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Yes the Rebellion won, Anakin and Luke destroyed the sith and we here there is a new republic. The ending of RotJ shows the heroes won.Zarm wrote:The Resistance? But what happened to the Rebellion? Did they win? If there's a shadow of the Empire, were they defeated? If so, why didn't the Rebellion finish the job? Are they the Resistance? If they won, why are they still so scrappy and underpowered? If they didn't, then how does this group differ from the Rebellion? Why isn't the Rebellion still fighting this group? Who are those planets they get blown up? They mention a new Republic, that's probably them, but why were they not fighting the First Order that grew out of the shadow of the Empire?miguelnuva wrote:The first order appeared from the shadows of the Empire. Snoke is their leader and Leia is leading the resisantance the group that fights them.
I say all this not to be snarky, but to point out how many gaps in knowledge there still are in that. They've been patched in with fan-assumptions and unconscious inclusion of knowledge that came from outside-of-the-movie sources, but what we are given in the film still does not adequately explain how we got from the end of Return of the Jedi to here, or what the various groups' relationships to each other are.
No, by the end of that, we know that the Empire is a major galactic power with a large starfleet and multiple star systems that used to be part of a Republic, but has turned into a tyranny, is using the bureaucracy of that Old Republic in order to maintain control but is slowly dismantling it as the Emperor seizes more and more power, that the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy that accompany the Republic had been hunted down and slaughtered by a servant of this Empire, that their primary doctrine is now to rule by fear in place of the democratic Senate that they have disbanded (which previously held the worst atrocities in chek, and had the power, if they sympathized with the Rebellion, to actually put a hitch in the Emperor's plans, but that has now been swept aside)... we know that the Rebel Alliance are a group of Imperial citizens that have turned and are opposing them because of their growing tyranny and tightening control, (as per Leia statements to Tarkin), and that because they have learned of the Empire's dreadful new weapon and have decided to take an active stand against them. We know they have leadership from elder statesman who are ceterans of the Clone Wars, and sympathies toward the Jedi Knights, are known of by the galaxy at large, have been on a number of secret bases throughout the galaxy, keeping on the move, abandoning old ones and finding new places to hide... we know plenty about the logistics and setup and motivations and goals, even implications of the Empire's size and origins. And all in one film.miguelnuva wrote:Star Wars has always had massive gaps, one could ask why the rebels are fighting the Empire for example in Anh.
So far in two, we barely know a fraction of that about the First Order, and have no explanation how things went from the status quo that we were left in the precursor film to the current ones, which is rather a necessity for a sequel that has changed around the Galaxy so much to establish.
The original Star Wars threw us into something new, but it was masterful at leaving clues and context, by implication as well as direct statement, to allow us to get our bearings and get a very solid idea of what was going on. The sequel trilogy arguably creates just as new a universe, as completely disconnected as it is from anything that came before, or else make such a drastic change to a familiar universe that the audience is left completely without bearings. It is on them to do at least as much explanation- as the original prove it can be done organically in without disrupting the story for exposition- and is definitely incumbent upon the sequel to not spin the events of Episode 7 in such a direction as to make even less sense.*
*For instance, turning the Starkiller Base event into the loss of hope for the Galaxy and aparent complete defeat of the New Republic, or going from the New Republic sitting by the sidelines because the Resistance had no proof of the First Order's threat to retconning that Poe and the others, despite almost no time having passed in which they could have learned it, now know Snoke's mega-warship on sight, indicating that they did have prior knowledge of the First Order's strength.
These things weren't errors in and of themselves in The Force Awakens, but the way that TLJ chose to add to the mythology them turned into issues.
