As an occasional visitor to Star Wars fandom, here are some things I would like to see come out of Rogue One:
–
the fic about the reactions of the Empire’s IT and records management
departments when they learn that some trigger-happy general just
literally blew up an entire unique archival repository of key bureaucratic data
– the comic about the first time some maintenance
technician tries to repair something on the Death Star and the guy’s
like, ‘where’s the documentation?’ and their boss is like ‘um, well,
funny story about that….’
– the in-depth analysis about various
mistakes the Empire makes in the original trilogy and how they operate
in context of an organization that has just, I repeat, LITERALLY BLOWN UP ALL OF
THEIR OWN BACKUP DATA. Of course it’s easy for any random hero to
impersonate a Stormtrooper! THEY DESTROYED ALL THEIR OWN PERSONNEL
FILES.Rogue One, or, Why All The Empire’s Librarians and Archivists Joined the Rebellion
Rogue 2 plot summary: a bunch of Imperial waste management techs go AWOL and steal the Death Star plans back from the Rebels because how else are we supposed to get the dianoga out of the pipes when we have literally no idea where half of these ducts go or what they’re for
they complete their mission but in the end decide not to delete the plans from the main Alliance computers after they’ve made their copy because ehhhhh what if we never had to fix anything on that piece of shit again, what if that, it’s insured right?
This also explains why none of the bridges or giant pits in the floor have railings: literally no one knows if they’re supposed to be there or not, and once someone tried to drill into the floor to install some and destroyed the main air circulation wiring for half the station, now everyone just has to be real careful all the time
It also means that when they built the second Death Star in ROTJ they had to start entirely from scratch, yikes
in the end they decide not to delete plans from main Alliance computers because their heist crew contains one records manager who’s like ‘look, we’re SUPPOSED to have redundant data backups, this way we’re not even paying for the storage!’
Paging @fahye because PUBLIC SERVANTS
this post has made the rounds amazingly on my dash and now it’s LITERALLY CALLING MY NAME.
pour one out for that tfa fic I was writing about della calrissian, disgruntled member of the new republic capital electoral commission, just trying to do her job and not get involved with the rebellion AGAIN.
never doubt my commitment to space bureaucracy.
I LOVE PEOPLE!
(Seriously, who’s up for a zine/anthology/cooperative AO3 series (group? tag? IDK) around the theme of various public servants sabotaged the Empire, joined the Rebellion, or avenged the besmirchment of their domains. #public servants of the empire, or the like.)
I love the way the glaring fucking design flaw that’s been pointed out since New Hope came out (your flying doom-planet that you’re going to use to subjugate the galaxy will explode entirely into so much space-dust after a love-tap from a single-pilot fighter if it’s in the right place? were you people high when you designed this?) just got shutupshutupohmygodshutuped away with Secret Rebels Sabotaging Things.
And it explains so much else, about everything, doesn’t it?
No guardrails over fucking bottomless pits? Some rebel sympathizer on the allocation committee line-itemed half the safety shit right out of the budget.
Helmets with no peripheral vision because fuck you, that’s why? The woman who designed them got conscripted into the job, and the only thing that makes her smile is watching those douchebag noncoms crash into each other in Y-intersection corridors.
Nobody notices there being extra stormtroopers running around? With the way Lieutenant Bob keeps dicking with the schedule, nobody can say for sure there shouldn’t be purple flying monkeys manning the security checkpoints. He’s run three Emperor Inspection Drills in as many weeks, and just three days ago he put the entire unit on duty at once and left the overnight shift “TBA.” He’s doing more to tank morale than Vader’s temper. Coincidentally, Lieutenant Bob’s homeworld got hit with a punitive tax hike six months ago, and people are literally starving in the streets.
The guy who checks itineraries and rosters for incoming shuttle flights believed the hype about joining up and seeing the Galaxy. Turns out fuck literally every actual thing about this job, from officer infighting to civilian casualties to Vader’s last-minute order to have every surface in his on-board suite kitted out with fucking lava lamps, of all things. Like, they’re in space. He gets that, right? They can’t just stop by SpaceMart and pick up stuff like that. His boss is a dick and he was up all night making lava lamps out of cooking oil and food coloring, and you know what? The last thing he wants to do right now is check the manifest on the next delivery of cooking oil. He’s had enough with cooking oil. He took five showers when he got back to his quarters, and he still smells like fucking canola. The Wookie and the guy who hasn’t shaved in a month and the guy still picking half a tumbleweed out of his hair can blow up the entire fucking station for all he cares–he will help them plant the explosives, if it comes down to it–so long as they don’t make him talk about the cooking oil he’s signing off on as being delivered.
My family was discussing this! Not only did the Empire blow up all of its own data about the Death Star, they also killed Every Single engineer who was even peripherally involved in its creation.
Literally, the Empire knows absolutely nothing about this giant ball of death other than it has no safety rails. Where is anything located? No One had a map. Where is the garbage compactor supposed to go?? No One knows, just toss the trash in the nuclear reactor.
Another note, about the location of the Main Comm Switch in the middle of concrete plate on a beach. I speculate that this is actually a legacy from a seafaring species who found it traditional to put their communications console next to where they liked to land their space ships, in the water. Then the Empire ‘recruited’ one to design their base, and Xe went Well Of Course It Goes There, and so it became part of the system and no one has complained for fear of death.
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