I kind of assumed that the Jedi were a big deal around the galactic core, but were little more than a rumour out on the outer fringe.
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i mean, yeah. some sort of explanation is needed. they were leading up trade negotiations, cutting down droids left and right, causing factions to run in fear at their mere mention. basically the galactic cops… but… suddenly it’s an ancient mystical religion that nobody heard of… including key generals of the empire.
they even had a jedi in their midst and were like – oh he has powers!? what are those!?
i presume what happened is that the emperor mind-clouded everybody. that would also explain why they seemed to believed the empire was the normal way things worked, even though it had only been around about 10 or 15 years.
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Where is this timeline?
Show me the “official version”, without reformats, without blurring, and without interstitial ads.
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Yeah, I guess that when the authoritarian Mind Police can actually police your mind, memory could get kind of hazy.
Palpatine, “This is the totalitarian galactic empire you are looking for!”
People of the Galaxy, “This is the totalitarian galactic empire we are looking for!”
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I’m glad I am not the only old fan thinking this.
As a person that generally loves complex narratives involving time travel, dreams, psychedelics, multiple worlds, overlapping realities, multi version of the same characters interacting, and so on… I am constantly baffled as to when a particular star wars story fits into the franchise timeline.
I’ve thought about this before. It’s not that the timeline is complicated. I think it has more to do with the problems of a lack of periodic tone if that makes sense. The movies all feel like they are in the same basic period of time and it’s only when I see a scene with an original character, now old, that I am reminded where we are in the timeline. The rest of the the time I just let my eyes go out of focus and enjoy the lasers going pew pew.
ETA: The way Fringe used color to differentiate the different universes was subtle and yet I always knew where we were without needing to think about it. I just felt it.
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Yeah, given how much we’ve seen our own society’s technology/fashion/etc change over the last several generations it is a little odd that the Star Wars universe seems so stagnant. Nothing in that universe ever seems to go obsolete. People dress pretty much the same at age 70 as they did when they were in their 20’s. Even after decades, an old, beat up cargo freighter can still hold its own against the latest generation of advanced fighter craft. In A New Hope someone mentioned something to Luke about how they had newer astromech droids available as if that was some kind of advantage over good ol’ R2, but as we all know R2 is still the best at what he does.
The reason is probably because the series is fundamentally a space fantasy, not science fiction. Fantasies need to stay timeless.
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I was thinking about this after watching the Mandelorian. All the technology is in stuff like spaceships and military gear, with very little visible tech designed to make people’s lives better. Like nobody has TV or computers or indoor plumbing or anything to make their personal lives less shitty but they can hop in the Millennium Falcon and go into hyperspace or blow up an entire planet. The imperials strut around in spiffy Nazi-style uniforms while a most other people look like Dennis the Peasant, except they own a beat up droid or two to help with the moisture harvest.
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Yeah nobody’s biting on this. They came out with it months ago, and everybody still just uses BBY/ABY.
i was super disappointed in the mandelorian’s dark droids or whatever they were called.
gleaming metal autonomous newly built technology.
meanwhile everything else in the universe, including other doids, is – like you say – run down, broken, rebuilt from scraps.
droid consciousness seems almost magical*, and the people who cobble together droids have a hint of wizardry about them
maybe i’m the only one, but i always presumed that starwars was far after the golden age of technology ( and jedi ) – with nobody quite sure how to make things from scratch.
but, then that’s almost as frequently discarded as the idea that tatooine’s a nowhere place where nobody goes.
( *the major exception was probably the roger-roger bots. they were mass-manufactured but cheaply made, and required some sort of central control. i won’t even mention darth vader making c3po, cause that was dumb. )
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Imperial droids were always gleaming and fresh. Not everywhere in Star Wars is broken down and worn — Cloud City and Naboo, for example, had an Art Deco aesthetic.
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Queen Amidala’s ship was shiny-- the better to show off ILM’s ray tracing algorithms.
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I share puzzlement with some of those upthread, but in my case it is probably because I’m a lukewarm fan (I’ve seen nearly every movie once), and I’ve always had a little trouble with eon, epoch, and era. How long is Han Solo supposed to have lived? Is he a member of the Howard Families?
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And when did the Xmas Special happen?
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Even places like Cloud City had their rough industrial places behind the shiny public-facing areas though.
Maybe we’ll see some of Naboo’s slums in a future spinoff.
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It never happened. This is not the holiday special you are looking for. (waves)
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The fuck?
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There is a certain group of Star Wars fans who got very upset when a photo of a whiteboard from a High Republic story development meeting was released and included the words REPRESENTATION/DIVERSITY (alongside AUTHENTICALLY LIVED IN, SWEEPING/EPIC, DROIDS, and DINOSAURS!). Me, I’m about to walk to my library to check out the first novel because they finally have it in. 
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