Star Wars Is Finally Fixing A 47-Year-Old Clone Wars Plot Hole

Since Star Wars began 47 years ago, the Clone Wars have been one of the biggest, and most misunderstood, parts of the galaxy, but the franchise is finally fixing the massive plot hole surrounding it. The Clone Wars have been hugely influential to the Star Wars timeline. They introduced some of the franchise’s most compelling elements, from Order 66 to villains like Count Dooku and General Grievous. Despite how much they added to the Star Wars movies, though, they also left quite a big plot hole.

Star Wars has had several major retcons in the past, but it has generally done a good job of giving an in-universe explanation for them. One such retcon was Palpatine’s resurrection in The Rise of Skywalker, and the subsequent fleshing out of Project Necromancer and his powers of essence transfer that is still happening today. There’s still a major retcon Star Wars made years ago that hasn’t been explained, though. Luckily, Star Wars is finally revisiting it, and its explanation could completely redefine both the Clone Wars and the entire Galactic Empire.

Star Wars Has Given So Many Contradictory Versions Of The Clone Wars

One of the biggest retcons in Star Wars history surrounded the Clone Wars. The Clone Wars were first mentioned by Princess Leia in A New Hope, when she mentioned that Obi-Wan had served her father, Bail Organa. However, they were completely changed during the prequel trilogy and subsequent television shows like The Clone Wars. It turned out that, in direct opposition to Leia’s previous words, Obi-Wan and the Jedi never served Bail or the Senate. That was just the first of many such changes, though.

The history of the Clone Wars has featured multiple inconsistencies and gone through numerous changes since the beginning of Star Wars. There was Order 66, which for years had no explanation in the movies and was only explained in Legends as a product of mental conditioning. That was later changed, as The Clone Wars introduced behavioral chips that forced the clones to comply. Darth Maul was also seemingly killed in The Phantom Menace only to become a major player in the galaxy’s underworld. While those changes had lengthy explanations to justify themselves, they didn’t explain the sheer number of retcons in general.

Almost everything that is known about the Clone Wars is largely contradictory to some previously established part of Star Wars canon. The accounts of the war are so often at odds that it seems like no one in the galaxy can agree on what actually happened during the conflict. Now, though, it seems there is a legitimate reason for that confusion, thanks to an upcoming Star Wars book.

Star Wars Finally Explains All These Clone Wars Contradictions

A new book will look at the history of the Empire, and how it managed to rewrite the Clone Wars

Thanks to an excerpt from Chris Kempshall’s upcoming book, “Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire,” there’s finally an answer to why the Clone Wars have been remembered so differently than how they occurred. As Kempshall explained, the Clone Wars were much more complicated than they seemed, and the fact that history is written by the victors only made their legacy more complex.

It is never easy to deconstruct accepted facts about momentous events of the past. As time goes on, the rough edges of memory are worn away until what remains is an easy to accept and understand recollection. But the past is rarely easy and, certainly for historians, when we encounter versions of it that appear to be widely shared across the population the reaction is generally one of concern or suspicion. This is true of how the Clone Wars has come to be understood and, of greater importance, how alternative views of the conflict have been effectively suppressed to maintain the dominant one. It is time for us to begin the process of re-examining the war by beginning with accepting a simple truth: there is no single unified history or memory of the Clone Wars because it was written by the only side that actually won – the Empire – at the expense of the experiences of Republic and Separatist participants.

The biggest reason for the misunderstandings surrounding the Clone Wars is that the Empire purposefully rewrote history. In quite a literal sense, Palpatine redefined the ending of the war by branding the Jedi as traitors to the Republic. In addition to writing his own history, though, he also worked tirelessly to silence anyone whose view of the war contradicted his own. By the time he was done, the Empire was the sole authority on the history of the Clone Wars, and the truth had been buried so deep that it no longer mattered how much they had lied.

Buy Chris Kempshall’s “Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire” on Amazon

By The Time Of A New Hope, The Clone Wars May As Well Have Been Legends

After the Empire’s revisions to history, it became easy to forget the reality of the war

The Galactic Empire lasted 24 years before it was destroyed, and for every second of its reign it filled the galaxy with propaganda. That propaganda campaign aimed to change the galaxy’s perception of everything about the Jedi and the Republic and replace it with a favorable view of the Empire, and it largely worked. After almost two decades of lies and misinformation, only the most important people in the galaxy would have known the truth. Even those who experienced the war themselves wouldn’t have had a complete picture of the factors that went into it, which made the Empire’s lies even more effective.

For everyone else, the reality of the war was even harder to hold onto. The Empire’s pervasive propaganda and revisionism made it difficult to determine what about the war was true and what was false. Additionally, the only official sources about the war were completely unhelpful, as they simply parroted the Empire’s message. The Empire seems to have pulled off one of the most effective misinformation campaigns of all time. While that helped them justify their tyranny, it will also help close one of the biggest plot holes in all of Star Wars.