Because it would be hard to empathize with a major character who speaks with that voice processing, or so the producers think. Of course, Chewbacca not being able to speak Basic didn't keep people from liking him, but in a TV show like this I'm sure it's heavily dialogue-driven so they feel they can't get away with subtitles.
New animated show announced... Star Wars: Resistance
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Because it would be hard to empathize with a major character who speaks with that voice processing, or so the producers think. Of course, Chewbacca not being able to speak Basic didn't keep people from liking him, but in a TV show like this I'm sure it's heavily dialogue-driven so they feel they can't get away with subtitles.
I don't see why. Plenty of alien or robot characters in sci-fi over the decades have had voice processing like that. It's a pretty standard thing.
Why the new Disney canon (AFAIK) has refused to make explicit the human supremacist ideology of the Empire, as implied in the OT and noted in the Thrawn Trilogy, is utterly beyond me, especially given the First Order appears no more diverse.
I'm hearing the target audience for the show is 8 year olds, which given the trailers makes sense. It still looks fun, I think my nephew might love it and get him into Star Wars. He already loves BB-8.
I think it's pretty self-evident from the difference between the almost all-human (and nearly all-white) Empire/First Order and the far more diverse Rebel Alliance/Resistance. It's plain enough that actually putting it in spoken dialogue would just be telling us what we can already see for ourselves.
Perhaps the story beat isn't considered essential enough to justify the level of controversy it would generate in the audience.
^ Controversy? What controversy? The "racism: but is it really that bad" kind?! Or are you saying Disney views racists as a large part of their fan base? 
The cynical interpretation, of course, is that Kennedy's Lucasfilm is petrified of having SW actually deal with anything as real-world or uncomfortable as racism or fascism, for fear of diluting the pure childish escapism of the brand. So they retain all the culture and iconographic cues of fascism, but, unlike the explicitly anti-racism of Harry Potter, remain breezily apart from the queasiness/challenging themes such engagement entails (and get to keep selling lots of "fascy" toys, too!). Indeed, I'm far from the only one to have noticed this increasingly awkward dance...
As far as the OT goes, I agree, especially since we barely saw any civilian environments in the original films. But even if the implication is consistently maintained, at some point, keeping it at the level of subtext, no matter how thuddingly obvious, starts to get weird and distracting. If indeed the Empire is a human supremacist organization, you'd think the non-human characters given lots and lots of screen time on Rebels would, y'know, maybe mention that aloud once or maybe even twice, across the now dozens of hours of screen content?
The cynical interpretation, of course, is that Kennedy's Lucasfilm is petrified of having SW actually deal with anything as real-world or uncomfortable as racism or fascism, for fear of diluting the pure childish escapism of the brand. So they retain all the culture and iconographic cues of fascism, but, unlike the explicitly anti-racism of Harry Potter, remain breezily apart from the queasiness/challenging themes such engagement entails (and get to keep selling lots of "fascy" toys, too!). Indeed, I'm far from the only one to have noticed this increasingly awkward dance...
You'd have to be blind not to notice the direct visual and thematic links between the Empire in the OT and early 20th century militarist totalitarian regimes. The Nazi's are certainly a major touchstone there, but by no means the only ones. Don't mistake thematic allusions for direct allegory. In Lucas's mind the Empire was just as much a representative of Nixon-era American Imperialism as it was 1930's German expansionism.
Personally, I prefer the way the new books are portraying the Empire vis-à-vis supremacist doctrine. Specifically that it's mostly confined to the military and while rampant prejudice & speciesism exists within the ranks, it's not technically official policy.
For starters, Palpatine isn't a racist, he's an "everyone-who-isn't-me-ist". He'll use anyone in any way to further his goals. That speaks to a certain degree of pragmatism and while humans appear to be the single largest group in the Republic and later Empire, they're clearly vastly outnumbered by everyone else collectively, so going out of one's way to persecute whole groups for no other reason than "they're inferior to us humans!" is impractical, shot sighted and pretty much guaranteed to galvanise untold thousands of worlds against you.
No, Palpatine's M.O. is to install or corrupt weak puppet leaders on worlds that are of use to him and use them as proxies to keep the population in line and serve his larger goals. That's how he operated from the shadows as Darth Sidious and how he persecuted the Clone Wars from both sides.
Secondly; from a meta perspective it massively restricts the types of stories that can be told and as the EU often demonstrated, with very few exceptions reduces Imperial characters to either cartoonishly broad and incompetent moustache twirlers or utterly deluded fanatics.
And finally; Palpatine's top man (besides Vader), the one who most of the upper echelons of the Imperial leadership must kowtow to to even *hope* for the chance of gaining the possibility of an audience the Emperor. The most visible symbol of governmental authority in the entire Empire other than doctored holos of Palpatine; the Imperial Grand Vizier himself...is a blue skinned alien with great big pointy headtails. Which for me just kills any notion that the Empire is meant to be an outwardly human supremacist organisation.
That's not to say that there aren't human supremacists within the Empire or that Palpatine is more than willing to use such people in certain positions to further his goals. But having Palaptine himself share those views; to me that would just seem petty. Lazy even. As if the full breadth of his malignancy could be so easily summed up. One might as well also claim that he kicks puppies, folds pages instead of using a bookmark and never switches his phone off at the cinema.
As for how this translates to The First Order...difficult to say since despite being two movies in, we still don't know all that much about them. That they're a direct offshoot if Imperial military exiles that fled rather an surrender certainly opens the possibility that they've also inherited the old military prejudice of non-humans...but then they chose a non-human as their Supreme Leader. So, so much for that idea!
Personally, I prefer the way the new books are portraying the Empire vis-à-vis supremacist doctrine. Specifically that it's mostly confined to the military and while rampant prejudice & speciesism exists within the ranks, it's not technically official policy.
For starters, Palpatine isn't a racist, he's an "everyone-who-isn't-me-ist". He'll use anyone in any way to further his goals. That speaks to a certain degree of pragmatism and while humans appear to be the single largest group in the Republic and later Empire, they're clearly vastly outnumbered by everyone else collectively, so going out of one's way to persecute whole groups for no other reason than "they're inferior to us humans!" is impractical, shot sighted and pretty much guaranteed to galvanise untold thousands of worlds against you.
No, Palpatine's M.O. is to install or corrupt weak puppet leaders on worlds that are of use to him and use them as proxies to keep the population in line and serve his larger goals. That's how he operated from the shadows as Darth Sidious and how he persecuted the Clone Wars from both sides.
Secondly; from a meta perspective it massively restricts the types of stories that can be told and as the EU often demonstrated, with very few exceptions reduces Imperial characters to either cartoonishly broad and incompetent moustache twirlers or utterly deluded fanatics.
And finally; Palpatine's top man (besides Vader), the one who most of the upper echelons of the Imperial leadership must kowtow to to even *hope* for the chance of gaining the possibility of an audience the Emperor. The most visible symbol of governmental authority in the entire Empire other than doctored holos of Palpatine; the Imperial Grand Vizier himself...is a blue skinned alien with great big pointy headtails. Which for me just kills any notion that the Empire is meant to be an outwardly human supremacist organisation.
That's not to say that there aren't human supremacists within the Empire or that Palpatine is more than willing to use such people in certain positions to further his goals. But having Palaptine himself share those views; to me that would just seem petty. Lazy even. As if the full breadth of his malignancy could be so easily summed up. One might as well also claim that he kicks puppies, folds pages instead of using a bookmark and never switches his phone off at the cinema.
As for how this translates to The First Order...difficult to say since despite being two movies in, we still don't know all that much about them. That they're a direct offshoot if Imperial military exiles that fled rather an surrender certainly opens the possibility that they've also inherited the old military prejudice of non-humans...but then they chose a non-human as their Supreme Leader. So, so much for that idea!
Do we know that Snoke is a nonhuman? Wookieepedia calls him a humanoid alien, but I'm not sure what that's based on. He looks more like a badly scarred and deformed human to me.
I agree, I find villans way more interesting without the racism angle. It's similar to Gilead in the Handmaid's Tale TV show. Unlike the book there isn't officially sanctioned racism, makes them way more interesting. Still gives you the option to make individual characters racist.
You know those little numbers wiki's have next to factual statements? They're called "citations" and (assuming the editors have done so accurately) if you click on it, it tells you *exactly* what said statement is based on. In this case, his non-humanity is attributed to the official novelization. So it's pretty save to say that's canon give how tight a ship the LFSG seems to be running these days.
Also, his hand is bigger than Rey's entire head...
...and if you really want to split hairs: in-lore, most of the "aliens" that just look are humans in make-up are basically mutated humans. Or rather, descendants of early human colonists that settled all over the galaxy and evolved (naturally or otherwise) to adapt to their new homes, long before the Republic would re-unite them with their genetic cousins; so called "near-humans". Twi'leks, Chiss, Dathomiri, Mirialan, Zabraks, Umbarans, Togruta etc. all probably have human ancestry.
If you're going to suggest that the Empire and the First Order extend their tolerance to just those groups...well that just feels a little arbitrary, no?
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I'd imagine that Disney recognizes that there's a good chuck of the audience that attends escapist fantasy who don't want to feel like the film is moralizing them. That covers more people than simply racists. In any case, Disney no doubt knows the political views of their customers better than we do.
In other words, Disney might prefer to keep these sorts of allegories at the subtextual level, under the theory that the more a work can be all things to all people, in a Rorschach ink blot kind of way, the broader its appeal will be. For example, in Frozen, it wasn't ever said that Oaken is gay. The shot of his family in the sauna could be read both ways, providing something for everybody.
Saying racism is bad shouldn't really be moralizing anyone at this point, it should be accepted human nature. But clearly it still needs to be beat into the heads of some, if they don't like that I don't feel bad for them or want to meet them halfway on anything.
Honestly, I'll be surprised if Disney ever crosses that line in Star Wars and explicitly establishes the Empire as racist, in film at least. It seems like Disney doesn't want to rock the gravy train and make too many Americans uncomfortable. But they might do it as long as there's an out to keep the allegory from hitting too close to home.
Considering the size of the Empire and the number of species in it, I pretty sure it couldn't afford to be racist. They might have a human superiority complex, or maybe they just have an over abundance of humans in the military are a result of the Clone Wars and most of the materials from that army were made for humans.....or actually just one human, who had millions of clones made of him. But the Empire is full of aliens, and some in high positions, just not many in the military (probably because of the Clone Wars and the old Grand Army of the Republic again being made up almost exclusively of humans). Now that's not to say the Empire's representatives can't be racist. Some definitely are, but most of those are probably due to stigma and other drama caused by the Clone Wars, and some species that fought against the Republic, and some that harbored the Jedi post-war. Those races got the hammer dropped on them by the Empire (Wookies, Mon Calamari, and a few others). Others, like the Goenosians, were exterminated to keep secrets (Death Star). And others, like the Twi'leks, just want to be free, and continue fighting against the Empire, which is totalitarian anyway.
I'm pretty sure that you could use all of that to make the case that they were racist. They seem to hit harder on non-humans, preferring to win over human worlds or simply hold them hostage until they surrender. Non-human worlds were enslaved. The only non-humans ever shown in any position of power in the Empire are either clearly puppets of Palpatine or Thrawn, who had to go out of his way to prove himself them.
It's not as though being explicitly anti-racist has hurt the global or financial appeal of the Harry Potter series. (And that's a franchise with its own set of problems in terms of glorifying elites, but at least those issues are secondary ones.) Indeed, Lucas was the first to drop the ball in this respect, by entirely omitting any human/non-human tension from the PT. It could thus be argued the Disney SW is merely extending that error, though I'd argue the more they deal with the OT and post-OT era, the more glaring that continued error gets.
Indeed!
"The pre-Civil Rights South wasn't racist; it just had a white superiority complex!"
... yeah.
An excellent reason to not continue fawning over the franchise, IMHO.
Too bad the Empire hasn't always been heavily reminiscent of historical enemies of the USA or anything... if only they'd been based on that group Indiana Jones liked to punch! You know the one - I'm blanking on its name.
Jedah and Lothal were both multi-species, but predominantly human worlds that were under heavy Imperial occupation. Onderon and the entire Mandalorian sector were under Imperial control from the very start. Alderaan was a *major* human planet that was totally obliterated. The Empire didn't exactly show a huge amount of favouritism.
It's also worth remembering that the lines that split the Republic were mostly social and economical. The core worlds mostly remained loyal to Coruscant because those were the old guard established human colonies with the biggest stake in the bureaucracy, while the Separatist worlds were mostly those on the inner and outer rim that felt like they benefited more from their relationship to the commerce guilds than the centralised government.
The result was that most (but by no means all) of the loyalist worlds were human and most (and again, by no means all) of the Seperatists were non-human. So when the Empire came about, it was the non-humans that mostly found themselves on the receiving end of Imperial persecution. Not because they weren't human but because they were on the loosing side of a war and many of them didn't give up the fight for years after the Clone Wars ended. Add to that all of the independent worlds that the Empire was occupying either because the Republic "liberated" them from the Separatists, or just because they were in a strategically located or has some resource they either needed to posses and/or deny to the enemy.
It also helps not to think of the likes of the Wookiees, the Lasat, the Geonisians and the Mimbanese as a species of non-humans and more as very small independent nations with no real allies to call on when the Empire moved in on them.
The only dialog in SW that I can recall right now that could imply that the Empire was racist is:
Detention Block Officer: "Where are you taking this thing?"
Han Solo: "Yeah, well, I don't think the Empire had Wookiees in mind when they designed her, Chewie."
Detention Block Officer: "Where are you taking this thing?"
Han Solo: "Yeah, well, I don't think the Empire had Wookiees in mind when they designed her, Chewie."
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