Movies & TV

I always hated how they handled the prequels around this issue. Sending robots into battle is apparently the evil option while the "good guys" are literally cloning people to raise them as soldiers from the day they first draw breath. Somehow, sending machines capable of independent operation into battle is evil but creating human clones for the sole purpose of sending them into battle - human beings who will literally never know anything but war - is "good". And not just the action of the side we're aligned with - the Jedi are ontologically good in star wars and they're fighting alongside the clone troopers. Really weird choice.

I remember Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy, from before the prequels. Not a lot of pre-trilogy detail, but it was definitely implied that the empire had been around a long time and that the Clone Wars was fought against imperial clone troopers, not that he clones were the goodies. Some fun stuff has come out of post-prequel Star Wars (I haven't seen Andor yet but ironically I had a lot of fun with the clone wars once I got past the bafflingly bad call to make the good guys the ones using clones) but I definitely preferred the old EU in terms of the lore.