only last a couple weeks, but it is extremely intense) and they executed the Jedi without hesitation. The original clonetroopers served the Republic against the Separatists, and were turned into the stormtroopers after Palpatine's total take-over. A very small minority of clones had their chips successfully removed and fought against the Empire, especially those who formed close bonds with their Jedi generals or local freedom fighters, but the vast majority of the Clones were more loyal to Palpatine than to the Republic itself, and didn't need much convincing to stick with the Empire, with or without inhibitor chips.
  • Various sources (even within legends) disagree on the exact reasons why Palpatine replaced the clone troopers: the rebels blew up the gene-banks, the Kaminoans rebelled and created their own clone army, the clones were too susceptible to targeted genome-based biological weapons, or that the clones served their purpose and were too expensive to maintain, especially with their accelerated aging. Remaining Clones either were retired, served as instructors and in the case of the Commandos and the 501st Legion (having proven their loyalty and competence over and over, including at the Kamino uprising), kept serving in pure Fett-template units as Vader's personal enforces. Even they were retired after Hoth due to being too old.
  • In Disney Canon, the clones were expendable once they served their purpose of killing the Jedi; removing them from the equation freed up resources for the Death Star and reduced the Empire's dependency on Kamino's cloning facilities. However, enough clones started to mutiny or desert that the Imperial military accelerated their replacement with recruited Stormtroopers. Some speculate that activating the Inhibitor Chip also made Clones worse soldiers due to their behavioral modification, though this is unconfirmed.
  • The old EU canon had a different take on why the Troopers had little trouble with executing Order 66; where the order was merely one of many (151 in total) contingency plans that would be enacted by either the chancellor or the senate if the existence of the Republic or the functioning of its governing institutions were vitally threatened (the irony was certainly not lost on Palpatine) and were just part of the normal training program of the soldiers. Order 66 was buried under plans for events like the Senate being blown up, the Chancellor becoming incapacitated, Coruscant being destroyed etc. What made Order 66 so insidious was that the Jedi thought it was a protection against renegade force users (not unheard of with Dooku and Ventress running around) and that Palpatine masterminded his scheme in such a way that the legal prerequisites of Order 66 - Jedi staging a coup against the Chancellor or the Senate, which technically was what happened when Windu attacked Palpatine (even more explicitly so in the Novelization, where Windu planned to install the Jedi council as an interim government until the Senate would elect a new chancellor) - was fulfilled with no one there to question it. Combined with the Troopers inherent psychological conditioning and more than one Commander holding serious grudges against many Jedi ensured that the Order would not be questioned even by those Clones who were fond of their generals.
• Stormtroopers: The soldiers of the Galactic Empire. Unlike the Clone Troopers, the vast majority of the stormtroopers are enlisted, typically from the underclasses of war-torn and impoverished worlds. Contrary to popular belief, Stormtroopers are not the rank and file in the Imperial army, they're closer to a mix of marines and Waffen-SS in terms of function. There's technically an Imperial Army apart from the Stormtroopers, though you'd be forgiven for having never heard of them, because most writers of the franchise tend to forget they exist too. Either way, Stormtroopers are a step down in quality from Clone Troopers (including their armor, with a surviving clone trooper making a point of how awful it is compared to his old wargear), but by this point the Empire didn't really need that many high-quality soldiers when it was more concerned with keeping civilian populations under its thumb. Since the First Order doesn't have a good dental plan to bring in recruits, they instead resort to kidnapping or buying children and raising them as soldiers to fill their mook quota. They are unwaveringly loyal and obedient to the Empire, ruthless and brutally efficient foes in combat, and incredibly precise shots with their state-of-the-art weapons. And like the Clones, their primary loyalty was to Palpatine, not the Empire, and were discouraged from using their names or fraternizing with members of their unit. Naturally, these qualities all go out the window when they encounter the protagonists, but that's life when you're wearing a helmet.
  • There are some explanations as to the inconsistency in Stormtrooper quality; one is that the Imperial army is so vast that quality differences are inevitable. Stormtroopers that are an actual threat will defend the core worlds or accompany the more "serious" units, such as the 501st legion. Lesser recruits get sent to rim world backwaters or meat grinder conflicts, making them easier prey for the odd band of rebels or pirates. The rebels learned the hard way, though, that trying to fight a conventional way against the former was just asking for trouble (the Battle of Hoth being the biggest defeat in their history). That being said, by the Original Trilogy, the Empire hadn't fought a war even close to the scale of the Clone Wars before the Rebellion, so there were a lot of inexperienced troopers as well.
  • Amusingly enough, Legends indicates that many of the Clone Troopers that actually stayed with the Galactic Empire hated the Stormtroopers, considering them a pack of incompetent idiots with no sense of their surroundings and terrible aim (which can be taken as a canonization of their memetically awful competence). One source even had Commander Cody (yes, that guy from Revenge of the Sith and the Clone Wars CGI cartoon) stating that he'd sacrifice an entire platoon of Stormtroopers for one real Clone Trooper and noting that Fett would probably kill the lot of them himself.
  • Lastly, these boys comes in literally all the flavors. Variants based on environments (Snow, Desert, Shore and many more) and roles (Heavy, Incinerator, Commando and the elite Death Troopers), ensuring that the Star Wars brand always has a new bunch of cool soldier dudes to make toys off of. When things has to get really dangerous for the heroes, the elite variants are brought in, like the Storm Commandoes, Death Troopers and (in Episode IX), Sith Troopers (no relation to the troops of the same name used by the Sith Empires pre-dating Palpatine). For a (mostly) complete list, see here.

• Inquisitorius: Darksiders trained by the Empire. While the Rule of Two prevents additional Sith Lords, it says nothing about other force users under their command, especially if they're not given full access to Sith lore and thus can't properly challenge Sith Lords on equal footing. It is not known if Darth Bane expected the Imperial Inquisition or if he would have approved of the Emperor bending the Rule of Two such. Their job is primarily to ferret out the remaining Jedi and other force users, but they are also used for all manner of wet work and internal affairs. Since their first mention way back in The Star Wars Sourcebook, they have served as enemy force users that while still dire threats could still conceivably be defeated by the player characters; while an Inquisitor would definitely be a threat to an undertrained Padawan or broken Jedi, the fact that they can only draw from the Dark Side in a more limited way makes them an easier foe to deal with than Vader. And even the Inquisitors know first-hand that there's no winning in a fight against Vader. The source of many prominent antagonists in the expanded universe, including Jerec.

Disney Villains

• The Inquisitors: The Disney version of the above, here reimagined as fallen Jedi who have taken up hunting their fellows for the Empire and wielding spinning double-bladed lightsabers while doing so. Actually rock a pretty boss set of designs overall, but sadly most of them are underdeveloped in both personality and backstory, with the exception of the Grand Inquisitor and Fallen Order's Second Sister. Composed of about a dozen members, with the Grand Inquisitor at their head and the other members having a "brother/sister" naming system. The Grand Inquisitor is noteworthy for actually being a former Jedi Temple Guardian, who willingly betrayed the Jedi prior to Order 66 by murdering his fellow Guardians as he felt slighted by not being allowed into the forbidden archives. Despite being killed off, Vader resurrected him as captive Force Ghost to serve as a trap for surviving Jedi, with the ghost noting that he was caught in a fate worse than death. The rest of the Inquisitors were killed off one by one, with Palpatine apparently not recruiting replacements, either because he felt that the Inquisitors were too weak or because they'd already purged all potential force users. By the Original Trilogy, the Inquisitorious appears to have been either disbanded entirely or severely reduced in size, as there were hardly any surviving Jedi left to hunt down, and in the end Vader took over much of their role, especially since they were not full Sith they were much weaker in power potential.
  • Grand Inquisitor: Head honcho. An Pau'an who used to be a Jedi Temple Guard before going bad. Voiced by Lucius Malfoy / Admiral Zhao and similarly evil. By far the coolest (and most competent), villain in Season 1 of Rebels, so of course they killed him off. Also shows up in live action in Kenobi where Third Sister stabs him, but his showing up in Rebels later suggests he walked it off, which was confirmed outright in Episode 5 of the Kenobi mini-series. His spirit is cursed by Vader to continue serving him in death as a trap for Jedi, and was only defeated by Luke Skywalker during his search for a replacement lightsaber after The Empire Strikes Back.
  • Second Sister: Main villain of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and as mentioned above, easily one of the more well-developed of the bunch besides GI himself. Once the Padawan of Cal's mentor in the game Cere, and hates her something fierce for feeling abandoned by her, leading to the Empire capturing her and giving her the Inquisition / Dark Eldar treatment. Just when it seems like she might make amends with Cere, Vader, unhappy that Second Sister failed him, cuts her down on the spot.
  • Third Sister: Another one of the better fleshed-out Inquisitors. One of the main villains of Kenobi series on Disney+, hunting him in the hope that Vader will give her a promotion in exchange...or so it seems. Turns out she actually just wants a chance to get close to Vader so she can kill him for murdering her fellow Younglings during Knightfall. But of course, Vader's way out of her weight-class. Can pose and parkour like a superhero, and has a bad temper even by Dark Side standards. Character and actress got crap from the usual offenders. The original script gave her less confusing motivations as she didn't know that Anakin was Vader and she blamed him and the Jedi Council for causing Order 66, so she was a more willing (if misled) participant in all the atrocities she'd commit as an Inquisitor.
  • Fourth Sister: Another Inquisitor introduced in Kenobi. Looks a bit like a Twi'lek but isn't listed as one. Not much else to say.
  • Fifth Brother: One of the more prominent male Inquisitors besides the GI (enough so that he shows up in Rebels and the Obi-Wan mini-series). Like Third Sister he covets the Grand Inquisitor's position, and the two dislike each-other. Confirmed by the creators as being blind in Rebels, but able to see through the Force. Killed off in Rebels Season 2 when Maul wipes the floor with him.
  • Sixth Brother: Minor Inquisitor who's main moment in the sun is fighting Ahsoka and getting killed by her.
  • Seventh Sister: One of the two main Inquisitors in Rebels besides Fifth Brother. Voiced by Sarah "Buffy" Michelle Gellar, who is also the wife of Kanan's voice actor, which the writers reference by giving Seventh Sister some flirting. Is a Mirialan like Barriss, but it has yet to be confirmed that the two are one and the same even though it would make sense. Killed off in Rebels Season 2, when Darth Maul takes a page out of Kenobi's book (oh the irony) and cuts her in half.
  • Eighth Brother: Throwaway Inquisitor who also dies the most embarrassing death of any Inquisitor to date (his helicopter lightsaber malfunctions and he falls to his death). Cool helmet though.
  • Ninth Sister: The "muscle" of the bunch, being big, brutish, and filled with rage. Though beaten by Cal Kestis on Kashyyyk, her death hasn't been confirmed, so we might see more of her...which we do, when she shows up in the second game as the starter boss. Unfortunately for her, Cal's a lot better than the last time, and gives Ninth Sister the Jango Fett treatment.
  • Tenth Brother: So far exclusive to the comics, he was once a Jedi in the Clone Wars who tried to off Mace Windu, which went as well as you'd expect. Since Jedi tend to frown on executing people, they sent him into exile...which allowed the Empire to pick him up and turn him into an Inquisitor. Whoops. He eventually bit it when a Jedi manipulated several Purge Troopers into Order 66-ing his ass, in a moment of positively delicious irony.

• Agent Kallus: Continuing Star Wars' proud tradition of unsubtly named characters, Kallus is Rebel's equivalent to Asajj Ventress, being the semi-competent, semi-bumbling secondary villain who gets a redemption arc. Was involved in a massacre of Zeb's people, but had not actually ordered said massacre and feels kind of bad about how it all went down. Later joins the Rebel Alliance after Thrawn outs him as a spy. Rocks some Wolverine-esque sideburns, but not the weird haircut to go with it. Art crew considered making him a Chiss based on the concept art, but it seems they decided there's only room for one in the Empire's hierarchy.

• Kylo Ren: A Dark Jedi (not Sith, they technically went extinct with Vader, Sheev, Dooku, and Maul) who is actually the son of Han and Leia, Ben Solo, which the Internet absolutely refused to shut up about after it was leaked. He's mostly based on Jacen Solo from the EU (a son of Han and Leia who became a Jedi then fell to the Dark Side and became a Sith) with his new name likely taken from EU character Kybo Ren and having the same real name as Luke's son from the EU with Mara, Ben Skywalker. He idolizes his grandfather, Darth Vader and wears a black suit and a mask to show this. He wields a unique crossguard lightsaber. People thought he would be a badass after seeing the trailers but after seeing the movie, he turned out to be a half-naked pussy looking like a gay Turkish oil wrestler who very often gets temper tantrums and gets his ass kicked by a teenage girl (though to be fair, if he had been a complete badass, everyone would’ve just complained that he was a rehash of Vader. So, you know, rock and a hard place. Also he only had his ass beat since he was already shot by a bowcaster and stabbed with a lightsaber, so fighting even in spite of that is pretty badass). Kylo's character became significantly more fleshed out in TLJ, ironically making him one of the only characters to have actual development in the whole movie. Between that and Kylo's actor Adam Driver being really bro-tier about the whole situation (he even appeared in a skit as Kylo which also included poking fun at Kylo's emo traits), Kylo has managed to win over many fans, with some citing him as probably the most interesting character in the Sequels. Serves Palpatine before turning on him with Rey and gives his life to heal her, scoring a kiss with her before he dies redeemed as Ben, ala Vader dying as Anakin. This relationship between Rey and Kylo sharply divided the fanbase and created some extreme reactions. The worst cases were some extremely rabid Kylo/Rey shippers who insisted Adam and Daisy Ridley - Rey's actor - become a real-life couple (despite both being in separate relationships), to the point that they harassed Daisy Ridley's boyfriend on social media, harassed Adam Driver along with his family (including stalking them and sending messages hoping for the deaths of Adam's wife and/or newborn son) and made death threats against JJ Abrams (far surpassing practically any other Star Wars backlash, even the death threats thrown at Ahmed Best - Jar Jar's VA - and the purported backlash against Kelly Marie Tran - Rose Tico's actress); it cannot even be “justified” (and justified is used very loosely here) as the ravings of butthurt ultra-fanboys, this crossed the line into full-on bullshit. To repeat, this one was Skub incarnate. Most fans either adore the Reylo ship or absolutely hate it with a passion.

• Snoke: Supreme Leader of the First Order who speaks to his underlings through a massive hologram. Very little is known about him at the moment. Though many fan theories say that he is Darth Plagueis, the old master of Palpatine who was assumed dead (everyone assumes every new Darksider is him, though, so grain of salt) the powers that be have repeatedly denied the theory (though it's admittedly a better guess than suggesting that Snoke is Mace Windu, Boba Fett, or a clone of Darth Vader, which we would like to stress are actual fan theories)...unfortunately, we will have to wait for an inevitable comic book or novel to explain it, since he gets killed like a chump by his own servant, Kylo Ren. It is possible he may return given that the ring on his finger has inscriptions that translate to various rephrasing of “survive death” that is carved from the stone of Darth Vader's lava castle (yes, you read that right), but that may actually be a nod to Palpatine’s EU resurrections. Turns out to be a genetically engineered pawn of Palpatine's, like he was literally born looking as shriveled and injured as he did and had some kind of fabricated backstory like an organic Blade Runner Replicant, whose sole purpose was to babysit the First Order and get Ren to fall to the Dark Side. So in sum, a dime-store Palpatine knock-off. Of course, the explanation we got in Episode IX was still pretty weak so it took Lucasfilm years after the fact to finally give him a proper story; Snoke was a failed Palpatine clone who was still pretty strong in the Force, so Palpatine used him as his proxy in getting the Imperial Remnant back under his control and to help him find Rey, his only viable descendant. Snoke didn't like being Palpatine's puppet so he engineered a plot to have Ren kill Rey and the two of them would overthrow Palpatine. This failed however, as Palpatine knew that Ren would turn on Snoke and that he'd get his hands on Rey eventually. Would've been nice if they planned that from the start...

• General Hux: The First Order's Tarkin equivalent and a moustache-less ginger Hitler in space. Delivers a pretty cool speech, but can't fight to save his life. The backstory for Hux is his father was an Imperial hero, and Hux wants to be the First Order version of his old man and lead the FO to a final victory. Hux openly dislikes Kylo Ren and has frustration with the Force-users borders on meta at times. Spends most of TLJ as a foil to the edgier and more toyetic bad guys, but he seems to be the only one to have noticed how impractical the Empire/FO's fuckhuge weaponry can be when you're fighting something smaller than a planet and have lost the element of surprise. Becomes Kylo Ren's comic relief ginger prison bitch at the end of TLJ, although he has an interesting scene where he was about to finish off the unconscious Kylo until he woke up. Sent some very simple info to the Resistance in Rise Of Skywalker that set off the movie plot (mostly by making them take the info they already had seriously) and later helped the main characters escape, and was immediately shot for his efforts. He is never mentioned again.

• Captain Phasma: A First Order operative in charge of instructing the new Stormtrooper legions, Phasma serves as the Boba Fett of TFA - which is to say that she does nothing of note other than stand around and look cool until she figuratively and literally gets thrown into the trash in Force Awakens. Lucasfilm have apologized for overadvertising the character in the lead-up to the film since she was just supposed to look cool and do nothing like Boba Fett originally did but the huge presence of her in the marketing implied she was going to be a major character (remember, Jar Jar and generic Battle Droids had far more merch than Maul during the release of Episode 1) and have promised to give Phasma an actual role and backstory for TLJ that will play into Finn's story. (This turned out to be bullshit due to the fucked-up nature of TLJ's production, but the reshoots managed to give her a good showing anyway.) Her backstory was released in a novel where she was a tribal on a planet the Empire stripped into the stone age, who backstabbed her tribe for a stronger tribe, backstabbed her second tribe and brother to rescue a stranded Imperial officer and join the Empire, backstabbed her mentor to become the supreme commander of the Stormtrooper Corps in the First Order, then in the comic series she was shown to have survived the trash compactor when a Resistance bomb blew it up and she entirely disregarded everything (including saving Starkiller Base or Kylo Ren) to backstab and frame one of her subordinates for lowering the shields then promptly hunted him down to “bring him to justice”. So she’s a spear-wielding backstabber extraordinaire. At the present she's got a nasty scar on one eye where her hyper durable helmet was busted in, and fell into a fire on a shattered starship to her confirmed demise. Worth mentioning that even many folks who liked TLJ considered this an unsatisfying send-off.

• Commander Pyre: The gold and male version of Phasma, and often the closest thing Star Wars: Resistance had to a big bad due to being in charge of most of the First Order's operations in the show. More active than Phasma usually is, but still not likely to become anybody's favorite new villain. And then he died, and no-one fucking cared.

• The Knights of Ren: The Dark Side warriors who Kylo is the leader of, each one having their own unique look and signature weapon. Also probably one of the biggest bits of Fail in the Sequel Trilogy on account of being teased in the first movie but completely absent in the second, and saying and doing absolutely nothing in the third before being unceremoniously killed off. Seriously, if you're one of those people who grouses about Boba Fett not having enough to do in the Original Trilogy, the way these guys are handled will drive you crazy. To put it into perspective, a non-canon LEGO short-film on Disney+ gave these guys more characterization than the actual Sequel Trilogy did.

• Moff Gideon: Gus Fring in Star Wars (or Antón Castillo if you're a Far Cry fan), he serves as the main villain for the first three seasons of The Mandalorian. Responsible for the Purge of Mandalore, where he nuked the planet and made the Mandalorians an endangered people, as well as laying claim to the Darksaber. If his wardrobe, willingness to kill his own men, and ultimate plan to make clones of himself who can use the Force are anything to go by, he seems to be almost as much of a Vader stan as Kylo Ren is. Because he needs an actual Force-Sensitive to make his cloning plan work, he goes after Baby Yoda, which is revealed to be why he was hunting him throughout the series. Though arrested by the New Republic at the end of Season 2, he gets busted out and forms an army of beskar armored Stormtroopers with jetpacks while also donning his own suit of Beskar armor to lead them. Comes to a fiery end in Season 3's finale, but given the aforementioned clones, some fans have wondered if it really was the real Gideon who died.

• Dagan Gera and Rayvis: Main villains of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (at least at first), being respectively a Jedi from the High Republic Era whose gone crazy and a Gen'dai (the same species as Durge from the 2003 Clone Wars cartoon). Dagan discovered a hidden away planet that couldn't be accessed by normal spacelanes, and decided it would make a great place to build a new Jedi Temple, but the planet was discovered by the Nihil, so the Jedi decided to cut their losses and not set up shop on the planet after all. This pissed Dagan off, and he became obsessed enough that his girlfriend hacked his arm off and put him in a bacta tank. Said bacta tank somehow preserved him until Cal discovered him and woke him up. As a one-armed, fallen hero from an older time, one could make comparisons to the Winter Soldier, though Dagan gets a much less happy ending.

Notable Pre-Disney EU Characters

• Thrawn: (See *below under villains since despite being created as part of the Legends - in fact, the 1991 book he debuted in is what began the Star Wars Expanded Universe - he was brought back into canon by Disney)

• Corran Horn: A Correllian detective who becomes a member of Rogue Squadron during the New Republic. Later becomes a Jedi. His unique bloodline makes him inept at telekinesis, but gives him the unique power of energy absorption. Often accused of being a Mary Sue by people who miss his huge ego and over confidence problem even though right from the start Wedge has to berate him on his putting himself before the squadron. Constantly makes bullheaded mistakes like ignoring his low fuel, causing him to run out of fuel, trying to use his girlfriend's dad infamy to his advantage on someone, before learning that's her dad, thinking having a lightsaber and some very basic training made him invincible, which would have killed him if bacta didn't exist, and smugly mocked Exar Kun in his temple under the mistaken impression he's physically powerless, only to get mauled in return and needing rescue from Mara Jade. He had legitimate criticism about Luke Skywalker's Jedi Academy and told Luke off when Luke tried to warn Corran about the lure of the Dark Side of the Force. Corran was once a police officer and God only knows how corrupt the Correllian police can be, so he's seen his own dark side from "down in the trenches" as it were. Also the only Rogue to ever get downed by SAMs. He also dated Chertyl Ruluwoor, a sterile Selonian (an alien race that resemble humanoid otters), during his time in CorSec, meaning he is also a furry.

• Booster Terrik: A jolly but hot-tempered smuggler boss with a prosthetic eye. Helped Wedge find and kill the pirates who killed his family. Currently working/had to work to reestablish himself after a stint in Kessel, courtesy of Corran Horn's father Hal Horn. Father of Mirax Terrik. That his daughter is dating the son of the guy who put him away drives him crazy, but he eventually gets over it by coming to think of Corran as a Rogue instead of CorSec. Has a serious rivalry with Talon Karrde's organization. A crazy bluff eventually (and inadvertently) leads to him being the sole private owner of an Imperial Star Destroyer, which he operates as a mobile black market known as the Errant Venture.

• Mara Jade: A Force-sensitive former agent of Emperor Palpatine, and generally seen as Star Wars' second great strong female character after Leia (Nomi Sunrider wasn't high profile or developed enough). A fiery, snarky, sexy redhead who is generally considered one of the best characters to come out of the old EU. Taken from her parents at a young age and raised as a servant to Palpatine, Mara trained with him and with his royal guards to become one of several high-level Force-using operatives with the title of "Emperor's Hand", though she used the cover story of being a dancer that Palps liked called Lianna. A life of hard work gave Mara a liking for challenges, and she completed numerous missions for him, living the high life under his patronage. Upon Palpatine's death, he gave Mara one last command and a Force geas - kill Luke Skywalker. Bereft of the Emperor's patronage, without job skills besides spy and assassin and unable to find Luke, Mara was forced to live paycheck to paycheck in numerous jobs until becoming a smuggler under Talon Karrde. When Mara finally met Luke, she tried to kill him but ened up in survival situations that forced them to work together. When she finally learned the the truth of her master and killed and escaped Palpatine's compulsion when she killed Luke's clone. Mara then joined the Jedi Order, and over the years Mara's grudging respect for Luke grew into love - which Luke ironically developed before Mara did despite Luke saying he didn't like fiery women like Mara, and the two eventually married. Then a Yuuzhan Vong agent infected Mara with a deadly bioweapon, and she only survived through using the Force to keep it at bay. When the Yuuzhan Vong invaded at large, she fought while struggling with the virus, being cured of it around the time her and Luke's son Ben was born. After the Yuuzhan Vong War ended, Mara led the Jedi alongside Luke and fought in wars against various aliens and the re-emergent Sith. Years later her nephew Jacen turned to the Dark Side and became the Sith Lord Darth Caedus. When he tried to corrupt her son Ben, Mara tracked him down to kill him to protect Ben. During the fight, Jacen killed Mara via cheap shot with a poisoned dart. But before she died, Mara told Jacen off while using the Force to alert Luke and Ben and say goodbye to them (Mara's death was one of the main reasons the book series was hated by fans). She later appeared numerous times as a Force ghost, visiting Luke - at one point to give him tips on how to fight Abeloth, and warning her great-great-grandson Cade Skywalker against the Dark Side. Due to being a sexy redheaded woman with a backstory as a spy-cum-assassin (emphasis on cum for neckbeards) for an evil government before joining the good guys, plus her fiery disposition and penchant for black catsuits, Mara has more than a passing resemblance to Black Widow from Marvel Comics (ironically, this didn't stop Disney retconning her from the lore despite Disney now owning both the Marvel brand and Star Wars franchise).

• Ben Skywalker: Son of Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade. Named for Obi-Wan Kenobi's pseudonym, Ben grew up learning the ways of the Jedi from his parents. He was close to his uncle, aunt and cousins too. Ben was nearly lured to the Dark Side when his cousin Jacen became a Sith but resisted, and any bond between them was destroyed when Jacen killed Ben's mother Mara. Years later when the Jedi got word of a lost tribe of Sith emerging and an emerging Force psychosis started spreading among the Jedi, Luke, Ben and the Jedi Order went to resolve the problem, Ben joining his father in re-tracing Jacen's steps to try and gain insight. Things went from bad to worse when the Jedi and Sith encountered the Lovecraftian Force Entity Abeloth, a shapeshifting being described as a dozen times stronger in the Force than Luke and able to use both sides of it. Things were so desperate, Ben accepted when Luke got the Jedi and the Sith to form an alliance against her. During this time, Ben encountered Vestara Khoi, a Sith apprentice and daughter of one of their leaders. While firmly on the side of the Jedi, Ben found himself often working alongside Vestara in their mission to stop Abeloth, and was attracted to her; for her part, Vestara reciprocated Ben's feelings but was hindered by Ben's disapproval of Sith. Eventually they confessed their feelings, and the two became a couple (with Vestara also leaving the Sith and trying to become a Jedi). Said co-operation proved invaluable when Abeloth kidnapped Ben and Vestara for the final part of her master plan. After Abeloth's ultimate defeat Vestara, after a ruthless act while fighting Abeloth, became convinced she had much of a Sith mindset to be a Jedi, reverted back to the Sith, ended the relationship by zapping Ben with Sith Lightning before fleeing. Heartbroken but resolute, Ben resolved to track her down and redeem her if possible (unbeknownst to Ben, Vestara was also heartbroken about leaving him).

• Jacen Solo: While George Lucas always had a story idea for a son of Han and Leia struggling with the Dark Side, Jacen Solo was the first incarnation, and a major influence on Disney's Kylo Ren. Born to Leia alongside his twin sister Jaina, he was a skilled Jedi, and often tried to be a calming influence on his younger brother Anakin Solo. Played a pivotal role in the Yuuzhan Vong War, killing their military commander Tsavong Lah and their true leader. However, his experiences during the war took a toll, and Jacen started struggling with the Dark Side. Falling into corruption of a Sith Lady, Jacen fell pretty hard. He became a Colonel in the Galactic Alliance and took control of their secret police and converted it into his own Personal SS division. He legally coup the Chief of State and turn the successor to the NR into a evil democratic republic.

• Jaina Solo: Jaina Solo was a Human female Jedi Master of the New Jedi Order and member of the Jedi High Council. Daughter of Han and Leia, twin sister of Jacen Solo and older sister to Anakin Solo, she inherited her father's mechanical aptitude and her mother's Force sensitivity, resulting in her eventual training at the Jedi Praxeum. During her time there as a youth, she had many adventures, including helping to thwart the Second Imperium, where she helped Zekk abandon the dark side of the Force and join the ranks of the Jedi. She became a distinguished pilot during the Yuuzhan Vong War, which also saw the death of her brother Anakin Solo and the birth of her cousin Ben Skywalker. Becomes the Jedi Saber, the Order's sword against the dark.

• Kyle Katarn: A stormtrooper commander who turns mercenary after learning the Imperials were responsible for the death of his father. After being one of the many people who stole the Death Star plans, he destroys an Imperial super soldier project essentially solo. After this he gets wrapped up in the head inquisitor's plot to revive the Empire and gets trained as a Jedi by a force ghost. Straightforward and prone to snark, but also very easy to trick. Partner (if not more) with hot space Asian Jan Ors. Considered one of the more powerful force users in the New Republic, even outside the games where his power level is rather over the top. Where Luke (and most Jedi) keep the dark side away with spiritualism and positivity, Kyle does it through sheer force of will.

• Talon Karrde: A suave rogue smuggler captain who became the new smuggling and black market kingpin after Jabba died. Compared to his predecessor, he's pretty benign given his preference for tariff evasion and illegal goods over straight up extortion and slaving and being a father to his men instead of someone who executes minions on whims. His favored product is selling obscure and/or stolen information. Explicitly what Han might have become if he didn't join the rebellion. Likes punny ship names, with his flagship the Wild Karrde (Wild Card, plus a pun on his last name) and secondary ships like Lastri's Ort (Last Resort), Uwana Buyer (You want to buy her?) and Amanda Fallow (A man to follow). He makes a business arrangement with Mara Jade when she's trying to track Luke down to kill him, where he provided her information if she worked for him temporarily. Years later he acts as a friend in the black market to the Solos and Skywalkers.

• Bevel Lemelisk: An old EU Character that hasn't been quite retconned out yet (even if Director Krennic and Galen Erso more or less took his place in the overall plot), Lemelisk is the Albert Speer/Wernher von Braun of the Imperial war machine. A genius architect and engineer with a serious boner for mass destruction, he designed the Death Star and several others of the Imperial Superweapons, like the discount Death Star battlestation Tarkin (kinda like a Proof-of-concept prototype for the Death Star concept) or the Eclipse-class of Super Star Destroyers. He bore the brunt of Palpatines anger for the Death Star's destruction, who had him tortured, executed and ressurrected via cloning several times for his failures. After the Empires defeat, he ended up working for the Hutts and worked on a Death Star knockoff called the Darksaber (which he purposefully sabotaged by not pointing out obvious design flaws and the overall shoddy construction work), where he was captured by the New Republic and executed for war crimes.

• Tsavong Lah: An alien Warmaster, Tsavong was a member of the Yuuzhan Vong species and in charge of their military during most of the Yuuzhan Vong War. His most notable accomplishments were conquering Coruscant and indirectly causing Anakin Solo's death. Tsavong was a skilled tactician but a poor strategist, a ruthless fanatic who's willing to throw countless lives away to achieve his goals. Also took on the Vong Nom Anor as his advisor, despite hating Anor's self-centeredness and lack of piety. At one point Jacen cut off his foot, so Tsavong cloned an extinct super-predator so he could prove he was still badass by killing it and using one of its feet as a prosthetic foot. Also got caught up in a plot by the Shaper Caste, seeking to control him through his body modifications. He also dearly loved his dad - a retired military officer he'd often turn to for advice, to the point that his death made Tsavong mentally unstable. Came to view Jacen Solo as his archnemesis, and was eventually killed by him.

• Nom Anor: A Yuuzhvan Vong member of the Intendant caste. After the events of ROTJ, Nom arrived with a Vong advance force as a saboteur to undermine the galaxy in preparation for the Vong invasion/Yuuzhan Vong War. During this time, Nom worked in disguise to manipulate various groups and even clashed with the Chiss Ascendancy... the capture of some of his agents also clued the Empire in to the coming Vong threat. He was also such a selfish schemer even Thanquol would turn his nose up in disgust and a major Troll; before revealing his true identity, when negotiating with Leia he often dress up and act like Darth Vader just to mess with her. Also notable for being an atheist while the Vong as a whole are characterized by being deeply religious. Before the war, Nom infected Luke's wife Mara with a Vong bioweapon that caused a terminal illness, forcing her to use the Force to stop its progression. When Mara confronted Nom, he tried and failed to kill her and was sent packing. After being heavily demoted, Nom tried to rally the outcast class under the guise of a prophet, only to throw them away when they weren't useful to him. Nom later found his way onto the Supreme Overlord's flagship (not that supreme overlord) during the battle to retake Coruscant. When the Supreme Overlord was killed and the ship started falling apart, Nom tried to kill the heroes three times but was always thwarted. When offered the chance to escape with the heroes, Nom realized he'd burned all his bridges; he didn't fit in anywhere and was too proud to reconsider his life choices or face punishment for his role in the war. So Nom chose to stay behind and die on the exploding flagship. Essentially Fabius Bile as a self-centered alien bureaucrat.

• A'Sharad Hett/Darth Krayt: A human Jedi-turned-Sith. Born A'Sharad Hett, he was born to a Jedi and his wife who somehow managed to live among the Tusken Raiders of Tatooine, he eventually joined the Jedi Order, becoming a Padawan of Jedi Masters Ki-Adi-Mundi, and later, An'ya Kuro. When he was only a teen, Hett's father was murdered by the Jedi assassin Aurra Sing, who was later defeated in a duel by a young A'Sharad Hett. During the Clone Wars, he served the Republic as a General. He met and eventually befriended Anakin Skywalker after Skywalker struggled to come to terms with Hett's Tusken heritage. He managed to survive the Clone Wars and Order 66. He was eventually captured by the Yuuzhan Vong, who tortured and experimented on Hett, which drove him to the Dark Side.

• Darth Talon: A female Twi'lek from the EU comic series "Star Wars: Legacy" who became a Sith Lord in Darth Krayt's One Sith in 137 ABY. Best known for being one of Star Wars most fanservice-y characters on account of her attractive, tattoo-covered body and always wearing skimpy skin-tight clothing (though the character's creators have gone on record to say her appearance is meant to be primal not sexualized, and the skimpy outfit is to show off her tattoos). Apart from the fanservice, she's also visually distinctive for being a rare red Twi'lek and the aforementioned black Sith tattoos. Appointed personal assassin of Darth Kryat, Talon was sent to kill Luke's descendant Cade Skywalker, then later chosen to be Cade's Sith teacher when Darth Kryat tried to induct him into the Dark Side. During this time, Cade and Talon drew close and w slept together, which may have been Kryat's plan (Cade and Talon are shown kissing, and in one scene Cade is shown getting out of bed while a naked Darth Talon is sleeping next to him). Interestingly, George Lucas' original plan for a sequel trilogy involved Talon corrupting Han and Leia's son to the Dark Side of the Force and Talon was nearly in the Disney trilogy and there is early concept art of her.

• Abeloth: A Lovecraftian female entity strong in both the Light and Dark side of the Force, and one of the most powerful beings in any Star Wars canon. She first lived as the Servant, a mortal woman who served the powerful Ones on an unknown jungle planet over a hundred thousand years before the Battle of Yavin. Over the course of her life, she became the Mother: she kept the peace between the Father's warring Son and Daughter and became a loving part of the family. But she was still mortal—she grew old while her ageless family lived on—and she feared she would lose her precious family. In a desperate attempt to hold onto the life she so loved, she drank from the Font of Power and bathed in the Pool of Knowledge. Her actions corrupted her, transforming the Mother into the twisted, immortal entity known as Abeloth. Has numerous titles such as the Bringer of Chaos and Beloved Queen of the Stars (the latter self-proclaimed). Spent millennia trapped on a planet by the Ones, though she'd escape only to be re-imprisoned once more.

• Natasi Daala: Tarkins lover (which, in a surprising twist for the kinds of stories Star Wars tells, was actually reciprocated), the first woman in the Imperial Navy to hold the rank of Admiral and certified badass. Sets herself apart from other Imperial leaders by being much less of a self-interested power-hungry warmonger and instead being fiercely and unquestionably loyal to the Empire and its ideals, which in turn also made her reasonable enough to not want to rule the Imperial Remnants like Thrawn or others, despite being more than capable of it. Her relationship with Tarkin and her sizeable aptitude as a tactician earned her the position to guard the Ultra-Top-Secret R&D base at the center of the clusters of black holes known as the Maw, where she commanded a small flotilla of four Star Destroyers. After having been isolated from the Empire for over a decade after the Battle of Yavin, never wavering from her posting in spite of the suspisous lack of new directions coming in, she was alerted to the fall of the Emperor when Han Solo accidentally crashed right into her turf. Being mightily pissed off, she proceeded to wreck shit for the New Republic just because she could. Later, she allied with Pellaeon, killed a bunch of imperial remnant warlords and helped him fight the New Republic in a series of battles, but vanished without a trace after she ordered her ship to make an unguided hyperspace jump and was declared dead, but not without giving Pellaeon a code with which he could call her she the need arise.

• Garm bel Iblis: The former Senator for the Correllian worlds, Iblis was part of the triumvirate that founded the Rebel Alliance alongside Mon Mothma and Bail Organa. Unlike the other two however, he started his career not as a politican, but as a military man, embodying the much more radical and aggressive factions of the Alliance, eventually splitting entirely from the Alliance in favor of waging an open war against the Empire for years at the helm of his own resistance faction (He was also unhappy with Mothmas leadership of the Alliance, as her demands of absolute political power over the Alliance jeopardized several Rebel operations that he had advised against). As a veteran of the Clone Wars and well connected within Correllian society, he assembled a sizeable force whose strength rivaled those of the Rebel Alliance and zip-zapped through Imperial Space while also exploring lost or badly known Hyperlane Routes, which eventually lead to the discovery of the Katana-Fleet; a sizeable fleet of ghost ships that had been lost decades prior. Since the knowledge about the Katana-Fleets whereabouts was crucial to both sides of the war during Thrawns campaign, Iblis found himself becoming an interesting target for both sides and begrudingly rejoined the Alliance, now the New Republic. As he was a fairly significant character (and a fan favorite) in the wider lore prior to Disneys takeover of the franchise, he tended to show up in various EU materials, like followup novels to Zahns Thrawn trilogy and even The Force Unleashed, where he played a major role in the overall plot. Empire at War even made him a unit, where he commanded a massive Tank with as many guns as a Baneblade.

• Tyber Zann: A crime boss who appearance-wise is Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter in space (yes, really). Invented whole cloth for an expansion pack for the RTS title Empire at War (which is a pretty good game that you should check out) as the head of a criminal syndicate that he, in an expression of boundless humility, named after himself. While not having the best of characterizations, he is fondly remembered by Empire at War players for the priceless insults he dishes out against nearly every canon character that shows up over the course of his campaign. Best thought of as a kind of "Anti-Han Solo" (even has his own tall, furry/feathery loyal companion), as he is completely without moral restraints of any kind and fought the Rebels instead of helping them, and most above all, a colossal asshole whose scheming over the course of his campaign might even rival Palpatines own.

• Soontir Fel: Another fan-favorite and second token "Good Imperial" along with Pellaeon. Human TIE-Fighter pilot who commanded the elite 181st Starfighter Wing of the Imperial Navy and banged and married Wedge Antilles sister (a bit ironic considering he's basically Wedge's Imperial counterpart). While he is a bit of a pawn in the political plays of the big leaders of the Imperial Remnants, he is above all loyal to the Empire and the men under his command. It hardly needs mentioning in this context, but he is of course also a mad crackshot pilot who gave the New Republic a really hard time and defected to them after Ysanne Isard sacrificed his beloved 181st to buy herself time to escape from Coruscant, much to his outrage. His son later becomes one of the founding members of Lukes Jedi Order, and his descendants are running the revitalized Empire come Star Wars: Legacy.

• Ysanne Isard: Basically Star Wars version of Lawrenti Beria, the infamous head of the NKVD during the Stalin Era in the Soviet Union, or for another historical comparison, a female version of Reinhard Heydrich (she even had the nickname of "Ice-Heart", similar to Heydrich's title of "the man with the iron heart"). A prickly, sadistic woman that was in charge of the Imperial Intelligence Services during Palpatines rule and as such a major player in Imperial Politics. Even colder in her calculations than Tarkin, which is quite a feat, as well as equaling him and Palpatine in pure sociopathy (also quite something). She rose to prominence when she pulled off a coup d'êtat against the Council of Moffs that was nominally ruling the Empire in the aftermath of the Battle of Endor and concentrated all political power in her hand, only for her (and the New Republic) finding out that she isn't actually all that good at strategy. Her cold demeanor paired with a serious mean streak led to a great number of capable Imperial Worlds, Coruscant among them, deserting the Empire or defecting to the New Republic, setting the gradual disintegration of the Empire in stone. Her answer to this were war crimes in the form of biological weapons and tearing a hole into Coruscants skyline, killing millions in the process. Also has a Dark Eldar's love of (and expertise in), torture, and a preference for responding to desertions or betrayals by exterminating the offender's loved ones and, if there aren't any available, anyone tangentially connected to them. Her scheming wasn't worth much in the end and she ended up being killed by Booster Terrik.

Old Republic Characters

• Revan: Simply put, you'd be hard-pressed to find an EU character with a bigger following than Revan and with good reason: the protagonist of one of the most beloved Star Wars games of all time, ultra-powerful, awesome design, red and purple lightsabers...he's got it all. This is reflected in how he's one of the only EU characters to get an official LEGO minifigure, action figures, a Gentle Giant bust, etc. For backstory, Revan was a bit similar to Anakin in that he was a talented but headstrong young Jedi who during the course of a war (in this case the Mandalorian Wars), got corrupted and fell to the Dark Side. From there became a Sith Lord who waged war on the very Republic he had led/saved before being betrayed by his cowardly dipshit apprentice Malak. One quick round of mind-wiping later, and the Jedi and Republic had themselves a new tool and patsy an important new ally for stopping Darth Malak, who had quickly proven to be a much worse Sith Lord than Revan had been (go figure). That's where the player comes in. After defeating Darth Malak, and remembering his true identity along the way, Revan goes off to fight an "I can't believe it's not Palpatine" Sith Emperor dwelling in the Unknown Regions and disappears. Later returns in Star Wars: The Old Republic, but how the game and its expansions portray him and end his story were divisive to put it mildly. Which is why we're going to skip right over that minefield in favor of giving a neutral summary of it in the timeline section.
  • Interestingly, the kind of Sith Lord he was differs somewhat depending on the source. The first game actually depicts his Sith Lord phase as being fairly par for the course: wanting power for power's sake, social darwinist, etc. But the sequel and other sources have instead cast him as more of a visionary who was trying to save/prepare the Galaxy for approaching horrors but also felt that only he had what it took to lead the effort, hence his war of conquest.

• Jedi Exile / Meetra Surik: The main character of the second game, and nowhere near as popular as Revan despite the fact that the fondness for her game is at least as strong among older EU fans. Started out as a general under Revan in the Mandalorian Wars. During the big battle of Malachor V, she activated a doomsday weapon that won the battle, but killed so many people and fucked up the planet so hard, that Meetra was shell-shocked and became cut off from the Force. Oh, and kicked out of the Jedi Order. The second game begins with her slowly rediscovering her connection to the Force under the guidance of a mysterious woman who totally won't later turn out to be a villain with an agenda. Her adventures take her to places recovering from the recent Mandalorian Wars and Jedi Civil War, and she gets to team up with some of the few surviving Jedi Masters until her mentor kills them near the end of the game. After putting the old woman out of her misery and also stopping the other Sith Lords who have been treating the Galaxy like their personal murder-playground, she follows Revan's lead and disappears into the Unknown Regions. Her anti-climactic death in a subsequent novel drew all sorts of white-hot Rage.

• Carth Onasi: Quite possibly the skubbiest character to ever come out of a Star Wars video game. A Mandalorian Wars veteran and your first permanent party member in the first game, his betrayal by his old mentor and then said mentor's bombing his homeworld and killing his wife has left him with major trust issues. But he's also the romance option if you're playing female, and so many a fan ships him with the female Revan even as others find him whiny and annoying. In a case of history repeating itself, his voice actor would go on to voice another party member in a Bioware game set in space who is a polarizing romance option for female players. Also shows up in the second game as an NPC, so long as you don't decide that Revan was evil in the first game. "If you find Revan, tell him... tell him that Admiral Onasi is carrying on his duty".

• Bastila Shan: A Jedi with a talent for Battle Meditation (a Force power that basically makes the user's side significantly better in a given fight), Bastila is the one who faced down Revan when Malak betrayed him. Outwardly haughty, holier-than-thou, and a complete stickler for doing things the by-the-book Jedi way. Actually very insecure, and one of many examples of Bioware's fondness for the defrosting ice queen archetype. The romance option for male Revans (and by extension his canonical love interest), she gets captured by Malak later in the game and tortured into becoming his new apprentice, at which point the player has to decide to join her or not. Canonically, Revan doesn't join her but instead gets her to rejoin the Jedi. The two of them get hitched in the period after the game, but then duty calls so Revan has to abandon his wife, much to the unhappiness of many a KotoR fan. Her love story with Revan is roasted by HK-47 in the second game, while Bastila herself makes a return appearance in a minor role.
  • Satele Shan: Bastila and Revan's descendant, and having the same voice actress and preference for double-bladed lightsabers as the former, and a similar talent for Battle Meditation too. Appears in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Also had a kid with a Republic soldier as it turns out and later formed an unlikely friendship with the Sith Lord Darth Marr. Said kid was a Republic Spy and was one of the best bros in SWTOR.

• HK-47: In running for the most popular character to come out of KotoR other than Revan himself, HK is basically a blend of Bender and Deadpool, being a sociopathic-but-funny anti-hero who enjoys violence, advocates for violence as a solution to all problems, and calls everyone meatbags (except his beloved master of course). Has a strange verbal quirk where he says the kind of speech he's going to say before saying it (IE: if asking a question, he'll first say "query"). So popular that he later showed up in an expansion for Star Wars: Galaxies despite that game taking place thousands of years after his debut appearance. Got some would-be-replacements in the second KotoR game in the HK-50s, and hates their guts. SWTOR would also give him a successor in HK-55, as well as yet another appearance from the original...before he gets scrapped. As already stated, he shows up on Mustafar later, so he must have gotten rebuilt at some point.

• Canderous Ordo: A Mandalorian veteran of the war who has become a cynical and ruthless mercenary before deciding to join Revan. Actually very pro-Revan, respecting him for being a good warrior and tactician and actually being able to kick his people's teeth in. Becomes the new Mandalore in the second game. So in short, basically the Boba Fett of his day, and accordingly is one of the more popular characters. Unfortunately got his legacy tarnished when the Mandalorians joined the Reformed Sith Empire in the Great Galactic War, though they dodged the karma backlash until thousands of years later in the Great Peace of the Republic.

• Mission and Zaalbar: A young twi'lek and her Wookie buddy, they're ostensibly the game's Han and Chewbacca, but are actually very different. Mission is the spunky-but-somewhat naive female with a can-do attitude who manages to be interesting and not insufferable despite what that description might suggest, and Zaalbar is a depressed exile who's brother is a sociopath that's willing to sell his own people into slavery for profit. Sadly nowhere to be found in the game's sequel.

• Juhani: A Cathar (no, not the Medieval Christian sect condemned as heretical), Jedi who is introduced as a failed Padawan who's in a sufficiently bad mood that she's caused all of the planet's local Kath Hounds (basically lion-dogs) to get extra-aggressive. Dealing with her is part of the player's Jedi Trials needed to pass to become a Padawan, and assuming the player doesn't off her, she later joins as a party member. Probably most famous/remembered for being one of the first LGBT Star Wars characters, and her girlfriend will fall to the Dark Side if you did kill her. Alternatively, female players can hook up with her also.

• Jolee Bindo: A cranky old man living in Kashyyyk's shadowlands who is actually a Jedi living in self-imposed exile. Something of an "unorthodox" Jedi, he adheres firmly to the good parts of the Jedi belief system while relentlessly roasting the bad and dumb parts, such as the Jedi's general aversion to love and families. This, coupled with his often hilarious "back in my day" cranky old man lines, have made him another one of the more popular characters to come out of the first game.

• Atton Rand: He is as Atton as Atton will ever be! Initially appears to be a Han Solo clone, but it turns out this is a front to hide something much darker: he's a veteran of the Mandalorian Wars who, pissed that the Jedi sat the war out but had no problem fighting him and his fellows when Revan became a Sith Lord, reinvented himself as basically a serial killer of Jedi. Eventually, his conscience caught up with him and he struck out on his own. As the ship's pilot and a romance option for female players, he takes over some of the roles of Carth Onasi, but is a lot less skubby, his overall reputation with the fans being a lot stronger (everyone likes a bad boy). Meetra redeemed him into being a Jedi.

• Bao-Dur: Zabrak Carth, being like him a staunchly pro-Republic goody-two-shoes who hates Mandalorians and gets into arguments with Canderous. Is missing an arm but replaces it with an energy field that connects the metal hand to the shoulder, which is different from most Star Wars characters who lose limbs. Also has a pet remote and helps the player character get their first lightsaber. Notably, he is one of the only characters who's futures Kreia isn't able to glimpse into at the end of the game, suggesting the writers either had specific plans in mind for Bao-Dur in an unmade sequel...or that they just got lazy. Meetra also made him a Jedi.

• Brianna the Handmaiden: Only joins if the player is male (and yes, is a potential love interest option). Due to being a handmaiden to the most insufferably puritanical Jedi Master ever, she's been fairly indoctrinated to have an extremely black and white view of what is and is not acceptable behavior for a Jedi. Dislikes Atton (and vice-versa), and may be Kreia's daughter. Member of the Echani, a species that look a lot like humans but white haired and apparently all martial artists. Don't let her slender figure fool you; she's one of the best melee fighters in the second game, especially if made into a Jedi or Dark Jedi. Giving her a double saber is just mean, and is definitely the best leader on the Dxun team for the party splitting on Onderon and Dxun mission (though Atton's skill-set and Visas' power make them good alternatives to the point that the game guide recommends picking one of them, Mira and Bao-Dur are also good picks as team members to stealth through the mines and slice respectively). Canonically traveled with Meetra even though she was female and became a Jedi.

• Mira: One of the many, many tough, sarcastic redheads in Star Wars' old EU, she's a bounty hunter who, unusually for a character in Star Wars, is actually reluctant to kill people and prefers to avoid doing so. She also has a wrist-launcher that shoots out various projectiles. Has history with the Mandalorians but doesn't really identify as one. One of the more popular characters to come out of the sequel, but you won't get her if you're Dark Side unless you start off Neutral or Light Side on Nar Shadda and then turn into a dick after getting her on your team. As many people prefer Mira, this is exactly what some Dark Side players do. Meetra made her a Jedi.

• Hanharr: The Anti-Chewbacca, being a bloodthirsty, vicious psychopath who was doing the whole "evil Wookie bounty hunter" thing long before Black Krrsantan was ever a thing. Joins the player if the latter is Dark Side and fittingly for a Wookie who would have done well in Khorne's service, is a melee powerhouse. Actually very depressed to the point of secretly wanting to die, which is part of why he hates Mira for not killing him/constantly hounds her and attacks her; he's always hoping she'll put him out of his misery. Also killed his own tribe to keep them from being enslaved due to deciding they were better off dead. Mira put him down on Malachor V after she realized that his suicidal state made it impossible to help him.

• Mical the Disciple: The Handmaiden's counterpart, joining only if you're playing female (canonically he accompanied the female Meetra). A very nice and pleasant guy and one of the least morally compromised of the sequel's party members. And this in turn is exactly why some people find him boring relative to the more flawed Atton, though he's also often compared unfavorably to the Handmaiden as well due to the feeling that she's more useful in fights. Secretly a spy for the Republic, though most would say its not much of a secret. And guess what, Meetra made him a Jedi.

• Visas Marr: A Miraluka who has been Darth Nihilus' "apprentice" (by which we mean slave) for an untold period. Unsurprisingly leaps at the chance to ditch him for the player character the first chance she gets. A romance option for male players, to the absolute fury of the Handmaiden (to the point that she might stop speaking to you depending on how things go). Can be talked into killing herself to hurt her ex-boss in the final battle with him, but because Visas is cool hardly anyone takes this option even if playing Dark Side. Gets bonus points for being voiced by Kelly Hu. Canonically Meetra redeemed her to the light side (though it's not a redemption so much as a "literally anything is better than her current situation").

• GO-TO: No, no. Not he-who-must-not-be-named and who is universally despised and shunned. This is a different GO-TO, who is a droid that runs the Galaxy's largest crime syndicate. Looks exactly like the torture droids used by the Empire despite existing well before the Empire's time. An interesting character, but as he's considered pretty useless in a fight, most players hardly ever use him. Canonically blown up on Malachor after he got stuck with Bao-Dur's remote during the final mission of KOTOR 2.

• Vrook Lamar: Where Jolee Bindo is a funny cranky old man Jedi Master, Vrook is the opposite. Generally fitting the negative perception of "humorless jerk Jedi Master who preaches and lectures a lot", Vrook is one of the few characters to appear in both games. Dark Side players will kill him, and for all his grumbling, this old geezer has the skills and power to back it up. Doesn't save him from Darth Traya in the canonical Light Side path even with Master Zez-Kai Ell and Master Kavar being with him though.

• SWTOR PCs: A Jedi Knight, a Jedi Consular, a Republic Special Forces Soldier, a Smuggler, a Sith Warrior, a slave-turned Sith Inquisitor, a Bounty Hunter who can join the Mandolorians, and a Sith-Imperial Spy. The Eternal Empire/Eternal Throne expansions are basically a continuation of the Jedi Knight's story, though the Outlander's actual background is purposefully kept vague and the story can be tackled with any class. With that said, the story makes a heck of a lot more sense if its one of the Force-Sensitive classes (as otherwise you have silly things like Arcann losing to a Smuggler or a Bounty Hunter). Since their names are player-generated, each one has a title that the fanbase knows them by. Specifically:
  • Jedi Knight: The Hero of Tython
  • Jedi Consular: The Barsen'thor
  • Republic Trooper: Havoc Squad Commander (or by the callsign, Meteor)
  • Smuggler: Voidhound
  • Sith Warrior: Emperor's Wrath
  • Sith Inquisitor: Lord Kallig (actually a surname, the Inquisitor was a slave unaware of the lineage from Sith Lord Aloysius Kallig, later changes to a Darth title that differs depending on your alignment, Imperious for Light Side, Occlus for Neutral and Nox for Dark Side)
  • Imperial Agent: Cipher-9
  • Bounty Hunter: The Great Hunt Champion
  • The one who went on to become the expansion PC is referred to as the Outlander, later the Alliance Commander and after the anti-Zakuul coalition dissolves simply as Commander. For the purposes of default timeline, we will assume that the Hero of Tython is the PC as that makes the most sense story-wise.

Old Republic Villains

• Darth Malak: Revan's former apprentice who turned on him because that's what Sith Lords do, and because Malak is a jerk. Unfortunately for the Republic and Jedi, it soon became clear that if Revan was like the Emperor of Man or Vlad von Carstein, Malak was closer to Abbadon or Konrad von Carstein, being that ever-disastrous mix of vicious and stupid. Where people often talk about Revan as a tactical and strategic genius with a real talent for scheming and planning out victories, Malak always goes for the bluntest, most brutally violent solution. Can't find a single person on a planet? Bomb it. Wants to get Jedi on his side? Torture them until they join. And so on. As a consequence of pissing his master off at least once before betraying him, he's missing his lower jaw, hence the machinery where it used to be. We get a look at him without it on towards the end of the game, and its appropriately grisly.

• Darth Bandon: Malak's utterly generic and forgettable apprentice, who is basically the writers thinking "what if we did Darth Maul, but without the Awesome?Just about the only memorable thing he does is kill the Republic Soldier Trask Ulgo who helped amnesiac Revan escape the ship crash in the beginning of the game. Fittingly, he's disposed of by Revan and then basically never brought up again. Like Calo Nord, he leaves behind an outfit that doesn't look anything like his actual outfit.

• Darth Traya / Kreia: The main villain of the sequel, though she initially appears as an enigmatic mentor to the Jedi Exile. Generally remembered for her unique philosophy that is often highly critical of both the Jedi and the Sith, and is later revealed to hate the Force itself due to viewing it as a malicious deity (the lead writer has actually admitted that he basically used Kreia as a mouthpiece for things about the Force as a concept that bothered him). This unique perspective on the Force and her regular challenges of the player's actions, motives, and beliefs, has led to Kreia becoming a favorite among fans and critics alike. That her view of the Force is factually incorrect does little to change this (though to be fair, she doesn't have the benefit of knowing everything the audience knows). Was also Revan's Jedi Master as part of her backstory, and clearly still has fond memories of him, as he's one of the only characters she speaks about in an even remotely flattering way. There's also evidence to suggest that she might be the mother of one of the other party members, the Handmaiden, but this has never been conclusively confirmed.

• Darth Nihilus: Another fan-favorite to come out of the KotoR games, Nihilus is the poster-boy for the sequel despite not being the main villain and in fact having the least characterization of the three main Sith Lords. But, he's got the coolest look and has the highest intimidation factor, so he became a huge hit with fans anyway. Voice sounds vaguely like a toilet getting backed up and/or audio from Minecraft, but its much creepier/cooler than that sounds. Specializes in Drain Life, a Force power where the user sucks the life of a person or persons and gives it to themselves. Has become so addicted to using this power that he's become basically a wraith and needs to sate his hunger constantly, even on the planetary level, making him vaguely a Star Wars version of Galactus. Sadly, you can't ever wear his mask in the game, but you can get it as an item after killing him. To SWTOR's credit, you can wear it there.

• Darth Sion: A walking corpse of a Sith Lord whose main shtick is regenerating over and over again, hence his current physical appearance. Gets a crush on the Exile if she's female, and the Exile eventually convinces him to let go of his pain, causing him to die for good. Weirdly, he was also an alternate skin for Galen Marek in the later Force Unleashed game when no other characters from KotoR were.

• Atris: If ever there was a single character who perfectly embodied every negative stereotype about the Jedi, and was everything fans criticize about the Jedi distilled into a single character, it would be Atris. Self-righteous, rude, and more dogmatic and sanctimonious then a bus full of puritans, Atris quickly established herself as a hated character, especially with her constant insulting and lecturing of the Jedi Exile. She also kept the Exile's original lightsaber that she was forced to surrender because she's that petty. Turns out, of course, that she's fallen to the Dark Side from her study of Sith Holocrons, making all of her posturing and bluster completely hypocritical. Her Handmaidens are assholes too, with the exception of the one who joins you. The good news is, because she's gone Dark Side, you don't need to play a villain to have an excuse to cut her down. Though making her eat her words by sparing her and lecturing her right back as she realizes how badly she has been fucking up since the Mandalorian Wars started is on an entirely different level of satisfactory. Meetra most probably spared her and let her spend the rest of her miserable life in depression.

• The HK-50s: The "next-gen" HK-47s that appear in the sequel. Unlike HK-47, they are very much not on the player's side and are a recurring enemy throughout the game. A subtle difference between them and the original, is that while HK-47 enjoys knowing how to kill efficiently and/or with style, the HK-50s just enjoy killing period. This is why HK-47 hates them.

• Calo Nord: The first KotoR game's equivalent to Jango/Cad Bane, being the top bounty hunter of his day who dual wields blaster pistols. Doesn't save him from getting killed by Revan and company when they go to the first of four planets in their Star Map hunt. Short in temper and stature both, but weirdly leaves behind a shiny set of silver armor after he dies that fits everyone in the party perfectly despite being taller than him (with said armor also looking nothing like his outfit in the game).

• Darth Malgus: Though he was initially dismissed as a lazy blend of Vader and Malak when first introduced in SWTOR's announcement cinematic, this big, bald Sith has actually developed a solid following after both SWTOR and a tie-in novel told from his perspective came out. Where many other Sith in the Empire Malgus is a part of are alien-hating assholes with no real redeeming features, Malgus is depicted as more egalitarian. And while a believer in Sith ideals, argues that wars and other conflicts are necessary for people to grow and realize their full potential. Pulled a Kaiser Soze on his wife when his enemies tried to use her against him, and after a failed bid to become the new Sith Emperor later turned on the Sith in the pursuit of his own agenda, making him something of a spiritual successor to previous Old Republic Sith villains Revan and Traya. In short, he's generally seen as one of the better characters/things to come out of the fairly skubby SWTOR game and tie-ins.

• The Sith Emperor: Very blatantly a Palpatine rip-off (right down to having elite, fanatically loyal, red-robed, faceless bodyguards who can hold their own against Jedi), who serves as the main villain of SWTOR. Revealed to have been the one who finished corrupting Revan and Malak to the Dark Side before sending them out to pave the way for his arrival. Revan and Malak of course, had other ideas, but the Sith Emperor's longevity meant he was still around to launch an invasion of the Galaxy anyway 300 years later. His backstory is that he's a parasitic body-hopper who transfers his consciousness every time a new, more powerful vessel comes along, and also has the ability to suck everything from a planet in what is an even more extreme version of what Nihilus does. Not just people's lives, but color, sound, the Force itself, etc. This is seen as so messed up that the few Sith who know the truth about him want him dead as badly as any of the Jedi. Unfortunately, the Emperor's body-swapping shtick continues after the player beats him, and he gets a new form and voice in Immortal Emperor Valkorion. In this body he's even more ridiculously powerful and basically becomes Fire Lord Ozai in space forms his own faction to try and wipe out both the Jedi and the Sith. Gets killed, but his ghost sticks around to cause more trouble, until that's taken out...and then a fragment of him persists even then and has to be taken out too. Since the fragment of the Sith Emperor's essence was wiped out, the jerk's (hopefully) gone for good, but if the game and its expansions have taught us anything at this point, always assume that the Sith Emperor will come back in some way or form down the line. For the purposes of timeline, the Hero of Tython is held to have killed him for real with the destruction of the last fragment.

• Arcann and Vaylin: Valkorion's children. As siblings who are the kids of a heartless, despotic ruler with great power, with the son having facial scarring as a result of his dad's actions and initially being a villain before redeeming himself, they are basically Zuko and Azula in Star Wars. Like their old man they're nothing to scoff at in power, especially Vaylin who has inherited her dad's psychopathic traits (much like Azula relative to Ozai). Furthering the Avatar parallels, Arcann's voice actor also voiced Koh the Face-Stealer. Despite being Dark Siders, neither one is technically a Sith, and both use yellow lightsabers instead of red. Arcann is defeated by the Outlander and since Republic Loyalist Light Side Hero of Tython is considered the most likely canon SWTOR expansion PC, turned to the light side. Vaylin is later implied to have soul hopped to one of the Jedi apprentices the Emperor's last fragment tried to take over, though further details are TBA as SWTOR is still on going.

One-Appearance Characters / Other Characters of Note

• Biggs Darklighter: Luke’s best friend from his Tatooine days, who would graduate Flight Academy with the promise of fighting the Empire. Deleted scenes show how connected the two are as Biggs gives his farewells to join the Rebellion, inspiring Luke with the same courage to want to rise up as his best friend. Tragically, he lost his life in the battle against the Death Star, but it was not in vain. While he would be cut from the movie, the old footage still exists on Youtube showing how Skywalker looked up to him, how they reuinited in the rebel base, and eventually losing his life.
• Owen and Beru Lars: Moisture farm couple and Luke's aunt and uncle (sort of, its complicated), who raise him on Tatooine. Effectively Luke's Ma and Pa Kent/Uncle Ben and Aunt May. And like Uncle Ben, their murders prove a major catalyst for Luke's transformation into a hero. Owen's main claim to fame is roasting Obi-Wan figuratively before later getting himself roasted literally. Isn't actually one-appearance, turning up in the prequel as their young selves and again in the Obiwan series where they defend their home from the Third Sister of the Inquisitors, successfully. We can imagine they died fighting those Stormtroopers now.

• FN-2199/"TR-8R": a First Order Stormtrooper who wields a badass riot baton in combat. Appears only in The Force Awakens and notable only for two reasons; he shouts "Traitor!" at Finn, and then he kicks his punk ass despite the latter wielding a fucking lightsaber. Such is the stuff that memes are made of. Gets a bit of backstory that he and Finn trained and grew up together, hence his outrage at seeing Finn fighting for the opposite side. Even if he goes out like a punk to Han Solo, by all accounts, FN-2199 TR-8R is what Phasma should have been. He would make a great commissar.

• Jyn Erso: Appears in Rogue One. A former member of the Space Taliban (Rebels who refused to group up with the rest of the Rebels due to their extreme willingness to do evil shit to kill evil assholes) who is captured by the Rebels so they can talk to Space Bin Laden (Saw Gerrara, a character who guest-starred in a few episodes of the cartoon Rebels and pretty much shows up to die in Jyn's movie) about rumors of a planet killer being fueled by Space Iraqi oil crystals (that makes lightsabers work), one that was partially designed by her father. Jyn is angry all of the time because her life sucks, she watches every parental figure in her life die in front of her, most of them over the period of a single day, and the movie hopes this will hide the fact that she really doesn't do much other then flip authority figures the bird. Her name mirrors that of Jan Ors, partner-in-crime of legendary badass Kyle Katarn which is REALLY not as well-received by the fans of the series her movie retconned as Disney thought it would be (to be fair, the old EU had around ten different versions of the Death Star plans being stolen which many fans just figured were combined into the one Leia had, so that doesn't mean Kyle and Jan can't ever be made canon again). Gets killed when Tarkin used the Death Star to destroy the facility in an attempt to stop the Rebels transmitting classified information, but Jyn and Cassian got the Death Star plans beamed into space before that.

• Cassian Andor: Appears in Rogue One. A Rebel spy and assassin, Cassian angsts about the fact that he lives in a political thriller about the space mafia VS the space Nazis set mere days before the simple good and evil morality of the original trilogy kicks in. His only friend is a droid, but that's not exactly as unusual in the setting as the movie implies it is. Shares an award with Luke for not getting the girl in the end...kind of; they do share a final hug and possible kiss in the elevator before he died with her getting atomized by a partial-strength shot from the Death Star. The Disney Canon variant of Kyle Katarn, who was an Imperial officer turned Rebel turned Jedi Master, who is so badass he shaves with a lightsaber. Ended up getting to star in his own show on Disney+, one that actually did quite well for itself as it charted Cassian's evolution from True Neutral loner to the radical Rebel we see in Rogue One (so sort of like a darker version of Han Solo's character arc in the Original Trilogy).

• K-2S0: Appears in Rogue One. What C-3P0 would be if he grew a pair and got a stronger droid body. A reprogrammed Imperial tactical droid and Cassian's only friend. Does that thing where he spits out survival odds in stressful moments. Caught a grenade in mid-air then tossed it back at it's original thrower without even looking, shot Stormtroopers (even took out two by picking up a third stromtrooper and whacking them with him), and delivered some great deadpan lines which endeared him the audience - even those growing more jaded to these new movies liked him. So of course he dies first in order to establish that shit gets real during the last twenty minutes of the movie, although he died holding the line so Stormtroopers wouldn't reach Cassian and Jyn and his last act was smashing the control panel with his bare hands so at least he went out as cool as he came in.

• Chirrut Îmwe: Discount Jedi The real star of Rogue One. A blind martial artist who may or may not have force powers, can beat a squad of Stormtroopers with a staff, shoot TIE Fighters out of the air, and could take your girl if he wanted to. Haha, jk, he's totally homo for his bara partner-in-crime with the badass autocannon. Dies in a bombing run, but he doesn't fear death. Even his actor (from the badass "Ip Man" series) admitted that he was shoehorned into the movie in a desperate attempt to make China give a shit about Star Wars (which failed, because China really just doesn't give a shit about the franchise). Chirrut is memorable mostly because he belongs to the "Order Of The Whills", notable because "Whills" were a thing George Lucas kept wanting to use in the original trilogy (immortal beings who were supposed to be telling the story, hence "a long time ago", later the spirits that make up the Force itself, and finally an order of warriors that Leia was supposed to found after Luke's death in a sixth movie before he decided to take a break then do prequels instead. Basically Space Moirae).

• Baze Malbus: Chirrut's best mate and self-appointed bodyguard. Has three lines, but comes off as memorable because of his hellgun-looking backpack mounted autocannon with a scanvisor that lets him hold down the trigger and headshot stormtroopers until they are all dead. In early scripts Chirrut was his father figure, in the finished product they're ambiguously gay even though the director intended there to be a "finding peace with the pastor who heard his confession after a very grim life" vibe. Dies shortly after Chirrut, and actually makes a connection with the Force in his final moments. Quite a bit of work went into designing his visual style and his backstory, not a single bit of which ended up in the movie.

• Orson Krennic: Director of the Imperial Military Research Division and Rogue One's villain. Forces Jyn's father into building the Death Star for him, causes the death of Jyn's mother, then proceeds to spend the rest of the movie getting roasted by the more competent Imperial characters because he's a fucking moron with a grudge. He's typical of the average Imperial who doesn't wear Stormtrooper armor in the Expanded Universe as well as Disney canon, notable mainly for giving off "Resident Evil villain" vibes.

• TZ-1719 / Jannah: Appears in Rise of Skywalker. The leader of a unit of First Order Stormtroopers who, upon being ordered to shoot civilians, all laid down their guns at once despite there being no communication between them to do so. Implied to be Force sensitive, with the accidental subtext being that she simply subconsciously Force-tricked her troops into not being evil anymore. They stole their dropships and escaped to Endor, living a non-tech lifestyle by taming some kind of goat aliens as mounts. She personally took on the name "Jannah". Her primary purpose of the movie is to replace Rose as Finn's love interest since they couldn't decide on hooking Finn up with Rey or not (for problems such as "would it offend racists into not buying merch, would it be seen as sexist to end her journey with a Disney Princess ending of getting a relationship, etc"). Further unfortunate subtext is how TZ is quite literally just Rule 63 Finn, although it fixes the "Finn Problem" that has been pointed out where suddenly Stormtroopers dying can be seen as a tragic loss of a potential hero by adding the idea that "Kanye was right, slavery is a choice good characters who end up as Stormtroopers can just choose not to shoot the non-combatants so anyone that doesn't deserves to die like the nameless loot pinatas mooks they are. The end of the movie adds spinoff bait the implication she is Lando's grandaughter, or at the least he has an idea of who she was taken from as a baby.

• Qi'ra: Han Solo's old girlfriend and partner introduced in Solo: A Star Wars Story, filling in for a number of older EU characters (don't worry, the Disney Star Wars comics had already given Han an ex other than her anyway). Grew up with Han on Corellia before getting forced into the Crimson Dawn, which is like the Mafia in space except run by Darth Maul instead of the Hutts. Helps Han survive an unobtainium deal gone bad, then backstabs her boss to become her gang's alpha dog and Maul's personal agent. Too bad this will probably never be followed up on outside of tie-in novels thanks to how bad the movie did. Also kinda awkward they made her Maul's Personal Assistant right after Rebels killed him off, meaning that Star Wars fans felt absolutely no curiosity about how the entire thing was going to go. She was still kicking around the Galaxy and is now involved in the Bounty Hunter Wars. Qi'ra is played by the famous Emilia Clarke which is one of the many reasons she is popular

• L3-37: While K-2S0 brought droid characters to an awesome new high, L3-37 brought them to a new low. While not being as bad as Holdo and Rose, and being far more memorable than the chick, the spy dude, the TIE Fighter pilot dude, and the two Asian dudes from Rogue One (admit it, you don't fucking remember more than two of their names at best), she suffered the most from the reshoots the movie underwent. The /v/-tier name is only the warning label on this crock of shit. A droid that constructed a body for herself from spare parts and wound up as Lando's version of Chewbacca, L3-37 is a woke robot feminist in space by direct admission of the writers, with everything that implies while also being a revolutionary leader who gives no fucks about any disgusting meatbags and at the same time is physically romantically involved with Lando while giving romantic advice to other characters and at the same time is all about profit and shooting up the place while using other droids as just pawns in her rampages (did we mention this character REALLY suffered from the reshoots?) Her body is destroyed in an escape attempt but ends up as one of the droid brains running the Millennium Falcon (yes, the same computer C-3P0 complained about in the original trilogy; draw your own conclusions.) Long story short, the feminist/sexbot/droid-supremacist/human loving/spree killer provides constant tonal whiplash. Did we mention that since she began without having a body there was no reason to stick her in the Falcon which is a fate worse than death based on about 1/4 of her characterization, it adds a LOT of disturbing subtext to Lando's fondness for the Falcon and the fact that Han basically just kept it after winning the game despite knowing Lando's lover was trapped forever inside, the implications for the conversations she had with Threepio during Empire Strikes Back, and the fact it was kept abandoned by a criminal on a desert planet for at least a decade means she's probably gone even more insane? Fan reaction is mixed, but only between "worst character ever, would prefer to watch Jar Jar and Holdo star in a sitcom combining the bad parts of both original EU and Reboot than watch the movie again" and "had potential, was disappointed, still don't like the name".

• Iden Versio: Created for DICE's Battlefront II as the protagonist of the story mode (though she's also playable in multiplayer). The leader of a small squad of Imperial Special Forces (because apparently the Empire can't get enough of black armored elites despite already having Shadow Stormtroopers, Storm Commandos, Purge Troopers, and Death Troopers). Modeled to look like her actress. Initially rabidly pro-Empire, but changed her mind during Operation: Cinder due to Palpatine's posthumous orders to take the rest of the Empire with him if he ever died. Becomes a New Republic soldier along with the one member of her squad who decided to go with her, and then later married him. Dies around the time of the Sequel Trilogy, but takes the member of her squad who didn't side with her with her. General consensus is that her shift to the Light Side either shouldn't have happened at all (so players could have an Imperial protagonist from start to finish like in TIE Fighter), or needed to come way later / be less sloppily done.

Nations and Organizations

• The Galactic Empire: Ever seen an evil, fascist space empire imposing itself on the galaxy with huge, evil spaceships and cool mooks? Then it was probably inspired by the Empire. Itself inspired by the brutalist designs, prejudices, and rampant cruelty of Nazi Germany (though they take inspiration from some other historical factions as well like the Soviet Union and British Empire), the First Galactic Empire is overall the classic authoritarian dictatorship, propped up by legions of obedient but easily disposable troops, cool propaganda that paints them as the saviors of the galaxy and ambitious officers ready to be choked for their failures. The Empire was created from the infrastructure of the Republic when Emperor Sheev Palpatine took singular power of the Republic Senate, ostensibly to keep the galaxy safe after the Clone Wars, but totally because he was a powerful Sith Lord who wanted to get his evil fascist dick hard. Once the galaxy got wise to this, the Empire used fear to keep them in line, which is one of the reasons why they took a liking to huge Star Destroyers and Death Stars, since they look fucking terrifying. While evil overall (as our Lord and Savior George of the Lucas proclaims it), individual people go from normal people who knows no better since they've lived with propaganda up their exhaust ports all their lives to genuine psychopaths like Palpatine and Grand Moff Tarkin (along with the obligatory Hermann Göring type corrupt hedonists taking advantage of their positions, and various sick fucks who Palpatine often puts into power for just that reason). Even so, The Empire still possessed deep flaws; apart from the authoritarian top-down rule, the Empire also wasted significant resources on its inefficient military, and their constant poaching of the Galaxy's brightest minds and permanent wartime economy meant the rest of the galaxy stagnated. Severe competition in the officer corps meant that infighting and backstabbing was not uncommon, either, and that the politically connected could still advance ahead of truly competent officers (that is, until their incompetency finally pissed off someone above them, as seen with Vader choking Admiral Ozzel). The Empire eventually broke apart after the Battle of Endor where the Emperor was killed (allegedly; it's more complicated than that...), his apprentice turned (back?) to the Light Side of the Force and the second Death Star blown up. The remains of the Empire's military became the Imperial Remnants who fought the New Republic and each other for control of resources.
  • Stormtrooper Corps: Covered above in the Villains section.
  • Imperial Army/Navy Troopers: As stated above, these guys formed the bulk of the Empire's military forces, but we don't really see much of them in most media. The reason for this is that most of the time they serve primarily as basic PDF units to garrison planets from static fortifications; The Stormtroopers meanwhile are the ones that go on the offensive. Whereas stormtroopers are politically indoctrinated fanatics with access to heavy weapons, are only referred to by designations, and wear de-individualizing and fear-inducing armor, Army and Navy troopers just act like normal soldiers, with many just being conscripts or looking for a paycheck rather than true believers. Which works fine for the Empire in their intended role, but as the Galactic Civil War ramped up, the Empire began leaning far more heavily on its Stormtrooper forces, especially when Army and Navy troopers were less likely to carry out morally dubious orders against fellow citizens.
  • Imperial Security Bureau: If the stormtroopers are the Waffen-SS, the ISB is the Gestapo/insert-three-letter-agency-here, complete with an interservice rivalry (as members of the more military-oriented branches of the Empire often look down on the ISB as a bunch of pencil-pushers who waste Imperial resources needlessly, and given what's shown in Andor they may just be right). They're not a military branch per se, but instead they're associated with COMPNOR, a political organization that focuses primarily on information warfare, including propaganda, law enforcement, Internal Affairs, and rounding up dissidents. The ISB is particularly feared and hated by both rebels and fellow Imperials, as they're always paranoid and ruthless when it comes to hunting down and dealing with any hint of disloyalty, and love using torture to extract information/confessions. The ISB had been depicted as early as the first movie through Colonel Wullf Yularen, but they hadn't been expanded upon much until after the original trilogy.

• Imperial Remnant: What the Empire is known as post-Endor, since they're no longer in charge of the Galaxy. Both Legends and Disney explored this idea, but in substantially different ways:
  • Legends: In the original continuity, the Empire splintered into different warlord factions after the death of the Emperor and took several decades for the New Republic to defeat. At various points these remnants continued to threaten the New Republic for a long time, including the splinter lead by tactical genius Admiral Thrawn. They did team up temporarily to fight off the extra-galactic invaders, the Yuuzhan Vong. Eventually the largest remnant, which had greatly mellowed out its policies since Palpatine's death, made peace with the New Republic. It would continue to exist into Cade Skywalker's era 130+ years after the Battle of the Yavin, where it would split into two major factions; one that was more overtly associated with the Sith and reminiscent of the pre-Rule-of-Two Sith Empire, and the other lead by a royal family of Force sensitives more akin to Grey Jedi. After a war, the One Sith (faction name of the last Sith group) aligned faction is defeated, tries to go back into the shadows but is destroyed by a renegade One Sith, Darth Wredd, who wants to return to the Rule of Two but dies before taking an apprentice leaving the Sith extinct. The Fel Empire joins the New Republic successor government and the Jedi for to form the new galactic government.
  • Disney: In the Disney canon, the Emperor had a two-part plan in the event of his death; firstly, he'd destroy most of his remaining forces in Operation Cinder (this plan appears stupid on its head, but does serve a few purposes; it prevented Warlords from using Imperial resources to carve out their own empires, it tested the loyalty of the remaining officer corps, and denied assets to the New Republic. But mostly he was just a bitter asshole who wanted to take his ball and go home). In the second phase, those considered worthy enough were to retreat to secret fortress worlds in the Unknown Regions. Most of the remaining Imperial forces surrendered not long after the Battle of Endor, but various warlords still existed in the Outer Rim for at least five years since the fall of the Empire. The New Republic decides to just ignore them because fuck it Jar Jar Abrams wanted Rebels vs. Empire again, couldn't be asked to explain it and had no plans for the rest of the trilogy anyways. Considering how a large part of the Galaxy's history can be characterized as "Core Vs Outer Rim," and how the region had always been hard to control, its likely that the New Republic didn't want to fuck around with such a large clusterfuck of a region when they were still trying to consolidate the core, which unfortunately allowed for opportunists like Moff Gideon to grow in the shadows. There's also good evidence that Grand Admiral Thrawn, who's already been integrated into Disney Canon, will once again be a major power player in the Imperial Remnant. Whether he's still working for the Imperials in the Unknown Regions or in it for himself, we'll have to wait and see.

The problem is 90% has been retconned multiple times now and Operation Cinder has suffered from having four different interpretations. Currently evidence points to an Imperial Civil War breaking out have been retconed again and retcons have frequently become a problem. As such there are several schools of interpretation and the amount of factions.

1. The Yomo Council: A faction which rejected the authority of Gailus Rax and Coruscant. This group was made up of Imperial Army elements and their families which ended up getting brutally attacked by the Loyalist Shadow Wing and the New Republic.
2. The Jakku Remnant: The term for the Imperial Forces at Jakku during the battle under Fleet Admiral Rax. This was the force you see at Jakku and was the one who was defeated at the battle. After the battle the Imperial Forces are either killed, Captured and tried as War Criminals, or fled the battle to other Imperial Forces.
3. The Shadow Council: These are the main Imperials seen in The Mandalorian. They are pretty good shots and made up of Imperial Veterans; outwardly they appear to be disorganized warlords, but they are secretly united under Grand Admiral Thrawn's machinations. Moff Gideon is one such member, having at least nine acting members of council. The only reason they do not kill Mando is because of the literal plot armor. They also had Dark Troopers and some specialized Imperial Assets.
4. The Iron Blockade: A faction led by a Imperial Governor name Adhard who locked down the Sector and pretended palps wasn't dead, despite the blatant evidence to show otherwise. He held tough control of the Sector and had is own Purge Trooper Squads and custom Imperial Logo.
5. The Outer Rims Remnants: A group of Imperial forces who rejected the FO as a bunch of larping Fags. They decided to fight against them and the Emperor because they saw them as traitors to the Empire they had fought for. These guys are kind of a cool idea of something not explored.
6. The Core World Remnants: These are planets like Fondor, Kuat, the Deep Core, and Coruscant. They kept some Imperial Forces as defense forces and they desire the return of the Empire. Despite being banned by the New Republic from building armies and navies they built tons of weapons and warships from the FO without the NR realizing..... When the FO took out Hosnian Prime, these forces joined up with the FO as sympathizers and auxiliary forces.

• The Republic: Before the Empire, the galaxy was governed by a huge representative democracy, seen in the prequel movies. It's corrupt as fuck, and not really capable of much other than ignore the fact most of the galaxy is already at war with itself, entire species are being wiped out in ethnic purges faster than they can be counted in a census, and slavery is pretty much everywhere. Acts like one nation, functions as an economic forum for oligarchs while planets police themselves to varying degrees. And since, by law, the Republic had no army before the Clone Wars, planets that were too poor to fight off pirates and slavers had little recourse. Besides failing to act on the many atrocities happening in the galaxy (and those they do intervene in ended up sowing resentment into the future Separatists), a major issue was that Republic policies gave special treatment to the prosperous Core worlds and large corporations over the remote and impoverished Rim worlds, one of those being that the Senate has a limited number of seats, so a lot of the newer worlds have to share a single senator for entire sectors of space. Don’t fuck with Hutts, leaving them to do whatever they want in most of the galaxy, and until Sheev took over and made it the prelude to his Empire the only thing they ever did to get shit done is ask the Jedi to deal with it, whatever it is. The scary thing is that in the final years of the Republic, the Senate voluntarily laid the groundwork for the Empire long before the Declaration of the New Order and nobody even noticed it happened until decades later, when Palpatine received his emergency powers at the start of the Separatist Crisis and the opening of the Clone Wars. As Maul would point out before the end of the War, the Republic was already gone.
  • High Republic: A historical term, it was still the same Republic as the one mentioned above but before all the corruption kicked in full force, making this period 100-500 years before the Republic's fall seem like a golden age in retrospect. During this time, the Republic was at its peak and made genuine attempts at taming the outer rim. Though galaxy-wide wars did not happen, the Republic did face several threats during this time regardless, like marauders who would have preferred the Republic to just leave the Outer Rim alone so they could continue their anarchistic ways, and a cult that believes that the Force is sacred and should not be used.

• The Old Republic: The early Republic. Far less corrupt, and had a standing army made up of what can charitably be called a mix of rent-a-cop security and elite paramilitary volunteers, the Special Operations department was top notch (although it had a bit of a war crimes problem and had a humiliating defection in the Cold War phase of the Great Galactic War that only didn't destroy them because the rookie and the cynical intel officer in the defecting Havoc Squad and the hacker, the Sith Imperial defector, the demolitions unit and the prototype battle droid assigned to them to rebuild were even better than the traitors and managed to convince three to surrender and killed the psychos) and the Navy as well as the armored land units were great, infantry and random conscript from wherever not so much. It was also far smaller, as the Republic only gradually expanded in stages across the galaxy, with humans leading most colonization efforts. Still rely heavily on Jedi, but mostly just for dealing with Sith. Hutt territory is more formal rather than them operating everywhere.
  • Ruusan Reformation: 1000 years before the Battle of Yavin, after the apparent destruction of the Sith, the Old Republic underwent a massive reorganization that made it into the modern Republic, but started with a dark age due to the damage caused by the war, during which the Republic had weakened to the point that in the eyes of later historians it had effectively ceased to exist. Used to reconcile a problem in the films where the Republic is said to have existed for both 1000 years and "a thousand generations". This also solves how many details about pre-Prequel works had substantially different depictions of the Republic and Jedi from what the prequels wound up doing, and how there were wars when a character says there hasn't been a full scale war since the formation of the Republic.

• The New Republic: The post-Empire government that the Rebellion forms.
  • Legends: Leia rules for a time, trying to manage the various monsters of the week and Imperial remnant groups, gradually stepping down to more minor titles to avoid being another Emperor. Then they have to deal with things like the extra-galactic cenobite invaders that cause a galaxy-wide holocaust while her Jedi kids died or flirted with being evil. Eventually it forms the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances, a confederation that includes a less-evil Imperial remnants (which it had been at peace with for a while) and some other powers, remaining a stable force combating Sith and their empires ever. During this time, Leia's granddaughter was prophesied to bring the Light Side of the Force into ascendance while a female Force-Cthulhu tried to co-opt the prophecy for herself. After Luke defeats her, a few decades are skipped and the Federation is defeated by a Sith backed Imperial Remnant faction, the Fel Empire. The Sith then backstab the Imperials and kick off the Sith-Imperial war. The Federation and the Jedi help the loyalists defeat the One Sith, and the Sith themselves are rendered extinct after Darth Wredd (who wanted to bring back the Rule of Two) kills them all and dies before taking an apprentice, leaving the Federation, the Fel Empire and the Jedi (who had suffered another purge before the Sith back-stabbed Emperor Roan Fel, who died at the hands of his Gray Jedi/Imperial Knight Bodyguard in the final battle after falling to the Dark Side and succeeded by his daughter Marasiah) to form the last known government, the Galactic Federation Triumvirate.
  • Disney: Focused on defeating the Empire, then dismantled the Rebellion militarily. Focused mostly on being an intermediary with independent planets, paying for each one in the alliance to have their own militia with treaties to support each other if attacked, while the Republic itself had a small fleet to bolster anyone in need. Despite sounding like the setup for World War 1, it actually is like the US/Soviet Cold War with the Imperial remnant then its successor the First Order, until the FO performed a Star Wars 9/11 and used a planet killer weapon to destroy all the planets in the sector of the New Republic capital then invaded the independent planets. Being essentially destroyed with their capital system despite being the galactic government which should have contingencies for such events since existence of planet killers is common knowledge, the planets focused on their own survival until Lando performed a short planet-hopping tour to rile up the militias and all the scum, villainy, and pirates who wanted to see the true death of the Empire/First Order. During its reign it had far less control over the galaxy than the Republic or Empire, but clever administration and assigned leadership of the militias made traditionally dangerous and lawless planets like Tatooine finally civilized. Its ultimate fate is now unknown.

• Confederacy of Independent Systems: aka the Separatists. Due to the rampant corruption in the Republic, a lot of systems were very unhappy with the state of the galaxy and wanted out. However, many of these separatists included extremely powerful corporate goons, such as the Trade Federation, who simply wanted more power for themselves, and were willing to lease out their droid armies to that end. While outwardly they were simply disgruntled and neglected planets who wanted independence, in reality the CIS existence was deliberately engineered by the Sith in order to further their goals in the creation and maintenance of the Empire. Under the leadership of Count Dooku, they formed a formidable alliance that would threaten the core worlds of the Republic with the biggest army ever created, eventually leading to the Clone Wars that would throw the galaxy into one of the bloodiest conflicts in centuries. And despite Dooku's purported political idealism at the start of the war, the more idealistic and politically motivated worlds who wanted to escape the Republic's corruption found themselves sidelined by the big Corporate worlds who controlled the war effort and stationed their droid armies everywhere. These corporations liked to pretend that they were still neutral in the war and that any corporate executives openly engaging with the CIS were "rogue elements," if only because they still wanted to play both sides of the conflict with a little war profiteering. That being said, it was clear to anyone who was in the know that the corporations, under the Separatist Council, held much of the real power (the non-corporate CIS worlds simply didn't have the money or numbers to pose any real threat to the Core), and that the CIS Parliament was just a formality for getting the Outer Rim on their side. As the war progressed, bloodthirsty war criminals like General Grievous made the Republic fear and loathe any hint of disloyalty, which was a major PR problem for the early Rebellion. One of the big ironies is that, because the CIS turned out to be just as corrupt as the Republic, many Separatist worlds begrudgingly sided with the Empire as the "lesser of two evils" in their minds. The fact that the CIS was made up of powerful, alien corporations from the Outer Rim also served to justify the Empire's xenophobia, nationalization of virtually all heavy industry, and subjugation of worlds far away from the Core. Because the Separatists were simply an expendable puppet of the Sith, Palpatine had no qualms about sending Vader to destroy the remaining leaders once he secured his Empire and they'd outlived their usefulness. The Empire then proceeded to dismantle the remaining Confederate groups along with pirates and other anti-central government forces in the Reconquest of the Rim. Several remnants continued resistance and some helped Order 66 survivors escape. After the Rebel Alliance was formed, surviving Confederate Remnant forces joined it, for those who joined the CIS to fight against Old Republic corruption happily, and for those who were full on separatists somewhat unhappily as a lesser of two evils. Until at least 1 BBY one Imperial Moff, Conan Antonio Motti, referred to them as a threat alongside rebels and criminal enterprises. Presumably, the last few organics holdouts joined the rebels or took the opportunity to disband after the Death Star was destroyed. Handfuls of Droid units that didn't receive the deactivation signal remained active on Tatooine, Lok and Kashyyyhk and were destroyed by the Star Wars Galaxies MMORPG characters. A large leftover unit was present on Geonosis and were destroyed in a Galactic Civil War battle there in 3 ABY. A single Droideka, which had been infiltrated into the Outbound Flight voyage, was out of range of the shut down order and was destroyed by Luke and Mara in 22 ABY during their expedition to the Outbound Flight crash site, ending the last relic of the Confederate cause that was still nominally obeying CIS Parliament orders.

• The Rebel Alliance: After Emperor Palpatine's political takeover succeeded and the Jedi murdered in a galaxy-wide act of backstabbery, Senators Bail Organa, Padmé Amidala, Mon Mothma and a small group of sympathizers come together to form a resistance group, knowing fully well that the new Galactic Empire won't be going quietly with their new "doctrines", especially since the Empire's militarization only increased following the end of the Clone Wars. Prior to the Battle of Yavin, the "Rebel Alliance" was more like the "Rebel Coalition of guys who loosely agree on some things," being made up of individual cells under the coordination of a High Command unit. The rebellion's supporters were an odd mixture of former Separatists, Republic loyalists who found themselves betrayed such as Kashyyk and Mon Calamari, and the occasional Imperial defector who found Imperial service either too immoral or too dangerous. For the next twenty years, the Rebellion will infiltrate, sabotage and generally frustrate the Empire as best they can, but unfortunately doesn't manage to really make a big difference; that is, before a certain Luke Skywalker gets swept up by them and leads them to their first, grand victory against the Empire's first Death Star. From here on out, the Rebellion does their best keeping themselves hidden from the Empire while maintaining strong relations with their allies, who, while few, did let them create a small fleet of outdated vehicles. Eventually, the Rebellion's hard work bears fruit after the second Death Star blows up and the Emperor goes missing. From here, the Rebellion and their members become the New Republic.
  • The Resistance: From a first look, the Resistance looks extremely similar to the Rebellion visually (they are called "The Resistance" for Pete's sake!), but there's a little more going on under the hood. Feeling her hairbuns tingle with fear, Leia Organa realizes the First Order will become a galaxy-wide headache soon and moves to get the New Republic to give a shit - except they don't, because her father was Vader, and thinks she's a military maverick that just wants to feel important. Leia then begins to fund a secret militia of her own, looking for supporters among fellow senators and calling in old friends. The result is... Less than ideal. Functionally just a strikeforce of some twenty fighters and one or two capital ships (who by now are über-mega outdated), the Resistance can do jack shit against the First Order, who literally commands entire space empires by force. By the Force Awakens, they're pretty much fucked - but luckily gets themselves two new heroes to add to the fold (one who is among the most naturally talented forces users ever seen), re-connect with Han and Chewie AND find a fucking map to Luke Skywalker's personal pillowfort he left for some 5-10 years ago. Eventually fucked up after destroying the Starkiller Base and grinded to metal spacedust by a prolonged space chase, they eventually manage to ignite resistance in the entire galaxy, which gets a fuckhueg navy of ragtag ships to reinforce them at Exegol.

• Sith Empires: The Old Republic's mortal enemies. In the many millenia leading up to the Ruusan Reformation, the Sith Empires held a significant chunk of the northeastern galaxy, holding thousands of worlds under their iron grip. The Sith engaged in several major wars against the Republic, oftentimes defeating the Republic and nearly exterminating the Jedi, only for their own empire to descend into chaos as Sith Lords backstabbed each other once they no longer had a common enemy. This pattern would continue until Bane killed all the remaining Sith Lords and instituted the Rule of Two, plotting to take over the galaxy and exterminate the Jedi through slow and careful planning rather than overwhelming force. Several different Sith Empires include:
  • Ajunta Pall's Dark Jedi: A predecessor group rather than an Empire, consisting of Jedi who turned to the dark side and were exiled by the Jedi, who then proceeded to fight the Jedi in what became known as the Hundred-Year Darkness 7000 years before the Galactic Empire. After their defeat, the Jedi, in a massive case of not as planned in retrospect, decided to exile them to the Unknown Regions rather than execute them as the Republic would have preferred, believing their exile would eventually turn them back to the light. They landed on Korriban, homeworld of a primitive species called Sith, where thanks to their Force-powers and advanced technology, the Sith basically saw them as gods. They then proceeded to take the planet over and Ajunta Pall became the first Dark Lord of the Sith.
  • Old Sith Empire: 5000 years before the Galactic Empire, the Republic had largely forgotten about the exiles and the Sith had lived in isolation from the rext of the galaxy, establishing an Empire of their own in their corner of the galaxy. That is until explorers from the Republic, attempting find a new hyperspace lane, accidentally found their way to Korriban. Learning of the Republic and territories to conquer, the Sith decided to invade the Republic in what became known as the Great Hyperspace War. The Republic, though suffering heavily in the war, would eventually defeat the Sith Empire, largely thanks to the Jedi. Some Sith survivors would then retreat to the Unknown Regions to the world of Dromund Kaas, where they would spend the next 1300 years in isolation, planning for revenge against the Republic and the Jedi.
  • Exar Kun's Sith Empire: 4000 years before the Galctic Empire, when an ambitious Jedi named Exar Kun became too immersed in studying the dark side and ancient Sith knowledge, he turned to dark side himself and decided to restore the Sith Empire and destroy the Republic and the Jedi in what became known as the Great Sith War. His Empire proved to be extremely short-lived, lasting only a year but would still leave a severe impact in the galaxy, with the Great Sith War being the first in a half a century worth of wars known as the Old Sith Wars.
  • Darth Revan's Sith Empire: 30 years after the Great Sith War, the Republic was invaded by the Mandalorian Neo-Crusaders, who unlike the later Mandalorians who merely place great emphasis on martial values, effectively worshipped war itself. The Mandalorians were defeated primarily thanks to the Jedi led by Revan, who decided to fight the Mandalorians despite the opposition of the Jedi High Council. Revan, after defeating the Mandalorian leader, Mandalore the Ultimate, that the Mandalorians were manipulated by the Sith and he, together with his friend Alek, would go to Dromund Kaas where they would confront the Sith Emperor. The Sith Emperor turned out to be too powerful for both of them who would dominate their minds and turn them to the dark side, then send them back to the Republic to soften it up for later full-scale invasion by the Sith. The two would eventually regain the control of their minds, though still under the dark side, decided that the only way for the Republic to defeat the Sith invasion is for them to build their own Empire in its place. Assuming titles of Darth Revan and Darth Malak, the two would discover an ancient Rakatan shipyard known as Star Forge, which was capable of producing near-endless amounts of war material from seemingly nothing. The two would then challenge the Republic, supported by massive amounts of Republic and Jedi defectors, still loyal to Revan after the Mandalorian Wars. Their empire, thanks to Revan's tactical genius, skills of Mandalorian Wars-veterans and near endless amounts of war materiel from the Star Forge, would then bring the Republic to its knees. The Jedi would eventually attempt to board Revan's flagship in an attempt to rob the Empire of their leader and greatest strategist but during the attempt, Malak betrayed Revan and fired on his ship. Revan however did not die and was captured by the Jedi, who proceeded to wipe his memory in a Force-induced amnesia in an attempt to turn him back to the light and discover the Star Forge so they could destroy it. In the meanwhile, the Empire continued its march. Robbed of Revan's strategies, under Malak it relied much more on brute force, enabled by the Star Forge materiel and already weakened Republic. The Star Forge would eventually be re-discovered by Revan, now redeemed, proceeded to defeat Malak after which the Star Forge was destroyed by the Republic Navy. Without the Star Forge and with Malak dead, the Empire was splintered as its remnants started to fight each other in the power vacuum. As in the eyes of the general public, there was little difference between the Jedi and the Sith and with many Sith being former Jedi themselves, this conflict came to be known as the Jedi Civil War.
    • Sith Triumvirate: A notable remnant of Revan's Empire, led by Darth Traya, Darth Sion and Darth Nihilus. Though no longer capable of fighting the Republic and the Jedi head-on, they still managed to bring the already weakened Jedi Order to near-extinction, in what became to be known as the First Jedi Purge. Thanks to efforts of one of Revan's leading generals, Meetra Surik, the Triumvirate was eventually destroyed and the Jedi Order was restored.
  • True Sith Empire: Directly descended from the Old Sith Empire, built directly after its defeat in the Great Hyperspace War. After spending the next 1300 years hidden in the Unknown Regions, occasionally manipulating galactic events like the Mandalorian Wars and the Jedi Civil war, the Sith Empire would finally emerge in a full-scale invasion of the Republic, kicking of the Great Galactic War. Immediately capturing the ancient Sith World of Korriban, the Empire would then fight the Republic in a war that would least almost three decades. Though the Empire would take severe casualties in the war, preventing it from destroying the Republic and the Jedi outright, at the end of the war, it would still manage to sack the Republic capital of Coruscant and force the Republic to end the war by signing a humiliating peace treaty and leaving the galaxy in a state of cold war. We do not know the exact details of what ultimately happened to this Empire, as the storyline involving it is still on-going. We do however know that by 1400 years after the Great Galactic War, it had ceased to exist and as is the nature of the Sith, it was likely infighting that ultimately brought it down.
  • New Sith Empire: Formed 2000 years before the Galactic Empire by Darth Ruin, this is the Sith Empire that people speak of in the movies. For the next 1000 years it would regularly fight against the Republic and the Jedi. Throughout these conflicts, later known as New Sith Wars, worlds further away from the Core would regularly be effectively abandoned by the Republic while many of them would then be ruled by Jedi effectively as feudal lords. 900 years after Darth Ruin, the galaxy had entered a dark age and the Republic had practically ceased to exist and was likely spared a complete destruction only by Sith infighting, which fragmented the New Sith Empire and its territories also effectively became Sith-ruled feudal holdings.
    • Brotherhood of Darkness: In the last decade of the Republic Dark Age, a Dark Lord named Skere Kaan attempted to reform the Sith under a more unified power structure which could finally defeat the less unified feudal lords of the Jedi. Realizing the threat this unified Sith faction presented, the Jedi Lord Hoth would form the Army of Light to oppose it. The Army of Light and the Brotherhood of Darkness would then fight throughout the decade until the conflict finally culminated in the Seventh Battle of Ruusan. The Army of Light would finally emerge victorious, ending the New Sith Wars. The Sith were now believed to be extinct.
  • Order of the Sith Lords **: This is the Sith we see in the movies. Though the Sith were believed to be extinct after Ruusan, they still survived though in a much smaller form. Darth Bane realized that the Sith were ultimately destroyed less by their external enemies and more by their own infighting. Thus he decided to implement the Rule of Two: At any time, there is to be only two Sith Lords, a master to hold the power and an apprentice to crave it. Thus as apprentice betrays the master, the sith will grow stronger every time. For a thousand years, the Sith would then remain in the shadows in order to manipulate galactic events until they could finally reveal themselves at an opportune moment. Order of the Sith Lords under mastership of Palpatine then finally succeeded where the earlier Sith failed by completely destroying the Republic and replacing it with the Empire while also bringing the Jedi to near extinction. Despite the Sith rule and various dark side users serving the Empire, the Empire is still generally not considered a proper Sith Empire as it does not make the Sith-rule apparent.

• The Hutt Cartels: Essentially the space mafia, if the mafia had the clout to influence the national government (like in Russia during the 90s with the Russian Mob). The Hutts managed to drive of the Rakatan Infinite Empire despite having no FTL at the time due to the Rakata losing their connection to the force. The original Hutt empire, after fighting some wars of expansion against neighbors and fellow tyrants in Xim the Despot's regime suffered a massive civil war known as the Hutt Cataclysms which ruined their original homeworld and made them move to Nal Hutta (Nar Shadda is it's moon). To prevent things getting this bad, cartels were established between influential factions, all answering to the Council of Elders made up from the heads of houses. Hutt Space is nominally ruled by the Council but it essentially practices anarcho-capitalism and takes its cuts to rule the core planets and lets the cartels compete out of the core however they wish. If there's an affair that's illegal by legal standards, the Hutts probably have a hand in it. Keeps to themselves and doesn't care much for what the Sith and Republic is up to, though Jabba the Hutt, owner of Tatooine, takes part in the original trilogy because of Han Solo's longstanding debt to him, and Jabba had one of the biggest criminal empires at the time, competing with giants like the ancient Black Sun. Gets helped and funded by the Empire to do their dirty work and gets killed for his efforts, so there's a good reason why they keep out of all that. Hutt space has significant overlap with the cartels, but the two are technically separate as mentioned above, with the Council of Elders acting as a government for Hutt Space and as a mafia council for other holdings by the cartels. They get invaded during the Yuuzhan Vong war, but effectively form a guerilla force tying up major assets and reassert their rule after the Vong were defeated. After dealing with some slave revolts around the time of the Second Galactic Civil War and selling arms to Darth Caedus's uprising, they continue as they were until the Fel Empire (reformed Imperial Remnant), backed by the Sith, defeats the Federation. When the Sith backstabbed the Imperials, the Hutts secretly provide support to the Fed Remnants and Imperial Loyalists battling the Sith in the Sith-Imperial War. After the Sith blow up a Hutt temple, they officially declare war and join the anti-Sith coalition. Presumably they joined the Galactic Federation Triumvirate with at least nominal autonomy after the Darth Wredd Insurgency and the destruction of the Sith in 138 ABY.

• The First Order: If the Empire was the textbook fascist dictatorship, Disney's First Order is the Nazi Party itself as a military organization/cult. After the Imperial Remnants began fighting amongst themselves, an Imperial admiral fled to the Unknown Regions to rebuild her version of the Empire. Here the First Order grew slowly as former Imperials joined them and they subjugated small local fiefdoms and kingdoms. Eventually the previously unknown Sith Lord Snoke took control as their Supreme Leader and Ben Solo joined him as his apprentice, becoming Kylo Ren. The New Republic eventually learned of the First Order, but thought they were just a paper tiger with no real power. In actuality, their military tech and capabilities were quite high for how relatively small they were... Oh yeah, and they had created a superweapon built into a trench in the planet Ilum that could destroy a whole star-system. Eventually they fired the thing and waged a war of subjugation on the anarchic remains of the New Republic.
  • RETCONS: The First Order apparently never existed until about 8 years before TFA meaning a lot of this does not make sense. Its assume a minor civil war happened in the Unknown Regions but again the FO is not given much lore. They also apparently had a fleet bigger the Empire's fleet at its Height..... just do not bother.
  • SPOILERS: Behind the scenes, the Emperor had manipulated the creation of the First Order to retake the galaxy, using an artificial body double (Snoke) to take direct control while hiding on the Sith homeworld. The plan was to eventually add his own fleet of Star Destroyers with planet-destroying capabilities to the First Order and form the Final Order, the one and final armada to take the entire galaxy through force and fear.

• Galactic Federation Triumvirate: The last known galactic government at the ends of the Legends continuity, formed from the Fel Empire, the Federation and the Jedi after the One Sith are defeated by a joint coalition of Fel Empire loyalists, Federation Troops and Jedi in 137 ABY. In 138 ABY, renegade One Sith Darth Wredd, wishing to restore the Rule of Two, manipulates the One Sith to destroy themselves and kills the survivors in the Darth Wredd Insurgency, before being killed himself without managing to take an apprentice in the last known battle, leaving the Sith extinct and the galaxy at least nominally unified by a well armed government.

Significant Worlds

"I sense a great disturbance in the Force. (...) How else can so many worlds be totally covered with only one terrain type without regard to latitudinal variations?"

– Darth Vader, Irregular Webcomic!, Issue 87

There's a fuckton of planets in the Star Wars Galaxy, so we'll limit this list to the more noteworthy ones (mostly the ones that show up in films). As a whole, the franchise is famous for its love of the "Single Biome Planet" trope, to the point that it's been poked fun at multiple times (including within the franchise itself), though given that planets with a single biome exist in real life, this aspect isn't as unrealistic as it sounds.

• Tatooine: A run down desert world orbiting a binary star system on the outer rim of the galaxy. Its close proximity to major hyperspace routes and its location in Hutt space makes this otherwise unremarkable planet relatively strategic for illicit trade (ie: Space Juárez). It has a few dingy little cities, towns and farms home to a collection of criminals, smugglers, people scraping by and slaves with some basic order imposed by Hutt Crime families. The oral history of the native sand people suggests that it was considerably more lush before its inhabitants pissed off the Rakata, but the source for that notes oral histories are generally inaccurate. Surprisingly it is the most visited world in the franchise, showing up in every one of the six original films but Empire Strikes Back and appearing in countless other works due to the Skywalker family's connection to this craphole. This has actually become something of a point of criticism in recent years, with lots of critics and even some fans complaining about how often Tatooine shows up in Star Wars products. But hey, desert scenes are cheap and people still like Space Westerns.

• Naboo: Lush planet between the Mid rim and outer rim, shared by both humans and gungans. Naboo's settlers are descended from Alderaaneans (Leia's home planet), so their culture and politics are extremely similar with a strong emphasis on pacifism, philanthropy, and high art (and ironically, early supporters of the Rebellion). Interestingly, the planet core is connected to the planet's oceans, though travel through the core is quite dangerous due to the leviathans living there. The planet hadn't been terribly important right up until the Trade Federation came knocking to demand tax payments over its trade routes (though in reality Naboo had massive untapped plasma reserves, and the Tradies wanted free reign to drill), which began a series of conflicts culminating in the Clone Wars. Relatively close to Tatooine, which is how the Jedi end up discovering Anakin Skywalker during the conflict when they're forced to evacuate the Queen of Naboo.

• Coruscant: The Capital of the Republic and the Empire, a Ecumenopolis in which basically every square meter of it's surface is covered in a multi-kilometer thick cityscape. So, Trantor. It's fucking Trantor. Several sources claim it to be humanity's homeworld, or else where humanity initially expanded from since their enslavement by the Rakata. Originally found in George Lucas's notes as "Imperial Center", Timothy Zahn named it Coruscant (pronounced chorus-saunt and is similar to Coruscate, which is a fancy way of saying to sparkle) in the Thrawn Trilogy (as Imperial Center was clearly not the original name) and Lucas was convinced to keep the name when it came time to make the prequels. Before the prequels, pronunciation in audio books was all over the place. Descriptions of the city are not unlike your typical Hive City (if not as extreme), where the elites live in the upper levels where the sky is still visible, while the lower class live in the dark, crumbling foundations, but with a more Art Deco vibe rather than Gothic. The actual planet surface is mostly landfill now, and the lower levels got increasingly uninhabitable after the Yuuzhan Vong terraformed the planet and later the Force-Cthulhu Abeloth made some new volcanoes. Not much is shown of Coruscant in the Disney canon after the prequel era, and its not even the capital of the New Republic. Supposedly J.J. Abrams wanted to blow the planet up but was told "no" by literally everyone.

• Yavin IV: Jungle moon of the gas giant Yavin. The temples on this moon used to house a warrior race that had been enslaved by the Sith before being driven to extinction; it then became the secret base of the Rebel Alliance, which became the staging area for the Alliance's battle against the first Death Star. After the superweapon's destruction, the Empire launched a conventional attack and the Alliance was forced to relocate to Hoth. After the Thrawn Campaign, it became the site of Luke's new Jedi Academy which, after a brief incident with a Sith wraith haunting the place, flourished until yet another galactic war forced them to relocate.

• Hoth: An obscure snow world devoid of any intelligent life, and seemingly named after a legendary Jedi master of old. It became the new headquarters for the Rebel Alliance after the fall of Yavin Base. It was established way back in the Newspaper comic that it was chosen by the rebels after Luke crash landed on it and encountered a pair of malfunctioning Replica Droid prototypes fleeing from their creators. Further sources have expanded on its reasons for being chosen to include the fact that it's just off of a major trade route, which concealed supply runs (and is why Bespin is within backup drive distance).

• Bespin: Gas giant with a breathable upper atmosphere. Home to Cloud City, an independent city that makes its income through mining Tibanna gas (used in blasters). Bespin's independence was used as political leverage when Vader arrived and extorted Lando Calrissian into betraying the rebels to him. After Vader double crossed Lando, the Rebels would later liberate Bespin from the Imperials.

• Kamino: Ocean planet that technically exists outside the Galaxy proper, in between it and what is known as the "Rishi Maze," which was why it was a bitch to find. The inhabitants are expert geneticists, and the place is really hard to get to without knowing exactly what you're doing, making it the ideal location for growing the Republic's clone army. Kamino's cities were destroyed by the Empire shortly after the Clone Wars, as they had decided to switch to recruited soldiers; we don't know much about what became of the Kaminoans themselves other than some were forcibly recruited into more specialized cloning programs. Legends had a revolt break out by the Kaminoans making their own Fett clones which was put down and the planet was irrelevant afterwards.

• Geonosis: Desert world inhabited by bug people. Was used by the separatists to build their armies and strategize, eventually becoming the site of the first battle of the Clone Wars. Geonosis is actually even more of a creepy hellhole than Episode II suggests, as the Geonosian Queen can use worms to turn corpses into zombies and mind control living hosts. During the Clone Wars, Geonosis was the first construction site for the Death Star, since it was technically the Geonosians who made the schematics in the first place. Most Geonosians were wiped out by the Empire when the Death Star was moved for completion.

• Utapau: Temperate planet characterized by its massive sinkhole cities. General Grievous tried to rally the Seperatists here after Dooku's death, but was killed by Obi-Wan in the ensuing battle.

• Kashyyyk: Forest/jungle planet and home to the wookies, who live in gigantic tree houses connected by enormous suspension bridges. The interior of the jungle, known as the Shadowlands, is full of a wide variety of dangerous lifeforms, so the wookies stay close to the canopy; the only time they enter the shadowlands is to hunt, in initiation rites, or to live in exile. In Kashyyk’s ancient history, the Rakata used dark-side powered technology to speed up Kashyyk’s evolution so that it could be used as an Agri-world for the empire; while the Rakata have long since disappeared, this machine is still active and is responsible for the many dangerous and twisted creatures that live on the planet. During the Republic it was an important trade world due to its location at the junction of several trade routes, highly prized resources, and the expert craftsmanship of the wookies. Despite their loyalty, during the Empire the wookies were severely subjugated and enslaved (with the help of Trandoshans) and their trees were chopped down for the valuable wood and sap. The Empire never truly took it over but did manage to pollute it to all hell.

• Mustafar: Lava planet and the last holdout of the Separatists. Darth Vader makes his base here after he is forced to don his iconic armor, proving that he did have the high ground by plonking a gigantic black tower on the surface. The planet has a strong affinity with the Dark Side, attracting various Sith cults in its history.

• Ilum: Small alpine planet covered in ice and snow and by the time of the prequels the galaxy's only known significant source of Kyber crystals, the core ingredient in a little thing we like to call "the lightsaber". Traditionally a place for Jedi to do pilgrimage to find their own Kyber crystal at, as Jedi initiates find that the only crystal visible to them in the caves is the one they're destined to use.
  • In Disney canon, the Empire turned one half of the surface into a gigantic strip-mine several hundred kilometers down into the crust. It was eventually rediscovered by the First Order and turned into an actually moon-sized laser cannon called Starkiller Base (This is poorly explained within the films; its not even identified as Ilum except in side stories. The idea is that like the original Death Star, the superlaser is powered by gigantic kyber crystals, and Ilum happens to be well inside the Unknown Regions yet its location and route were still known thanks to Jedi pilgramages).

• Dathomir: Death World-style hellhole and home of Darth Maul. Filled with gigantic brambles, noxious swamps, poisonous critters and savagely insular tribals. The native inhabitants use the planet's natural Dark Side energy to do all sorts of creepy and arcane shit, including necromancy. Nearly all of its magick-using females were wiped out by the end of the Clone Wars, leaving the planet to decay.

• Malachor V: The last battlefield of the Mandalorian Wars, which blasted the entire planet into a Mars-like wasteland thanks to a superweapon deployed, ironically, by the Jedi. The Jedi, Sith, and Mandalorians all regard it as perhaps the most critical place and moment in their respective histories despite it being a lifeless desert littered with crumbling temples and the rusting armor of countless thousands of fallen warriors. The general takeaway is this: Nobody EVER wins on Malachor. It is a tomb-world, a monument to the devastation wrought by pursuing raw power to beat your enemies.

• Dagobah: Uncharted swamp planet where Yoda went to live in exile. Noteworthy for the Dark Side cave, a naturally-occurring phenomenon where the dark side would tempt anyone who entered. Briefly the EU made the cave a remnant of a random dark force user Yoda fought there, but this was retconned away when it was implied Yoda had never visited the place before his exile, then the Clone Wars series made it so Yoda did visit Dagobah before his exile. This would just be a random detail if not for a significant character having his backstory linked to this event.

• Endor: A gas giant also known as Tana at the end of the Outer Rim before Wild Space (and it probably was in Wild Space before one of the most significant events in Galactic History took place there). The Empire built the second Death Star in its system.
  • Sanctuary Moon: Better known than the planet itself is its forest covered moon that the Empire build the shields for the under-construction Death Star 2 on. It's home to the short, furry and deadly Ewoks. It was the nominal capital of the interim Alliance of Free Planets and New Republic for two years till the capture of Coruscant.
  • Kef Bir: Ocean moon of Endor. Despite the Death Star II being in orbit of the Forest Moon, Disney decided that the wreckage landed on Kef Bir because JJ wanted an ocean setpiece. No explanation is given other than "wibbley-wobbly hyperdrivey-wimey." The LEGO Skywalker Saga game even takes a bit of a shot at it.

• Death Star & Death Star II: We're fudging the definition of world here, but its not an exaggeration to say this thing is the size of a small moon and has a very sizeable population. While the Death Star II was incomplete, it was substantially bigger and more deadly. Its main purpose was the protection and operation of a garguantuan superlaser capable of blowing up an entire planet in a singular shot. This thing was able to get around with a battery of hyperspace engines, but still took a fair amount to time to get around in order to get within firing range. Curiously enough, the idea for the superweapon came from Tarkin, but was designed by the Geonosians of all people, which then terrified the pants off the Republic that the Separatists had a superweapon prompting them to start reverse-engineering the design (Just as planned as far as Palpatine was concerned). Its design ties back to their Genosian origins, who where insectoids living in large anthills with little regard for the concept of "up" or down". As a result, the Death Star became notoriously awful as a posting among its crew, many of which had problems with orientation and becoming nauseaous.

• Alderaan: A perfect pacifist planet until the Death Star blows it up. The planet Leia was raised on by the Organas, and actually shown to have been very nice prior to its destruction, with lush forests and snow-capped mountains.

• Felucia: Another jungle-world, but this one looking like something conceived by either Dr. Seuss or someone from the 60s who got a hold of the good stuff. Rancors can be found here, and some have been tamed by the natives, truly bizarre-looking beings that look a bit like tye-dye, technicolor tree-people who are all Force-Sensitive.

• Taris: Ostensibly an Outer Rim version of Coruscant, in that the planet is a big city that really leans into the whole "what most people think of when they think of a far future city" aesthetic, beneath the shiny exterior is actually a pretty shitty society. Basically, it's society is like Pre-Civil Rights America in space (with aliens as stand-ins for out-groups), and that's before the Sith show up and put the whole planet under quarantine. Beneath the Upper City is the Lower City, which is a slum that gangsters constantly fight over and with shitty apartments that are more likely to house crazed killers or the aforementioned gangsters than honest citizens, as well as looking like they've been abandoned for years. Beneath that is the Undercity, which is where the descendants of Taris' failed proletariat uprising are consigned. Them, and Rackghouls, who, as the name implies, are basically Ghouls in Star Wars, but as there are no Elves, no one's immune (unless you have some handy Rackghoul serum). So to recap, its a planet that hates aliens, has crime-filled lower levels, and is much more Grimdark in its overall set-up than the average Star Wars planet. The Imperium would be proud...or would be, if Malak hadn't then bombed the hell out of it. Even thousands of years later, much of the planet is said to still be in ruins.

• Telos: A mix of futuristic cities and natural environments, so unlike Coruscant and Taris it isn't all one big city. A major Republic world, and then Malak bombed it, leaving it badly scarred. As such, the Republic launched a restoration project to try and get the planet back on its feet. Or, in the words of Atton Rand, "a dying world the Republic is trying to breath back to life". Also houses a secret (and defunct), Jedi academy in its polar region, where ultra-bitch Atris and her similarly obnoxious handmaidens reside.

• Dantooine: Farm planet. Fairly idyllic by all appearances, enough so that the Jedi in Legends had an Enclave here for a time...until Malak bombed it (you may be noticing a pattern by now). Even after this bombing though, the planet remains a major agricultural center up to the Clone Wars and beyond. First mentioned in A New Hope as a location Leia gives for the Rebel base to try and save Alderaan (it doesn't work). One of the Star Maps is located here.

• Kuat: Earth-like world encircled by an orbital ring station; until the Death Stars came along the Kuat Drive Yards were the largest space structure definitely built by humans (and still might be depending on how you want to measure). The Kuati are rich as fuck from selling giant angry triangle starships to whoever appears to be the ruler of the galaxy at that moment, which they have been doing since forever.

• Manaan: Water-world, but a lot less rainy than Kamino. Source of Kolto, the top healing substance in the Galaxy prior to Bacta. Once that stuff got on the market, Kolto became obsolete, and Manaan and its fish-folk inhabitants fell into decline something fierce. One of the Star Maps is located here.

• Korriban / Moraband: The homeworld of the Sith, and as to be expected, a place that tends to scream "this is an evil location". A ton of Ancient Sith Lords are entombed here, as is a Star Map (in Legends anyway). The Sith also naturally had an academy here too, which was basically a Hogwarts for sociopaths before it became abandoned. So saturated with the Dark Side that its affected the local wildlife, making most of them vicious, fearsome looking monsters (though who knows what they eat with no apparent herbivores or plant life around).

• Jakku: The Sequel Trilogy's absolutely shameless Tatooine clone (such that when the first trailer dropped, a lot of people thought it was Tatooine). Where the war between the Rebels and Empire ended in the Disney Canon, being the site of the latter's last stand and with ruined Star Destroyers and other wreckage still littering the place. As such, its mostly populated by scavengers, but in a feeble effort to convince you that it isn't a complete Tatooine clone, they aren't all Jawas this time.

• Hosnian Prime: The Sequel Trilogy's absolutely shameless Coruscant clone (and again, folks initially thought it was Coruscant). Gets the Alderaan treatment from Starkiller base, meaning it rips off of two previous planets for the price of one (still better than actually destroying Coruscant though, which according to rumor is what JJ really wanted to do).

• Ach-To: The planet Luke Skywalker flees to in the Sequel Trilogy. Apparently the planet where the Jedi originated (which is Tython in Legends). Mostly a lot of water, with at least one big landmass that's where Luke's holed up. Rey goes there to get training from him, but that clashes with Luke's whole "I don't want to be a Jedi anymore" bit. Briefly reappears in Episode IX when Rey considers doing what Luke did before his ghost talks her out of it. Also home of the "love 'em or hate 'em" Porgs.

• Canto Bight: A mostly barren planet that hosts a giant casino where rich bastards can go. Seems to be a general dress code of only black and white allowed, and filled with wholesome activities like gambling, arms dealing, child labor, and war profiteering. So a lot of glitz and glamor standing side by side exploitation and "rich people are jerks" stuff. So basically Pre-Revolution Cuba in space. Generally considered to be where a bunch of largely unnecessary stuff happened, even by folks who didn't hate Episode VIII.

• Crait: Site of an abandoned Rebel base that the Resistance remnants flee to at the end of Episode VIII, leading to a vaguely "Battle of Hoth" esque fight involving the First Order's own version of AT-ATs. As one Youtube LEGO video aptly put it, the ground is white but the dirt is red for no real reason other than that it looks "cool". Also, apparently its salt and not snow. So like, a salt-Hoth. Or something.

• Exegol: A world shrouded in darkness and perpetual lightning storms that is where Palpatine and his cronies have been hiding out since losing the Galactic Civil War. How such a large number of people existed or thrived on such a dead world is never explained, but it does manage to give the other Sith world Korriban a run for its money in the whole "obviously evil death world" department.

• Rakata Prime / Lehon: Home of the Rakatans, and where the species has become trapped ever since their empire fell. Actually a pretty lush and scenic place, though as Rakatan tribes and small-but-still-deadly Rancors roam about here, one vacations here at their own risk. That, and the same thing keeping the Rakatans from leaving (the Star Forge), also causes ships that get too close to crash-land, making it a ship's graveyard. By the time of Darth Bane, the planet seems to have become deserted, the Rakatans having apparently gone extinct.

• The Maw: Bears mentioning for being one of the more unique places of the EU. An unusually dense cluster of black holes near Kessel whose gravitational anomalies make it the ideal backdrop for risky hyperdrive spice smuggling operations. Strongly implied to be the work of an unknown precuror civilization, the Maw was considered to be largely impassible, if not for the work of top secret scouting operations that the Empire undertook to find a place to house a big R&D facility kept from the public eye. Within the Maw station, developments like the prototyping of the first Death Star and several other imperial superweapons took place, protected by a small flotilla consisting of four Imperial Star Destroyers.

Species

One important thing to note about alien species in Star Wars is that almost all of them were originally singular costumes added to the films for background color or to make a character stand out, then had a species name and culture retconned onto them by Expanded Universe writers. As a result, most species' "personalities" are just shallow clones of the character they're derived from. Many of the species seen in the original trilogy were given names and backstories by the original RPG from West End Games that became canon as every other EU novel to come after used Star Wars D6 as a reference. All entries after humans are alphabetized.

• Humans: They originated in the Galactic Core, but have spread to most inhabited planets, first as slaves to a now-extinct species of precursors and then through initial space exploration with pre-hyperdrive generation ships. As a result there are a lot of "near-human" species kicking around that are basically just weird-looking humans and pretty much the only species humans can crossbreed with.
  • Mandalorians: Bobas/Jangos. A society of space Spartans/Vikings with cool armor. Actually not human majority initially (Unless you are a Disney fan), originally made up of a species called the Taung. The Taung had a habit of adopting orphans of other species to the point that when shit hit the fan and they died out following a war with the Jedi, their culture was preserved by other species who remember them as their Progenitors. As it stands, a Mandalorian can be of any race (the adopting the orphans-thing was something else the Taung passed down) but are usually human. Way, way back during the Old Republic, they were death-worshipping genocidal crusaders who were used by the Sith to crush the Republic and provoke the Jedi into war. In more modern times they mellowed out and mostly work as mercenaries or bounty hunters (and for a brief time, even flirted with pacifism), though some extremist sects like the Children of the Watch still exist, clashing with mainstream Mandalorian culture. Following the Empire's purge of Mandalore, the Mando's Beskar Armor became a priceless resource (As only Mandos knew how to make Beskar Iron, a near-impenetrable material and one of the few that can block blaster bolts and lightsabers), with the surviving Mandos sometimes being hunted just to be stripped of their armor.
  • Corellians: Hans. Literally an entire culture of dashing rogues and space cowboys who like to go fast and smuggle shit (and penniless street urchins looking for their big break to become dashing rogues and space cowboys). The Corellian Engineering Corporation made the YT series (of which the Falcon is officially part of, though its modifications are extensive enough to make listing CEC as its manufacturer a Ship of Theseus problem) and many of the Rebel ships seen in the original trilogy. Nearly ruined their planet with starship factories, but now they've gone green and relocated all of their heavy industry to space stations. Their home system reeks of precursor meddling and is detailed enough to be a setting in itself, complete with a Big Dumb Object in the middle (Centerpoint Station) for PCs to fuck with. Worth mentioning they (at least in Legends), also have their own special group of Jedi called "The Green Jedi".
• Aqualish: Ponda Babas. Vaguely spider-like (from the neck-up) aliens who are easily one of the ugliest looking species in Star Wars. Generally portrayed as violent thugs, though not always. Apparently they don't usually get along with Biths.
• Bith: Another species that debuted in the original Star Wars movie, and because they did so as a band playing the famous Cantina theme, they were naturally given the species-wide hat of being musicians (though some Bith do pursue other careers). Their bulbous heads are probably owing to their being a fairly intelligent species, as they are big on mathematics and science as well as music. Generally a peaceful species.
• Bothans: Died to bring you this information. A species of wolf-men/horse-men/goat-men (depending on which author/illustrator) who are almost universally spies thanks to that one-off line from Mon Mothma. When you remember these are hairy-ass, man sized, cloven beastmen, it seems like the bothans would be the shittest race for something as subtle as spywork. In truth the best and early EU works portray them as something far worse than spies: politicians. The most prominent Bothan is Borsk Fey'lya, a Bothan politician who used his role in the acquisition of the second Death Star plans to maintain a place in the New Republic's senior leadership and uses his position for personal gain like any proper politician should. Now possibly NOT wolfhorsegoatpeople, thanks to some Lucasfilm source being all like “uh actually, it’s never explicitly stated that they’re aliens, maybe they’re humans, *WINK*”. Let’s hope they’re humans - or at least less dumb than wolfhorsegoats. EU Bothans were as ridiculous a concept as force cancelling weasels.
  • Half-Bothans: Satyrs/Fauns in Star Wars. Seriously, look up a picture of them and that's exactly how they're drawn. Don't seem to be too common, suggesting most humans in Star Wars aren't Furries.
• Cereans: Ki-Adi Mundis. Near-humans recognized primarily by their elongated craniums which contain a binary brain.
• Chiss: Thrawns. Near humans with blue skin, dark blue/black hair and red eyes. They dwell in the Unknown Regions, with they’re own fancy schmancy empire, crack navy and altogether superior technological advancements that make the rest of the galaxy look fucking backward (see blaster resistant clothes...whereas fucking stormtroopers in armor can be knocked down by arrows loosed by Care Bears). Known for being superb pilots, traders, negotiators, tacticians and all round scheming bastards with Danish accents.
• Devaronians: Near humans with an appearance resembling classic portrayals of Satan, with red skin, pointy ears and horns, though horns is only a male trait while having hair is a female trait.
• Dugs: Sebulbas. Except, most of them aren't Podracers, instead being even more explicitly criminal in their professions (gangsters, drug dealers, members of Black Sun, etc.). Usually abrasive, arrogant, pushy, and violent. Though somewhat humanoid, the position of arms and legs are reversed for them. They share a homeworld with the Gran, which leads to some tension. Understandably hated in-universe by most.
• Duros: Seen once in Hope during the cantina scene. Naturally they're one of the most important species in the EU despite not having a canon character until The Clone Wars introduced us to Cad Bane. Enslaved by precursors alongside humans, they were among the first to develop FTL travel based on salvaged hyperdrive technology and are the only non-human species to have an equivalent of "near-human" in a few "near-Duros" species. Look a bit like classic sci-fi Gray Aliens, as well as the Tau, but without the whole "Space Stalinism" thing.
• Echani: Similar to humans in appearance, but most if not all of them have white or silver hair. They're also a culture of martial arts experts, specializing in armed and unarmed combat and even being able to "read" their opponents to an extent. Generally seem to prefer melee combat and have comparatively less impressive ranged weapons (at least to hear Mandalorians like Canderous tell it).
• Ewoks: If skub became a species, Ewoks would be a contender up there with Gungans and Yuuzhan Vong. Small koala-like creatures, similar to Jawas, that live on the forest moon of Endor, Ewoks are super primitive and live in tribes. They end up playing a big part in the Rebel victory in Return by attacking Imperial stormtroopers and destroying some walkers. Their reception didn't seem too bad at first, but in the following decades they've become reviled by many, not so much for their design but more for the idea that small bears with spears and rocks could defeat what were supposed to be the Emperor's finest troops. Some people don't mind them (and they were definitely profitable for merchandise) but others hate them and say they're a prime reason that attitudes toward Return have gotten increasingly negative over the years. That being said, people tend to overlook that Ewoks have a dark side to them; remember how they were going to eat Luke, Han and Chewie? Some EU material reshaped them into brutally savage death world survivors who practice some shady tribal customs, but are also well-accustomed to hunting much bigger and more dangerous creatures than themselves, which would make them fighting the Empire a little more credible.
• Gamorreans: Space Orcs: Pig-like, brutish, stupid and violent. Constantly at war with each other, their clan identity is so strong they'll try to kill each other if from opposing clans if they meet off-world. Frequently brought into the galaxy as slaves or by clans trading labor/muscles for outside resources. Like Wookiees, can't physically speak Basic. Unlike Wookiees, only their clan matrons and some high ranking men are literate in their native language.
• Gen'Dai: The longest-living sentient species in the galaxy, to the point that they are seemingly immortal. This is largely due to their biology, as they are formless and have no internal organs, allowing them to survive from injuries that would be fatal or disabling to most other species, thus making them difficult to kill. Thankfully, most of them are quite peaceful and live as nomadic philosophers, though it is noted that they do tend to develop violent tendencies as they get to several thousands of years in age. They are however quite low in number and due to their seemingly endless lifespans, they have extremely low birthrates. They typically wear armor to give them an appearance of a regular humanoid species. Made infamous by the vicious bounty hunter Durge, and have also gotten representation in Disney's canon via Rayvis.
• Geonosians: The franchise's token bug alien race, because every space setting needs bug aliens. Hugely vital to the CIS due to their homeworld being one of the main planets the Droid armies were built on. Various sources describe them as as rather arrogant. They're hive-like, seem to treat their warriors and minions as expendable, and use a mix of polearm melee weapons and sonic weapons with green projectiles no one else has. Genocided by the Empire in Disney's Canon.
• Gran: Three eyed goat (?) like aliens with rough, tan skin. They are quite nice and peaceful with excellent vision, especially in distinguishing color. Unfortunately for the galaxy at large, Gran exile most of their criminals: They consider being unable to see the rich and beautiful environments of their homeworld a fate worse than death. These exiles often fall into criminal groups.
• Grysk: A near mythical species from the Unknown regions, where starships usually can't go because the hyperspace along its border is a level of fucked-up that only warp storms can match. Little is known about them except that they live on a spacefleet, have a fierce warrior culture, are humanoids with tapered skulls, their weapons and armor are ritualistically disfigured on the right side and they had a penchant for electrical weapons. Likely Disney's replacement for the Yuuzhan Vong, since Space Cenobites with bio-tech is too weird and grimdark for Disney. tl;dr the Grysk are the Rak'gol to the Yuuzhan Vong's Tyranids.
• Gungans: Jar-Jars. These guys suffer from an extremely poor choice of poster-boy (compared to Wookiees who have one of the best possible poster-boys of their species). You may think that just because Jar-Jar is one of the least intelligent (and most hated) characters in the entire Star Wars galaxy, the rest of his species are too, and this is certainly how a lot of people feel. But if you can look beyond Binks you'll see that the Gungans are pretty cool in their own way. Remember that, canonically, Jar-Jar is considered a disgrace in Gungan culture before the Battle of Naboo and after the rise of the Empire (as Senator Binks directly enabled it). Masters of organic technology, they live in bubble-buildings under the sea and have access to bioelectric spears and booma (essentially organic shock grenades fired by the various historical throwing devices) alongside army-wide shield generators (in defiance of everyone else in the galaxy deriding them as primitives). Like the Wookiees these guys have a warrior-culture to be proud of, but unlike them they have at least made the effort to have a go at learning to speak basic (even though they still need to work on it). Due to their cartilaginous skeletons they are especially athletic and dynamic, making them pretty good fighters if they are trained properly, and in a rarity for a sci-fi species they have a racial weapon that's actually entirely practical (sling hurled explosives continue to see use today). Certainly if you want an accurate Gungan poster-boy, look no further than Captain Tarpals, who manages to hold General Grievous up in a duel for several minutes with nothing more than his spear. Oh, and their king is voiced by BRIAN BLESSED. Still, for most folks, being the species of Jar-Jar is a hard thing to forgive, but like with many things from the Prequels, time has been a bit kind to their image. Worth mentioning that the writers are acutely aware of how much people find Gungans annoying, and so take shots at them now and then.
• Hutts: Jabbas. (Fun fact: "the Hutt" was just a title in the original trilogy and Jabba was just some random slug dude. The original film didn't even intended for him to be an alien!) Naturally they're all mini-Jabbas who live in a clan/crime-family/zaibatsu type of arrangement known as the kadjic. Kind of like the Mexican drug cartels in that they have their own corner of the galaxy that they rule independently, even after they join the Empire they pay the Moff to look the other way when they do shady shit. (They're always doing shady shit.) Because the Hutts own exactly one third of all organized crime (and a significant number of planets) in the galaxy and it is the third (after Basic and Binary) most widespread full language, Huttese is a good language to take, especially for criminal-types . Be warned! Hutts have four fingered hands and their numbering system uses base eight! Despite being looking and acting like fat neckbeards they're actually insanely strong and their less bulky youth are very agile for their size. They LOL at the Force, so the RPGs tend to give them a huge bonus to resist mental influence, although the old EU had a full blown (and mad) Hutt Jedi master named Baldorion who avoided Order 66 and fell to the dark side after he became the tyrant of a minor planet in Hutt Space.
• Jawas: Utinni! They roam Tatooine (and a few other planets) scavenging technology and selling it. A handful of sources mention they are rodents under the hoods. Popular with the fans, but sadly we haven't yet gotten an (official), Jawa Jedi or Sith.
• Kaminoans: A tall, gaunt species with super long necks hailing from a water-world who's species-wide hat is being expert cloners. Anyone who has a thing for clones always goes to Kaminoans to do the job, including the conspiracy behind the Clone Army that fought in the Clone Wars. Unfortunately for them, the Rise of the Empire led to their downfall in both Disney and Legends, though the circumstances between the two differ. The origins of modern Kaminoans are actually pretty grimdark for Star Wars: Originally an aquatic species confined to Kaminos vast oceans, their society was nearly driven into extinction when a climatic shift slowly turned these oceans into solid ice. Their solution to this issue was to enact a selective breeding program which later bloomed into full blown eugenics. As a sideeffect they accumulated a vast amount of knowledge about genetic engineering, which lead to the rise of their highly profitable cloning business.
• Kel Dor: Plo Koons. Humanoid species most recognizable by their distinctive masks which cover their mouths, noses and eyes, as oxygen is poisonous to them. They can however survive in the vacuum of space, though only for a limited time.
• Kiffar: Quinlan Voses. Near-human species who are physically only set apart from regular humans by their facial tattoos. Their most notable characteristic is that a rare and latent Force-ability known as psychometry, which allows people to read memories of objects and places, occurs in the species much more commonly than most species, though still only in one out of hundred.
• Lasats: Zebs. Large humanoids with somewhat feline facial features and a proud warrior race whose design is based off of early concept art fro Chewbacca. They are expected to hand over their weapon to anyone who defeats them. A particular note for them is a weapon known as bo-rifle, a weapon combining characteristic of a rifle and an electro-staff. Genocided to near-extincion by the Empire.
• Miraluka: A species that look very similar to humans, but for two major differences: they're all blind, and they're all Force-Sensitive. That first part's not as debilitating as it sounds thanks to the second part, as they effectively "see" through the Force. If Visas Marr from Knights of the Old Republic II is anything to go by, they can see what alignments other people are, with good guys being blue, ultra good guys being glowing dark blue, bad guys being red, super-evil bad guys being glowing red, and neutrals being a yellowish-white.
• Mirialans: Luminara Undulis. Look a lot like humans, but with skin along a green/olive spectrum and also often black diamond markings on their cheeks, forehead, and/or chins. As the setting's resident "green-skinned space babes" (other than Twi'leks), they naturally have a bit of a following with the fans.
• Mon Calamari: Ackbars. An aquatic species whose long history of making airtight vehicles for travel in three dimensions has made them excellent ship-builders. During the early days of the Rebellion the Mon Calamari were one of the few species to successfully throw off the Empire during Operation Domino and not be subject to immediate reprisal thanks to their isolated location and strategy of mining hyperspace routes; basically they turned their system in to Space-Finland and the Empire gave up suiciding ships into them. Those weird-looking bubble ships from Return of the Jedi are built by Mon Calamari.
• Nautolans: Kit Fistos. A green-skinned aquatic species with large black eyes and tentacles for hair.
• Neimoidians: Nute Gunrays. They will not survive this. Their reproductive cycle is really weird: they produce lots of grubs which are raised in warrens fighting over a limited amount of food; this results in only the biggest, most paranoid, and most greedy surviving. Unlike how this usually goes, this process makes the Neimodians prone to hoarding resources and wary of danger. They're also fouler than Luke (not Luke Skywalker, that other Luke) when it comes to hygiene; their homeworld's principal export is considered to be Type-B Brainrot, and even the Republic had the place functionally quarantined because of the sheer number of diseases they shit out.
• Nikto: Reptilian humanoids with leathery skin and spikes around their head.
• Noghri: Primitive, short saurian people who happen to be some of the deadliest non-Jedi melee combatants and assassins in the galaxy. Darth Vader bought their loyalty by saving them from the environmental damage a crashed ship caused. They are a major part of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy, which they were invented for. Thrawn still has one as a sidekick in Rebels.
• Pau'ans: Inhabitants of Utapau, together with another sentient species, Utai. Tall humanoid species with slender limbs, jagged teeth, two stomachs and hypersensitive ears. They typically handle the politics on Utapau while the Utai handle the labor.
  • Utai: Inhabitants of Utapau, together with another sentient species, Pau'ans. Short humanoid species with long eyestalks, they handle the labor on Utapau while Pau'ans handle the politics. This is not due to them being subservient to the Pau'ans however; they are just humble and hardworking by nature and simply prefer things this way.
• Pykes: humanoids with bulbous heads and small beady eyes, and typically wear decorative masks. Don’t let the appearance fool you, the Pyke syndicate is one of the most dangerous criminal organizations in the galaxy as they have a stranglehold on the underworld’s number one resource: Spice. Yes it’s a blatant reference to Dune. No, it doesn’t give you freaky superpowers, it’s just a very powerful narcotic. The Pykes control the Spice supply chain for the entire galaxy, taking in mined pre-spice from various planets (most of it coming from Kessel, located deep inside a maelstrom that makes navigation extremely hazardous), having it refined on their homeworld in Oba Diah, and then distributed to every corner from Tatooine to Coruscant. The Pykes allow independent smugglers to do supply runs for them but expect their cut, regardless of the smuggler’s success or failure. If you’re really unlucky, they’ll just kill you on the spot, since their leaders are constantly high on their own product.
• Quarren: Another background species from Jedi who share their homeworld of Dac with the Mon Calamari. Prideful isolationists who stick to the depths, with their main contact to the surface being trading deep sea mined materials to the Mon Calamari. Look more than a bit like Illithid. Quarren and Mon Calamari have a complicated (by which we mean bad), history and hate each other with a passion, with each species taking opposing sides in the Clone Wars.
• Rakata: The aforementioned precursors, developed by BioWare for the Knights of the Old Republic game (though there were a few mentions of precursors here and there before that). Formed an "Infinite Empire" long before the Republic using dark side powered hyperdrives only they could use. When they gradually lost their force sensitivity their empire fell apart. Responsible for why there are so many Humans and Human off-shoots everywhere: They were seeded throughout the Infinite Empire as a slave species and abandoned when it fell. Also enormous assholes as it turns out, doing everything from eating people to genocide and basically having a level of sociopathic awfulness that wouldn't be out of place in 40K. There is no evidence they existed past the Old Republic era, where a few fractured and primitive survivors were seen on their home planet and this planet was devoid of life by the time of the Ruusan Reformation.
• Rodians: Greedos. Their home planet being a death world full of predators means they are often aggressive and put hunters in high regard, which is the EU excuse for most Rodian characters being criminals. Despite being somewhat popular with the fans, they tend to be given the role of blaster/lightsaber fodder, especially in the KotoR games where hordes of Rodian goons and thugs are a relatively common sight. Those Rodians who want to live longer seem to generally gravitate towards jobs like bartenders and merchants if the KotoR games are anything to go by. That, or politicians, but as Senator Farr reminds us, that can be hazardous too.
• Selkath: Aquatic species from planet Manaan, a planet covered completely by one massive ocean with nothing but Selkath-made structures above water. Their main export is a medical substance known as Kolto, only found on Manaan, which Selkath used to enforce their neutrality throughout galactic history by selling Kolto to all sides. With discovery of Bacta, a more effective medical substance, Selkath lost their prominence in galactic affairs.
• Shards: Sapient crystals. They are incapable of movement and don't speak the way humans do. They can however control droid bodies they are implanted into. Several are force sensitive which led to a Jedi teaching them the ways of the Force. The Jedi order shunned these "Iron Knights" and excommunicated the master responsible. This wound up benefiting them though, as the master and his students were able to survive the Jedi purge due to the obscurity this granted. When Luke's new order emerged they welcomed the Shards with open arms.
• Sith / Sith Purebloods: Red skinned near-humans with bony tentacles growing out from near their nose and an affinity for the dark side, especially illusions. Natives of Korriban, the order most people know as Sith were a result of exiled dark Jedi interbreeding with them and adding their knowledge of technology. So diluted with human blood they were extremely rare by the Old Republic era and believed extinct by the time of the prequels. A few small mostly primitive pockets had been discovered however, but were covered up by Palpatine so he could grab more dark side goodies. More or less invented whole-cloth for the EU.
• Sullustans: Short, tunnelfaring, crafters who can drink a lot without getting drunk. Vaguely simian near-humans with flappy jowls, large ears, and black eyes that originally evolved for tunnels. Their SoroSuub company is one of the largest tech makers in the galaxy, and likely the largest that isn't Human run.
• Tarasin: Invented whole-cloth for the Living Force campaign for Star Wars D20. Lizardmen with scales that change color based on their emotions and frilled necks. With focus they can control their colors enough to camouflage themselves and even "speak" silently amongst each other. They had a high degree of force sensitivity, though if this a result of their species or their home system being a place where the Force is strong is unknown.
• Tholothians: Adi Gallias. Near-humans who for the most part resemble humans but have tendrils coming out from the back of their heads, and seem to also have a much narrower range of skin tones.
• Togruta: Diet Twi'leks. Humanoids with lekku and hollow horns that allow echolocation. Shaak Ti and Ahsoka were Togruta.
• Toydarians: Wattos. Blue tapir-looking dudes from Hutt Space who can hover on fly-like wings. As their source character is a hilariously offensive Jewish stereotype, the EU largely ignored Toydarians until The Clone Wars reinvented them as a vaguely Cambodian monarchy on a mud world. Mind tricks don't work on them (only money). Of the non-Watto Toydarians who showed up pre-Clone Wars, they're mostly surly and greedy like Watto, but with the Jewish stereotypes downplayed for obvious reasons.
• Trandoshans: Bossks. Brutish, scaly Lizardfolk capable of regenerating severed limbs and absolutely obsessed with hunting shit. Have had a continuous species war with the Wookiees since before FTL was a thing, which is a long-ass time in Star Wars (well over 150,000 years), owing to the fact that the two species share a home system. Their religion is about scoring "points", with the only known method of gaining them is violent action and the only known method of losing them is being captured alive by enemies. The system was first mentioned a mere three years after Doom so the fact that they essentially see life as a giant, violent video game is likely pure coincidence. Despite this they aren't universally evil, though they often are. Have their own Predator ripoff homage movie.
• Tusken Raiders: More commonly known by civilized folks as "Sand People," they are the native race of Tatooine and are your typical desert-dwelling nomadic raiders, with the added twist of having a major cultural taboo against showing any flesh (including their faces) and having "blood spitters" as part of their biology. One of Tatooine's two primary non-human races (the other being Jawas). One of the first alien species encountered in the franchise, yet never as fleshed out as others. Even the actual name of their species is unknown; their current name originates from the first Human colonists, who named them 'Tusken Raiders' after their repeated assaults on Fort Tusken. Fiercely xenophobic and violent, the Tuskens typically have an antagonistic relationship with the other peoples living on Tatooine, usually raiding moisture farmers or sometimes outright kidnapping and killing civilian homesteaders, or even massacring small frontier towns, and in turn being seen by most as pure monsters. In reality they have more nuance than they're often given credit for, and more recent appearances have made them a bit closer to portrayals of 19th Century Plains Native Americans; not taking crap from trespassers, but honorable and fair with those who respect them. Its been shown to be entirely possible to live peacefully with the local tribes if you can communicate and work out a deal with them (that you don't break). Their civilization is quite ancient, with them remembering when Tatooine still had seas and having adapted to both the harsh desert and salvaging the technology of foreigners into blaster-muskets. They also seem to be one of the few cultures in Star Wars that haven't heard of women's liberation, because with the exception of a female Tusken warrior in the Book of Boba Fett, the female Tuskens seen thus far all seem to tend to the home and not be armed warriors.
• Twi'leks: Technicolored humanoids from Ryloth (which is about as far as you can get from the core worlds without leaving the major hyperspace lanes) with weird head-tails ("lekku") that they have instead of hair. Enough have been transported off world, generally as slaves, they can be found anywhere, and many have never seen their ancestral home. Given it's a borderline death world whose chief economic exports are drugs and slaves, they aren't missing anything. Their most interesting physical quality (aside from the girls being hot) is that they can communicate silently with their lekku. TORtanic tried to rationalize their fetish for enslaving their own as being the result of a precursor project to design the perfect slave species, but nobody cares about this because TORtanic is shit Skub.
• Ugnaughts: Short pig-like humanoid species, highly respected as hard-workers with a specialty in engineering, making them a bit like space Dwarves. Hard work is central to their culture, to the point that criticizing their work, even if valid, is considered a great insult.
• Umbarans: Gray-skinned near-humans from a planet on which the sun never rises, giving them the nickname of "Shadow-people". Their technology is considerably different and more advanced from that of most people in the galaxy.
• Weequay: Humanoids with hard leather skin and spikes in their lower jaw, as well as hair resembling dreadlocks. They are often stereotyped as outlaws, criminals, and thugs.
• Wookiees: Chewbaccas, and one of the only species to be named in the original films. Huge, swole sloth people that do not live on Endor and can't speak (but absolutely understand) Basic. Most are actually pretty peaceful and intelligent and they have produced a lot of highly skilled engineers. They also have a reputation for being the best Navigators in the galaxy, in part because their highly secretive Navigator's guild has plotted all sorts of shortcuts across the galaxy - plus you better be bloody good at orientation, pathfinding, and being able to make your way back to your treehouse at days end if your entire planet is a fucking forest. They highly value people who save their life, becoming their eternal friend in what is known as a Life-debt; this is how Han met Chewie. They have retractable climbing claws, but a cultural taboo on using them in combat leads to those who do so being exiled as "madclaws". Has the unfortunate distinction of being the first species in Star Wars lore to have their home planet and culture detailed... via the Star Wars Holiday Special. Despite the infamy and single airing, the broad strokes survived the entirety of the Expanded Universe's lifespan and would reappear in Revenge of the Sith.
• Yoda's species: Yodas (natch). An extremely mysterious species, to the point that it does not even have a known name and hence is known only by its most known representative. A species of green-skinned, extremely short humanoids who are all Force-sensitive and have extremely long life-spans, though they also age extremely slowly, with a 50-year old still being a toddler. Their home planet and how many there are is still a mystery.
• Yuuzhan Vong: Humanoids with pallid skin and tapered skulls from another galaxy and who only use organic technology. Native to a living planet called Yuuzhan'tar which they worshipped as a god, their first contact experience was an interstellar robot war. They weaponized their biotech and defeated the invaders - and in so doing gained a taste for war and conquest (plus a hatred of machines) that led them to invent a war god and conquer their galaxy... which they later destroyed through infighting. The destruction of their homeworld cut them off from the Force, unintentionally making them mostly immune to it. Their attempts to undo this gave them a species-wide fetish for pain and body modification instead. Centuries later they found and invaded the Star Wars galaxy, leading to a galactic war that decimated the New Republic, caused multiple genocides and had a death toll around 365 trillion (including Chewbacca). Luke and his family ended the war by killing the various Vong leaders and finding Yuuzhan'tar's offspring, Zonama Sekot. The Vong colonized Sekot, were reconnected to the Force and became terraformers as penance for the war. Rendered part of the Legends by Disney. Some fans consider the Yuuzhan Vong a fresh blast of originality that provided a threatening and utterly badass new foe (even Dave Filoni has tried at least twice to pull the Yuuzhan Vong into his projects), while others consider them a nonsensical edgelord race that relied on major retcons to make sense.
• Zabrak: Mauls. Near-humans with mostly bald, spikey heads and two hearts. Those black markings Maul had are actually ritualistic tatoos that Zabrak men often get. They were pretty divided internally till the Empire decided to oppress them all and force them to join together. Eeth Koth and Agen Kolar of the Jedi Council were also Zabraks.
  • Dathomirians are a sub-species of Zabrak native to Dathomir who supposedly interbred with humans to create a new group, though their origins have been neglected in current canon. Even so, the females of this sub-species do not have the spiked heads typical of other Zabraks, looking more like ashen-skinned humans. Strictly divided along gender lines, with the bulk of the females forming the Nightsisters while the men are relegated to the role of slaves and breeding stock. Darth Maul is the most prominent Dathomirian in the films and TV series, with Asajj Ventress close behind.

Ships, Superweapons and anything in between

Please see the articles on Armada and X-Wing, because pretty much all the interesting stuff has been depicted in one game or the other.

Star Wars Miniature Games Tactical Guides
X-Wing:	Rebel Alliance, Galactic Empire, The Resistance, The First Order, Scum & Villainy, The Galactic Republic, Confederacy of Independent Systems
Armada:	Rebel Alliance, Galactic Empire, The Galactic Republic, Confederacy of Independent Systems
Legion:	Rebel Alliance, Galactic Empire, Grand Army of the Republic, Confederacy of Independent Systems,

The Galaxy (and beyond)

The Galaxy Far Far Away is a spiral galaxy about 120,000 light year in diameter. It is home to an unusually high number of populated planets and species. It has a few smaller satellite galaxies, though only one is ever visited in the entity of Star War media and only in an obscure short story (but visitors from the others have come).

• The Deep Core: The innermost part of the galaxy. Due to a high number of black holes, and dense star clusters, only the outer most areas are explored. The sole exception is a top secret Imperial bunker world of Byss, also Empress Teta (a world that once rivaled Coruscan in population, named after the badass who broke Naga Sadow's attempt to destroy the Republic with the Old Sith Empire) is just on the inside of the border between the Deep Core and the Core.
• The "Core" worlds: The most populated and best mapped part of the galaxy. Holds the actual capital of the Republic/Empire/New Republic, and some of the biggest sources of culture. The earliest known home world of Humans and Duros, but the Rakata taking these species as slaves leaves the world of their origin a mystery.
• Colonies: The first areas that was expanded to after hyperspace travel came about.
• Inner Rim: The next set of areas colonized. By the time of the films, they’re pretty developed.
  • Hapes Cluster: An independent system of stars ruled by the matriarchal Hapes Consortium. Even for Star Wars, it's incredibly dense in populated worlds. They took in a large number of Separatist scientists at the end of the Clone Wars and by the New Republic it has unique technology that's more advanced in some areas despite lagging behind in some other areas.
• Mid rim: An even further area of expansion. Where the Mid Rim ends and the Outer Rim begins is a bit vague, with a lot of the outer Mid Rim being barely if at all better off than the Outer Rim.
• Outer Rim: The farthest reach of the galaxy. Civilization is sparsely populated, neglected by the galactic authorities and/or largely dominated by the independent and cruel Hutt Empire.
  • Hutt Space: An autonomous section of the galaxy ruled by the Hutt clans ("Kajidic"). How, exactly, head of state (or any government function) is determined and what titles they hold is unclear, but there seems to be some Hutt that somehow becomes on top of it. A lack of extradition agreements with the Republic renders it a haven for criminals, who in turn kick money back to the Hutts. It joins the Empire during its existance, only to continue its shifty ways after early Imperial attempts to wipe out crime fail and regain independence after Palpatine's death.
• Corporate Sector/Tingel Arm: The "northern" most edge of the galaxy. Over 400 years before The Phantom Menace, the Republic had the brilliant idea to develop an unpopulated section of the galaxy: Get a bunch of large companies to do it in exchange for some autonomy, resource rights and lower taxes. Naturally this went poorly, and the whole place is a Cyberpunk style megacorp controlled dystopia. Originated in the Han Solo books, one of the first expanded universe books ever, and the fluff from there has seen little change.
• Unknown Regions: The vast, largely unexplored due to similar issues to the core, western chunk of the galaxy. It actually has several native hyperspace capable civilizations forging their own empires by the New Republic era, one of which was already active over 4000 years before the Battle of Yavin.
• Wild Space: Wild Space is the area of the galaxy that is charted and open to Hyperspace travel, but unsettled and most of the detail on the maps is lacking. Holds the Rishi system, the only publicly known path to the Rishi maze (a state secret path in the Outer Rim's Rothana goes to Kamino).
• Rishi Maze: The only one of the satellite galaxies to be visited by those from the main galaxy, able to be accessed by traveling a chain of systems stuck between the two. The one short story that actually goes there describes it as a mess of radiation, but this could be the particular system within the maze. The only people known to live here are exploiting the natural resource deposits and hiding from The Empire. More well known is the cloner planet of Kamino, which is between the main galaxy and the maze.
• (unnamed) Yuuzhan Vong galaxy: This was the home galaxy of the EU race the Yuuzhan Vong, their original homeworld of Yuuzhan'tar, the planet Zonama Sekot, the reptoid Chazrach, and possibly the Silentium (who made first contact and war on the Vong) and the Abominor droid civilizations . The galaxy was a spiral galaxy like GFFA and had a vast number of sentient races in it; however, the Yuuzhan Vong wiped the others out, save the Chazrach whom they instead enslaved. The Yuuzhan Vong referred to it as the "ancestral galaxy", and much of it was destroyed when the Yuuzhan Vong started fighting among themselves after dominating the galaxy, with its current state of what's left of it unknown.
• Firefist Galaxy: Another one of the orbiting galaxies. The only contact the main galaxy has had with it has been sending probes. Home to the Faruun, Maccabree, Nagai and Tof, all of which arrived during the early New Republic fleeing the problems of their home or in pursuit. All of this comes from the Marvel comics (with some smoothing in the details in reference books), but despite the general oddness of fitting the Marvel comics into more modern canon and many silly concepts in those comics, the presence of these species and their conflict is largely accepted because, unlike the other extragalactic visitors, it's not very disruptive to overall canon to include them. Given that Disney now owns both Marvel and Star Wars, we may see more of them.

Technology

Star Wars appears to be a fairly standard sci-fi world (because it set that standard), but there's many subtle nuances that are easily missed

• Hyperdrives take ships to Hyperspace where they can travel and arrive at other destinations at FTL speed. However, massive objects such as planets and stars exist in hyperspace as mass shadows and colliding with them is fatal. Using a hyperdrive takes careful calculation to not only arrive on target, but avoid hitting anything on your way there.
  • Each hyperdrive has a class, which multiplies travel time. At the time of the Rebellion, the standard was 2x, with newer/upgraded ships often packing class 1x and the Millennium Falcon (proclaimed to be the fastest ship in The Galaxy) had a class 0.5 as a result of modifications that made it unreliable. Anything larger than a fighter has a backup hyperdrive of much higher class (typically double digit) to ensure the crew can limp to the nearest populated system in the event of failure of the primary drive.
  • Most travel occurs along the great hyperspace lanes, where the way is known to be clear and calculations are more established.
  • Vehicles have to start up their shields after they complete their jump, which makes them vulnerable if you can predict where they are coming from. This makes launching an attack purely to target any reinforcements possible.
  • Hyperspace itself is weird, and standard procedure is to avoid looking outside long term during travel to prevent people from going nuts. Communications while in hyperspace (except to ships making the same jump) are near impossible. Leaving hyperspace without the ship you came in on is impossible, and ejecting someone during travel ensures their death.
    • Disney Retcon: In Rebels, the Ghost ejected its shuttle in hyperspace, resulting in it quickly (and violently) returning to sublight speed in normal space.
  • There's a handful of instances of of hyperdrive failures sending people to Otherspace, an alternate dimension populated by a ship graveyard and hostile bug aliens with organic technology.
  • One thing that's often overlooked is that modern hyperdrive technology is adapted from the dark side powered hyperdrives of the ancient Rakata after they lost the ability to use The Force and could no longer travel to maintain their empire. The result is that even experts don't have a total understanding of how Hyperspace works.
  • Hyperdrive is quick, a good hyperdrive capable ship can get you across the galaxy in at most a couple of days.
  • Interdictor ships are capable of generating artificial gravity well to stop travel through their path and prevent ships from getting away. These first appeared in the Mandalorian Wars of the Old Republic, using spammed tractor beams to fake gravity wells, but these couldn't keep pace with hyperdrive improvements and disappeared till a superior successor technology was developed in the Imperial era. During the early days of the New Republic, Admiral Ackbar devised a tactic of using of such ships to prevent ally movement, ordering one to power up if it detected sabotage on a planned target had failed so the incoming attackers would be pulled from hyperspace far enough away to retreat. It would be Thrawn however that would prove the true master of such maneuvers, developing a system that allowed reliable same-system hyperspace jumps during tactical combat, hence it's name, Thrawn Pincer. Thrawn himself nicked that idea from Plo Koon and Saesee Tin when they wanted to bomb a planet but also bypass the superior blockade around the planet.
• FTL communication comes in four forms, all with their own issues.
  • Holonet: The best known method for FTL communications. Vaguely comparable to the early internet, with news, primitive BBS, email, and some other stuff. Quite rare once you get past the developed core areas, and expensive to use both in setting it up and bandwith costs. Only military command vehicles and those for heads of state are likely to have personal holonet transceivers.
  • Subspace relay: The cheaper alternative to the holonet is subspace relays. Relatively slow and has problems with dropped communications, but still FTL. Most capital ships have subspace transceivers, and some smaller vehicles are known to have them as upgrades. Comparable to snail mail, with shopping being a mail order order system like the Sears Catalog (view catalog, send order and payment, await shipping) rather than online shopping.
  • Hyperspace Courier: Has all the problems of courier communication, and all the problems of hyperspace combined. Despite these faults, it's often the only choice for the most remote systems or if someone is disrupting the above two (like in a war) and always the only way to send physical goods.
  • The Force: Occasionally powerful Force users are seen communicating via The Force across very long distances. This requires both parties be strong in The Force and have a very close connection. Even then being able to do anything more than sense the other is in danger is a crapshoot.
• Blasters use energy to excite special gas that is then expelled to deadly effect. Most blasters have an alternate stun setting which provides less-lethal takedowns. Stun setting is quite reliable and consistent even on physically tough species like Wookiees, though it's not safe to use on pregnant women and outside of specialized stun-only blasters the range is rather low. Despite being energy weapons, they have quite a kick. Routinely dismissed as "slow" despite multiple sources contradicting this idea. How fast they are is somewhat debatable (and differs depending on which canon), but they're considered more advanced than Slugthrowers (detailed below), implying that Blasters are better overall, including in projectile speed.
  • Normal firearms, known as slugthrowers, are also present. Compared to blasters they're cheaper, cause bleeding, are far more dangerous to block with a lightsaber (it'll usually just melt the slug and make you get hit with molten metal instead), can be suppressed, and lower maintenance requirements, but have less initial stopping power, lower capacity, can't stun, make far more noise without a suppressor, and have heavier ammo. Considered more primitive than blasters, which is why you rarely see them (well, that and the powers that be preferring Star Wars to not be rated R).
  • Ion weapons disrupt electric systems, but cause little structural damage and only minor burns on living creatures. This allows them to disable droids or ships without totally destroying them, making them important in capturing them.
  • Sonic Weaponry exists, but it's considered an odd fork (as powerful as a slug thrower with none of its benefits) by everyone outside of water worlds and Jedi hunters.
• Repulsorlifts keeps vehicles, industrial equipment and some droids floating off the ground a good distance. Most spacecraft have repulsor systems as well, which is how they're able to operate in atmosphere despite their poor aerodynamics.
• Droids aren't a true species, but are playable in all RPGs. They're supposed to be really smart appliances, but Star Wars technology is so fucked up that a few develop sapience if left on too long without formatting. Despite this droids aren't considered people by the galaxy at large because sapient droids are as rare as non-evil drow and most of the time leaving droids running for a long time just makes them slower and buggier until they can't do their jobs anymore, like Windows, or, at best, overly attuned to a specific user. That a good number of sapient droids have learned to bypass that pesky "no killing" clause doesn't exactly encourage experimenting with it and trying to replicate it either.
  • Class 1 droids are designed to preform scientific applications like medicine or lab work. Since they were designed to be used in fixed locations most, but not all, have limited mobility.
  • Class 2 droids are designed to preform technical labor like repair work. Since they are expected to work within artificial locations they are generally on wheels or treads and have short, non-human shapes. One notable subcategory of Class 2 droids are Astromech Droids (like the famed R2 series), which are designed to plug into fighters and bombers where they function as a co-pilot, navicomputer and in-flight repair.
  • Class 3 droids are designed for human interaction, with jobs like translator or chef. Some lower end Class 3 droids were made for positions like waiter. Almost all of them are roughly human shape, with the main exception being those built by and for non-humans that instead resemble their intended masters.
  • Class 4 droids are the most varied but have one thing in common that clearly separates them: They are made for combat and (except for a few armed with only stun weapons) don't have programming against killing. Class 4 droids vary in intelligence from blaster turrets with some targeting AI to clever and ruthless assassins/commandos. Even Human Replica Droids, designed to be indistinguishable from humans, are technically Class 4. Many Class 4 droids have their nature obfuscated by building them into the shell of a Class 1 or Class 3 droid.
  • Class 5 droids are made for manual labor like heavy lifting or a power generator with legs. They are barely intelligent, rarely have names and almost never become sapient. They are however cheap and quite common.
• Cloning: Fairly realistic on most accounts. You take a gene sample, use it to make an ova, grow it in an exowomb and decant it as an infant you raise to adulthood. The main difference is that SW cloners are much, much better at it, with a vastly higher success rate compared to real life plus the ability to do accelerated aging for army building. The Kaminoans are the best at this. Generally, Force-Sensitives can't be cloned, and when they are, they most often come out as physically and mentally unstable nutjobs who need to be put out of their misery. "Perfect" Force-Sensitive clones are exceedingly rare, to the point that (again), most in-universe consider it impossible. Palpatine bent the rules a bit by creating soulless husks that his spirit would hop between if one of the bodies would die, but this was generally only a temporary solution, as every clone body he inhabited would quickly shrivel and age at a rapid pace.
• Cloaking devices come in two types.
  • The first was dependent upon crystals that became rare due to overharvesting. Use of a superweapon for deep excavation allowed an imperial research project to toy with the idea of fitting an entire squadron of fighters equipped with one.
  • The second, the hibridium model, used a different rare material and was developed near the end of the Empire, though didn't see use till after the fall. It was substantially (though still only relatively) cheaper but had two unique drawbacks. The first was that it also blinded the ship to the world outside and rendered it unable to communicate as well. These problems would briefly be overcome with the use of the Force instead. Afterwards the Remnant gave up on it as mostly useless, and agreed to ban it during the peace treaty with the New Republic.
  • Personal "stealth field" generators also seem to exist, unrelated to these. They simply dampen sound and bend light to make the wearer harder to spot and difficult (but not impossible) to see. Presumably these aren't upscaled for vehicle use because of the real world problem with such a concept of being completely useless against any sensor beyond just human level vision (still being blatantly obvious to thermal, as well as radar if they're big enough ect.).
• In many ways, while technology is advanced it's still in the mindset of 1983, if not 1977. As mentioned above, the internet (at least the interplanetary one) is quite primitive and poorly connected. Even though everyone has a tiny radio set (Comlink), there's no such thing as cellphones (you have to broadcast to a channel and hope whoever you want to hear something is listening). Aside from portable computers, which are quite expensive, and datapads, which still have limited functionality, most non-droid technology only does one thing. Unlike the 1913 rail and M-Lok equipped guns of the 90s onward, weapon accessories either need to be made for a single model or hand-fitted by an expert. Video games are either professional simulators or extremely primitive.
• Energy shields come in several variants
  • Ray shields protect from energy weapons but are useless against physical attacks. Most ships are equipped with ray shields.
  • Particle shields protect from physical attacks but are useless against energy attacks. Generally only bigger ships are equipped with particle shields while smaller ships such as fighters only have ray shields.
  • Planetary shields are the reason why ground battles happen and why orbital superiority isn't enough to secure a planet. They can withstand even the most severe bombardment for weeks, with only weapons like the Death Star being capable of penetrating them almost instantaneously. As a result, it is generally more feasible to land troops on the planet.
• Lightsabers are the most iconic weapon of the setting, being plasma-based melee weapons only used by crazy space wizard-monks.
• The Force isn't so much technology as something in between a religion, magic and psionics. This is the element that turns Star Wars from Space Opera into Science Fantasy.

Setting History

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Bear in mind the highly contradictory nature of canon and many sources from EU to Disney means any attempt to truly form a concrete history would take an in-depth scholarly pursuit of all sources and debate amongst the global community while taking into account upcoming new results that can entirely rewrite the record. You know, like real history (Tolkien did an admirable job, but nothing quite says plausible history like something everyone has an opinion on but nobody that anyone wants to listen to has fully researched). At any rate, what is presented here is an abridged version of the lore history prior to the Original Trilogy, using the most complete accounts, and combining the EU AKA “Legends” with the Disney canon when not contradictory (because despite having supposedly wiped it out of canon, there are frequent callbacks to parts of it). Though in fairness, Legends lore is far more fleshed out and takes priority in practice. Since it is under construction, it will probably be split into different sections (or we'll put parentheses showing whether it's Disney or OG, going in year order). As a note, most dates are referred to Before or After the Battle of Yavin (with both 0 BBY and 0 ABY existing) for the sake of out of universe convenience. There are various in-universe calendars, but this is pretty much the standard at the time of the end of the story and is the easiest to follow IRL. Thus, when the contradictions majorly start after Episode 6, the format will be Legends-5 ABY, Disney-5ABY, Legends-6 ABY and so on.

• The universe begins, life begins to evolve. A lot of small things happen that tie into other stories, but aren’t worth mentioning outside that story.
• The unknown Celestial race holds dominion around a hundred thousand years Before the Battle of Yavin, they mysteriously vanish soon afterwards.
  • Before disappearing, a set of force wielding physical gods known as the Father, the Daughter and the Son help them to seal Abeloth "The Mother", a mortal who lived with them and in desperation for sharing their immortality did some extremely bad dark side Force stuff and turned into an eldritch abomination, in the Maw Cluster of black holes using Centerpoint Station, a super weapon in the partially artificial Corellia System.
• The first galactic civilization (that we know of except whatever the Celestials were, if they even count as a formal polity) are the Rakata, cruel aliens who uplift various other species for slaves and food in the Rakatan Infinite Empire. This explains most aliens that are just paint and simple face prosthetics away from being human, as well as recurring traits like bipedalism.
  • The Rakata encounter the Sith species, who also use the dark side. The Sith drive them off after a costly battle thanks to Sith King Adas sacrificing himself.
    • The Sith'ari prophecy is made to indicate a worth successor to Adas who would bring the Sith to the height of their power, Bane would be the Sith'ari more than twenty thousand years later.
  • At some point the Rakata encounter the Hutts, and the result is the Rakata being nearly wiped out. Hutts did not possess space travel, nor would they until much later so how the fuck that happened isn’t clear, though it is mentioned that they lost their connection to the Force (universally the Dark Side due to species wide enforcement of being an asshole) after an unknown illness.
  • Time progresses and the Rakata are forgotten from general knowledge outside of archeological and historical circles, even then only Force sensitives really know the major significance other than "big empire that collapsed before the Republic was even a dream".
• Civilizations develop and discover space travel, then hyperspace travel. Initial hyperspace colonization and mapping is risky, requiring oftentimes blind jumps and the hope there isn’t a star or something where you end up.
  • Blind jumps result in colonists losing contact with the rest of the universe and evolving on their own, explaining some groups that are VERY similar but not the same species (for example, Miraluka are lost human colonists who ended up on a planet with poor light and over generations they evolved to not have eyes, but instead all have a Jedi-tier connection to the Force to “see” with).
• The Force-users find their jumps guided to a specific planet, with aliens from many diverse backgrounds guided to a planet (First Tython in Legends, changed to Ahch-To in the Disney canon. Later material for The Mandalorian brought Tython back alongside Ahch-To as both being early Jedi planets and nobody knowing for sure which was actually the first).
  • Bringing their own religions, traditions, and cultures, the Force-users develop schools of thought on the philosophy. Eventually one group decides the meaning of life for the Force is to destroy evil (like Paladins), and wages war on the others saying “you’re with us or against us”. One group resists which saw honor and personal development as the meaning of life (like Cavaliers). The rest were split between the two.
  • The Paladin-like aggressors were victorious, slaughtering and driving off the Cavalier-types. The Paladin-like Force-users would become the early Jedi. The Cavalier-types would find pain and misery in exile after multiple Great Schism's, sinking deep into worship of power and personal gain. After the Third Great Schism caused by Jedi Knights Ajunta Pall, Sorzus Syn, Xoxaan, Remulus Dreypa and Karness Muur wanting to study the Dark Side after the balance started falling towards Light Side use lead to the Hundred Year Darkness civil war, they are exiled. The exiles find and enslave a species of aliens and stole both their dark Force/alchemy teachings as well as their name when Ajunta Pall killed the last King Hakagram Graush, the Sith, and interbreeding with them to build the Old Sith Empire, Pall as the first Dark Lord of the Sith.
    • The Hundred Year Darkness leads to the invention of Lightsabers, inspired by Rakata Forcesabers, though initial examples like the one Karness Muur used require energy batteries on belts connected by cables.
    • Karness Muur discovers the method of immortality when he transfers his spiritual essence to his Muur Talisman amulet created by Sith Alchemy. Dreypa, his rival, makes a stasis coffin to hold Muur in, said coffin is later named the Jebble Box and is misidentified as a Jedi artifact.
  • This becomes a recurring pattern in Star Wars history regarding good and evil Force-users. Good creates its own evil by standing up and declaring themselves good and morally correct, turning any challengers to their orthodoxy towards the Dark Side (look, it comes up whenever Lucas or some other writer wants to go back to the Taoist roots of The Force). Good then defeats the evil it created once evil has almost won, and they reestablish order with some oppression in an attempt to prevent another evil which restarts the cycle.
  • The Chosen One to bring balance to the Force prophecy is made. Anakin Skywaker would fulfill this prophecy a thousand years after Bane fulfilled the Sith'ari prophecy.
• Humans and Duro, the first two species to discover hyperspace travel from Rakata technological remnants, eventually meet. The planet they meet on has been implied to be the human homeworld, the Duro homeworld, Earth, and various other things, but it doesn’t matter, final decision settled on as Human homeworld with any connection to real Earth slashed and Duro homeworld being described as another planet in another part of the galaxy. It becomes Coruscant (the homeworld of the Taung, a.k.a. OG Mandalorians, and also the homeworld of the human predecessor race, the latter won and drove off the Taung to Mandalore), and they create the first Galactic Republic in 25553 BBY.
  • The exiled Taung found Mandalore, a martial society of warmongers and Social Darwinists, on the planet of Mandalore, which along with it's moon and nearby systems has a massive amount of the substance known as Beskar, capable of making Lightsaber resistant armor.
• Various expansion wars occur after the Republic is founded, including a religiously motivated 1000 year long pro-human genocidal regime, the Pius Dea cult, taking over, brought down by the Jedi and those sick of their shit after their reign, leading to a few decades of Jedi Grandmasters pulling double duty as Supreme Chancellor to restore democracy and arrest leftover cultists. Other wars also occur such as the the Hutt Wars with Xim the Despot, the Hutt Cataclysms (a major series of Civil Wars and natural disasters that ruined the Hutt Empire and instituted the Hutt Cartel system and founded the basis of the galactic criminal underworld), and a series of wars on and off for 20000 odd years over whether Coruscant or another planet (Alsakan) is to be the capital.
  • Two important worlds that need to be noted are Corellia, which has disproportionate influence in the founding of the Republic and even has the right to declare neutrality in civil disputes due to economic power of its status on the most important hyperspace shortcut in the galaxy (as well as the Celestial influenced state of their system), and Kuat, founded by pre-Hyperspace human colonists launched from Coruscant and the premier shipyard in the galaxy.
• Eventually the Sith return to destroy the Jedi after two Republic scouts accidentally stumble upon Korriban, the Sith species home planet and now the burial site for the Dark Lords, and return while being followed, kicking off the Great Hyperspace War.
  • The Republic is almost destroyed, but survives, and led by Empress Teta (the Empress of a member world that is) in turn smashes the Old Sith Empire led by Dark Lord Naga Sadow.
  • The Sith slink back into the shadows. The Jedi start their other big tradition, over-correcting from their past mistakes and creating new ones, by beginning a time of non-interference in galactic affairs and a general desire only for peace.
  • During this time, Darth Vitiate (born Tenebrae as the illegitimate son of Sith Lord Dramath who raped one of his slaves) exploits the defeat and manipulates 8000 fellow Sith Lords to a secret ritual to live forever. It goes Just as Planned for Vitiate as he consumes the souls of his fellows to become immortal (but not invincible) and names himself Sith Emperor of the Reformed Sith Empire. He secretly builds his forces from the remaining Sith armies and lords.
  • Duringthe final battle of the Great Hyperspace War a Sith ship crashes into a planet and the survivors become the Lost Tribe of Sith.
• Freedon Nadd, Jedi apprentice, is denied knighthood and falls to the Dark Side after finding Sadow's tomb and his spirit. He causes the Beast Wars on Onderon and its moon Dxun and rules for a hundred years before dying, his cultists becoming weirdo beast rider types who plague Onderon.
• Two Jedi Knights, Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma fall to the Dark side after finding Dark Lord Marka Ragnos and Nadd's spirits respectively and become Master and Apprentice in that order. After Ulic kills his brother and former fellow Jedi, he returns to the light and kills Exar Kun during their war to destroy the Jedi. Ulic wanders around for a while and then dies in his former lover Grand Master Nomi Sunrider's arms, who had become Grand Master after Exar Kun and Ulic's war ended with the formers death.
• Mandalorians, the space Mongols/Aztecs, start attacking the universe because all they understand is war (and because the Taung species is dying out, leading to them allowing worthy foreigners to join, humans end up as the vast majority).
  • This massive war almost wipes out several species but the Jedi do nothing. Eventually one of their number, nicknamed the Revanchist and his friends Alek and Meetra Surik are dispatched to investigate, and upon finding the atrocities committed decide to forsake the Jedi wuss way and break the back of the Mandalorians.
  • The Revanchist takes the name of Revan after picking up and putting on the mask of a female Mandalorian who refused orders to massacre civilians and died defending them.
  • During the fighting, Mandalore the Ultimate orders Serocco and Jebble nuked from orbit, killing everyone who failed to escape and leaving Jedi Assassin Celeste Morne stranded on Jebble in stasis, which she had gone in to to keep the Muur Talisman which contained to soul of Karness Muur, one of the Dark Jedi exiles who founded the Sith Order, from escaping. The stasis coffin is the same one built by Remulus Dreypa to keep Muur in.
  • Revan kills Mandalore the Ultimate in single combat, leaving the Taung extinct. After learning that Mandalore the Ultimate was manipulated through his final words, Revan and Alek go to Dromund Kaas to investigate, then fall to the Dark Side and create a fascist government centered on Dromund Kaas (actually the hidden capital of the Reformed Sith Empire who brainwashed the leader of the Mandos). The Sith Emperor had brainwashed both of them.
  • Revan becomes Darth Revan and Alek becomes Darth Malak, which almost destroys the Republic, again (a third recurring theme), with the only loyalists remaining being Surik and her chief engineer, who had returned to the Order after the final battle at Malachor V where they fired a super weapon, the Mass Shadow Generator on Revan's orders which the brainwashed Revan used to kill the other loyalist Jedi, before Revan and Alek went off to open revolt.
  • A Jedi named Bastila Shan is sent to assassinate their leader Darth Revan, but believing in redemption instead she wiped his mind. The two went on an adventure while Revan was trained as a Jedi again, and he defeated his apprentice Darth Malak and dismantled his own army (also did a bunch of racing, theme #4).
  • Afterwards, the remaining Fallen Jedi institute the First Jedi Purge under the Sith Triumvirate, Darth Nihilus (who vored planets after being reduced to a husk by the superweapon Revan used at Malachor V), Darth Sion (who was so edgy he had to be convinced to let go as he was too angry to die), and Darth Traya (a.k.a. Kreia, actually Jedi Master Arren Kae, who wanted to destroy the force itself) and their followers, survivors of Malak's remaining army.
  • The only loyalist Jedi survivor of Revan's initial force, Meetra Surik, having been exiled from the Order after being the only veteran to return, comes back and destroys the Sith Triumvirate (redeeming the only apprentice they had, Visas Marr, in the process) along with her companions (including Visas and her old chief engineer) who she trained as Jedi, plus Revan's old war buddy/current Mand'alor (Mandalorian king) Canderous Ordo and an asshole droid.
  • Revan's companions and Meetra's companions then presumably rebuild the Jedi Order and the badly damaged Republic over 300 years, while Revan and Surik go to Dromund Kaas to finish off the Emperor (Revan not telling anyone like a moron, while Surik just went to help her friend) but are betrayed by their ally Darth Scourge, who foresees the Emperor is not going to die for three more centuries.
  • Surik ignonomously dies, while Revan is tortured for 300 years while managing to keep the Emperor from attacking the Republic when it is vulnerable.
• A clusterfuck of things happen.
  • The Sith create a nearly galaxy-wide coalition to start a civil war with the Republic. The Sith have overwhelming advantage, but are so backstabby and hedonistically asinine they fail to accomplish anything major after the initial strikes, though Darth Malgus manages to sack Coruscant and the Jedi Temple.
  • Things cool of for 12 years in a Cold War, then heat back up again and are disrupted when the Sith Emepror (who as stated was the guy who manipulated the Mandalorians and brainwashed Revan) is apparently killed by the Hero of Tython (who is then promoted to Jedi Battlemaster) aided by Darth Scourge (who the Emperor life-extended to serve as his personal assassin, while plotting to kill the Emperor).
  • Revan splits in two from the 300 year torture, and after the torturers (the edgiest Sith ever, the Dread Masters, who were personally trained by the Emperor) get killed by the SWTOR player character of your choice (story-wise, the Hero of Tython makes the most sense as the Jedi Knight so will go with that for the purposes of timeline), who had also apparently killed Darth Malgus when he got pissed at the Stupid Evil of the other Sith and tried to make his own empire, and tries to bring the Emperor back to a physical body, with the protagonist and their allies barely stopping him.
  • It turns out the Emperor manipulated Revan's last efforts and used the bloodshed there to transfer all of his spirit to where he was actually focusing on, the Eternal Empire at the planet of Zakuul he made over the past few centuries, after finding a super robot fleet in the planet of Iokath and possessing a local hero named Valkorion. His body is destroyed by the protagonist, and the Emperor's son Arcann (who killed his light-side twin in a rage) invades both the Republic and the Sith Empire.
  • Meanwhile, the protagonist is placed in carbonite for five years, while Arcann used the Emperor's supposed death to drum up support for his regime in Zakuul. He is defeated and (due to Light Side Republic Loyalist Jedi Knight being the most reasonable choice for storyline purposes) is redeemed to the light side. His sister tries to take over, and is killed. A large part of the Emperor's soul is destroyed after trying to take over the SWTOR protagonist.
  • Afterwards, the Republic and Sith Empire return to war over the remaining superweapons on Iokath and the SWTOR protagonist rejoins the Jedi and the Republic. Empress Acina (who took over the Reformed Sith Empire after Darth Marr, regent after the Emperor faked his death, was killed after being captured along with the protagonist prior to the 5-year timeskip) dies in the fighting and Darth Malgus returns, having survived and rebuilt as a cyborg.
  • The Emperor finally loses control of the Force and all three of his personalities (Tenebrae, Darth Vitiate and Valkorion) are destroyed, finally killing him for good and thus letting Revan and Meetra become one with the Force. The protagonist continues heroics and defeats/captures some Dark Council Sith Lords (and Malgus, presumably in the next expansion as of the time of writing - which happened and he was captured by the Republic, further details TBA as SWTOR storyline continues) and the final phase of the Great Galactic War eventually ends in Republic victory, the Reformed Sith Empire shattering to pieces.
• Around 2000 years before the Battle of Yavin some dickwad Jedi falls to the Dark Side as Darth Ruin and reignites the brewing low intensity conflict as the New Sith Wars at full scale as the first undisputed Dark Lord in a millenium since the Sith Empire Remnants shattered to insurgencies and individual Dark Side cabals. Ruin instigates the Fourth and last Great Schism of the Jedi.
  • The Sith eventually reform into the Brotherhood of Darkness to prevent the mass backstabbing that restarted with the New Sith Wars and bans the title of Darth, with all Sith Lords being equal (though of course, some are more equal than others, like fallen Jedi Master Skere Kaan).
  • After a thousand straight years of war, a Galactic Dark Age settles in and ruins major tech infrastructure and companies, fixing the dissonance between movie era tech being worse than literally thousands of years ago. The last three hundred years until 1000 BBY are particularly brutal, killing FTL communications past the Mid Rim sans courier and brings the Republic to its knees.
• 1000 years before the Battle of Yavin, Sergeant Dessel, transferring from the Sith Army to the Sith Academy after his force sensitivity was discovered, thinks the Brotherhood of Darkness is a bunch of bullshit. He decides that the Dark Side can only have two Sith, one Master to embody power and an Apprentice to crave it, after finding Revan's edgy fanfiction he wrote after the Mandolarian Wars and before the Jedi Civil War in a Sith Holocron. He names himself Darth Bane and manipulates Lord Kaan into building the Thought Bomb, a Dark Side Force weapon.
  • The Brotherhood of Darkness are defeated at the (Seventh) Battle of Ruusan. They detonate the Thought Bomb, which wipes them out along with the Army of Light, a Jedi army formed in desperation by Lord Hoth as a last resort to save the Republic, as the Army of Light sacrifice themselves to force Kaan to detonate it early and end the New Sith Wars, exactly as Bane planned.
  • The Rule Of Two is instituted by Bane who takes Zhannah as his apprentice, preventing the Dark Side clusterfuck that happens when too many assholes exist as “equals” in one faction. The Jedi almost destroy the Sith as Zhannah is caught spying in the Jedi Temple and is forced to retreat, chased by three masters and two knights.
  • Bane and Zhannah defeat them and Zhannah's cousin is made insane by her Sith Sorcery and attacks the Jedi task force sent after them, who are forced to kill him. Thinking that was the Sith they were looking for the Jedi pat themselves on the back and go back to Coruscant to report the Sith being destroyed.
  • Zhannah defeats Bane and takes Cognus as her apprentice. Cognus takes Millenial (yes, Darth Millenial) as her apprentice, who disagrees with the Rule of Two and goes to Dromund Kaas to start the Prophets of the Dark Side, who worship the Dark Side. Cognus takes another apprentice and things continue as they hide, plan, research, and backstab in secret for 1000 years.
• After this apparent victory, the Republic undergoes the Ruusan Reformation, beginning the Great Peace of the Republic in which no major war occurred.
  • The Jedi are greatly weakened in political authority and demilitarized. They also begin strictly enforcing the age maximum for training people as Jedi. Having lost its best and brightest save for Grand Master Faye (namely, Lord Hoth and Master Valenthyne Farfhalla) in the Army of Light's sacrifice, degenerate into Lawful Stupid morons with the Ruusan Reformation, which states that the Jedi can no longer create an army, and that the Jedi are under the command of the Senate, although they still have their own Council for internal stuff. They decide to vigorously enforce the age limit and become more and more detached from the people and the small good deeds that help reinforce the light side in an individual (demonstrated in SWTOR with the Hero of Tython, whose dead master as a Force Ghost instructs him to give labor and medical assistance in a small village to help reinforce his soul).
  • The Republic disbands its military except for a small anti-piracy force in the Judicial Forces and leaves actual defense to Planetary Defense Forces.
  • The Republic massively decentralizes and executive, as opposed to legislative or home planet/sector, power starts falling back into Senators hands for the first time since pretty much the Pius Dea period as Supreme Chancellors and Vice Heads essentially become first and second among equals to other Senators, thus making the executive and legislative significantly accountable to the larger and more bribe friendly Senate rather than the government.
• Due to the infrastructure damage, a period of Medieval Stasis sets in, turning for example battle droids from multi legged hyper mobile tanks and super deadly assassins to crappy shit tier fodder infantry outside of expensive special models.
• Megacorporations gain power in the sparser regions of the Mid Rim and the Outer Rim as the republic falls into a combination of absurd political corruption and Inner Rim/Core Worlds exceptionalism, to the point that some corps have Senators of their own (not even bribed, literal voting members presumably elected/bribed the electoral offices from corp owned worlds). Senators essentially become mouthpieces of planetary interests or big business and vote based on who bribes them.
• 65 years before the Battle of Yavin, a man from Naboo's House Palpatine (dubbed Sheev in Disney canon) became the apprentice to a Sith Master named Darth Plagueis.
  • He learned secrets of Sith Alchemy and pretty much any other plot-related evil shit that writers want, takes on the name Darth Sidious, then killed his master and began a (very convoluted) plan to wipe out the Jedi, rule the galaxy and wage war on things outside the galaxy, and live forever. Just assume anything that happens from here until his death is because of him.
  • Palpatine takes on an apprentice, an older Jedi who left the Order due to its hands-off approach to galactic governance. The now ex-Jedi Dooku Serenno reclaimed the fortune and title of Count he had relinquished to join the Jedi and was secretly contacted by Palpatine to slowly cajole him over years.
• A Jedi named Sifo-Dyas has a prophecy that the galaxy will soon be at war, and concocts an elaborate plan to get an army for the currently armyless Republic using money from criminal organizations and the genetic material of a Mandalorian descended from the old warriors. He’s killed by Palpatine (the guy that planted the idea in his head), who takes over the project via Dooku and had each clone implanted with a secret control chip that would override their training and loyalties when Sheev gave “Order 66”.
• As the Republic weakened due to corruption and the rising power of corporations, and the Jedi weakened due to Sheev’s (and his predecessors) tampering with the Force via bullshit Alchemy handwaves and becoming detached from the common people weakening their compassion and the light side, planets and organizations within the Republic began to act aggressively. Sheev was behind many of their moves as his public identity rose as the Senator of his home planet of Naboo.
  • As aforementioned, many organizations gained enough power to have Senatorial representatives, making corporations as powerful as entire planets and causing the clusterfuck of alliances and conflicting interests to render the Republic almost powerless.
• The Trade Federation, a simple shipping company that had its own Senator and via shared interests controlled many, MANY more, began using its private army to blockade planets. They did this to secure exclusive contracts with the goal of controlling all trade everywhere eventually, and even hold power over the Republic due to its lack of military.
  • Sheev as Sidious reveals himself to be heavily invested in their projects, and they gladly accepted his patronage. He advised them to upscale their ambitions and blockade the planet Naboo, which was far more powerful politically and economically than their previous targets, 32 years before the Battle of Yavin.
• We leave the mists of backstory/dubious canon and enter into the Movie/TV Canon.
  • Two Jedi, an apprentice and a master (Obi-wan and Dooku’s old apprentice Qui-Gon) were sent to negotiate an end to the blockade. Fearing that the Federation had gone into dangerous territory, the leaders contacted Sheev, who ordered them to kill the Jedi and continue the blockade as if nothing had happened.
    • The Jedi escaped to the surface of the planet and escaped with the planet’s leader Queen Amidala. They were delayed due to engine problems from the escape, and stopped at Tatooine where they picked up a slave boy named Anakin who was Force-sensitive (implied to be an experiment from Sheev’s Alchemy to create life as he learned under Plagueis, abandoned after accidentally rendering Anakin's mother pregnant with no father, bot Plagueis and Palpatine deeming it a failure). Meanwhile Sheev’s own apprentice Darth Maul had been sent to ensure his plans were carried out. A couple of weeks after this Palpatine kills Plagueis and becomes the Dark Lord.
  • Sheev convinced the Queen to start a movement against the administration of the Republic, which was joined by the majority of the Senate; even the corrupt were sick of everyone else’s corruption.
    • This destabilized the Republic leadership, shuffling Sheev into power as Supreme Chancellor and putting his lackeys in charge. Meanwhile, the queen and Jedi returned to Naboo and lead a revolt, defeating the Trade Federation and leaving their leadership as prisoners of the Republic, but Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jin dies at the hands of Sidious's apprentice Maul and his apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi is left grieving and Maul believed dead as he was cut in half by Kenobi.
    • Sheev worked behind the scenes to keep them from being prosecuted for their actions while making plans to turn Anakin Skywalker, who had been found and chosen for training by the Jedi as part of the Chosen One Prophecy (by Obi-Wan, who had literally just become a Knight after Qui-Gon's death, so that was a dumb fucking call giving the kid who needed a father figure to a rigidly dedicated young man in mourning who had almost failed out of the Jedi into the Jedi Service Corps due to relative weakness in the force), into a future asset.
  • Sheev progressed his plan for a war to further destabilize the galaxy by pitting the various corporate powers he controlled as Darth Sidious against the united planets he controlled as Supreme Chancellor. This leads to a Separatist movement with both sides financially powerful, both sides possessing armies, and both sides feeling they were the ones who were wronged and both firmly in Sith pockets, the Separatists as a disposable tool under Dooku (who, after Maul's believed death, had become Sidious's apprentice Tyrannus) and the Republic primed to vote for Palpatine to gain more and more power.
    • The “Clone Wars” began after a series of events orchestrated by Dooku where the Jedi discover and deploy the clone armies against Separatists who had been planning to execute the Jedi and former queen of Naboo as revenge on behalf of the Trade Federation.
  • Sheev manipulated both sides of the conflict to deplete the strength of all participants. The Separatists were led by the cyborg General Grievous, Count Dooku (Sidious planned to replace both Maul and Dooku from the beginning, with Anakin) and the corrupt Separatist Council essentially acting as Count Dooku's mouthpiece, while the Republic forces were led by the Jedi Master Mace Windu and Grand Master Yoda.
  • Public opinion began to turn against the war, and groups of Senators who had previously been allies of Sheev began meeting in secret and planning for militarizing their planets so there would no longer be a need for an army of the Republic.
  • When the time was right Sidious orchestrated a finale of battles which resulted in the deaths of Dooku and Grievous, then enacted Order 66 to slaughter almost all of the Jedi and turned Anakin to his side as Darth Vader. He declared himself Emperor and the Republic his Empire, eliminating much of the old government over time, and allowing cronies to make it into the ranks of a galactic military dictatorship which used powerless puppet governments on the local level.
  • Separatist remnants continue resistance and a majority of them are defeated in the Reconquest of the Rim.
  • Small rebel cells popped up everywhere, which would eventually unite under the surviving members of the old Senate following Palpatine using Vader's "secret" apprentice to lure them out and failing to kill them as said apprentice turns to light and sacrifices himself (the plot of The Force Unleashed).
  • The Great Jedi Purge comes to an end one year before the Battle of Yavin with Master An'ya Kuro being killed by Vader, leaving several dozen Jedi alive as the Empire shifted focus to fight the Rebels, now united as the Alliance to Restore the Republic. The Alliance is led by Mon Mothma and Bail Organa, two Senators.
  • The Emperor dissolves the Senate and orders his military second Wilhuff Tarkin to use the newly built Death Star, a planet killer super weapon, to enforce his rule, while his civilian second Sate Pestage handles the bureaucracy.
  • Han Solo, would be Imperial Officer, quits the academy after saving Wookie Warrior Chewbacca's life due to personal aversion to Imperial policy and turns into one of the best smugglers in the galaxy (having a Wookie owing a life debt to you really helps in fights, by the way).
  • Vader turns out to have fathered twins with Padme Amidala, the Naboo senator after Palpatine became Chancellor, who died due to her life force being drained after giving birth to Luke and Leia. Leia got sent to live with Bail Organa and his wife in the idylic paradise Alderaan as Princess, while Luke got given to his in aunt and uncle at the sandy shithole Tatooine, utterly worthless except as a shadowport since the Rakatans bombed it to dust in such a way as to render minerals mined from it useless due to ion fluctuation after the world defied them. When we said the Jedi degenerated into Lawful Stupid morons, we meant it, given it was Obi-Wan and Yoda, basically the two big name Jedi of several dozen who had their heads screwed on straight, who made this decision.
  • In 0 BBY Leia, by this time a very active but powerless Senator, acquires the Death Star plans after various different missions gather bits and pieces of it and rushes to Tatooine to get Obi-Wan's help on her fathers orders. Obi-Wan was on Tatooine to help guard Luke. Leia's ship and its escorts are intercepted by Vader and his units and her corvette attempts to escape from the battle only to be boarded by Vader's personal elite unit since the Clone Wars, the 501st Legion. Leia is captured but two droids, C-3PO (a protocol droid built by Anakin as a child) and R2-D2 (an astromech that used to belong to Naboo and was used by Anakin in the Clone Wars) manage to escape with the plans which Leia gave to R2-D2. The droids crash onto the planet in an escape shuttle.
  • The Droids find their way by sheer happenstance into the hands of a lowly moisture farmer Owen Lars and his Nephew, Luke Skywalker, the latter of whom manages to find Leias hidden message in R2-D2 and brings it to Obi-Wan Kenobi. The Imperials on the other hand managed to trace the movement of the droids to Lars and kill him and his wife; this prompts Luke to travel to Alderaan with Obi-Wan Kenobi.
  • Luke and Kenobi make the aquaintance of Han Solo, who hire him and his ship, the Millenium Falcon, to make the journey to Alderaan. On the way, they accidentally discover that Alderaan had been destroyed by the Death Star and get captured by the Empire. Han and Luke escape with Leia, but Kenobi sacrifices himself in a duel with Vader. Leia guides the other two sods to the Rebel hideout on Yavin IV, but the Imperials had traced the Millenium Falcon and were preparing to destroy Yavin IV with the Death Star.
  • The Battle of Yavin occurs. The Rebels use the Death Star plans to find the stations achilles heel in the form of a tiny exhaust port leading directly to the stations main power generator (EU canon had it that this was simply an oversight, Disney Canon has it that it was purposefully placed there by the leading engineer of the Death Star as a sort of contingency plan he cooked up as revenge against the Empire for forcing him to spend all his life with his work and away from his family). Since the Death Star was designed to face massive fleets, rendering any large-scale attack pointless (and also save on the SFX budget), the Rebels instead concoct a highly risky operation to attack the station with mere fighters until Luke lands a hit on the exhaust port, blowing the entire Death Star to smithereens.
    • Anything after this is referred in the official time as ABY. The time between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back also suffers from dubious canonicity, since all of it was contained either in novels, comics or other stuff and even then, it wasn't well covered.
  • The Rebels, with their cover blown, find themselves immetiatly beset by a very pissed Vader leading a massive Imperial Fleet to exact vengeance on them. Yavin IV is abandoned in a messy evacuation, forcing the Rebels to stay spaceborne for some years. Luke, while exploring opportunities to expand his knowledge of the Force, crashlands on Hoth and proposes the ice planet to become the new Rebel headquarters. The Rebels start to accumulate more covert support from big players in the political sphere of the Empire, most notably the Bothan senator Borsk Fel'lya and the Corellian resistance fighter Garm Bel Iblis and become a bigger thorn in the Empires side through constant guerilla warfare.
  • Vader, having learned about Lukes identity, makes it his mission to find his son and leads a vast effort to locate the Rebel headquarters. A probe droid sent out by the Imperial Navy eventually finds the Rebel base on Hoth; however, a premature attack by the incompetent Admiral Ozzel gives the Rebels proof that they had been found out and prepare to get the fuck out of Hoth. Vader leads the Imperial troops that attack the Rebels covering the evacuation in a brutal onslaught (that also serves as a reminder that the Empire is not to be trifled with, as the Rebels stand absolutely no chance in taking the Imperial forces head on). Most of the Rebels manage to escape, but their forces are crippled and take years to reconstitute. Luke starts his Jedi training under Yoda and ultimately learns that Vader is his father.
  • The Rebels learn via the Bothans that the Empire has begun construction of a second Death Star with cocaine and hookers over Endor and moreover, that the Emperor is personally overseeing the construction. Any common sense gets thrown out of the room when the Rebel leadership decides to attack the Death Star directly with all of their forces only for the whole ordeal to have been a trap set by the Emperor who fed the Rebels false intel, catching them between the Death Stars hammer and the Imperial Navys anvil (which they should have smelled from five miles away). In spite of all the odds, the Rebels still manage to disable the Death Stars shields, blow up the stations generator like the last time, killing the Emperor, Vader, most of the Imperial Navys commanders and get away with it. This is where the old Lucasfilm canon ends. The Empire is defeated and the galaxy liberated from its tyranny.
• Here we continue on with the old EU timeline, although what is and isn't considered canon is a bit difficult to determine.
  • The Empire's leadership collapses into total anarchy, as various factions of politicians and warlords vie for power. Nominally, a council of regional govenors stays in charge, but it gets undermined by various factions trying to take control over the majority of the Moffs via blackmail or corruption and several military leaders outright seceding from the Empire with the forces under their command. The Rebels still face the daunting task of taking down the Empire properly; while the weakened grasp on power of the Empire is obvious, it still is a force to be reckoned with. The immediate fallout of the Battle of Endor involves an invasion of a far outpost near the uncharted regions by reptilian invaders whose call for aid, originally meant for the Imperial Command aboard the second Death Star, gets intercepted by the Rebels who send Luke and company to fix their mess. The first truce between the Rebels and an Imperial Faction gets signed and the world becomes independent shortly afterwards.
  • The first big internal Imperial kerfuffle gets resolved when the former head of the Imperial intelligence services, Ysanne Isard, manages to instigate a successful coup against the council of Moffs and take control of Coruscant. The Rebels move fast to take control of Coruscant themselves and while the attack on the planet is successful, Isard escapes with a Super Star Destroyer buried in the planets crust and unleashes a bioweapon that only targets non-human species, stoking paranoia and racial tensions in the Alliance and on Coruscant while Isard manages to keep the upper hand on the Alliance by embargoing a number of planets producing a vital substance needed to cure the effects of said bioweapon. Rogue Squadron suceeds in tracking her down and ultimately kill Isard shortly afterwards. The Alliance takes control of Coruscant, various imperial worlds defect to the Rebels, the New Republic is officially founded and Leia becomes its first chancellor.
  • Thrawn returns from the unknown regions to single-handedly take control of the badly battered Imperial factions, several of which were contemplating surrendering to the New Republic. Thrawn reinvigorates their fighting spirit, reforms the Imperial fleet and starts a campaign of conquest that proves to be a major headache for the New Republic. Luke starts his first earnest attempt to reform the Jedi Order on Yavin IV that gets thwarted when Mara Jade lures him into a trap. After a series of twists and turns, Thrawn is assassinated by his Noghri bodyguard and his rule over the Imperial Remnants comes to an end.
• Here we will discuss the post-Endor to start of TFA Disney timeline.
• Here we will discuss the aftermath of Thrawn's death until the Abeloth fight in Legends timeline.
• Here we will discuss the Disney Sequel trilogy and it's surrounding side stories.
• And finally, the end of the Legends timeline.

Star Wars
About:	The Franchise, The Setting, The Movies, The Video Games
Television Shows:	The Clone Wars, Rebels, Resistance, The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch, Disney + Originals
Star Wars Games
Miniature:	X-Wing, Armada, Legion
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Roleplaying:	FFG, WotC (d20), WEG (d6)