Star Wars fans, myself included, tend to take their love of the franchise to extremes, and that comes in many shapes and sometimes all of them for some fans. You have your collectors who will endlessly search for and gather any memorabilia they can get their hands on. You have fountains of knowledge who know everything and anything about Star Wars and will proudly proclaim they knew the Wookiee homeworld was Kashyyyk before that knowledge had ever been committed to screen. And then there are the theorists who get so hyped for anything Star Wars coming out that they the engage the hyperdrive and start analyzing trailers and any other media for clues about what is to come, forming their own ideas about it as they go. I myself am guilty of all three of these traits I've mentioned. But it is the theorists who have been the fuel for this article.

Star Wars theorists tend to have a million and one wild ideas about where the saga has gone, is going, and might be going. Sometimes one of us manages to hit the nail on the head, sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently. And it is one of those inadvertent happy accidents that I am going to bring to your attention here. I am going to look at a theory that emerged about the prequel trilogy surrounding Palpatine and his true identity that actually whilst wildly off the mark about the prequels actually just about uncovered the identity of Supreme Leader Snoke in a way almost two decades before he was even thought of.

In the leadup to The Phantom Menace, there were a lot of theories flying around about Senator Palpatine and who he was. Many people thought that him actually being the Emperor was far too straightforward, whilst some thought that no other answer was even possible. People theorized a lot of different things, but they all had one thing in common: the good senator was in someway connected to Darth Sidious.

A lot of people had thought that perhaps Palpatine was completely innocent and was being manipulated by the Dark Lord of the Sith much in the same way the Jedi were revealed to have been. Others thought that maybe Palpatine was in league with him somehow and was helping to achieve his master plan. Of course, as it turned out, the answer was in fact the simple one staring us in the face all along ,leaving us all feeling a bit like Ace Ventura with his Ray Finkle revelation, because Palpatine is Sidious, Sidious is Palpatine.

Before we go on to look at the theory about the Emperor that ended pretty much being right about the backstory for Snoke, let's have a look at the Supreme Leader himself, because in the leadup to both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, many of us started coming up with our own theories about him much like we had done for Palpatine. A lot of people were convinced that he couldn't be connected to the Emperor because, after all, he was thrown into the reactor core of the Death Star. So surely the Supreme Leader had to be new and unconnected, right?

People had theorized a lot of things, and one of the most popular idea for a while was that Snoke was in fact a fallen Mace Windu. Mace wielded a purple lightsaber, a color synonymous with those Jedi who could channel both sides of the Force to an extent. And after being betrayed at the hands of Anakin, you could easily see why people would think he turned to the dark side if he had survived.

Another popular theory about Snoke was that he would actually turn out to be Darth Plagueis, and this theory for most of us made much more sense from what we had seen. He fit the bill in terms of size and stature for Muun and seemed to be extremely powerful. Add to that the last time Plagueis was mentioned, it was said that he could stop people from dying, though Palpatine killed him, so the thought was he had stopped himself from dying surely.

My personal theory on him for the longest time was that he was Ezra Bridger from Rebels. It just seemed to make sense to me that I wasn't really ready to accept any other conclusion. But as we all know now, his backstory turned out to be none of these various theories.

As it happens, way back in 1998 on a Star Wars forum, one fan theorized that Sidious had cloned himself to make the senator and had then essentially had the poor senator do his dark bidding in the open instead of him orchestrating it in secret in the darkness. This, my friends, as we find out in The Rise of Skywalker, is not actually all that far off from how Snoke came to be in existence, as we now know the Supreme Leader was nothing more than a clone and Palpatine's puppet.

You can check out some of the fan theories about Palpatine from the 90's here on this forum. This will give you an idea of what I meant in the beginning when I said we're a passionate bunch who love to debate where this amazing franchise is going. I think I am going to go dig out some of my old theories and see if I managed to hit some gold back in the early 2000's like this fan clearly did in the 1990's.

Written By Steven Shinder

Source(s): CBR, TheForce.net

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