Why Palpatine Disliked ARC Troopers
Everyone knows Palpatine is a control freak. Everything about the guy is calculating and patient, anticipating, watching how everyone reacts to what someone simplified as being his horrible “Ping-Pong game.”
This is exactly why analyzing his inconveniences is so satisfying, namely his extreme displeasure with ARC (Advanced Recon Commandos) Troopers. This YouTuber provides a well-spoken explanation about it below:
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In short, he explains Palpatine’s dislike for ARC Troopers for three reasons:
ARC Troopers are elite soldiers and creative thinkers trained to adapt and achieve some form of success. Before Echo and Fives were promoted by Cody and Rex to be ARC Troopers, the first two generations of ARC Troopers had been personally trained by Jango Fett himself. Of course, Jango was no longer an option after Episode II, so second-generation clone Alpha-17 was established and took over the training of the ARC program to produce some of the best tacticians.
The Kaminoans had only their product and reputation in mind, even under the secretive threat of the Sith. They were described as “having no chill,” which is incredibly accurate. A diminished species that had evolved to have an incredibly long lifespan without the need to biologically reproduce because they could just devote their life to their work to make a better version.
Fives. The one out of a million kind of person who’ll keep pushing to find and deliver the truth until he can’t keep up proved to be Palpatine’s worst nightmare.
Source Taken: Age of Republic: Jango Fett
In addition, it could be argued that Palpatine’s apprentices, Dooku and Anakin, also had a profound effect on the ARC Troopers that made them such an inconvenience to Palpatine. In 2002, the game Star Wars: Bounty Hunter was released to GameCube and PlayStation 2 from the perspective of Jango Fett. The game revealed that Lord Tyrannus was looking for the best of the best bounty hunters and wanted them to prove their worth by hunting a death-stick-trafficking target that turned out to be an aggressive handful.
The winner earned the privilege of being the template for the Republic’s clone army. Anakin, in comparison, had the honor of constantly serving with ARC Troopers such as Rex; this helped immensely in making them more unpredictable, intuitive, and less constricted by regulations that Anakin frequently ignored. This camaraderie formed between the Jedi and this elite team so thoroughly that Rex and others were fine with helping conceal Anakin’s marriage to Padme from Obi-Wan and the Council.
For those that also grew up with Boba Fett, his father, Jango Fett, had a dark start to his career path on Mandalore and became an incredibly bad-ass character who went as far as killing a few Jedi bare-handed before eventually surrendering in Jango Fett: Open Seasons, a Legends comic series that ties in with the video game mentioned above. So it only made sense for Count Dooku to take notice.
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