People of the Republic!
Rebel fighters have at last dealt the Empire a fatal blow. With a blast heard around the galaxy, our forces have destroyed the Death Star and with it the Emperor’s reign of terror. This blow has turned the tide of galactic oppression and righted the ship of justice. Now is the time to set off your fireworks, celebrate in the streets, and hold an Ewok close. The nightmare is over, the Emperor has fled, and we can say with absolute certainty that there will never be another Death Star ever again.
Our reports state that, at the time of the attack, the Emperor was playing golf at his resort in Canto Bight, but has since retreated to the farthest reaches of the Outer Rim. He continues to send out communications claiming that he won The Battle of the Death Star, even though flaming chunks of debris from the former moon-sized battle station are currently raining down on nearby planets. Try not to take his refusal to acknowledge defeat and his vow to never relinquish supreme power too seriously. In the wake of our victory, his regime and all of the anti-republic support he has stirred up over the last few years will surely fade back into the dark corners of space from whence they came. There’s no reason to believe that his followers will quietly nurse their hatred in the shadows and commence rebuilding a second Death Star the minute we become complacent and return to the status quo. But, if they did, we would absolutely notice before it was almost fully operational and poised to once again destroy the galaxy (how dumb would we have to be to let that happen a second time?).
Thanks to a poorly placed exhaust port and a brave contingent of fighters, the Rebel Alliance has reclaimed at least partial control over the fate of the galaxy. The fact that we just barely managed to secure this victory by very thin margins doesn’t mean anything at all. A win is a win, even if 55% of white women and 99% of Hutts still support the Empire. And there’s definitely no reason to be concerned that 47.7% of the galaxy’s population still rallied around the Emperor despite the fact that he blew up Alderaan, called fallen stormtroopers losers, killed over 200,000 people by failing to respond to an intergalactic pandemic, and is obviously a hideously malformed, agent of the evil Sith Order. Now that we’ve won this one battle, those are just details!
It also seems totally fair to say that “dismantling the Death Star with a well-placed laser blast” and “dismantling the systemic oppression and empire supremacy that led to the rise of the Sith to begin with” are basically the same thing. All that remains for us to do now is clean up the remaining star destroyers, ignore the Emperor’s calls for vengeance, and pat ourselves on the back for something that was largely achieved by a small and extremely marginalized subset of our organization. Once that’s complete, everything can return to normal. Which is something we all long for because, as it turns out, launching and sustaining a rebellion to restore balance to the Force takes up quite a bit of time and emotional energy — energy we’d much rather dedicate to sailing the sand dunes on our pleasure barges and posting selfies on The Holonet.
Fortunately, now that we’ve achieved victory in this single battle, it seems perfectly safe to return to the idle apathy that allowed an evil Sith lord to take over the galaxy in the first place. After all, the Emperor doesn’t have his Death Star anymore and he never will again. What can he do to us without it? Sure, he does have those scary lightning hands and that super evil apprentice and all those henchmen who still believe in his ideology, but they’ll probably just give up and go into hiding now that they’ve developed a taste for power. That’s clearly something a group of angry, hate-filled, empire supremacists would do in the face of defeat…
Just wait and see, in a few months, things are almost guaranteed to go back to exactly how they were before the Emperor seized power. And by “normal” we do mean “still not even remotely okay for many of the marginalized groups that were key to the rebel alliance’s success.” But, there will be plenty of time to deal with those issues later. Because now that we’ve blown up the Death Star, there will never be another one, and none of this will ever happen again.