I’m just a stormtrooper grunt, seventeen years in the service, so I don’t follow politics all that closely, you know? I fight the Resistance, I hyperspace home six parsecs to my wife and kids on Eadu, and then I do it again the next day. Your classic man in the white Phase III armor.

And I’d cast my ballot for Supreme Leader Snoke, if we had voting. I’m a law-and-order guy, obviously, so I’m with him on exterminating all Resistance scum. I love his First Order First agenda of building a force field around our planets and making those freeloading aliens in the Mos Eisley Cantina pay for it. Oh, yeah, and draining the swamp on Dagobah—Snoke tells it like it is, and if you can’t handle it, go back to your own galaxy.

Except things started changing when Snoke passed that big tax bill. The very next day, we’re told our pensions are getting cut—which hardly matters, because stormtroopers have a seventy-five-per-cent fatal occupational-injury rate. (Some from combat, but mostly guys falling into chasms off narrow ship walkways that for some reason don’t have guardrails.)

Sure, the galaxy’s health insurance wasn’t perfect, but at least I got a little subsidy from Vadercare. Snoke repeals the individual mandate and all these stormtroopers, fresh out of the academy, thinking they’re invincible, go, “Awesome—I’m young and healthy, Han Solo’s dead, screw it.” My premiums suddenly shoot through the roof, so I’m going without it this year and hoping I don’t run into a freaking Jedi Knight. But how am I gonna pay for the infirmary visit when a trespassing Resistance fighter conks me on the head to steal my uniform and gain access to a ship’s inner sanctum, which now seems to happen every other year? And if my arm’s sliced off with a lightsabre, you think my stormtrooper’s comp will cover the robotic prosthetic?

I used to go to Snoke’s rallies, where he’d brag about how the Force was the strongest with him of anyone in history, and how he was going to incinerate so many Resistance planets for us with his mothership that we’d get tired of incinerating, and how he’d lock Princess Leia up in a carbon-freezing chamber for some crime with space pirates we didn’t really understand. And even though no one really believed him and we all knew he was basically the biggest asshole in the galaxy, we were, like, “But he’s our galactic asshole.”

At some point, though, I got worn down by those holograms he sends out at all hours—some of which just list who he’s killing that day at his palace in Coruscant, like he wants to prove he’s actually working or something. The straw that broke the tauntaun’s back was when he nearly started an interplanetary war with Tatooine because Jabba the Hutt’s weirdo son—I can never remember his name, something the Hutt—said he was “a wizened anemic worm,” and Snoke couldn’t resist calling him short and fat. It’s, like, are you really that thin-skinned? I mean, yes, technically speaking, he has extremely porous, almost translucent skin. But sometimes—and I never thought I’d say this—he sort of makes me miss Palpatine. At least he had some respect for the throne room!

I used to have dreams—maybe not of wearing red armor in the Imperial Guard or anything, but of a country house on Maridun, or seeing Cloud City before I die. Instead, I’ve got plantar fasciitis from wearing these jackboots sixteen hours a day and my TIE fighter may be repossessed. My eight-year-old’s being hologram-bullied, and his combat instructors say it’s because the other kids are copying Snoke. When I get home, I’m too tired to take off my suit; our couple’s therapist tells me I’m shielding my feelings with “metaphorical armor.”

I’m starting to understand the Resistance types who ask the MGGA crowd to explain when the galaxy ever truly was great. I wake up in the middle of the night, look out my porthole into space, and think, Is this all there is? Last week, I found myself inside an escape hatch, my finger over the eject button, before I came to my senses. The therapist says this is all related to childhood traumas I haven’t fully processed. I think it’s more about how whenever the Supreme Leader gives me an order, he chokes me with the Force. Who the hell knows, maybe it is about my childhood. Snoke does kind of remind me of my dad.

Speaking of which, if Snoke, Jr., ever becomes Supreme Leader, that’s it. I’m moving to the ice planet Hoth.