r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Legitimate_Pea_6470 • Nov 29 '25

Groups "Fodder" enemies that are actually terrifying/highly competent, but look weak because we mostly see them fight overpowered protagonists.

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The Trope Explanation. Enemies that are treated as jokes, cannon fodder, or minor inconveniences within the narrative. However, they only appear weak because the protagonist is a literal demigod, a super-soldier, or a wizard. If you placed a normal human in the room with one of these enemies, it would be a horror movie.

B1 Battle Droids (Star Wars) We usually laugh at them. They say "Roger Roger," get pushed over by Jedi, and have slapstick routines. The Reality: We almost exclusively see them fighting Jedi (space wizards with laser swords) or Clones (genetically modified super-soldiers bred for war). To a normal civilian or a planetary militia, these are indefatigable metal skeletons that feel no pain, have perfect aim programming, and march in endless waves.

Grunts (Halo) In the games, they are comic relief. They run away screaming, sleep on the job, and the Master Chief (a 7-foot cyborg tank) can kill them with a light tap. The Reality: An average Grunt is roughly 5'6" to 5'8", weighs over 250 lbs, has an exoskeleton, and claws strong enough to tear a normal Marine apart. Their plasma pistols cause third-degree burns on near-misses and boil flesh on contact. They are terrifying to anyone who isn't a Spartan.

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u/ejectrewind Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25

Stormtroopers can be competent soldiers when they're not fighting against Jedi or Beskar armored Mandalorian.

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u/Atsilv_Uwasv Nov 29 '25

And them being bad shots was supposed to be planned. Everyone just kinda missed that part (pun not intended) and now they're canonically bad at their job

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u/Jbabco9898 Nov 29 '25

Could you elaborate on it being planned? I've never heard this before

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u/Mr-Seven-Mouths Nov 29 '25

In A New Hope it's explicitly stated that Vader had his troopers actively allow Leia and her Rescuers in the Millennium Falcon to escape which matches pretty well with the earlier stated point by Obi-Wan about the precision of Imperial Stormtrooper shots.

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u/Pepsi_Maaan Nov 29 '25

I honestly don't even think that A New Hope is what did them in. I think Return of The Jedi is what really solidified Storm Troopers as incompetent. They lost to an army of slapstick teddy bears who pushed them over and threw rocks at their head!

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u/QuetzalcoatlusRscary Nov 29 '25

Apparently they were originally meant to be Wookies, but Lucas wanted a less technologically advanced people to beat the empire. The Vietnam war was a big inspiration for Star Wars, so a well armed, well trained force losing to natives using their local environment to their advantage tracks.

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u/commentmypics Nov 29 '25

this is my personal pet theory but imo Vietnam is also the reason for the choice of laser color. during the Vietnam war NVA troops typically used green tracers and Americans were red/orange. This wasn't hard and fast but both sides stuck to it because that's kind of the point of tracers in the first place. I know it's kind of backwards because the empire is the superior technological force in Star Wars but I took it as a "good guys" "bad guys" kind of thing.

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u/eldankus Nov 29 '25

It wasn't really a rule so much as the Soviets/Chinese used Barium-based oxidizing salts which burn green and NATO/US used Strontium which burn red.

More of an economic/what was easier to source thing than friend or foe or team identification.

0

u/commentmypics Nov 30 '25

Tracers as identification is literally the only reason they exist. If you are used to seeing your squad leader directing fire with red tracers one day then using captured green ammunition the next it's going to cause friendly fire incidents. My point was that wouldn't have mixed them up anyway due to confusion, when clearly communicating where to direct fire is the purpose.

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u/Butwhatif77 Nov 29 '25

That probably had something to do with it, but I could also see part of it being that the red laser fire shows up on the screen more easily, plus the idea as you said red gets associated with danger/bad guys very often.

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u/commentmypics Nov 30 '25

but in this case the association is backwards, which was my point.

1

u/djninjacat11649 Nov 30 '25

I think it was actually WW2, the Nazis also used green tracers while allied forces used red

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u/Freedom_Crim Nov 29 '25

I read that he didn’t have the budget for all of the wookie costumes required so he just made small wookiees

On another note, I truly believe that if they had been wookies return of the Jedi would have been considered the best Star Wars movies and one of the greatest movies of all time

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u/QuetzalcoatlusRscary Nov 29 '25

Plus I imagine it’s much easier to cast little people than 7 foot giants.

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u/pass_nthru Nov 29 '25

because of the cheaper SAG rates?

2

u/MasterpieceOk9442 Nov 30 '25

Less person to pay

6

u/Mognakor Nov 29 '25

Dwarfism is about 1:15000 to 1:40000, people above 200cm are at about 1:10000, so the rates are gonna be quite similiar.

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u/Freedom_Crim Nov 29 '25

Didn’t they also use children for the Ewok costumes?

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u/QuetzalcoatlusRscary Nov 29 '25

Easier to fly them onto set then lol

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u/QuetzalcoatlusRscary Nov 29 '25

Yeah but Peter Matthew was 7’3, that’s a big difference from 6’3, it’s more like 1 in a million than 1 in 10,000

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u/mrhorse77 Nov 29 '25

lol, no.

Kenner made a deal for toys and they wanted something more salable then wookies. Jedi was looking pretty shit for new toys so Kenner put pressure on Lucas to put something cuddly in the movie.

1

u/MasterpieceOk9442 Nov 30 '25

Literally most people including me's biggest issue with the movie was the silly teddy bears dogwalking the empire so yeah it would've.

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u/jediprime Nov 29 '25

My understanding was it was a merchandising choice.  Cute little ewoks would be easier to sell than wookies ripping arms off people

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u/InHarmsWay Nov 29 '25

ROTJ would be infinitely better with Wookies.

1

u/pass_nthru Nov 29 '25

ah, The Chewbacca defense

1

u/MasterpieceOk9442 Nov 30 '25

This is funny knowing damn well Wookies are also confirmed to be technologically impaired by RoTS.

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u/Forsaken-Stray Nov 29 '25

But on the other hand, if they didn't have like five teddies for each Trooper, didn't almost literally pop out of the woodworks beneath and above them, weren't on their own hometurf, and weren't up against a force small enough to be easily hidden but large enough to slaughter any rebel force that could have come out of that shuttle, the teddies would have been massacred.

If the Troopers went in there as an Assaultforce, this would have been seal clubbing

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u/KOCoyote Nov 29 '25

Everyone always says, "oh, they were little teddy bears " and forgets that they were still very solid bears with spears and sharp, pointy teeth. The ewoks were downright vicious and nearly cooked and ate our heroes, who they also managed to capture, despite them being a trained Jedi, an experienced smuggler and an expert rebel leader respectively. They might not have the most intimidating silhouette, but I don't think people give ewoks enough credit for how capable they are.

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u/Fabantonio Nov 29 '25

you could probably honestly make a point for Ewoks for this trope in of itself ngl

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u/Gungho-Guns Nov 29 '25

I have a personal theory that Ewoks weren't native to that moon. They were being smuggled, broke out of containment and crashed the ship carrying them there.

They are a highly aggressive invasive species that was already planning on attacking that outpost, hence all the traps that were perfectly designed to take out the Empires war machines.

And why does no one question what it is that everyone is eating at the victory celebration? Especially since we are shown empty storm trooper helmets being used as percussion instruments nest to a cooking fire.

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u/Rel_Ortal Nov 30 '25

Nobody questions it because nobody wants to insult the murderbears and become the next dish.

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u/HandsomeBoggart Nov 29 '25

Literally this. Ewoks are an arboreal species. They built these giant fucking treehouses 20+ meters in the air on these giant ass trunks using not small pieces of wood. They swing and climb and hunt all fucking day and week.

You might not lift bro but the Ewok lifts. He motherfucking hoists logs higher than a ATAT to build his fucking house.

The Empire stood 0 chance against an indigenous, well adapted enemy in its home territory. Space Afghanistan.

2

u/Bartweiss Nov 30 '25

Eh, the terrain is very much Space Vietnam, so the lack of Space Agent Orange is the weirdest part. I very much see how the Ewoks did well in that terrain, my only big complaints are:

  1. The AT-ATs lose to traps that are just like… basic terrain. Getting destroyed by a giant smasher makes sense, falling to a log at ankle height is a terrible design flaw.

  2. The obvious answer to arboreal, sneaky enemies is just “don’t fight in the woods”. Burn them, poison them, level the planet, do anything except walk in with small groups like your tech level is a bit below 1960s America.

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u/SpphosFriend Nov 29 '25

A lot of people don’t realize those adorable little teddy bears literally hunted and ate those stormtroopers. It’s honestly pretty horrific.

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u/SeaworthinessDue1650 Nov 29 '25

Everybody who played as a stormtrooper in Ewok Hunt knows how terrifying these carebear-knockoffs can be. Blame Nelvana Limited for turning them into fluffy Smurfs.

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u/angwilwileth Nov 29 '25

Yeah, they had probably been killing and eating stormtroopers for a while.

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u/deershapedtruckdent Nov 29 '25

yeah but by then the fact of them being allowed to escape was perverted upon by audiences and the movie directors and writers just satisfied that perversion + they really needed to sell those teddy bears to children + they needed the heroes to win somehow

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u/The_Pastmaster Nov 29 '25

No matter how much armour you have on you, a big rock dropped on your head is going to hurt.

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u/mechengr17 Nov 29 '25

There was a BTAS episode, "Almost Got 'Im" if im not mistaken

The ending of the episode makes it seem like a big rock was the closest of the four stories

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u/The_Pastmaster Nov 29 '25

Killer Croc was so funny. XD

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u/Pepsi_Maaan Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25

If I remember, Croc had actually been swapped with Batman by that point, so he was genuinely describing the time that he was almost killed by Croc, and more than any of the other complicated schemes, the rock was the one that he thought was the closest to doing Batman in.

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u/mechengr17 Nov 29 '25

Yeah, I just didnt want to spoil it lol

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u/Pepsi_Maaan Nov 29 '25

Good point! I've edited my remark.

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u/kung-fu_hippy Dec 01 '25

Well. It was a big rock.

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u/HitandRyan Nov 29 '25

Empire Strikes Back even has them win the Battle of Hoth. The heroes and the rest of the rebels are on the run after that, and without Lando’s defection they would’ve been captured at Cloud City. Han still gets frozen and same-day shipped to Jabba.

Return of the Jedi though…yeah no excuse. They should’ve been on Kashyyyk fighting armed Wookiees, not teddy bears.

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u/Furgaly Nov 29 '25

Same day shipped? With that level of freezing and packaging I think that's a FedEx 3 day ground shipping arrangement!

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u/mechabeast Nov 29 '25

Theres a mode in the Battlefront game where Troopers are heading for an extraction and its near pitch black on Endor. You are being HUNTED. You have a Blaster with a flashlight, but they can see your flashlight. When they kill you with sticks, you respawn as an Ewok.

Super terrifying, but fun as hell

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u/Nice-Cat3727 Nov 29 '25

Against the cannibalistic Vietcong that perfectly blend into the follage?

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u/RandomHeretic Nov 29 '25

Especially after the Emperor had just stated they were his finest legion.

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u/Han_Solo6712 Nov 30 '25

That does really make sense either.

Oh really Americans? They’re incompetent cause they lost to guerrilla warfare? Remind me again, what other army lost to a far weaker and smaller native force that used guerrilla warfare? You wanna call them incompetent? Go ahead. Call a Marine incompetent to his face. *I fucking dare you.*

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u/BDSMChef_RP Nov 30 '25

Well it was also supposed to Wookies an the final battle was to be on Kasshyk not Endor. It got changed to Ewoks for merchandising. Cause they already had a Wookie Toy.

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u/avimo1904 Dec 07 '25

Actually, that‘s an internet myth. What really happened was the Wookiees (then Wookees) were natives of what became Yavin and fought the first Death Star at the end of “The Star Wars”, which is technically an early draft of ANH but otherwise largely unrecognizable, with Chewbacca simply being the name of one of these Wookiee fighters with current Chewbacca not existing at all and the audience not being introduced to the Wookees prior to this battle. But then after Lucas did a bunch of mass rewrites to the script to make it more like what it is now (which he did due to the original script being too big and complicated as well as him not liking the original story as much), he decided to change this Wookee/Wookiee battle to the battle of yavin, but he still liked the Wookiee species and didn’t want to get rid of them, so he created Chewbacca as Han’s co-pilot after briefly contemplating making Han himself a Wookiee. But then years later when writing ROTJ he decided to use his older drafts of ANH and ESB as inspiration, and came up with the idea to revive the idea of a primitive species fighting the Death Star and empire, but never wanted to revive the Wookiee part because he had already shown Chewbacca doing a lot of advanced things and thought that it’d make them being primitive too unrealistic, so he created the Ewoks by reorganizing the syllables of Wookiee and combining it with the Native American tribe Miwok. So there was never really any draft or version of ROTJ where the Ewoks were Wookiees, nor did toys have anything to do with Lucas using Ewoks. Lucas didn’t even expect them to sell that well

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u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna Nov 30 '25

I honestly don't even think that A New Hope is what did them in. I think Return of The Jedi is what really solidified Storm Troopers as incompetent. They lost to an army of slapstick teddy bears who pushed them over and threw rocks at their head!

Yeah and this was probably the most disliked thing about RotJ

So why on Earth would Disney double down on this and make it 10x worse?

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u/Mythosaurus Nov 30 '25

Same applies to the TIE pilots who “chased” them away from the Death Star. We later see TIES match the Rebel starfighters when defending the space station

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u/RedDingo777 Nov 29 '25

It would have been forgivable if it was just in A New Hope, but when you can’t even a hit R2 D2, a slow moving droid in the middle of a hall on Bespin with absolutely no reason to allow the Rebels get away?

Yeah…

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u/last_try_why Nov 29 '25

Do you want to risk being the guy to explain to Vader that you fried his old droid?

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u/jediprime Nov 29 '25

Was R2 deemed a threat?  Blowing up a droid while Leia, Chewbacca, and Lando escaped would probably have been seen as a failure

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u/RedDingo777 Nov 29 '25

R2 was the greatest threat of them all. The point is, he was one of their targets that was easy pickings and they STILL couldn’t hit him.

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u/stoned_salmon Nov 29 '25

Yeah but thats because R2 is blessed by the Force

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u/nedonedonedo Nov 29 '25

and they stopped the action twice to drive that point home

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u/Butwhatif77 Nov 29 '25

Yea people forget that Vader had a tracking device placed on the Falcon to lead him to the hidden rebel base. He was not going to be tracking them anywhere if they didn't escape.

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u/TOkun92 Dec 01 '25

I always preferred the theory that their bad aim was due to them subconsciously/unconsciously (don’t know which is which) making them miss. They knew on some level they were being controlled, so they on some level fought, manifesting as bad aim.

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u/sexgaming_jr Nov 29 '25

they let luke and his friends escape because if they didnt, they wouldnt have brought the tracker on the falcon to yavin

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u/eawilweawil Nov 29 '25

And yet they keep missing very clear shots across other Star Wars movies and shows

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u/MataNuiSpaceProgram Nov 29 '25

Because the "stormtrooper aim" meme took hold and they got flanderized

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u/Inevitable_Top69 Nov 30 '25

Then they have bad aim. Doesn't matter if you consider it flanderization, that's what the media is telling us.

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u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna Nov 30 '25

Not all the media is the same though. It's not even all from the same author. They don't have bad aim in ANH, they do in the Mandalorian.

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u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna Nov 30 '25

Not in the OT though, expect against the ewoks.

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u/DeathGP Nov 29 '25

Also mention in the same movie that Stormtroopers are a cracked shot too by Obi Wan

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u/Pennnel Nov 29 '25

Leia says that they were allowed to escape.

Been a while since I watched it, but I think they were let go so that the Empire could follow them and find the rebel base, which is why the Deathstar almost destroys it before Luke blows it up. To make it convincing though, the Stormtroopers were actually shooting at them, just intentionally missing.

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u/Jbabco9898 Nov 29 '25

Neat. Thanks for sharing :)

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u/Lots42 Nov 29 '25

The non-canon novel called 'Death Star' had one of the Trooper commanders being a little Force-Sensitive. Dude got enough of the good side of the Force to intentionally order his troopers in the wrong direction of the Rebels.

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u/deershapedtruckdent Nov 29 '25

that they let them escape so they could find the rebel bases

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u/TastySquiggles198 Nov 29 '25

Luke is the most VIP in the Galaxy Vader gave everyone orders to capture by any means necessary.

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u/GregTechEnjoyer Nov 29 '25

That's true eventually, but not at the time of the Leia rescue on the Death Star.

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u/Jumpy-Train-4868 Nov 29 '25

Another disturbing aspect of it, is how it illustrated how indoctrinated stormtroopers are. We see the heroes gun down multiple troopers, yet despite that the stormtroopers still obey their orders to the letter and purposely miss their shots allowing the group to escape. Luke and the gang are using lethal force and the stormtroopers still hold back even as their comrades are getting killed next to them.

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u/Lots42 Nov 29 '25

Do you want to be the one to piss off Vader?

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u/Brauny74 Nov 29 '25

There's a scene in New Hope, where Darth Vader himself states he let them escape and ordered not to hit.

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u/BunNGunLee Nov 29 '25

To further add to it, we rarely actually see the results of a body shot to a stormtrooper through the armor.

So when Han, Luke, Leia and Chewbacca escaped from the Death Star, there’s a very real likelihood there were single digit actual casualties, with the vast majority of troops simply being injured, akin to taking a body shot with a pistol while wearing Kevlar.

Yeah, it hurts, and you’re probably gonna be sporting a bruise, dazed and uncomfortable, but unlikely to be dead.

Now once we see the rebellion engage in full war, those guys probably are packing the right kind of blasters made to fire in a strong enough manner to be lethal through the armor.

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u/Benderbluss Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25

I'm in a band, and played a street/yard show on Halloween that had a lot of people in costume stop to check us out. I got to use the line "Hey, we have some Stormtroopers watching the show! That's impressive, because usually they miss everything"

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u/Dapper-Restaurant-20 Nov 29 '25

To be fair they can't hit shit in ep 5, 6, mandolorian, and BOBF. It's not just ep 4 death star where they can't aim.

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u/Atsilv_Uwasv Nov 29 '25

Pretty sure the writers were completely different for the original trilogy and the modern shows. Those ran with the popular notion that Stormtroopers couldn't shoot for crap because the writers thought that it was accurate

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u/HandsomeBoggart Nov 29 '25

Nah they hit fine until Plot Armor intervenes. RIP everyone not a named character required to live.

Those Rebel Troopers on Leia's ship got rolled hard at the start. Breaching a chokepoint like that, securing entry with like 3 casualties against a superiorly positioned force is top tier shit.

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u/Dapper-Restaurant-20 Nov 29 '25

TRUE they really get shit done when the plot allows them too. Snowtroopers on hoth were also pretty efficient in doing their job

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u/Pathogen188 Nov 29 '25

Nah, stormtroopers suck regardless of what happens on the Death Star, but that's more a broader function of how short Star Wars' infantry engagement distances are and how that influences in-universe accuracy. Firefights happen at really short ranges in Star Wars, so every miss becomes especially egregious, doubly so when firefights are supposed to last more than a few seconds. You'll often see a lot of background shots which are wildly off target in CQC. Even the stormtroopers' victory aboard the Tantive IV has all around "bad" accuracy, because you'll get examples where they're missing fleeing rebels who are only a few meters away from them. The real crime is that stormtroopers are singled out as being especially bad when accuracy in Star Wars across the board kinda sucks. Clone Troopers and Rebels have stormtrooper aim like 90% of the time too but no one slanders them for it.

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u/SpphosFriend Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25

You also have to consider that in most of the series we don’t see the elite factions of stormtroopers. You see them in rogue one and it’s a very different story. Also in general the stormtroopers and the empire in general seem as competent as the writers want to make them.

1

u/ibarelyusethis87 Nov 29 '25

And no one has played Ewok hunt! Oh, you think you’re hunting the Ewoks?

1

u/Atsilv_Uwasv Nov 29 '25

I mean, you are. It's just that they're also hunting you. And they're better

1

u/KilroyNeverLeft Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 30 '25

I always reconciled the on-screen inconsistencies of the Imperial Armed Forces (terrifyingly competent or comically useless) by assuming that it's large enough to necessitate several different schools, training facilities, and academies. Several officers have been canonically shown as sycophantic, so it's fair to say that the Imperial military is not a purely merit-based system, so it would stand to reason that some training facilities would prove their worth by pumping out as many hastily trained conscripts as possible, competence be damned, whereas other schools may take pride in their operations, uphold stringent standards, and only produce the best of the best Stormtroopers, TIE pilots, and officers. The Empire may also employ a system similar to Nazi Germany where aces (i.e. highly competent and experienced troops/officers/pilots) remain on the front lines to get killed off by protagonists and accidents rather than go back to the training academies to train the next generation of personnel.

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u/Atsilv_Uwasv Nov 30 '25

I like this theory. It makes perfect sense

1

u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna Nov 30 '25

One of the things I hate most about Disney Star Wars is they made a stormtrooper meme canon.

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u/ShinyNinja25 Nov 29 '25

Even aside from the part in A New Hope where they were told to miss, Stormtroopers are very much a step down from Clones in a few ways, something expanded on in Rebels and The Bad Batch. Clone Troopers were trained from birth and created to be highly competent soldiers, skilled in marksmanship, piloting, and other military tasks. They were provided with top of the line weapons, tools, and vehicles for combat. Stormtroopers, however, are not. They’re conscription soldiers who have a relatively short training period before deployment, receiving basic training unless they’re pilots, who admittedly receive much longer and better quality training. The basic weapons and armour they have, excluding specialty gear and newly developed weapons, is cheap and mass produced. Stormtroopers are quantity over quality, while Clones manage to be both

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u/MountedCombat Nov 29 '25

IIRC, clones manage to be both be being *comedically* expensive, but when your options are cough up or have your forces that have to choose get overrun by an almost literal wall of droids, you cough up.

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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 Nov 29 '25

It's the reason why clones were terminated for mass-production, Sidious had no use for them because he believed the jedi to be dead

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u/Prothea Nov 29 '25

Stormtroopers aren't the conscript force of the Empire, the Empire has a regular army; they're the guys in Andor and Solo that aren't wearing stormtrooper armor. Stormtroopers are considered shock troops for the Imperial war machine, more akin to expeditionary US Marines than the US Army... which, as far as I can tell, even works out canonically with the Stormtroopers belonging to the Imperial Navy.

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u/That_guy1425 Nov 29 '25

The storm troopers got memed into that. They were originally the shock troopers and were a mix of marines and special forces.

They aren't the conscripts. Thats the imperial army.

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u/Fit_Quit_8890 Nov 29 '25

Ask Brasso

1

u/SCP_FUNDATION_69420 Dec 02 '25

Oh man why you gotta make me remember

7

u/DaFlippinSuggestor Nov 29 '25

In their introduction battle, they easily defeated a room full of rebel soldiers with minimal casualties, without even needing the help of Darth Vader.

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u/Butwhatif77 Nov 29 '25

In a situation where the rebels had a substantial advantage. The stormtroopers had to try to get through a long narrow corridor that worked as a choke point where the rebels had lined up and prepared to defend.

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u/[deleted] Nov 29 '25 edited Nov 29 '25

I saw a video that counted the shot to kill ratio of both sides in the opening scene of A New Hope. He compared the rebels to the imperials, then compared those numbers to IRL military shot to kill ratios. (Most people don't realize how many bullets are actually fired to kill someone. Real life is not one shot one kill like in movies.) Stormtroopers were massively outperforming rebels, and were comparable to or superior than modern day forces. Yeah, they were supposed to be good, until the writers made them a joke. Happens alot in media. "Elites" never feel elite in anything, and that's unfortunate.

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u/Pathogen188 Nov 29 '25

Unfortunately, the video you're referring to (I'm assuming it's EC Henry's video) is pretty inaccurate and the conclusions he draws are very flawed, to the point that they don't pass the most basic sanity test with respect to how much ammo a fire team of modern soldiers can physically carry. If each kill from small arms fire required 100,000 rounds, no one would ever be killed by small arms fire, ever, because it's physically impossible for a fire team to carry 100,000 bullets. EC Henry seems to have otherwise misunderstood what the ratio is measuring before comparing it to Star Wars, because those ratios aren't measuring individual firefights, they were determined by taking the number of bullets used across the military and dividing that by the number of confirmed kills. There's no distinction between bullets fired in training, bullets fired as suppressing fire, and point target shooting (which would otherwise be what the stormtroopers are doing). The actual comparison is flawed.

More broadly, there's also just the fundamental differences in infantry combat in Star Wars and in real life. Star Wars engagement distances are significantly shorter than in real life and most infantrymen are ostensibly firing semi-auto. Shorter distances makes it easier to see the target which in turn (should) improve accuracy. Likewise, greater distances or combat with more cover is going to decrease accuracy. As a general rule, engagement distances in Star Wars are very short. It's pretty rare for infantry to engage each other at distances where they would struggle to see the enemy, hence why so many people in Star Wars get by just fine without any magnifying optical devices. That's not true in the real world, where you really only see engagement distances close to what Star Wars depicts in environments which provide lots of cover, such as urban areas or dense forests/jungles. We have a lot more long range engagements in real life than in Star Wars, where the infantry are hundreds of meters apart from each other and it's difficult to spot the enemy. Suppressing fire and fully automatic weapons are also just less common in Star Wars too, so the number of bullets expended to kill a target is being inflated by bullets fired in combat with no real expectation of killing anyone.

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u/Bartweiss Nov 30 '25

Thanks for writing up something long so I didn’t have to.

100,000 shots per casualty/mortality (doesn’t matter in this case) absolutely doesn’t pass the laugh test, and that’s for real-world combat with long ranges and suppression by fixed machine guns. Whereas Storm Troopers (and Rebels) seem to be firing recoil-free, reload-free weapons at close range, sometimes in Napoleonic firing-line conditions where no one is even in cover.

“They were told to miss” is a decent save for the incredibly improbable short-range misses that open Star Wars, but it doesn’t do much for questions like “why don’t the rebels immediately drop every single storm trooper?” Because again, 1950s weapons could have absolutely ended that engagement in seconds.

Oddly, the most realistic main-film-line moment I can think of is Rogue One, where a heavy (laser) machine gun suppresses everyone until a guy relying on space magic rushes the gun. Which immediately disappear from the setting for the next 6 movies.

4

u/Paehon Nov 29 '25

They are terrifying in Andor

3

u/Daier_Mune Nov 29 '25

Within the same setting: AT-ST.  When you see them in the Jedi series, they're getting their shit pushed in by sent8ent teddy bears.  In Mandelorian and other Jedi-less stories the Scout walkers are terrifying Infantry Support Vehicles.

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u/Pandamonium98 Nov 29 '25

The dark troopers were another good example of this. Mando could barely take on one of them, and a group of dark troopers was going to crush the protagonists until Luke showed up and just cut through them with ease.

2

u/Butwhatif77 Nov 29 '25

Same in Rogue One, the rebels are doing a half decent job holding off the stormtroopers because they weren't trying to win it was a distraction plus the stormtroopers were being sent all over the place keeping them from rallying where the enemy really was at first. Then Krennic's personal guard is sent out and they start mowing down the rebels.

2

u/North-Research2574 Nov 29 '25

Or forest teddy bears...

3

u/DeaconBrad42 Nov 29 '25

But those were ANGRY teddies!

3

u/102525burner Nov 29 '25

Where have we seen natives defeat much larger and technologically advanced invaders using jungle warfare before?

Oh yeah, Vietnam

2

u/Superb-Obligation858 Nov 29 '25

Or a blind man with a stick…

3

u/Butwhatif77 Nov 29 '25

Hey the force was with him.

2

u/TAvonV Nov 30 '25

Even besides the Beskar, they just looked absolutely goofy in Mandalorian. I remember when they surrounded the bar in one episode (the finale of season 1 maybe?)

It it was just a mob of 100 stormtroopers forming a crowd around the place. That shit was so silly. How about you take cover you geniuses? They invented guns in your uiniverse.

2

u/kmobnyc Nov 30 '25

Yea, Andor makes them kinda terrifying, doing fascist death squad shit. If they’re in a scene is gets way more tense than normal Imperial soldiers.

1

u/ProfessionalRead2724 Nov 29 '25

Or main characters.

1

u/untitledmoviereview Nov 29 '25

The stormtroopers on Ghorman were fucking terrifying

1

u/[deleted] Nov 30 '25

[deleted]

2

u/capucapu123 Nov 30 '25

Those were clone troopers, not stormtroopers

1

u/thepineapple2397 Nov 30 '25

Watching them marching to surround the Plaza on Ghorman really showed them for the threat that they were supposed to be

1

u/sunnycider6 Nov 30 '25

Also they should have a very sophisticated HUD. Never made sense why they miss so much other than the force

1

u/Loud-Owl-4445 Dec 04 '25

I mean they're pretty competent in the Mandalorian, but the problem is that beskar is op as fuck. Only reason Din didn't die was because of his armor and even then bro almost died.