Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Merchandise Could Confirm Who the Sith Troopers Report to

We’re still months out from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but the film’s new Sith Trooper variant has already sparked fans’ curiosity in a lot of ways. If a new merchandise listing for the film is to be believed, we might already know exactly who the group reports to. Reddit user Milnersblog recently discovered a t-shirt, featuring some surprisingly-informative text, which was seemingly found on the official StarWars.com website. The shirt says the following:

“Sith Trooper – First Order Battalion – Only the finest troopers in the galaxy under the strict command of Kylo and the Knights of Ren.”

While this might not be a major surprise for some Star Wars fans, it does squash any theories that the troopers are being directly commandeered by Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). Granted, there’s a small chance this t-shirt isn’t official, or that the true nature of the Sith Troopers is more complicated. But either way, it (for now) adds a small bit of context to the mysterious troopers and their place in the overall Star Wars canon.

“In The Rise of Skywalker, we have new troopers that are completely different in design.” director JJ Abrams revealed in a video exhibit at San Diego Comic-Con last month. “The materials, the color, the lines…there is something about the aesthetic of it that just felt absolutely right. I cannot wait for people to see the work that everyone’s done.”

“Our movie was not just following what we had started [with The Force Awakens], it was following what we had started and then had been advanced by someone else [with Star Wars: The Last Jedi]. So there was that, and, finally, it was resolving nine movies,” Abrams shared in an interview back in April. “While there are some threads of larger ideas and some big-picture things that had been conceived decades ago and a lot of ideas that Lawrence Kasdan and I had when we were doing Episode VII, the lack of absolute inevitability, the lack of a complete structure for this thing, given the way it was being run, was an enormous challenge.”

Are you excited to see the Sith Troopers factor into Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will arrive in theaters on December 20th.