I was, as I detailed in the previous post, a Star Wars fanatic as a kid. But I never really got into the Extended Universe - which was probably the largest fictional shared-universe that exists until Disney 86'd it to make room for these sequels. So I can't really tell you much about the Yuuzhan Von or Grand Admiral Thrawn (and to those of you who know that I have misspelled these - unless I somehow got them right - I don't mean this to be judgmental.) My sense of the Star Wars universe is really just from the movies and I guess some of the video games.
We've gotten a few details about the new movie. We know that the three main characters will be Finn, a stormtrooper who I presume defects, Poe Dameron, a hot-shot X-wing pilot, and Rey, a "scavenger" who I am 99% convinced is a Jedi and possibly a Skywalker.
Some of the action appears to take place on a desert planet called Jakku, which was the site of some major battle between the Rebels/New Republic and the Empire, and is littered with wreckage of Star Destroyers and other ships. We know that there is a villain named Kylo Ren who wields a red lightsaber (with a controversial cross-bar,) so he's presumably a Sith. There's another planet (I don't know if we know the name) that looks to be a kind of ice-and-lava world.
And the two factions are called "The Resistance" (good guys - they have X-wings) and the "First Order" (bad guys. They have Stormtroopers.)
The big mystery, of course, is what happened in the thirty years between the battle of Endor and this movie. The assumption I think most people made after Jedi was that the Empire crumbled, and the Rebel Alliance re-established the Republic with Coruscant as its capital, and there was a pretty happy ending, with Luke re-building the Jedi order.
Of course, if there's anything that last thirty years has taught us, it's that toppling a powerful, scary regime does not mean happily ever after. Just as the Empire was dealing with a constant rebellion, we can expect that the New Republic is going to be dealing with former Imperials who aren't ready to get down with the new program. Sure, the Empire was explicitly evil, but you've got to imagine that there was a massive propaganda campaign to shift the blame for its policies outward. Yes, the Empire ruled through fear, but the only way that you can do that is to make the people signing up for your military feel empowered. And when the Empire fell, those people were going to be really, really upset that their side wound up losing.
"The First Order" is pretty open to interpretation at this point. It has a distinctly fascistic sound to it - like the Third Reich - which paints it as a reactionary movement to try to re-establish some earlier era of glory (to be fair, this is true of the "New Republic" as well.) On the other hand, it could almost come off as a religious name. The "order" could be some kind of devotion to the Dark Side. Or it could be a literal vestige of the Empire - perhaps the "First Order" is the first step that the Empire is supposed to take in the event of the Emperor's demise.
"The Resistance," then, is a kind of curious name for what we can probably assume are good guys. The Rebel Alliance, after all, was really a resistance movement. However, there's a subtle distinction. Rebellion implies that people are fighting against their own government - engaging in a civil war to oust the current regime. Resistance typically connotes that one is fighting against an occupying force.
So, putting that all together: I could imagine that we're seeing a galaxy where the Rebels did succeed in taking over Coruscant and establishing themselves as the New Republic. But perhaps the Empire didn't die so much as lose ground. The new status quo is that the galaxy no longer has a Galactic government, and the two sides have come to something of a stalemate - neither powerful enough to totally defeat the other, and settling into perhaps something of a Cold War scenario (which would be appropriate given the WWII feel of the original trilogy.) In the absence of a Sith Lord running the show, the Empire has mellowed ever so slightly (we're talking like Stalin to Kruschev levels, perhaps.) They sign a peace treaty or something and cut their losses, ceding Coruscant to the Republic and licking their wounds.
But Kylo Ren or someone takes this as a betrayal, and that anything short of total galactic control is unacceptable. So he gathers the First Order to launch a campaign to take back the worlds they lost to the Republic, and the worlds he conquers become... *drum roll* the Resistance!
Let's see how wrong I am!
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