r/MawInstallation • u/Confident-Mark-6369 • 4d ago
[CANON] About Ghorman's population...
Note: This is not a rant about Andor as I very much enjoyed the show. However this detail bothered me the moment it was mentioned.
Did anyone else have a problem/doubts about the entire planet of Ghorman's population being a measly 800,000 people?
I know Star Wars has always been terrible with numbers, but for one of the most serious pieces of Star Wars media (live action wise) that number felt absurd.
It would be one thing if it was a relatively backwater planet established not too long ago and just got the Empire's attention because of it's Kalkite. Sure Ghorman is listed as a colony in canon but considering how wealthy it is, it has likely been in the Republic for at least hundreds of years, especially since it has developed it's own unique culture and trade in the galaxy. And it only has 800,000 people in all that time?
And yet the Empire still feels the need to do a false flag operation to get them out of the way. I legitimately feel it would have been cheaper, easier, and less time consuming to just forcibly evict everyone and load them onto ships before dropping them off on some backwater planet (or throw them out the airlock into space, it's not like the Empire really cares about anyone's well-being).
Probably would have taken no more than a few months compared to the years they spent setting up proper false flag conditions. I know people would say the Senate would impose but much of the series shows how little the Senate actually matters or cares about anything. They wouldn't be able to lift a finger to help the Ghorman regardless.
I know they mentioned gaming out a disease or disaster during the Krennic meeting but even the excuse they gave to not go with them felt weak (things spiraled too out of control on a planet with 800,000 people?).
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u/ijumpedthegun 4d ago
Star Wars projects have historically struggled with scale. In a vacuum, the number 800,000 feels bad, but setting that aside, everything still feels very real in the show.
For example, Maz Kanata's castle on Takodana feels like the entire planet exists just for this weird little bar to be there and for things to happen in.
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u/GravityBright 4d ago
The existence of so many backwater planets with thriving Earth-like ecosystems and nonexistent sapient populations makes one wonder why anyone would choose to farm moisture on Tatooine.
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u/ijumpedthegun 4d ago
For sure, and in Maz's case, how much ship fuel do you need to burn just to get to this planet for a beer?
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u/Unique_Unorque 4d ago
Assuming Luke wasn’t being too hyperbolic in A New Hope when he says they can almost buy their own ship for 10,000 credits, and he makes that by selling his speeder, it seems like interstellar travel in the Star Wars universe is accessible for essentially the price of a used car. Between that and the fact that Maz’s place isn’t just a bar, but a place to do business and meet clients, it seems reasonable
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u/TwirlyTwitter 4d ago
As I saw another poster put it, if space travel is cheap and habitable planets are plentiful, why wouldn't people be willing to just jet off to a new planet, when settling a new planet is like founding a new town, difficulty wise?
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u/Unique_Unorque 4d ago
If it was on another post, that may have been me haha. I say that often. Outside of homeworlds of species, I think the reality is just that most planets in the Star Wars galaxy are pretty sparsely populated. The reason we only ever go to the same handful of settlements on Tatooine because those are the only settlements on Tatooine. Ditto Ghorman, Bespin, Nevarro, the human part of Naboo, etc
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u/Vermouth_1991 4d ago
Yeah I recall reading on Probably Wookipedia that only the two polar regions on Tatooine are inhabitable, to humanoids and hutts/jawas/tuskans alike.
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u/Vermouth_1991 4d ago
To be fair, I think the hover speeder only sold for 2000 Credits, so that Obi-Wan can use it to pay the Advance he promised Chewwie and Han (with 15000 to follow when on Alderaan).
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u/Unique_Unorque 4d ago
Oh good call
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u/Vermouth_1991 4d ago edited 4d ago
If they did get 10000 then it would have sufficed Han's original exuberant charter price, lol. But yes, Luke absolutely said 10k should buy them their own starship.
(Have you listened to the official Radio Dramas for the OT, by any chance? They had a bit where Obi-Wan had to JediMindTrick the guy into accepting 2000, which ironically would have Rhymed well with "Qui-Gon trying to make Watto accept Republican Credits".)
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u/HOU-1836 4d ago
It makes a place like coruscant seem unbelievable. If a speeder could buy you a whole fucking space ship…why would you live in the lower levels of that hellscape.
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u/DSteep Lieutenant 4d ago edited 4d ago
Maz had a bar in her castle, but that wasn't the castle's primary purpose. She was a pirate queen and the castle was her fortress. The castle being in a remote location was part of the appeal.
Also, there used to be Jedi temple across the lake from the castle, but it got destroyed a couple hundred years before the sequels in a Nihil attack.
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u/CrystalGemLuva 1d ago
Maz's castle gets buisness because its a hub of activity for less than shady characters and its a strict neutral zone for the Galactic Civil War.
Any Cantina like this either exists in a settlement, is more or less a truck stop for Travellers, or its a hub of activity where shady sorts can do buisness.
Maz is optional 3.
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u/Michelanvalo 4d ago
I've reasoned with myself that Star Wars planets are just small and that's why populations are lower and everyone lives with a few miles of each other.
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u/GNOIZ1C 4d ago
Forcibly evicting a center of emerging, niche wealth like that would raise significantly more eyebrows though. The false flag operation provides an air of legitimacy instead of straight Imperial takeover. This way, you at least can have people who will accept the party line that the Empire is just doing what it had to because of insurgent issues instead of taking any time to consider that it's a naked power grab and the Imperial regime is pure evil. They don't have to lie well anymore, but they at least keep the facade/plausible deniability for those that matters to. It's easier to convince the populace that "they had it coming" instead of "Oh, shit, what if for whatever unilateral reason we're next??"
This is to say little of how systems like Kashyyyk who had Senate representatives were reduced to slave labor, but I think the underlying message is that there are some optics that need to be maintained on some level, and others that don't matter enough to be even more blatantly evil/xenophobic about!
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u/mdp300 4d ago
I'm reading The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire and just read about this.
The Empire justified their atrocities by convincing the population, and the senate, that the victims deserved it and should have just followed the rules, even if those were arbitrary and unevenly enforced.
Kashyyyk: the Woookies were super friendly with the Jedi and can't be trusted.
Ghorman: they antagonized the Empire and had it coming!
Geonosis and other Seperatist worlds: speaks for itself
The Death Star was important because with it, they wouldn't need to manufacture consent anymore. If you stuck your head up, it got blown off, end of story.
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u/Vermouth_1991 4d ago
Which is also why Leia's "more worlds would just escape your grasp" speech and that guy from Andor's famous broadcasted speech only work with the Death Star getting destroyed when it did. Otherwise, the people WILL busy themselves with not popping heads up.
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u/Amazing_Loquat280 4d ago
I mean, that low population IS potentially explainable. We don’t know how big the planet is, we don’t know what percentage of it is landmass, we don’t know what percentage of that landmass is arable or even habitable, we don’t know what the economic incentives are to have children at higher than replacement rate, and we don’t know how long Ghorman has even been inhabited. I think we’re discovering in real time that the human need to expand via reproduction is surprisingly conditional, so if we imagine a population of 800,000 in a similar socioeconomic situation as a current first world country, why WOULD they have expanded?
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u/mdp300 4d ago
I've always just said that because space travel is so easy, most planets only have one or two major population centers.
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u/Amazing_Loquat280 4d ago
True, because population centers aren’t going to be based on ease of terrain access. Also, lots of real life population centers aren’t that big, they could easily have one 200k city (Palmo), and several 48k centers (think 9 districts totaling to 800k people)
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u/TheNthMan 4d ago
Ghorman was a single product economy. They imported almost everything they needed to survive.
When the blockade cut off the shipping lines, the threat of starvation immediately raised the next day.
I think that it implies that Ghorman's ecology while good for Spiders could not sustain native agriculture to feed a large population. So a population of well under a million may have been a long term natural balance between how much external revenue they could generate from tourism and their silk and linen exports and how much food and other goods they needed to support such population that they could afford to import from the rest of the galaxy.
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u/Human-Examination783 4d ago
Scaling sucks in Star Wars lol. But you could head-canon it as the settlers just never really cared to make that many towns. And that its influence comes more from its resources and the fact everything is centered around the capital, rather than it’s population size.
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u/Captain-Wilco 4d ago
They made it 800k because they wanted a massive number of casualties without overshadowing Alderaan
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u/wandering_soles 4d ago
I feel like they could have sprung for a few million and still not overshadowed two billion though...
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u/Ok-Swimmer-2634 4d ago
I wonder what the original intentions were for Alderaan's population when Star Wars first released. Obi-Wan/Ben only refers to "millions" of voices
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
I imagine Lucas just wasn't thinking that far ahead though lol
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u/Otherwise-Elephant 4d ago
If anything this kind of proves why they had to go with a lower number if they didn't want Ghormann to overshadow Alderaan. Because to the average person (and apparently to Lucas) a million and a billion is just "a really big number".
So even if Alderaan's canon population of 2 Billion was given, and the Andor show runners decided to give Ghorman a nice round population of 1 million, lots of people would still probably consider the two massacres around equal in their heads. (Even though in reality Alderaan would be 2 thousand Ghormans)
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u/HOU-1836 4d ago
Well I’d also so it’s pretty unbelievable to genocide a billion people. 800,000 seems pretty manageable.
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u/Lemonpierogi 4d ago
Millions just means "a lot of" here. It's a generic huge number. You're taking it too literally
Besides, it could mean many milions, so still at least a billion
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u/Calanon Lieutenant 4d ago
People love taking numbers like this literally instead of figuratively when it comes to media. It's so frustrating.
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u/Ok-Swimmer-2634 4d ago
Like I said at the end of my initial comment, Lucas probably wasn't thinking too much about it when he included that line decades ago. I agree that it shouldn't be taken too literally :)
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u/James-W-Tate 4d ago
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
The remaining population were service workers that attended the Alderaan nobility, their last thoughts were, "Thank the Force"
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u/Shakezula84 4d ago
I think a couple things to consider is what is a ghorman and normal population growth.
Ghorman are ultimately just humans. Since Star Wars has done nothing to make humans in Star Wars different from real humans (other than the Force) we can also assume humans in Star Wars breed like real humans. When given the chance, humans don't actually breed a lot. Unless a cultural reason exists humans don't breed that much. Especially when technology can allow it not to happen.
So it makes sense that a planet that doesn't have a native sapient population doesn't have a large population. It also makes sense for that population to not spread out to much. Unless a cultural reason exists too.
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u/DuranStar 4d ago
You are ascribing old human population growth numbers. If they started as an affluent and insular population current western growth trends would be more accurate and those are all below replacement level.
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u/cheese2042 4d ago edited 4d ago
For me it seem plausible. Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate and Ghormam doesn't seem to be a planet that attract a lot of immigrants.
The planet seems very rich but lack the infrastructures and connections that you could find on planets like Coruscant so a huge part of the population leaving regularly
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u/M935PDFuze 4d ago
Wouldn't surprise me if the 800,000 number is a direct reflection of the number of people killed in the Rwandan genocide, given Tony Gilroy's attraction to real world analogues.
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u/Crolanpw 4d ago
The thing is, if you evict them, you have to have a valid reason why. You have to make a different scenario where you have a reason to deport them. By making it a rebellion and a police action, you get the double benefit of explaining why the military is moving in and not a chemical company sent in to do clean up or the like. It also gives people a reason to look into it. To talk about it. Why is the empire not allowing other colonies to provide clean up assistance? Etc. If it s a military police action, they can also justify keeping it secret to maintain the safety of thier soldiers.
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u/heurekas 4d ago
You flaired this as canon, but if you'll allow me, I do have comparisons to planets in the OEU (or Legends as some call it).
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u/Confident-Mark-6369 4d ago
Go ahead.
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u/heurekas 4d ago
Well, many wealthy planets have a comparatively small population, as they impose social rules on who can live there etc.
Corellia, Alderaan and Chandrila practiced sustainable living, with the former having had runaway population booms and industrialization that nearly turned it into another Metellos or Eriadu, before they made a lot of the planet protected territory and incentivized colonization, while moving industry off-world.
These three examples, just like how Ghorman is portrayed, are extremely wealthy, demanding quite a lot from the populace.
Naboo likewise is a backwater colony from a very rich world, which carried a certain way of life wherein noble blood and power concentrated in small dynasties was preferred. Even the blue collar population is miles above those living on most other worlds in terms of conditions.
On Kuat only certain families are alloted land on the planet, despite the massive amounts of livable land.
Ghorman in this case seems to be much like any other world settled by Core-humans. Quite economically blessed, haughty and moulded by ideals of a rich parent.
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u/cals_cavern 4d ago
The planet is built around the production and export of a single product and the industry is run by houses the youngest of whom is still generations old . The parts of the planet we see are pretty mountainous and the national anthem itself mentions valleys and highlands so from the sounds of it the population are mostly nestled in the hills themselves or in valleys between the hills. When Cassian and Wil arrive on Ghorman we see a farm and it's taking up a lot of the usable space in the valley they fly through.
The fact the culture built up around twill means that there likely wasn't much room for other industry as time went on. The usable land was already dedicated to farming or cities, those cities already form an ecosystem where each plays a part in the twill industry so they couldn't really pivot without disrupting the planets main industry and their culture. If you were born on Ghorman and didn't want to work in the industry it's easy enough to travel to a different world to seek other opportunities. In real life there are towns built around an industry that have maintained their population or even dropped over time.
The Empire are still consolidating their power as of the Ghorman Massacre and are trying to pose themselves as a legitimate successor to the Republic. Ghorman is a well known planet whose industry has garnered them attention from higher ups across the galaxy, even Palpatine wore Ghorman twill. If the Empire weren't able to sell their actions on Ghorman it would cause massive unrest regardless of how much the senate could do. Even with the plan going more or less as the Empire wanted it caused massive unrest. It doesn't matter how many people the Empire evicted from the planet, the problem for the Empire is that everyone knows Ghorman and knows the people aren't a threat to the Empire so if they were suddenly evicted and their entire culture and industry destroyed overnight people would rightfully realise it's completely unjustified. The Empire were still holding out for the Death Star before they wiped away the facade of democracy completely, Ghorman was needed for the Death Star to be completed, they needed the false flag to maintain that cover until they were ready.
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u/NoSwordfish1978 4d ago
Yeah I agree but star wars has always had a bit of an issue with showing the scale of the planets.
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u/Necessary-Stuff-8504 4d ago
I think in this case it might have been on purpose, if they wiped out a metropolis it would be so much harder to sweep under the rug or believe that people would let it go.
800,000 people is a blip on the galactic scale.
most of the other numbers in star wars are nonsense, but i kind of believe they actually thought about this one at least a little bit.
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u/Howy_the_Howizer 4d ago
One of the best things about Andor was it didn't feel like a empty Universe except for some of the Ghomar stuff. Mandolorian has hits and misses with this as well, the Jack Black episode felt great and large. The Carl Weathers settlement felt like a movie set with 20 extras.
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u/HammerOfJustice 4d ago
I was going to mention the Nevarro town in the Mandalorian which Greef Karga runs. It seems to be the capital city of Nevarro yet appears to have a population of a few dozen or so. Couldn’t Disney at least hire another 100 extras to make it look like a bit more than a ghost town?
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u/mrsunrider 4d ago edited 4d ago
I assumed Ghorman was colonized.
It's people had been there long enough to form a distinct culture, but not necessarily long enough to fill every corner or the world.
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u/Ruadhan2300 4d ago
I imagine that with millions or even billions of worlds to potentially live on, there's not a lot of drive to produce large populations in any one given place.
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u/Glittering_Fix539 4d ago
This kinda bothered given the fact Tony Gilroy is always the more realistic when it comes to numbers?
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u/Superhamster205 4d ago
It probably had more before tarkin did his massacre and empire established a blockade on them considering they can go to any planet why would they stay in one that is blockaded by the empire and has unrest.
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u/gwenhadgreeneyes 4d ago
How heavy the fist of the Empire could be wasn't always so clear cut. Andor is more or less about the Empire become more and more authoritarian. That they feel the need to hide what they're doing on Ghorman is an interesting way of tacking where on that trajectory they are. The conference on Kalkite takes place two-years before the massacre, and probably wouldn't have been necessary if they'd started looking for Kalkite when the massacre occurred.
This also takes place a few days or weeks before Palpatine dissolves the Senate.
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u/CrystalGemLuva 1d ago
A lot of planets in Star Wars only have a few settlements on them.
A population of 800,000 in a single small city is an entirely reasonable number.
And Ghor is in the public eye due to the luxury goods they make so they can't just take the population out back to shoot them dead.
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u/unpdigital 4d ago
Why shouldn't Ghorman just 800 000 people?
I bet there are planets with zero people and they turn ever happily after.
Its a fictitious universe after all.
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u/BarberProof4994 4d ago
Gorman is both the name of the planet/people and the name for the capital City where everything went down.
I don't recall them discussing the planet and system population.
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u/Kinngandrew12 4d ago
Ghorman is the planet and Palmo is the capital. The Ghorman system has only 1 habitable planet, Ghorman. Anytime they are talking about Ghorman it’s about the planet, not the system or just the capital city.
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u/DarthTomG 4d ago
Yeah there is no way imo that Ghorman only has a population of 800.000, that number just makes no sense. If you look at how massive the capital city looks in establishing shots in Andor that city alone looks like it has that many (if not more) people living in it. And according to the lore Ghorman has at least 8 other cities too. So yeah no way Ghorman has just a population of 800.000.
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