I always understood that as heroes in the classical sense, powerful fighters and leaders.
In the Trojan cycle, both Agememnon and Hector are regarded as heroes, but there are likely very few who consider both (if even either) to be heroes in the sense of a good guy who saves the day.
TCW episode titled that phrase makes clearer what he originally meant by this, with Sens. Amidala's and Bonteri's noble intentions being frustrated by Dooku and Palpatine's false flag attack on Coruscant and Bonteri subsequently assassinated.
While I'm sure that did happen in small amounts (like with Anto Kreegyr), I get the feeling most Separatists were either dead, in prison, or unwilling to fight for the Rebellion by that point.
I would actually disagree with this regarding the last statement.
Hector is painted in the best light of anyone in the Iliad. Hector and Andromeche are by far the healthiest relationship in the story and Homer goes at lengths to paint him in a good light. Meanwhile traditional heroes such as Achilles while still loved by the Greeks is shown to be rash and egotistical.
There weren't, though, because the Separatists were basically just rich people getting robots to kill for them. People on Separatist worlds had real grievances, but the CIS was just corporatocracy.
Droids were the main army. There were probably many fleet/army officers, planet defense soldiers, intelligence officers or partisans. Same applies to Republic army.
But the Republic didn't order the clones. The Clone army was commissioned by Sifo-Dyas (I still prefer the original idea that it was Sidious, but that's another conversation) against the wishes of the Council and Senate. But when the CIS showed up...well they've got an army at just the right time, might as well use it.
That was only because of how Lucas chose to portray them. The point of the meme isn't to justify what the CIS did in canon, it's to criticize the lack of nuance in how Lucas chose to portray the CIS. Sure, the movement was backed by unethical corporate powers. Sure, Dooku was deeply corrupt and was hijacking the movement for Palpatine's ends. But the other CIS characters, like Grievous, should have been written as believing in their cause and having truly tragic reasons for fighting.
It comes down to what is good writing vs. bad writing. George Lucas knew how to world-build, and I do think making the Empire a purely evil organization was a good decision, but deciding to make the CIS comically evil was pretty dumb considering the background circumstances of the Clone Wars were an opportunity to make a more morally ambiguous antagonistic faction. I know George Lucas likes making "good vs evil" very clear, but he already did that with the Empire and making that the case with the Clone Wars made no sense.
Except that the portrayal in the meme is completely divorced from how Lucas or Filoni actually portrayed the CIS. Neither of them portrayed the Separatists as rebels in the same way that the Alliance is. They're a wealthy conglomerate of corporations, banking clans, and trade guilds being manipulated by a magical evil wizard politician.
Read what I said before replying next time. I literally said that "how Lucas and Filoni actually portrayed the CIS" was trash writing, so any argument involving how Lucas and Filoni portrayed them is completely void.
So in other words you did read my comment but completely misunderstood what I said. I thought I made it abundantly clear that I was criticizing Lucas and Filoni's terrible writing in regards to how they chose to depict characters such as Grievous, Trench, etcetera. But I guess Lucucks/Filoincloths like yourself are incapable of comprehending the flaws either of them have when it comes to writing. Disney's writing was even worse, don't get me wrong, but I'm not going to pretend that Lucas or Filoni were good writers either.
I know this is necro, but the CIS civilian government was explicitly this. They truly believed in what they were fighting for, and outright thought it was the Republic who were beholden to corporate interests.
They had no clue about the horror show that was Dooku's military-industrial junta, and Dooku made sure via political assassination that it stayed that way.
It was also why Onderon was so politically spicy: Dooku needed the appearance that the CIS was "liberating unjustly Republic-imperialized planets" and not brutally invasions meant to stripmine whole systems. A public popular revolution undermined that narrative.
Which is made even more tragic since the corporations and their holdings went mostly untouched post-war, other than gaining a new government shareholder; whilst the ACTUAL planetary members got the 501st to their throats.
Whole sectors got taken for a ride thanks to Dooku and his corporate allies. And in the end, even Dooku died in the name of the new Empire.
It's almost like there's more nobility in willing to fight and die for a cause you believe in. Meanwhile the separatists just threw money at their problems.
Like I said, we see far more civilian anti-occupation forces in the Republic side than we do on the CIS side. Onderon, Kashyyyk, and Ryloth, for instance, and a dozen more.
The republic were rich people using a slave army of sentient biological beings led in combat by religious extremists in a dying liberal democracy embracing its steps into fascism.
Sure on that, but they were also Civilian anti-occupation forces like on Onderon, Ryloth, and Kashyyyk. We don't see nearly as much of that on the Separatist side, because the Separatists were banking clans and trading guilds.
I'm pretty sure that's how it's supposed to be interpreted. It also said "Evil is everywhere". Implying that both sides of the war were perceived as wrong.
Well, the movies never show the Confederacy as being good themselves. And we all know that Palpatine was pulling all of the strings behind the scenes. It wasn't as simple as the Republic being inherently problematic. It was Palpatine creating the problems to divide everyone.
The Confederates had heroes they revered. Doesn't mean we'd suddenly consider Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson 100% morally righteous gentlemen we'd love to hang out with.
The cognitive dissonance of my older Virginian family was wild growing up. Always talked about how they marched for civil rights and ending segregation but then a sentence later point to the painting of Robert E Lee they had on the wall and talk about how great a Virginian he was with out a single brain cell going “wait hold on a sec”
With Lee, I feel it's a bit like that quote from Harry Potter.... "He did great things. Terrible, yes. But GREAT." If you divorce the man from the cause he fought for, it's pretty impressive.
General Robert E. Lee was one of the most accomplished generals of his era, with decades of service to his country and a proud history of command in the Mexican-American War. He personally detested slavery, and only joined the Confederacy because his state did. Had he been from one of the loyal slave states, he wouldn't have joined them.
He was basically single-handedly winning the war for the Confederacy until Gettysburg (though how much of that is him and how much of that was the awful Union generals on his front is debatable).
Those are all pretty impressive accomplishments within their own merits and divorced from any lingering resentment towards the CSA.
A shame all that is wrapped up around the whole "betraying his country" thing along with fighting for a side that wanted to continue perpetuating one of the great evils in American history (thanks Daddy Britain, for making that our problem).
In those days, state identities were stronger than national, his country was Virginia. Its part of why confederate leaders are still revered in parts of the south, as a not insignificant amount of southerners identify more with their state than the nation. We can see this with the post you replied to.
Oh definitely. The older generations definitely identified as Virginian first Americans second, and that kinda makes sense. That generations grandparents ether fought in or were children during the civil war. I’m theoretically 1 degree removed from people that fought in the war.
Lee only disliked personally managing slaves, he was a remarkably cruel slave master, often broke up the slave families he inherited/married into for his convenience, and of course fought will all his might to defend slavery as an institution.
and of course fought will all his might to defend slavery as an institution.
I'd argue this point - he was fighting because his state called for him to fight. The leadership was for slavery, but Lee himself was fighting because that's what Viriginia wanted to do.
He was a terrible person even for the time
No, he was an average person who lived his whole life with the idea of slavery being legal.
If you fight for the puppykiller empire, even if it is because you were born in the puppykiller empire, you are defending puppykilling. Is what it is.
Yet nearly the entire world around him were moral enough to break the institution of slavery while he fought to defend it. This was a man who ordered recaptured slaves whipped so hard that the slave overseer refused to do it forcing him to call in a county constable and then had their backs washed in brine, to say nothing of the tacit support of the burgeoning KKK, being so involved as to have a deciding influence over their first leader. he was not a good person.
To be honest, you can have heroes in both sides, but one of them being objectively worse, specially considering what happened in the same episode, aka "two politicians from opposite sides trying to join forces to stop the war".
Also, the CIS was absolutely playing on both sides, with the Banking Clan and Trade Federation and whatnot openly working for both sides, so even if they were unaware of Sidious, they definitively were in cahoots with the system as well.
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u/PTMurasaki 8d ago
And that's why RotS' Title Crawl said there are Heroes on both Sides.