Trope-a-Day: La Résistance

La Résistance: The Resolutionist Faction (your local name may vary; it’s not like they can agree on one) are a loose coalition of hundreds, if not thousands, of separate groups, struggling valiantly against the lack of tyranny imposed by the Empire and, to a lesser extent, the Accord of Galactic Polities.

Yes, I said “lack of tyranny”.  This is also what makes them a fine example of We ARE Struggling Together, inasmuch as their common feature is opposition to the “apathetic, nugatory, and downright irresponsible” oversight that prevents the Right People from applying the jackboot of firm governance to the buttocks of the unrighteous, and indeed, only seems to act to oppress people’s perfectly legitimate demands to reward the Obviously Correct and oppress the Just Plain Wrong.  As such – which is to say, as a coalition of the extrasystemic-resistance-inclined among all of old-style aristocrats, conservatives, liberals (vis-a-vis libertists), socialists, progressives, fascists, communists, theocrats, democrats, xenonationalists (although surprisingly few polity nationalists inasmuch as imperial annexations have been out of style for a long, long time), deep ecologists, other single-issue crazies, and every other kind of power-hungry whackjob imaginable – it’s about as effective as it sounds like it is.

But it does, at least some of the time, manage to hang together well enough to achieve something (usually something from The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized) on the grounds that they can fight each other afterwards, once The Man has been taken down.

(There are also a few really serious anarchist La Résistance groups, but since they’re – as you might expect – rather disorganized, and since there are so many more attractive targets in the galaxy than most of the protagonizing ones, they’re generally considered of minor importance.)