Lit A/V Clone Wars Continuity Discussion (Spoilers Allowed)

Essential in terms of the films' internal storylines they are not (and the reason the Sith want revenge was, two movies later, mentioned onscreen in an film titled very conveniently for doing just that). The films are self-contained stories. But the films do their thing, the EU does its thing, and when the relationship works, you can turn to an EU work and find the answers to the questions that came to your mind when watching the films. Casual viewers don't need this, but people who watch these things over and over kind of do.

All I'm saying is, when the films and the EU support each other instead of trying to outsmart each other, good things happen.

 

I don't understand why some TCW fans hate the rest of EU so much, many TCW's factions/races came from EU.

 

I may be willing to run another L-Canon thread after the show finally wraps next week. I've already got a timeline thread I intend to finalize once this era is finally closed.

Again, having actually watched the episodes... it's not the C-Canon elements that are most in danger to me this time. Valorum is the most blatant issue, but that one can be solved with either "nope, he didn't actually die" or "he was cloned" or somesuch. It's distasteful again, but not that hard to fix. I've watched the german episodes. My understanding of the dialogue is very limited, but the onscreen events don't contradict much in and of themselves. The only real things of note are SifoDyas' lightsaber, Valorum's survival.

The biggest issues that are hard to fix in canon are blatant events we see depicted on screen that contradict established material. Dialogue can be worked around with interpretations and context in most cases. Someone suggested that they act like a force ghost never happened before in the history of anything. Even if that is what's said on screen (which I'm not sure it is), one character can simply be mistaken or misinformed, or even skeptical of previous claims that it happened.

Once again, the big things I see with these episodes is that they stretch the believability of the G-Canon 'film' events fare more than they should. The Jedi seem to learn way too much before Order 66 happens. That's something that needs to be judged carefully once the actual dialogue is seen in English. Though, again, almost none of what they learn is attributed to Palpatine directly outside of what Fives tells Anakin, who would never bother believing or repeating any direct criticism of his mentor.

 

Is there anything in this arc that demands it takes place at a certain point in time? Because as far as I spotted you could shift it around.

 

Valorum's death is vaguely depicted in Republic Comic 61, Dead Ends. A story which has fairly clear placement around the earlier Republic issues and specifically references its place in a a series of events where Kenobi is captured by Ventress and thought to be missing. Adi Gallia also appears in the issue, and Anakin is clearly shown to be a Padawan. Those events keep the placement of the story at a fairly specific point. It should be noted that his actual death is not seen, merely heavily implied. The ship he supposedly gets on explodes, and the writer meant for this to be his death, obviously. May I add that he was killed because he believed (correctly) Palpatine set him up to take the fall and began consulting with Bail Organa about it. He comes off as a bit paranoid, but he's correct. This explosion later turns out NOT to be how he died, though.

The circumstances behind his death were later somewhat rewritten in the comic series. It turns out that in reality, the ship which he entered never had him on it. An Anzat assassin tells Quinlan Vos in issue 72-73 Trackdown (which take place late in the war, by my own timeline after the current TCW episodes) that she actually killed him herself (draining his life like a vampire, as Anzatti tend to do) and planted a bomb in the transport to cover her tracks and let everyone assume he died there.

This may give us some loopholes to work with if we assume the assasin's story was an example of an unreliable narrator.

Perhaps she did not actually succeed in killing him until much later, or she thought she got him and lied to Vos about it, claiming the failed attempt was part of her plan. Maybe she took credit for the bomb when Palps had someone else do it, but it failed. One could say perhaps she bided her time and only got him shortly after Yoda met with him, not long before Vos tracked her down. His death would still be the same, there's just more time that passes between the faked death and the real assassination.

This would ultimately mean that he evaded being assassinated (somehow) long enough to appear in the show, only to die the same death shortly after, allowing everything to remain canon, just a bit reorganized.

 

May I add another point on a somewhat more unrelated note...

Unreliable narrators are a retcon's friend. Ventress' backstory was originally told by a rival warlord who was said to have once been a rival of sorts. He told the tale, supposedly a legend, of Ventress' warlord parents. He also told the story of Ky Narec.

Any inconsistencies between the story he told, and the one we saw in TCW can be blamed on him fudging up the details or hearing it through second hand rumors. He could've mistaken the criminal who took Ventress to be a warlord parent, ect. ect.

These are the kind of loopholes that a good writer can use to fix inconsistencies. This is the kind of stuff the EU's been doing to patch holes for years. I see no reason why we can't take similar views.

 

I'm a fan of in media res and I largely agree, but not every complaint is the same. Grievous, for example, really isn't comparable to the Emperor. It's an Empire; we know it must have an Emperor, he's referenced in the first movie, he shows up briefly in the second, and he's fully introduced in the third, by which time we're already well prepped for him. On the other hand, AOTC is supposed to set up the Clone Wars and the Separatists, and it shows Count Dooku and the Separatist Council as the big bads, and then all of a sudden it's ROTS and General Grievous is the big bad who commands the Separatist army and is second in command to Dooku and there was never so much of a hint of his existence in the film that was supposed to introduce this kind of character. It's obvious that the planning stage failed and we got stuff that was made up as it went along and just kind of dropped into the narrative without a proper introduction. I think that's a better example of the kind of thing that legitimately does give off the feel of "It seems like the movies missed a step."

 

I'm not talking about not properly introducing the characters in that sense, but even so I don't think it's really fair to compare the Emperor to Grievous, as though Grievous needs some advance setup in Episode I and II to justify his existence. He's not the central antagonist of the saga. I'm talking about justifying the characters' motives and giving some context for their presence in the plot. General Grievous is a Boba Fett character. He's not significant. Palpatine is pretty significant to the overall mythology of the saga, and we knew nothing about the character prior to 1999, besides what Dark Empire invented. We didn't know his history, we didn't know the reason for his enmity for the Jedi, we didn't know how he became Emperor apart from Vader helping him hunt down the Jedi. And I'm strictly talking from the films here, since the common complaint against the prequels is they require the EU or novelizations to explain. Well so did the OT.

The character of the Emperor in the OT just strikes me as this huge cipher, and everyone was perfectly willing to go along with it then, but now with the prequels suddenly we need to be spoonfed why there's political and economic unrest in the Republic, why General Grievous exists, why the Sith hate the Jedi and want revenge, etc. It's a complete double standard.

Edit: Oh yeah, and for the vision of Yoda involving Shaak Ti being stabbed from behind, "always in motion is the future." I think Shaak Ti has had like 5 different deaths or something.

 

Yeah, their policy on fixing TCW stuff is really strange. I mean, they went with the full package on Mandalore/the Mandalorians. It took a while and a couple different books, but Fry and associates put the whole thing back together and then some, to the point that The Last Jedi can take us seamlessly back to Keldabe and we're getting an Asian Mando in Rebels. But they're not even going to *try* on most of the other stuff? Fixing Adi's fate for instance would be so much easier, but they're just like "LOL Don't care, **** Obsession". What the hell is that ****?

Ignorance. If it's not on screen, it doesn't exist to them. And surely nothing in a book could ever match Lucas' masterful storytelling.

 

Well, the main point is that when there were places that obviously should have been introducing Grievous -- the introduction of the Separatists, the Battle of Geonosis -- he wasn't there, and then suddenly he shows up later. It's more like if the Empire had had no reference to the Emperor previously -- Darth Vader comes in and says he dissolved the Senate, he's shown consulting with the Council of Moffs or whatever about how to run the Empire in TESB -- and then all of a sudden in ROTJ here's the Emperor, didn't you know he was around? Some things demand to be introduced in certain ways or at certain points, and if you don't, you end with complaints that the groundwork wasn't laid. I mean, Luke can't all of a sudden show up ROTJ with his wife of two years, Betsy Skywalker.

Also, context matters. For the Emperor, we know he's an Emperor who came to power and rules the galaxy as a tyrant. Does he need a motivation to eliminate the guardians of peace and justice? Because he's evil and they're good pretty much covers it. You've got enough context to figure out the general picture. You may not have the details, but you can grasp the concept. And that's ultimately the key to in media res working (and the larger issue of starting at any point, in general) -- you have to be able to grasp the concept even if you don't have the details. My point is just that there are times you can legitimately feel that you've been cheated of too many details for the concept to make sense, that the introduction of the concept has been bungled. Palpatine had enough context that we got the concept; Grievous wasn't introduced when there was a chance to put him in context, and then when he showed up he was treated basically as if there wasn't any need to establish a context, which created a dissonance that had people complaining. "Backstory" probably isn't the right term for what they wanted, but I'm not convinced that everybody using it means they want to know his motivations and history; they just mean they didn't get the context they wanted.

I think context, more than "backstory," is at the heart of the PT complaints. The OT was able to use in media res so well because it was so archetypal; it relied on concepts that needed minimal context to grasp. There's a tyrannical Empire fought by a brand of freedom-fighting Rebels; that's an archetypal conflict, you don't need to know Imperial policy to understand. Here's an Emperor, he's evil, he uses the dark side like Vader -- well, he's the guy who corrupted Anakin, taught him the dark side. We've been told about the dark side, told about the dangers, it only makes sense there are dark side practitioners out there standing opposite the Jedi. You can roll with it all pretty easily. The PT, however, isn't as archetypal. There's a taxation dispute and a blockade and the Senate is slow to act -- it's not bad, but it's not intuitive what the nature of the dispute is, why it can result in a blockade, why the blockade is of Naboo, what exactly is keeping the Senate from acting. It's a type of story that's more reliant on particulars, and needs more context to be graspable than "rebellion against tyranny." Of course there's going to be more clamor for context than there was for the OT.

 

So, you're saying that he didn't die for real in 21 BBY and yet they had a memorial built for him by that year? Let's face it. TCW goof'd again. Funny thing: the source in which the Finis Valorum Memorial appeared was written by Pablo Hidalogo. xD

 

Because they used to rule the galaxy and now they don't anymore?

 

Allston, Zahn, Luceno, Stover, JJM, John Ostrander etc can write Star Wars just as good, if not better than Lucas can.

 

It can also be an reaction to all the dislike and internet hate they receive from some of the EU people

 

You know, this is all rather odd, as TCW had been a lot better about continuty lately.

I guess they decided if they are going down, they are taking the EU with them.

Though, more seriously, I wonder if these episodes were Lucas ideas - after all, based on interviews, this kind of big, force-philosophy stuff is something a lot of writers are afraid to touch without his advice.

 

Clone

 

Vos outright saw his death when he read the assassin's mind

 

Overused

 

Meh. It's certainly the easiest way to resolve this. Sidious had thousands of cloning cylinders at his disposal to produce doubles. It's so simple

 

Sinerebirth pls