The Star Wars Canon: An Attempt to Work it All Out

Canon is law. Canon is the accepted, approved truth of Star Wars. If it gets broken, we all scream bloody murder. Then we fix it. Sometimes, it gets worse and worse until that becomes the canon. The canon is supposed to be supreme and unquestioned. It makes up the continuity of Star Wars.

Fine, except we have a problem. Star Wars continuity is not even close to being perfect. Authors make mistakes. Editors miss them. They're human, so it's to be expected. Also, the fact canon has multiple tiers of authority, with G-canon on the top, contradicts the very essence of "canon". How can one part of the "truth" be more authoritative than another? Strangely enough, that is the case, and people accept it as such, which brings us into a whole mess of Orwellian unpleasentries which I don't want to go into right now...

My big gripe: rationalizing the differences between movie and novelization of movie.

The six movies of the Star Wars series have, obviously, six novelizations to go with it. Given the different modes of media, they are naturally different in presentation. Strangely, though, many times in the novelization, dialouge, plot, and most notable for the purpose of this post, visuals, directly contradict. In the ROTS novel, Palpatine's lightsaber flies out of a statue. Kit Fisto's decapitated head sits on Palpatine's desk. In the ESB novel, Yoda is blue-skinned, Veers is killed by Hobbie.

This may not be as big a problem as I make it out to be. Some may say these novelizations are in a lower canon category than the movies, so in any visual or plot conflicts, the movies win out. Mind you, these are supposedly the most accurate depictions of the Star Wars universe next to the films yet conflict the most with the films.

But wait, there's more. G-canon is anything that comes from Lucas himself. Want to guess who wrote the novel version of Episode IV? That's right, Lucas did. A novel in which Han shoots first, Luke never sees his aunt and uncle's remains, and performs two trench runs as Blue 5. Vader chokes Tagge, the Tantive IV is captained by a man named Colton, not Antilles, and Luke and Leia's leap across a pit on the Death Star is suspiciously devoid of stormtroopers shooting at them.

Add to this the movies' own visual and continuity inconsistencies and you have a mess. A big mess. If G-canon conflicts with itself, on multiple levels, what wins out? What does this say about the accuracy of what we see, hear, and read? Is it reliable? I'd say no.

 

Good assestment of the imperfections in the canon system.

 

Alan Dean Foster wrote the ANH novelization, not Lucas.

 

True, Alan Dean Foster was the one who actually did write it...

Mind you, Lucas is credited as the author.

 

For movie novelizations, I tend to take a laid-back approach. The film is the higher level of canon, so it takes precedence, but stuff like Luke being told about ducks and the like can also be canon. Any direct conflict defaults to the films. Things like Yoda being purple in Marvel or Luke being in Blue Squadron are overruled. Same with the comic adaptations of the movies, and games (and presumably audio). They're either simply errors like Syal's alias changing in Betrayal, or artifacts of being written before the final version of the film, or neccesary changes due to the different medium. It's not a big deal. I also tend to have the same take on things with the comic adaptations of Han Solo at Star's End and The Thrawn Trilogy. If they omit some dialogue or change something around, I just default to the novel, but they can still have new canon stuff. Anakin didn't really fight Clone Blaze Troopers or whatever, but that doesn't mean that Clone Blaze Troopers didn't exist. The Chariot LAVs are drawn wrong in the TTT comics, but aside from that they can still show us "true" pictures of what happened at Wayland and Bilbringi.

And I don't have a philosophical problem with "many levels of truth" or anything like that. It might be logically impossible, but that's not an overriding concern for me.

 

I tend to ignore the classic movie novelizations...I read them, but it was just something I did for the heck of it. The RotS novelization on the other hand...

 

Well, I never saw Kit Fisto's head not on Palpatine's desk...

 

Judging by how cheesy the scene that was shot for the Posse was, I can't imagine how badly it would have looked if they had done the beheading scene. I can visualize it pretty well, but I think it would be bad on screen.

That said, I really like the format that the entire Posse scene was done in the book. Actually, Stover wrote that entire novel in a really creative way. I know there are some people that bash it, but to each his own. I thought it was great.

Carnage

 

The movie novelizations are fine as second tier canon. Where they conflict with the movies, they should be ignored. The movies ARE the highest canon. I hate the current trend of "all inclusive" silliness the EU tends to foster today, like Boba Fett escaping the sarlacc three times, or Han Solo encountering that bounty hunter on Ord Mantell multiple times.

Pick a damned story that sounds best, and BIN the others. That's the kind of canon revitalization the whole system needs.

 

How about this simple solution? The reason the books and novelizations are slightly different can simply be explained this way: The movies aren't documentary...what if they are simply holonet movies, using ACTORS, portraying Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, etc? Then, any differences can easily be explained as directorial interpretation. We don't see the Star Wars characters, we see Star Wars actors PORTRAYING the real characters for a holodrama...and, we know movies based on true events almost never get it entirely right...

 

Agreed! It would make the Death Star plans thingy sooooo much less insultingly convoluted and stoopid!

Davi; instead, you and many others should consult the wise words of the Prophet Ex in my sig.

E_S

 

Heh, I LOVE the attempt at making everything fits. I love the idea of a galaxy that can contain Trioculus on one end and Vergere and TRAITOR at the other.