7. What's The Deal With The New Republic?
With both the movie and novelisation making it very clear that the planet the First Order used Starkiller Base to destroy was a new world called Hosnian Prime, many fans have been left wondering why the New Republic weren't based on Coruscant (the home of the Galactic Senate in the prequels). Well, it turns out that there was a legitimate story reason for the change of location, and it goes back all the way to Return of the Jedi. Following the Battle of Jakku, the Empire accepted defeat at the hands of the Rebellion and signed the Galactic Concordance. That's essentially just a peace treaty, and in a bid to prove to the Galaxy that the new government was different to what had existed under Emperor Palpatine's rule, they developed a system which would see the Senate move to different planets every few years to show that all worlds had a say. As a result, Hosnian Prime just so happened to be the unlucky host planet which housed the Senate when The First Order decided to strike. For obvious reasons, none of this backstory was addressed in the movie, but if Jedi Temples are going to be important moving forward, could the one of Coruscant be tied into what comes next? It definitely feels like that planet was saved for some reason, so we'll have to wait and see.