Star Wars Rebels

Star Wars Rebels is an American 3D CGI animated television series produced by Lucasfilm Animation. With its story beginning fourteen years after Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and five years before Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Rebels takes place during an era when the Galactic Empire is securing its grip on the galaxy. Imperial forces are hunting down the last of the Jedi Knights while a fledgling rebellion against the Empire is taking form. The visual style of Star Wars Rebels is inspired by the original Star Wars trilogy concept art by Ralph McQuarrie.

Fourteen years after the fall of the Galactic Republic and the Jedi Order in Revenge of the Sith and the rise of the Galactic Empire, a motley group of rebels unite aboard a freighter starship called the Ghost and conduct covert operations against the Imperial garrison on and around the planet Lothal and on other planets in the galaxy.

Tropes used in Star Wars Rebels include:

All CGI Cartoon: Just like its predecessor.
Ambiguously Brown: Both Ezra and Kanan have noticeably dark skin, but no real indication of what kind of real-world ethnicity they'd be.
Art Attacker: While she's a deadly crackshot and good with explosives in general, one of Sabine's signature weapons is explosive graffiti tags.
Artful Dodger: Ezra, who lived as a lonely street urchin who often stole what he needed to get by before crossing paths with Kanan and the rest. Even as a full-time rebel, he often puts his skills as a street-smart crook to good use on the battlefield.
Badass Grandpa: Captain Rex, Commander Wolfe, and Gregor are incredibly old men thanks to the rapid aging that Clone Troopers go through, but they're still Clone Troopers and are every bit as lethal in a fight as they were in their youth.
Badass Spaniard: The Fifth Brother is a dangerous Jedi hunter with a Spanish accent. This isn't incidental either: the casting call for his voice actor requested someone who could do a convincing Spanish accent.
Balloon Belly: Puffer Pigs will inflate their bellies to the point of turning into gigantic, bloated spheres when they're scared. Poor Ezra finds this out the hard way when he finds himself squished between the ceiling of the Ghost and a wall of pigflesh when he and Zeb stress out a pig belonging to Lando.
Beautiful Slave Girl: Twi'lek women are in high demand from slavers due to their beauty and exotic flair. And both Hera and Lando take advantage of this trope when they try to rip off Azmorigan, with Hera playing the part of a sexy, seductive slave girl seemingly being sold to him.
Big Bad: Each Season has one of its own.
- The Grand Inquisitor is this for the first season, along with Tarkin. Tarkin's arrival at Lothal leads to the Empire cracking down hard on the Ghost crew's activity on the planet, while the Grand Inquisitor himself is the active threat hunting them down and clashing sabers with Kanan and Ezra.
- Season 2's Big Bad is Darth Vader himself, who chases the rebels off of Lothal and proves to be much more of a threat than the already-dangerous Grand Inquisitor ever was.
- Grand Admiral Thrawn makes the leap into Star Wars canon proper come Season 3, and proves to be the crew's most dangerous and intelligent foe yet. He keeps this status for most of Season 4... at least, until a certain threat takes the stage during the grand finale... Emperor Palpatine himself!
Brats with Slingshots: Before he upgrades to a lightsaber/blaster hybrid, the teenage Ezra Bridger's weapon of choice is an energy slingshot that instantly stuns people with its electric ammo. It's fittingly annoying, given his mischievous street urchin lifestyle.
Cloudcuckoolander: Poor Gregor's mind isn't exactly what it used to be since the last time we saw him in The Clone Wars. He's very childish, excitable, and a bit out of touch with reality. Not that it makes him any less dangerous in a fight, however.
Cute Machines R2-D2 as usual, but this show gives us a new one in the form of Chopper, who's basically a cranky, yet lovable old man in the form of an adorable astromech droid.
Dark and Troubled Past: Being insurgents fighting against a tyrannical empire, it goes without saying that the main characters didn't rebel due to happy circumstances in their lives.
- Ezra is an orphan who lost his parents, who were outspoken critics against the Empire, when he was only seven years old, and the man who was supposed to take care of him got cold feet and left him. He spent the next eight years as a lonely street urchin who stole to survive, and developed serious trust and abandonment issues in the process. Is it any wonder that he'd grow up to show a natural affinity towards the Dark Side of the Force?
- Kanan watched his mentor Depa Billaba die during Order 66, and barely escaped the betrayal of the Clone Troopers with his life. He was only a boy when this happened, and would be haunted by self-hatred for being unable to save his master well into adulthood.
- Hera's homeworld of Ryloth was brutally subjugated by the Separatists during the Clone Wars, where she and the rest of her people were starved, murdered, and forced to serve as living shields by the occupying emir Wat Tambor. The Empire would prove even crueler and more oppressive than the Separatists ever were, and her anger towards her father's refusal to help other worlds that were crushed by them gave her the final push she needed to become an independent freedom fighter.
- The Empire butchered nearly the entire population of Lasan, leaving Zeb as one of very few surviving Lasat in the galaxy or so he thinks. While he seems better adjusted than the likes of Ezra and Kanan on the surface, he gets dead serious when he's reminded of what happened to his people.
- Sabine unknowingly helped the Empire make deadly weapons when she was a younger girl, and was abandoned by her family when she spoke out against them. Combine this with being left for dead by her bounty hunting partner on a mission, and you've got a troubled youth with some serious trust issues.
Darth Vader Clone: The Grand Inquisitor plays a similar role to Darth Vader, what with him being a stone-cold, serious servant of the emperor decked out in black armor and wielding a red lightsaber. His baldness and deathly pale palor even bring Vader's appearance under the helm to mind, though in his case he wasn't horribly burnt beyond recognition: it's just how the Pau'an race looks. He dies just in time for the actual Darth Vader to take an active role in the story, however.
- It also turns out that the Grand Inquisitor is in charge of an entire group of Darth Vader clones. The Ghost Crew comes into conflict with two more Inquisitors who are less outright Vaderesque than their boss, but are still evocative of him in other ways, such as Seventh Sister's menacing voice-changing helmet and the Fifth Brother's imposing stature and brute-force approach to fighting.
Deadpan Snarker: Just about every crewmember of the Ghost is this to some degree. Even Chopper, whose streams of "Bah BAH"'s tend to slide between snarky and outright rude, judging by the reactions of the cast.
Delinquent Hair: In keeping with her rebellious street artist demeanor, Sabine's hair is cropped short and often dyed all sorts of bright colors ranging from orange, to blue, to neon purple/pink.
Dirty Coward: While her fearful reaction to the Grand Inquisitor and Tarkin's cruelty does seem to be at least partially rooted in genuine horror towards their brutal methods, Minister Tua is still a smug bureaucrat happily assisting a tyrannical government in oppressing a planet's population and only defects outright when it's clear that she's due to be executed for failing to put a stop to rebel activity in her sector.
- Kanan is as far of an example of this trope as you can get, but this is what he believes himself to be since he left his master behind in order to survive Order 66. Despite him doing so on her orders, it doesn't make him any less of a self-hating wreck, and the Grand Inquisitor gleefully weaponizes this insecurity in order to psychologically break him down.
Driven to Suicide: After failing to stop the rebels one too many times, the Grand Inquisitor chooses to kill himself rather than face the wrath of Vader, who'd do far worse to him.
Fantastic Racism: Being a survivor of Order 66, Kanan is very hostile towards Rex's group of elderly Clone Troopers and refuses to trust them thanks to how easily they betrayed and murdered the Jedi that they served. The fact that the Clones were forced to carry out Order 66 against their will doesn't matter to him.
Kid Hero: Ezra and Sabine, though they're on the older side of this trope (especially Sabine, who's 17 at the start of the series).
Last of His Kind: While Zeb is never said to be the last Lasat, he still goes through plenty of angst over being one of the few members of his species left and we never see any until it turns out that they're not quite endangered.
Lovable Rogue:
- Lando Calrissian plays more of an antagonistic role here than he did in the movies (at least initially), but isn't any less charming as he swindles the heroes out of their droid and keeps them off-balance by pitting them against each other with his manipulations.
- Thanks to having Took a Level in Kindness since The Clone Wars, Hondo's an even bigger example of this trope than usual. While still a manipulative thief who plays fast and loose with the truth when confronted about his shady dealings, he's a reliable ally and one hell of a fun guy to be around.
Off With His Head: Grand Moff Tarkin makes his debut by ordering the Grand Inquisitor to decapitate Grint and Aresko as punishment for failing to capture the rebels. While we don't see their heads leave their bodies, we do see the moment his lightsaber pierces their throats... as well as Agent Kallus and Minister Tua's horrified reactions.
Pig Man: Azmorigan, a repulsive Manchild slaver who looks like a grotesquely fat, red-skinned humanoid pig. His disgusting eating habits and constant slobbering also make him a Messy Pig.
Smug Snake: The Empire as a whole tends to skew towards this: there are plenty of cocky Stormtroopers, sneering officers, and overconfident government officials to go around, and their collective idiocy is what leads to them being outwitted by the Ghost Crew time and time again. Even the more competent officials such as Agent Kallus and the Grand Inquisitor tend to underestimate their enemies and very rarely learn from their mistakes.
Team Dad: Kanan to the rest of the Ghost Crew, while Hera acts as the Team Mom.
Those Two Bad Guys:
- Taskmaster Grint and Commandant Aresko, the Fat and Skinny Imperial officers who try and fail (spectacularly) to reign in rebel activity on Lothal during the first season. When they aren't a thorn in the heroes' side, they're hassling street vendors for fun and putting young Imperial recruits through abusive Training From Hell. At least, until the Grand Inquisitor executes them on Tarkin's orders.
- The Seventh Sister and Fifth Brother are a duo of Inquisitors dispatched in the wake of the Grand Inquisitor's death and work as a team. A team that is very prone to petty arguments and ego-fueled self-sabotage, making them surprisingly non-threatening towards the rebels despite the inherent horror of being hunted down by two force-sensitive Jedi killers.