

Most big fictional space wars have clear good guys and bad guys. Babylon 5comes close with its "Shadow War," but that's kind of an outlier. When you boil it down to that Palpatine planned thw entire thing, the Clone Wars is not only totally ridiculous but also creatively brilliant and sort of peerless when it comes to other big science fiction and fantasy epics. It's kind of like if we found out in The Rise of Skywalker that General Leia Organa had been controlling Snoke the whole time, or worse, was Snoke. And who's in charge of the Republic? Chancellor Palpatine (aka, Darth Sidious). Who's at the very top of the Separatists? Darth Sidious. Second, an army of clones was mysteriously created to aid the Republic without their knowledge, and came in very handy when they needed it.īut what makes the Clone Wars so weird is that the entire thing was basically a fake war orchestrated by one political mastermind. First, the Separatists had an army of battle droids that was too big to ignore. The Senate of the Republic didn't want to enter the war at first, and had their hand forced for two reasons. So what started the Clone Wars? Put simply, the Clone Wars was a war waged by the Galatic Republic to prevent various star systems from seceding from a larger galaxy-wide union.


Evil is everywhere." The leader of both sides of the Clone Wars was the same person It may have been more accurate to say: "There are no heroes. Whereas the Rebels versus the Empire or the Resistance versus the First Order is fairly clear-cut, figuring out who the good guys are in the Clone Wars is actually pretty hard. In Revenge of the Sith, it feels like not only are there no heroes on the Separatist side of the war, but perhaps none in the Republic either. If your first response to this is to incredulously say "really?!" you're not out of line. In the opening crawl for Revenge of the Sith, we learn "there are heroes on both sides" of the Clone Wars. The Clone Wars as depicted in the prequels and The Clone Wars cartoon lasted only three years, and yet, even before the launch of The Clone Wars Season 7, we have a staggering 121 episodes (60 hours) devoted to this period of time in Star Wars, unequaled throughout the saga.īut what were the Clone War s actually fought over? The answer reveals why this war is so important, and why, despite being (mostly) a cartoon, it's the most realistic depiction of war in the entire saga. But the Clone Wars occupy a staggering amount of material within Star Wars canon. What's your favorite star war? True to its name, each era of Star Wars - from the original trilogy to the sequels - is defined by a specific galaxy-spanning war.
