Lit Angry review of EU

Except the whole Katana Fleet, clones, C'Baoth's Jedi history...

And yeah, perfect example. The film canon's been changed, for the worse, over time as well.

 

I have better things to do than complain about relatively minor details from TT being contradicted by the PT, because that's what all of those details were to me.

 

C'baoth's Jedi history was background infodump at best (the few paragraphs in DFR), and mainly it's the dating that makes no sense. The Republic fighting insane clones isn't what we saw in AOTC, but isn't impossible to have happened elsewhere--and considering the number of renegade and AWOL Kaminoan clones we eventually got, it's not far-fetched. It's been a while since I read the trilogy, but I don't recall anything about the Katana fleet specifically contradicted, other than the Republic having a Navy, which was assumed by 1999-2001 EU before AOTC anyway.

I was around before and during the canon kerfuffles caused by the PT, and none of them were anything like the clean sweep we have today.

 

Very little of any of that was actually altered, other than a few dates.

 

And at the time, they were history which was rewritten. It gave you the sense that the novels were jolly good fun and all that but totally disposable if LFL made the call.

 

Lucas gave WEG the impression the Clone Wars occurred around 35 BBY, which were apparently the dates Zahn used for TT, so its Lucas' fault for changing his mind.

 

And we learned back then that the canon of the novels was a fleeting thing. I'm not sure this undermines my point?

 

And the point of my example? That canon - of everything - is a fleeting thing.

I've already mentioned before that Lucas wasn't Tolkien or GRRM - he was a filmmaker, not a worldbuilder. That Lucas would arbitrarily change ideas about Star Wars from day to day was par for the course. That we had people who made an effort to make it all work out (especially around the era you're talking about) is what made the EU great.

Again, we'll see in a few years how it pans out for the NEU.

 

Lucas was the problem, not the EU, for the most part.

 

We all knew, deep down, that while Lucas might incorporate EU elements he liked, he wouldn't feel obligated to follow anything he didn't want to. And there had been enough contradictions within EU continuity itself, that the TPM changes were simply a few more to chuck onto the "to-do" list. So I don't recall experiencing it as particularly earth-shattering.

 

It basically rewrote the established history of the galaxy from WEG, TTT etc onwards. But we knew it was coming and we were probably unique from a fandom, generational point of view because we had that event to adjust to. Anyone who hopped on fandom after, say AotC has known a relatively constant canon with little to no changes. It's never been a risk for them. We had benefits of a fairly early on challenge on continuity and a change in the "preferred approach" to novels. Despite their silly elements, there's a really strong space opera core in the Bantam books. Del Rey, by contrast, was largely mimicing prequels style stories and events with OT and NR-era characters - effectively trying to sandwich two styles together and less obnoxiously than the Legacy comment did.

 

A handful of continuity rewrites once every three years was fairly easy to handle. Retcons could be spread out over time to still make as much as possible fit.

Where this really changed was during TCW, where instead of changes every three years that could slowly be dealt with , we had changes close every week for the twenty plus episodes of each season. It became too much, too fast.

And as some suspected, TCW was just the first example of things to yet to come, at least at that point. And we still could even have made most(but not all) of Lucas's TCW changes fit given time to do so. The universe simply never had the time.

None of that compares to what we have now.

 

Ender Sai I actually agree with everything after your first sentence, but rewriting a collection of hints and disconnected details with little influence on the "present-day" plotlines aren't even as serious as the retcons ESB and ROTJ inflicted on ANH. It would have been different if there were full narratives depicting those events, but I guess I accepted early on that infodump details were never as important as what happens "onscreen."

It might be worth mentioning that I learned about upcoming prequels within the first year or two of my fandom, so I'm in a weird borderline position of having had a couple of years to acclimate to the Bantam/DH/WEG EU unadulterated, and having that form my baseline understanding of what Star Wars "should be," yet with knowledge almost from the beginning that there were major and potentially canon-changing movies in the seemingly distant future. Old enough to imprint on the EU as "my Star Wars" yet young enough to accept the PT into it without all the wailing and gnashing of the Gen-X fans having to come to terms with a new trilogy in their twenties and thirties. Which, ironically, is the position I'll be in for the ST, turning 30 two months before Episode VII, so I'm genuinely interested to see how I respond to it.

 

Is every thread these days going to turn into a canon/legends argument?

 

I don't think I even read book 10. For awhile they would come out right at the time my parents took our yearly vacation, so I would read them in the car or plane, those giant tomes, and I just remember being confused when Book 4 suddenly diverted the plot to do a Dune pastiche, and then everything slowed to a crawl. I swear the later books were literally about someone moving down the road. They'd start moving somewhere at the start of the book and around the end either they'd have traveled a mile or they'd have used a warp gate or whatever. And everything was happening in the last chapters.

I gave up when Rand woke up in a barrel and was just like; "Yeah, that whole piece of the prophecy that has driven most of this story? *blink* The curse is gone, YOLO!" and then passed out.

Oh, and the writing of the women. EEEEP! No more hair tugging, please!

I can't really moan too loudly considering I think I read just about every David Eddings book in middle school/high school and those were pretty much written with the Find/Replace feature, and yet I still enjoyed them.

 

Oh hey, that guy posted another review.

http://theunion4ever.com/nerd-bucket/star-wars-expanded-universe-2/

This time he's looking into Lanoree Brock: particularly the book Into the Void and some podunk Kindle Single they released this year, "the racially ambiguous samurai mage." He likes this stuff a lot more (except the Kindle Single which he despises), but he does bring up the fact that claiming the reason we call the Jedi "Jedi" is because they're descended from the "Je'daii" was a really, really terrible idea. It's like the whole midichlorian thing: the more Star Wars tries to explain itself, the worse it gets half the time.

 

Hahaha what

 

Most people, 30 millennia later, won't know or care where the term Jedi came from.

 

I like most EU stories. The only things I don't like from the EU are Dark Empire and The Force Unleashed II.

Obviously, I like many EU characters. These include Darth Traya, Revan, Bastila Shan, Satele Shan, Darth Malgus, Darth Bane, Darth Zannah, Mara Jade, Jaina Solo, Darth Caedus, Lumiya, Vergere, Cade Skywalker, and Darth Krayt.

 

I think the EU got a little out of hand in the post ROTJ era...too many solo/skywalker children....I knew right away that if a st ever came out they would never incorporate all that into it...and I like Mara jade as a character but the notion of her marrying Luke never sat well for me...and I hated the Force Unleashed...I almost want to say that it was worth rebooting the EU just to get rid of that nonsense

 

What is an ST?

 

IG-88, Starkiller, and Vitiate are the unholy trinity of the EU to me.

 

Sequel Trilogy or Star Trek.

 

Sequel Trilogy.

 

Ah, I see.