I don’t see how you can blame the New Republic’s poor showing at the beginning of the Yuuzhang Vong War on Palpatine. It was the Yuuzhang Vong’s attempts at destabilisation (combined with a massive Idiot Ball held by the New Republic leadership) that did this, not Palpatine’s actions 45 years earlier.
I can do it quite easily. I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to say that Palpatine’s actions had extremely powerful consequences even 45 years after he performed them. Hell, there is still an Imperial Remnant 45 years later.
Yes, I believe had the Yuuzhang Vong attacked years earlier, at the height of the Galactic Republic and not a few decades later after two revolutionary regime changes they would have been more easily repelled.
What about the Alliance in Firefly? We’ve mainly seen how they look from the point of view of the Serenity crew - and let’s face facts, these people were self-admitted criminals who’d fought against the Alliance in a war. For all we know maybe the Independants were the bad guys.
Except in the movie you see who really created the Reavers (you know, the ones who rape you to death? That always gives me a chuckle).
Though I’ll admit when I was originally watching the series I had this exact thought. The show never really shows them doing anything evil other than being a big bad government with big bad soldiers. Hell, the crew once robbed medicine headed for a frontier town from the big bad government. I guess it puts things in perspective.
Why he thought a bunker 70 feet below the surface of the Death Star throne room was any safer than anywhere else on the Death Star is unknown. Some suspect Force Senility.
By the end of the total mess I’m not sure if we’re supposed to like Annakin again or not. Annakin/Vader kills an insane old man who had just advised Luke to kill Vader- there’s less reason to believe he killed him out of fatherly affection than he was pissed. Besides, if Annakin had just let Mace Windu arrest Palpatine 20 years before anyway he wouldn’t have been there, but instead he gets Windu killed and then he performs the Massacre of the Younglings and probably keys a landspeeder or two just to be evil and all so that he can save the life of his wife and unborn kids who (Annakin believes) die anyway, which begs the question “Why now is he serving Palpatine? What you slaughtered people so he’d do is something he didn’t do- he’s in breach of contract”. (Alright, true, he saved your life, but you were only fighting Obi Wan because he promised to save Padme and once you learned she was dead- by which time your great new life involved robotic everything and you can’t take a mask off for more than a few seconds without dying- you don’t owe him anything.
So he kills an old man who’s just put a hit on him to save a son the old man was supposed to save 20 years ago and when said old man was about to get killed anyway- he just expedited it- this is supposed to cancel out all the kindergardeners he told he was taking to see the Ewoks and then slaughtered? Or the billions of people he killed on Alderaan (including Jimmy Smits- there can never be a L.A. Law reunion)? Or the fact he waterboarded his own daughter after taking her onto the death star after picking up and snapping the throat of a British guy who was just a purser on her craft? The tribe of Sandmen I have no problem with, they killed your mom (for no apparent reason) but that’s you’re one freebie. He’s no more a hero than if Goebbels had shot Hitler just before Hitler committed suicide.
Palpatine didn’t “put a hit on Vader.” It had been, for thousands of years, the way of the Sith for potential apprentices to kill the shit out of one another to earn the right to be taught under a powerful master. Vader wasn’t a complete retard, he knew when Pappy first ordered him to bring Luke in that the plan was to have him duke it out with Luke to see who deserved the spot more.
The real brain tickler is whether Vader had been planning to kill Pappy to begin with. He tells Luke that this is his plan and that he’d make Luke his right hand (har har) man after doing so and this fits right in with the Sith- they routinely kill their masters- but when Luke has an opportunity to cut Pappy into pieces it’s Vader who intervenes and blocks the hit. You could argue this away by saying that either a.) Vader had been lying to Luke in an attempt to tempt him with promises of power or b.) Vader protected his master out of habit. The truth is simpler, of course- shoddy film-making.
/rant
I think you’re right. I also think you’ve thought about it too much. Speaking of which, have I mentioned Dorothy, Glinda’s stalking horse, from the movie The Wizard of Oz? No?
Before Dorothy comes to Oz, there are 2 good witches, 2 bad witches, and a wizard, we presume in some sort of equilibrium. Dorothy appears and snuffs the WWE. Glinda, coming to stake her claim to Munchkinland, shows up and in a fast move puts the ruby slippers on Dorothy, figuring, ‘what the hell, maybe she can shake thing up a bit’. Note that Glinda could have sent her home at this point, but choses not to do so.
She then sends Dorothy off to see the wizard, figuring that she’s better off causing trouble anywhere but in the North or East, where Glinda now rules. The wizard makes the same analysis and turfs Dorothy to the West, where…surprise, she snuffs another witch. Holy Crap!. The Wizard promises to take her away, but instead runs like hell, taking off in the balloon without her, and leaving a literal puppet in power, in the form of the Scarecrow.
At this point, Glinda appears and decides that this is getting out of hand, Dorothy has neutralized 3/5 of the magical heavy hitters in Oz, and still has a powerful magical item. Figuring it’s time to quiet things down and consolidate, she tells Dorothy how to get home. Note that she could have let her go home from Munchkinland, about 15 minutes after she arrived, but she didn’t - she used Dorothy as a stalking horse to take down some competition. Now she’s only got the Good Witch of the South to deal with, and it’s ***Glinda Magical Dictatrix of Oz.
Magneto comes to mind. At least, he did back in 1995 when I stopped keeping up with X-Men.
Actually, it’s pretty clear in the series that the crew has the moral high ground. Consider: In the 'Verse, it’s actually economical to smuggle live cattle and Matrushka dolls. Drugs, military supplies, sure, those are standard smuggler fare, but the government has to be pretty darned corrupt for it to make sense to smuggle toys and livestock.
And even without the knowledge that the government created the Reavers in the first place (knowledge which probably never made it to most of the Alliance military anyway), the military still retains a willful and negligent ignorance of the existence of the Reavers: At the very least, they’re just writing off a whole heck of a lot of distress calls.
Plus, of course, there’s what they did to River. The most you can give them there is that maybe they didn’t know that cutting out portions of a healthy brain would drive the owner of that brain batshit sane. In which case, they’re not necessarily evil, just idiotic.
I haven’t seen the series in forever and I only watched it once, so forgive my ignorance of the series. But really, they smuggled toys? 
That’s pretty hilarious.
Umm, that’s not what happens in The Force Unleashed. The Rebellion already existed and Palpy’s attempts to bring it out into the open so he could crush his enemies just brought those particular enemies out in the open.
But besides that, even without Starkiller, it’s pretty clearly implied that the Rebellion would have formed anyway.
Any resistance that existed before Palpatine ordered Vader to send Galen to unite it was token at best. Hell, the Marek family crest is what’s used as the damn Alliance Starbird! They didn’t have a different logo before that- there wasn’t an organized resistance at all.
The book makes it clear that the three factions behind the Rebellion… Mon Mothma, the Organas and the third guy all lead pretty powerful resistance groups of their own. Smaller groups also existed.
To say there wouldn’t be a Rebellion is crazy. Leia is never on the Death Star and Vader doesn’t even know she’s involved until the beginning of Star Wars. With her father dead, she would have taken up the Rebellion herself (as we saw her do after the Empire destroys Alderran in Star Wars).
I agree, a rebellion would have formed anyway. But the Rebellion movement that existed was the lovechild of Palpatine. And when Leia saw Alderran bite the dust, she was already a part of the resistance united by Marek who was, of course, dead by that point.
Starkiller lives!
Lord Humungus from Mad Max 2 seems to have the best interests of his gang at heart. They need fuel to survive, and he’ll stop at nothing to get it. He even sacrifices himself by crashing into the tanker, after all other attempts to stop it have failed. Think Spock in bondage gear.
Professor Moriarty may have been known to empty the occasional safe or two, but his reputation for muder and mayhem on a grand scale is surely exaggerated.
(and I see from Amazon there are new Moriarty books out since I last looked, too. Mmmm … books…)
Wide Sargasso Sea tells Jane Eyre from the point of view of Mr. Rochester’s first wife. She really isn’t the “villian” of the first book, but she isn’t portrayed positively either.
Magua from the Last of the Mohicans would arguaby qualify. Told from his perspective, his quest to avenge the murder of his family at the order of Gen. Greyhair would seem noble, and I wouldn’t blame him one bit.
There was another film which I caught just the other day which also would fit in here, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was…
You think he chose a name that sounds like Germanic words for “dark father” completely by accident? I think Vader was always intended to be a corrupted Anakin, even if the details of his former life, what he did to become evil, and his eventual redemption had not been worked out yet.
Not to say that he wasn’t genuinely evil in Star Wars; he couldn’t have been redeemed if he wasn’t.