i feel like Star Wars is not going to be able to completely memory hole the fact that in its canon, as things stand *right now*, without added context, it sure as hell seems like Palpatine’s plan the whole time was “genetically engineer a hot chick and steal her body”
like, for the whole saga
1. Become apprentice to a guy who is trying to figure out how to stop death
2. Betray that guy and steal his secret technique to stop death
3. Corrupt a messiah by lying to him that I can stop death.
4. also have a son
???
5. get the messiah to kill me
???
6. steal my granddaughter’s body
like this sucks, Rise of Skywalker is a bad movie, but it is in fact canon so like… what the hell was the plan? they have to tell us, they just have to
1) first of all, did Palpatine have a clone backup in RotJ also? was he going to steal Luke’s body?
1a) was the original plan to steal Anakin’s if he hadn’t been burned? how does that track w/corrupting him?
2) was he just gonna walk around as either Luke or Rey?
3) has he done this before?
I just don’t think the series can actually continue without explaining whether the main villain has been reincarnating across bodies for millenia, or just like once or something
also it’s still fairly extant canon that the Empire is pretty socially reactionary so uh… gender much?
I think the intention is that this was the one time he did it. Legends has a novel about Plagueis meeting him, training him, and getting betrayed by him (spurred by Plagueis meeting Doolu and Anakin and Palpatine feeling betrayed). Canon has The Bad Batch destroying his early reincarnation attempts.
He doesn't quite have much of a plan. He improvised a lot and worked at immortality but his plan was basically "1. Turn the jedi into wannabe dictators. 2. Kill them all now that they're corrupt. 3. Fuck me what now idk immortality i guess". Once Anakin was a robot Sidious wanted to replace him.
Though the "genetically engineer a hot girl body" thing sorta comes back in Bad Batch so honestly theres a good chance Star Wars plays out very differently with informed consent
Yeah, Palpatine's mechanations make more sense if you break them up into "be dictator and remove main threat to power" followed by "200 contingency plans if I die before my 100 various immortality projects give me results."
The TV shows seem to be putting a lot of effort into filling in the gaps. e.g. A major plot thread in THE BAD BATCH is a secret project to clone Force-sensitives. And the first main plot of MANDALORIAN is Imperial remnants chasing a force-sensitive Baby Yoda for research purposes.
I think they'll just kinda pretend the sequel trilogy didn't happen except to have characters walk around in theme parks basically and call it a day on ever thinking about the plot of them ever again
By extension, since he had physical control of Anakin’s grandson, does he have a clone or clones of Ben Solo? It’s been a fascination of mine for a while and several of my stories involve this concept.
