A Spiritual Successor to the Jedi Apprentice, Jedi Quest, and Last of the Jedi series, Rebel Force is a six-book young reader's series set in the aftermath of A New Hope in the Star Wars Legends continuity. Focusing primarily on the Big Three of Luke, Han, and Leia, several characters of the previous series make appearances.
This series provides examples of:
- Back for the Dead: Ferus, Lune, and Trever are killed off before the series ends. Although there might be just an ounce of ambiguity to the later twos fates.
- The Bus Came Back: Ferus Olin, Lune Divinian, and possibly Trever Flume return from the Last of the Jedi series.
- But What About the Astronauts?: Thousands of citizens of Alderaan were off-world when the Empire blew up the planet, visiting their sister planet Delaya.
- Dying Alone: Ferus Olin is left mortally wounded by Darth Vader. Leia comes across him and holds his hand as he dies — and he has a vision of a long-dead friend and partner coming to him, and it's not until Ferus sees Roan and feels him holding his hand that he is ready to go.
- Emotion Suppression: An Imperial has developed brainwashing techniques to create assassins (similarly to Dengar, though without surgery), and it's repeatedly said that these assassins are without any emotion at all, though they can convincingly fake any while infiltrating on the way to a target. The best of them, X-7, finds while tracking Luke Skywalker that anger is returning to him.
- Foreshadowing: The main Imperial villain of the series get his hand on some resonance torpedoes and lures the rebels and other Imperials into a trap with them.
- Heel–Face Brainwashing:
- A brainwashed Imperial assassin, X-7, has been trying to kill Luke Skywalker, but his continuing failures and time away from his master shakes the brainwashing — not much, but enough that he's bothered by stray emotions and fragments of memory with no context to them. He goes rogue in order to search for his obliterated past — the Rebels, aware of this, decide to set things up to convince him that he's the long-lost brother of one of them, in the hopes of turning him against the Empire. It's much milder than what was done to him in the first place, but still harsh, and has very mixed results. The brother in question starts to suspect that X-7 actually is his long-lost brother, then doubts it again — and then both of them end up dying with the truth of the matter left ambiguous.
- In the next book, Luke Skywalker pulls off a much kinder example on a base full of people who'd undergone similar brainwashing. He uses a desperate wide-scale Jedi Mind Trick to undo the Imperial brainwashing, leaving it a base full of people who are confused and don't know who or where they are — he can't restore the memories that have been lost — but won't think and act as appendages of the Big Bad anymore.
- Holding Hands: Leia Organa holds Ferus Olin's hand as he is dying, so he won't die alone. He has a vivid Dying Dream and sees Roan Lands in her place.
- Mass Hypnosis: One Imperial base is stocked by people who were brainwashed on an individual, laborious basis. Luke Skywalker, unwilling to kill brainwashed enemies, actually manages to undo it en masse with a desperate Jedi Mind Trick; the people have no idea who they are or what they're doing, but they don't belong to the Big Bad anymore.
- Serendipitous Survival: Mazi and his brothers survive the destruction of Alderaan because they'd convinced their parents to let them go to a sports tournament on Alderaan's neighboring planet Delaya and were just about to head home when the Death Star blew Alderaan up. Many Alderaanians on Delaya survived under similar circumstances.
- Spirit Advisor: Obi-Wan appears several times to Ferus Olin to advise him. Maybe because Olin's already a Jedi, Obi-Wan can manifest more easily to him than to rookie Luke.
