I was thinking of the Bothan pilot in Wraith Squadron books (SW again, the less consistent part of it). 12 X-Wings drop out of hyperspace approaching a planet. One of the pilots is able to spend no more than 5 minutes to find out some pretty specific shit from governmental archives of that planet, listen to encrypted communications of the Imperials, whatever.

It’s worse than the Elder Wand in HP.

In one episode they find some kid’s password protected laptop. The super hacker goes “oh no, I can’t hack that. It’s running Anti-Hack OS! We need the password”. The password ends up being plain text password that a brute force dictionary attack could break in seconds.

Well, that’s right. Thinking to install Anti-Hack OS is something only that kid can do. The govt is too stoopid.

3 things should match for this to happen like in the movies:

occasion, ability and need.

Two of these can happen at the same time, all three - I dunno.

Hacker shit. Some lone genius passing through systems intended to be secure for militaries and governments. It’s not about details being stupid, that’s to be expected. It’s about the very fact of power imbalance.

Random characters challenging militaries and governments and just “quickly finding” some qualified assistance in doing that. And winning. You don’t. You are an amateur and they are professionals. And if you want to do that, you are likely already under personalized surveillance.

That last thing is a trope from a free society where some people on the top are bad. And fighting them you can find help and learn, because in some sense you are protected, and guaranteed privacy and safety. There are no such free societies on our planet right now. The closest you can get is probably to join Hezbollah or some mafia, that is, well-established powerful organizations.

On the contrary, Luke Skywalker taking a lucky shot at a vulnerability that a team of engineers and military men, all of which were high-level Imperial defectors, with support from many planets of what is the Star Wars alternative of Western Europe and North America, had found by analyzing space station’s stolen blueprints, using computers and what not, is realistic. Similarly to the Empire (at that moment with kinda democratic Senate and all) being fine with anyone on the way being murdered trying to contain such high-value corpus of information.

Again, I love Star Wars so much. A lot of the materials written in AotC and RotS time describe very well, in my modest opinion, how the real world oppression really works and how you can’t really escape evil or defeat it. The best you can do is survive till that evil dies on its own, but the realistic best is planting the seeds for that time.

In general everything showing fighting your enemy as something easy, impressing upon audience that if it didn’t work out in a month, then you just give up and do something more pleasant, deceiving yourself.

At the same time the sheer extent to which personal brilliance and hard work and persistence can change the world is often downplayed in movies. Drastic changes made by characters are attributed to magic or being in some unlikely situation. But the whole reason for previously described power imbalance is that professionals perpetuate their knowledge and understanding every day, and if one’s persistent, one can beat them.

Yes, I like fiction about justice and fighting evil.

Remember that occasion where a Danish warship found itself in contact with pirates or Houthis or whoever, and it turned out half the weapon systems are not functional or something?

This is what they don’t want to show. That any military rusts, so the initial moments of those countries’ participating in any war will be full of shame. The first weeks of Russia’s invasion are a good example of such. No, EU doesn’t mean this won’t happen. Yes, defense-related corruption exists everywhere. No, European militaries are not full of supermen somehow magically superior to Russians and Ukrainians.

It’s very simple. The moment that happens, some people may find themselves under scrutiny for clear failures in their area of responsibility. So they resist. This is normal.