#commander pyre

I haven't been able to get the thought of a Jedi-led battalion that takes in clones about to be reconditioned/decommissioned out of my head. Therefore, I'd like to introduce the 488th, aka the Phoenix Battalion, and one of its key commanding officers, Commander Pyre.

More info below the cut!

Look I don’t hate the sequels. In fact I quite like them for various reasons, and if nothing else they nailed how fascism comes back dumber with bigger toys

And the reality is, it probably won’t be the fandom pariah forever. Much like the prequels, many kids who saw them young do like them and will want to see more of it in the future. The real difference is that George Lucas owned Lucasfilm when the prequels were made and he made sure to tell the story he wanted to tell. I grew up with the OT. I genuinely liked TPM when it came out could not say that out loud without catching hell because I thought the whole point was that the Galaxy hadn’t yet become like it was in the OT. I had a harder time engaging with the latter two

I damn well remember when the PT came out. TCW is such a necessary addition to engaging with them. I cannot overstate this as someone who graduated high school around the time ROTS was released and who really didn’t get the fascination with the PT until watching TCW. It really makes Anakin’s descent from where he is in AOTC to ROTS make much more sense and his serial killer energy in Ahsoka is mwah chefs kiss. TCW makes Anakin an engaging character: you can understand why he was so admired by the people around him. He’s flawed. He’s charismatic and capable and negs his wife and has an alarming proclivity towards violence with a smile on his face. You want him to do better and not make the choices that he does and he consistently fails at making good choices that little fucker

Anyway I was having stupidly good sausage crustless quiche breakfast over at my partner’s place and he plays Galaxy of Heroes, and I asked him if he was playing First Order characters on it because I didn’t recognize the red stormtrooper armor, except that I recognize the helmet and I’ve seen SW: Resistance so I know they have full-bodied color jobs for some of the named characters that wear armor, like Phasma, Pyre, and Vonreg, besides the black color scheme the Empire prefers

Which led down a whole rabbit hole because apparently that is not a named character but a generic Sith Trooper, which since I’ve seen TROS once I vaguely recognized as a concept—but the damn article went into respectable depth about where they come from and what’s going on with them and none of that is shown. Do not tell me to go read a damn book, I should not need to. There’s only like two or three SW authors I can stand to read anyway. The guy who wrote Tarkin and I have beef he doesn’t know about lmao

What the sequels need is something like a failed Rogue One/Andor to contextualize literally anything about the First Order or anything about Palpatine’s bullshit on Exegol. Hell, have Leia sent an operative out that finds out a lot but never makes it home. Make it a damn tragedy if you need to bring in Kix maybe I know he’s there, he’s apparently at the battle of Exegol anyway. But give us some context that’s not squirreled away in a book or a guide or a comic. Hell, what happened to everyone on The Path? If you need Force sensitive dealing with Palpatine’s shit why can’t they be involved somehow?

I enjoyed Resistance after those first few episodes. But Resistance, for all it feints at a wider story, is basically a small, narrow tale instead of a wider story about The Resistance at large, so imho it’s poorly named, and it doesn’t really engage quite as readily with the wider worldbuilding elements that really needed to take place because the story is so focused on a single frame of reference you absolutely can sell political nuance to kids, TCW did it… “Corruption is…”

Teal deer; a show that engages with the sequel era in a meaningful way that does good leg work towards painting a better picture of a post-Rebellion world would go a long way towards rehabilitating these movies for the fandom. I would prefer it in animation since that’s often where good depth is and I’m not sure they’ll ever let Tony Gilroy make another SW project since on my life I don’t think Disney corporate ever really meant for Andor to be that deep

Also Rose is overhated. Fight with yourself not with me. Honestly I love the sequels’ characters, I think they were crippled by things beyond the actors’ control. And I will die mad about no stormtrooper to Jedi Finn arc

She's from Star Wars Resistance. Here's what the Star Wars Databank says about her:

A specially-trained member of the First Order Security Bureau with a mysterious scar on her jaw, Agent Tierny hopes to restore peace to the galaxy through absolute order. A master of manipulation, Tierny's tactics more often involve lulling her targets into a false sense of security rather than using more aggressive forms of interrogation. Her arrival at the Colossus platform, as part of a First Order security takeover, ushers in sheer chaos when the platform is plunged deep into the waters of Castilon, leaving only Doza Tower above sea level.

And a CBR article:

While Tierny was executed by Supreme Leader Kylo Ren because of her repeated failures to capture the Colossus, she still represented a more cold and calculating side to the First Order. Agent Tierny was a far more effective leader than her superiors because she favored calm manipulation over rage and fear. Her actions, in particular the way she convinced Tam to join the First Order, showed the subtle and overt manipulation that the First Order used to convince people to join their cause. Tierny's manipulation in Star Wars Resistance fleshed out the First Order more and made them even more horrifying because Tierny showed how good people, like Tam, could be convinced to do horrible things with the right misinformation campaign.

Also, this EW article:

If you’ve seen the season finale of Star Wars: Resistance and know that Tam Ryvora (Suzie McGrath), a mechanic on the refueling station Colossus who has a good heart but suspicious nature, decided to side with The First Order. This wasn’t something she sought out. She was clearly manipulated by the First Order security officer Agent Tierney (Sumalee Montano), who revealed last episode that she had good reason to doubt her fellow mechanic Kaz Xiono (Christopher Sean) — he’s a Resistance spy. When you don’t trust someone, it’s hard for them to trust you back. So, Tam takes this news hard. Now that she knows her friend has been lying to her, Agent Tierney has her hooked. In the end, a confused and isolated Tam takes her hand and joins up with the bad guys.

Wookieepedia says this, in the first paragraph about her, in her entry on the fandom site:

Tierny was a human female who served as an agent in the First Order Security Bureau during the conflict between the First Order and the Resistance. In 34 ABY, she was sent to the supertanker fuel depot Colossus on the planet Castilon to root out the Resistance presence on the station. While there, she interrogated the mechanic Tamara Ryvora, whose colleagues Kazuda Xiono and Jarek Yeager worked for the Resistance. After presenting herself as caring and sympathetic, Tierny manipulated Ryvora into joining the First Order as a pilot and betraying Xiono and Yeager, making the mechanic believe they never cared about her. Tierny, Commander Pyre, and Ryvora fled the Colossus before its jump to hyperspace, boarding the Resurgent-class Star Destroyer Thunderer, where Ryvora was accepted as a First Order cadet. Over the following months, Tierny and Pyre pursued the Colossus across the galaxy. Using Ryvora's comlink, they tracked the station to the planet D'Qar but were unable to prevent the platform from escaping. Tierny devised a plot to have an engineer—Nenavakasa Nalor—sabotage the Colossus, but it proved unsuccessful

This sort of dynamic usually tends toward the more strategic of the pair being the cynic or realist of the duo, but that role actually goes to Pyre during season 2, with Tierny more frequently playing the optimist against him.