[kemayo]

> Admittedly, I thought Ep 8 was the entire wrong genre for Star Wars: it was a Vietnam War movie in a franchise built around World War 2 metaphors/aesthetics.

Ah, but Star Wars has always been a Vietnam metaphor filtered through WW2 aesthetics. Specifically, with the Rebels being the Viet Cong -- they're a small group using asymmetric warfare tactics against a vast military machine that's exerting cultural hegemony over even the territory it doesn't control. Lucas has actually been pretty explicit about this being his intention in interviews.

[WorldMaker]

That's a fair point, though in practical terms I think Lucas just took the roundabout way to arrive a metaphor involving the real world Maquis (as opposed to Star Trek's odder counterpart): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquis_(World_War_II)

There's still a lot fewer "shades of grey" in "French rebels versus Nazis" than in all the complicated geopolitics of Viet Cong versus US military. Lucas may have used the idea from the Vietnam War, but he didn't just filter it through a WW2 aesthetic, he entirely embedded it in it.

To my mind Star Wars isn't exactly the franchise for "maybe the Empire are the good guys in the story" shades of grey. (Though admittedly I also find it appalling how many people cosplay the Empire and how much merch there is and seeming adulation the Empire gets. Though it is seemingly great for Disney's bottom line if people don't think of the First Order as a Nazi Regime that exploded entire planets worth of people like the text tells us they are.)