Star Wars’ ‘darkest secret’ is one I wish I’d never learned

Star Wars fans have been discussing what the darkest piece of in-universe lore is and… well, they’ve definitely found it. Hope you weren’t hoping for this one to be a happy article.

The Star Wars canon is full of gruesome and abhorrent stuff, which really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise considering half of the antagonists’ names start with “Darth” and they all dress like late 90s goths.

Which is why the commenters in a thread titled “What's a dark fact about Star Wars that is rarely addressed?” over on the r/StarWars subreddit were truly spoiled for choice when it comes to heinous, depressing stuff… but they definitely found the one example that truly takes the cake.

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“The geonosians were exterminated after building the first deathstar,” commented user Hecatomber_RoF.

“And all of the queens are sterilised so that Geonosis may never rebuild,” replied user HeftyFail2726.

Now, just to put this into numbers for you, the going estimation is that roughly 100 billion geonosians died by the Empire’s hand as a result of this order.

Apparently the Empire went about this by loading up a bunch of imperial gas canisters with poison and then launching them at every genosian planet in existence.

Worst still, we do know of at least one genosian that actually managed to survive the massacre: Klik-Klak.

I say “worse still” because Kilk-Klak held onto the last remaining genosian queen egg, and they made it their life’s goal to protect it and ultimately help bring back the genosian people… only for the queen to hatch and learn that she was completely sterile, resulting in the complete eradication of their people.

Jeez. And here I thought Anakin’s story was the darkest piece of Star Wars lore. Then again, Darth Vader was an accomplice to the genosian genocide so… maybe he got what was coming to him.