maulusque:

transboba:

the 501st is a battallion, not a company, and has been for some time now.

anakin has no idea how rank works, to the point where it’s a running joke in the “company”, but also sometimes actively detrimental or causing his troopers to be undervalued or given jobs below their positions. appo was actually a pretty high-ranking lieutenant on umbara, but was still a sergeant in name. 

which is also why rex, despite being in command of as many troops as a commander and doing all the active duties of one, is still referred to as a captain. 

some time after umbara, appo becomes essentially a captain, in command of one of the companies ( though likely not torrent ), but he’s now called a lieutenant in name for the same reason. 

a bit before rex and ahsoka are both gone, someone finally notices the disrepancies here ( possibly appo, again, finally straightening out years worth of shoddy or unfiled paperwork ), and fixes the rank system, so rex is, for a short time, called a commander, and appo is a captain. 

which is how he became a commander, by the time of revenge of the sith – he didn’t rankjump from sergeant to commander, it was a fairly natural promotion chain. also, lieutenant is a rank we’ve seen given to cc class clones before, with thire, so it starts to actually make sense why appo, also a cc-clone, is in that position on umbara.

Appo just about becomes an alcoholic trying to fix all the paperwork and unfuck the 501st’s personnel database. When Anakin was inputting his officer’s names to match their numbers, he apparently couldn’t understand the difference between the “rank” field and the “name” field. So he put Rex’s name in as “Captain Rex”. and his rank in as “Captain”. Appo doesn’t have the admin authority to edit the names, just the ranks. So he sighs and switches Rex’s official rank to Commander.

During the few days that it takes for the promotion to make its way through the bureaucratic machine, everyone has a grand old time addressing Rex as “Captain Captain Rex”. then it finally comes through and Rex gets to introduce himself as “Commander Captain Rex”.