In the history of the Galactic Civil War in Star Wars, all roads lead back to the planet Ghorman. We’ve known this since the Star Wars Rebels season three episode “Secret Cargo.” That episode depicted Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) renouncing her seat in the Senate, in reaction to something called “the Ghorman Massacre.” This occurs about 1 BBY, or one year before the Battle of Yavin in A New Hope. In season two of Andor, we’ve known since the very first episode, events were pushing us to the Ghorman Massacre actually depicted for the very first time. But the idea of a Ghorman Massacre as a catalyst for rebellion goes all the way back to 1990.
The first mention of a massacre on the planet Ghorman came from a rather unlikely source. It first appeared during “The Dark Times” era, as fans call it, of the Star Wars fandom. From roughly 1984 to 1991, there was almost no new Star Wars stories. There were cartoons aimed at young kids, like Droids and Ewoks, plus a couple of TV movies about those Endor inhabitants. But Marvel Comics canceled their Star Wars series in 1986, and there weren’t any new novels either. In a world littered with new Star Wars material, it’s hard to imagine that for years, there was almost nothing new. But one thing that did thrive in this era was West End Games’ Star Wars roleplaying game. In 1990, author Paul Murphy wrote West End Game’s Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, where the Ghorman Massacre was first mentioned.
In that sourcebook, the event on Ghorman happened only one year after the declaration of Palpatine’s New Order. According to the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, this massacre occurred when Governor Tarkin landed his starship on a group of protesters on Ghorman blocking its landing pad. At least dozens died, with hundreds more injured. The people of Ghorman, a wealthy planet, were protesting the new Imperial taxes placed on their world. In the original sourcebook timeline, this tragic event inspired Bail Organa to join Mon Mothma in plotting a rebellion. Of course, deleted scenes from Revenge of the Sith show that Bail and Mon organized even before the Empire was formally declared.
Someone at Lucasfilm remembered the Ghorman Massacre from the RPG, however. In 2016, a new version of the infamous Ghorman Massacre became canon in the Fantasy Flight Games RPG sourcebook, Age of Rebellion: Forged in Battle. In this version, Lucasfilm canonized it as 2 BBY, two years before the events of Rogue One/A New Hope. Mon Mothma’s appearance in the 2017 Rebels episode “Secret Cargo” confirmed this. Lucasfilm further canonized this in the novel The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire. The book confirmed the event as an Imperial massacre on the planet itself, not the death of Ghorman citizens elsewhere. But it was still unclear what the incident actually was, or if it had anything to do with Tarkin still.
Now, Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy has found a way to make all of these separate things work together to form one galvanizing event. In season two of Andor, when Cassian (Diego Luna) goes to Ghorman to check it out as a possible source of rebellion, he meets an employee of the fancy hotel he’s staying at. The man explains how as a child, he saw Tarkin land his ship on a crowd of protesters. This killed several of them, including his own father. In fact, his father died getting him out of harm’s way. A memorial now stands in the city’s main plaza to commemorate the fallen. What happened years earlier is never far from the minds of the Ghor who survived.
Andor just found a way to canonize that event from a 35-year-old roleplaying game once again. The event with Tarkin was a Ghorman Massacre, just not the Ghorman Massacre. At least, not the same one Mon Mothma spoke of in Rebels. Nor was it the one that is no doubt coming up later towards the end of Andor season two. Whatever happens next, it’s going to have to be significantly worse than Tarkin landing his ship on a crowd. It has to be something heinous enough, and large enough, that Mon Mothma puts her own life at risk, blaming the Emperor for it directly. This Ghorman Massacre will have to be the tragedy that unites the various rebel cells into the Alliance that ultimately takes down an Empire. But it all began as detail in an RPG from over three decades ago.
Content shared from nerdist.com.