In the full story lines (novels, whathaveyou), do the skinny-necked things continue to manufacture clones for the storm trooper armies of the Dark Side after the Emperor’s mutiny? Or do they have a finite number of troopers as determined by the first batches that we saw in the dreadful 2nd installment of the most recent trilogy?
While there are clones in a few of the Expanded Universe books, I think most authors present the storm troopers as actual people who have been recruited.
There was a rumour that came out of somewhere indeterminate*, way back in 1979 or so, that stated the Stormtroopers were clones. Many years later, because that rumour was hard to substantiate or pinpoint its origin, it was generally dismissed by the fans, so a lot of the stories (comic strips, novels, games etc) had the Stormtroopers as conscripted.
When the prequels came out, there was some retro-fitting applied. I believe the accepted canon now is that some are clones, or descendants of clones, and some are conscripted.
*My best guess for the origin of the rumour is George Lucas himself, who tended to reveal lots of tidbits like that in the earliest interviews or appearances, which were then lost in the mists of the past. He apparently revealed that Darth Vader was Luke’s father at a convention very soon after the first Star Wars / A New Hope came out.
Aha. I see that the article I linked to has a similar explanation.
I prefer the fanwank that the first batch of clones that was ordered was the only one, and once Palpatine got his hands on the Republic he started conscripting soldiers to fill the ranks.
The logic that follows is consistent: the clones were necessary for the surprise attack because pulling Republic citizens for the army would have been noticed, and the clones were needed to execute Order 66. After Palpatine had control of the Republic, he’d have no need for Order 66, and it’s probably far cheaper to train conscripts than grow and train clones anyway.
Although I don’t follow the SW universe as closely as I used to, hasn’t it been put forward that clones become mentally unstable as they age? ISTR that a number of the clones either offed themselves or had to be committed or whatever, and it just became generally accepted that clones had a specific lifespan in which you could use them, then were retired. But since that was a lot of admin, the Empire then turned to conscripts.
However, it’s more than possible that my memory’s fuzzy.
ETA: I think this is alluded to in the Joruus C’Boath storyline, but I forget which book that’s in. And geez, how big a nerd am I for even knowing that name. I need to get out more.
That seems to hold true after seeing the lost footage someone linked to earlier in the week of the Biggs/Luke conversation. Biggs said he wanted to join the rebellion as quickly as possible before he was drafted by the Empire.
Well, part of the problem is that it normally takes 10 years to grow a clone that is mentally stable due to some effects from the Force. By putting the growing clone in a Force-empty bubble (caused by some creature whose name I can’t remember), the growth rate can be remarkably increased. What makes more sense, 10 years of growing a clone or enlistment/conscription?
I’ve read short stories set in the Star Wars universe and the Stormtroopers are always presented as regular guys who were recruited. If I’m not mistaken, Kyle Katarn was once a Stormtrooper and the illustrated “Dark Forces” hardcover novella depicts him with the rest of his Stormtrooper regiment, all of them regular and individual humans.
I hate the idea of Stormtroopers being clones. It takes away the idea that there are all individual people with their own lives and pasts beneath those helmets, which is an essential concept in light of the fact that the empire is still made up of “regular people” who were persuaded to fight for evil.
The Marvel Star Wars comic line ('77ish -> '84ish) had at least one issue that depicted a “regular guy” being a stormtrooper. As I recall, the stormtrooper was an Alderaan-ian who blundered into taking Leia captive somehow while they were both castaways on a desert planet somewhere. He spent the later half of the issue with his helmet off and also revealed that he wore a chunk of rock that came from Alderaan on a necklace under his suit.
I hated the whole clones vs droids thing in the prequals (there’s no love lost between these armies of emotionless automatons).
I’ve been watching the original trilogy on HBO HD the past month. What made the battles so badass was that Lucas takes you into the cockpit of the Rebel fighters. The Rebels have open flight helmets so you can identify each of them as individual characters while the Imperials all wear faceless battle armor (except for their Nazi-like officers). Plus I really liked the scale of the Battle of Hoth.
The prequals were like watching a bunch of CGI action figures fighting it out.
If we go with the idea that the Storm Troopers were mostly conscripts, then why were they all humanoids, something that doesn’t seem to have happened to any other group in the SW universe? That they were clones is the only thing that explains why they don’t have a Wookee or a yoda type or even a Greedo type.
Expanded-Universe-wise, I think most stormtroopers weren’t clones. In the second novel of Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, Dark Force Rising, the Imperial remnant under Thrawn has been growing clones in Force-free bubbles (made by the ysalamiri mentioned above) and has stuffed a supposedly abandoned Old Republic Dreadnaught with clones. Luke has trouble reading them with the Force, and can’t understand what the problem is until they realize they’re all clones. If the stormtroopers had all been clones, Luke would have recognized the Force-feeling.
The Empire was very racist. Only humans had any value. Every other alien species was a second-class citizen, good only for labor slavery. Nazi Germany would not have armed the Jews, and the Empire did not arm aliens.
There aren’t any clones in the Imperial Navy, and yet there aren’t any Wookies or Rodians or other non-humans evident in their ranks.
If you don’t like the ‘Empire is human-only apartheid’ theory, you could just assume it was a matter of making it easier to supply units if they weren’t a mix of species. So there are all-Wookie Imperial Stormtrooper units somewhere, it’s just that we never happened to see any. It’s not like the Rebellion was stuffing Wookies into the X-wing cockpits, either.
No, but there were alien pilots, and while my list of alien examples may be brief the only explanations that work for an all humanoid ST force is either the clone idea or the racism idea, neither of which make much sense. Darth Maul, while humanoid isn’t exactly normal looking and you’d think that the racism would extend to people who kind of look like the devil, so then they would have to be clones, right?
Darth Maul was a Sith apprentice, not an Imperial. Heck, he died a good ten years or more before the rise of the Empire, and his existence was never known to the general public. If you’re suggesting that his status as Palpatine’s apprentice indicates that the Emperor himself was not racist, well, you’re probably right. Palpatine was a master political manipulator. The Empire’s racism wasn’t an extension of Palpatine personal beliefs, but a tool to consolidate his control over the population.
Imagine that!
So are we to draw from that the idea that the majority of known space in the SW universe was populated by humanoid beings, or at least the area that the Empire decided to start with?