Q&As About Star Wars: Does the New Star Wars Trilogy Diminish the Events of the Original Trilogy?

On Quora, member Al Hartley asks:

Does the fact that the Empire is still basically around in the new Star Wars trilogy diminish the events of the original trilogy?

As Luke Skywalker says in Star Wars - Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, “Every single word you just said is wrong.”

First off, the Galactic Empire is not “basically around” 30-some odd years after the destruction of the Death Star II and the downfall of Emperor Palpatine and his evil regime.

The main antagonist of the heroes in the Sequel Trilogy is not the old Empire. As the title crawl of Star Wars - Episode VIII: The Force Awakens states:

Luke Skywalker has vanished. In his absence,

the sinister FIRST ORDER has risen from the

ashes of the Empire and will not rest until

Skywalker, the last Jedi, has been destroyed.

The villains - Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader Snoke, Armitage Hux, Captain Phasma, et. al. are not Imperials. They are, in essence, neo-Imperials, fanatical adherents of Palpatine’s New Order who fled to the Unknown Regions after the Battle of Jakku ended in the defeat of the old Imperial military and Mas Amedda, the Emperor’s Vizier, signed the Galactic Concordance, thus ending the Galactic Civil War.

In real-life terms, it’s as if Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann and a cadre of fanatical Nazis had eluded Allied forces in 1945 Europe and fled to Argentina or Brazil; 30 years later, their children and maybe a few now-old former Nazi officers have raised an army of devotees to Nazi ideals, built their own Hitlerian utopia in the jungles of South America, complete with factories and a military-industrial complex that rivals the U.S. and Russia, and now wants to avenge Germany’s defeat in World War II.

That’s what the First Order is; it’s a group of bitter revanchists who glorify the old Empire and mimic its ethos, its technological design philosophies, and its military structure, but it’s not the Empire.

As to the “does it diminish the events of the Original Trilogy” part of the question:

No, the Sequel Trilogy does not do that.

Seriously, think about the logic behind that question.

History tells us that wars never have tidy and “they-all-lived-happily-ever-after” resolutions. The Civil War of 1861–65 left scars on our nation that have yet to heal. The definitely messy ending to the First World War led to the beginning of the Second World War 20 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919. Likewise, the people of Earth did not simply hold hands and sing Kumbaya when World War II ended on September 2, 1945; the Cold War between the U.S.-led Free World and the Soviet-led Communist bloc began shortly after the surrenders of Germany and Japan, and we’re still seeing the side effects of all those conflicts in 2019.

If Star Wars was going to continue in any fashion in a universe set 30 years after the fall of the old Empire, it had to show a galaxy that did not, in effect, have the expected “happily-ever-after” ending that was implied when the credits rolled at the end of Return of the Jedi. Otherwise, what’s the point in making a Sequel Trilogy at all?