Lit Whatever happened to... the revised Legends Clone Wars timeline!?!?

Would you begrudge me a little story?

Once upon a time there was a huge conflict called the Clone Wars. For some reason people wrote a lot of books and comics about it, and even made two cartoons too. And lo did the chronology of the Clone Wars become really confusing...

For reals, though, back when the original bunch of Clone Wars material was released in '02-'05, the Lucasfilm continuity people drew up a huge timeline that all the media would have to adhere to, beginning with AOTC and ending with ROTS. And it worked - until, of course, it was decided to revisit the Wars in 2008 with the new cartoon and its own tie-in materials, which resulted in a lot of things having to move around. Leland Chee stated that the big ol' timeline would be revised so that everything would fit.

...and we never got it. Unlike the first timeline, the revised one was for whatever reason not released to the public. The Reader's Companion gave a few tidbits, like revealing Jedi Trial was moved from the end of the war to the beginning (Ahsoka wouldn't make much sense otherwise!) and there were a few stories done to reconcile Maul/Ventress's various contradictory backstories, but the majority of it - including, most of all, where each actual episode of the show happens relative to other stuff - remains a mystery. And then the reboot bomb dropped and all of it bar the second show got wiped out.

Am I the only one who'd like to see this released in full? The snippets we already have indicate it WAS ironed out to at least some degree. And obviously it wouldn't hurt anything to release it now. Honestly? Once I get this and Supernatural Encounters (and we know we're getting that), I'd be near-totally content with letting Legends lie.

 

They gave up on it before it was ever officially completed, as the canon-purge happened a mere month or so after the final episodes aired.

I compiled one by mixing a few other timeline lists from this forum and then further refined it with a few retcons (mostly to show that it was still possible at the time), but that sort of flew out the window when the official canon purge happened.

Mind you, I still sort of view it as at least partially valid. The big problem with the nucanon Clone Wars is that the early events before the TCW movie left a gap that was originally filled by legends material (I could argue that Filoni produced the film/early season 1 material partially with the EU in mind, even if Lucas disagreed) such as the microseries and parts of the Republic Comics. Ventress never gets a a full introduction in the series (though we do see her EU origin partially re-used), and the show never shows us the full battle of Coruscant. We never see Anakin get his scar, ect. ect.

Without going into full detail, I'll just say that it roughly went like this...
EP II
CW Micro series season (eps 1-22)
Mixed with SW: Republic Comics 49-71
TCW Movie
Seasons 1-4
SW: Obsession
TCW Season 5-6
Republic 72-77
MicroSeries Eps 23-25
EP III

The full timeline is much more elaborate, but I haven't kept it up to date since Kanan 7-12 came out. Needless to say, it was never going to be official anyway.

 

What's interesting is that, by what is certainly sheer coincidence, the two cartoons actually fit together really well - there's a big time skip in CW Ep. 21, from the beginning of the war to mere days before ROTS, that TCW fits nicely into. Everything else though is where it gets hard.

 

I don't think it's a coincidence. Early TCW was very, very obviously adapted from the microseries, as Anakin's outfit, starfighter designs, and even the artstyle itself are all deliberately lifted from it.

At least in season 1, Filoni still had had canon (mostly) in mind when they made the show. It was season 2 onward where Lucas himself really took the reigns, and that led to more of the deviations our canon thread complained about for all those years.

Ryloth no longer being tidal locked was the worst retcon in season 1, and the first big sign of a major deviation, but even back then people had ways to rationalize it (the battle took place in the temperate zone between tidal locked regions, ect ect).

At best, official canon implies that events LIKE the microseries still happen. We just have never seen what they actually look like onscreen in nucanon.

 

I was actually surprised the microseries was dropped. The last arc in particular explains a TON about ROTS.

 

Still part of my headcanon.

I think the Legends part of Clone Wars ended at the end of Lost Missions. Kanan comics, Dark Disciple, Darth Maul - Son of Dathomir and even the Clone Wars Legacy reels were never classed as Legends I reckon.

 

My guess is the effort got dropped even before the Disney buyout was officially announced. We know a few people at Lucasfilm knew it was coming, and others suspected it by, among other things, big audits of the official Holocron that were requested to take stock of Lucasfilm's IP. At that point, Chee probably saw the writing on the wall (for the current canon as well as TCW itself) and decided trying to fit everything together wasn't worth the effort any more. That's my guess, at least.

Even Lucas himself, during the period when TCW was still in development, referred to the microseries as "the pilot series" a few times in interviews, and I thin even at C3.

 

I love Genndy's show but I hated seeing that narrow Dooku face throughout all six seasons of the 3D one

 

The Full of Sith podcast actually did an episode about the microseries and the influence it had on the CGI series, including a list of things that the microseries did first and the CGI series essentially just copied. It was kind of surprising, considering the hosts of the podcast tend to be a bit dismissive of pre-2012 Star Wars products.

 

Like I said, though, even if it was never fully completed, we know at least some of it was done. At the very least we know from the Reader's Companion that the new novels were placed relative to the old ones.

 

http://www.starwarstimeline.net/Complete Saga.htm has the go-to complete Clone Wars timeline, in my opinion. It even shows where the new canon stuff like Catalyst and Kanan would fit in!

 

The old Clone Wars timeline had its own issues, though, even back in the day.--there was at least one revision, there was much grumbling here about contradictory versions of events and the over-the-top nature of the microseries, characters that seemed to appear after they had been apparently killed off in earlier stories, etc. It looked cool and official, but it was always a bit of a work in progress. It would have been nice to see whatever final timeline they came up with iron out some of these continuity wrinkles. (For example, Ventress's first appearance in the Dark Horse comics takes place before the microseries according to the traditional timeline, even though she appears to be an hitherto unknown agent in the microseries--it would be nice to have those stories reshuffled into something more coherent.)

I'd like to see it posted again! As much as it contradicted the earlier stories, the Clone Wars cartoon was pretty well baked into the Expanded Universe before the Legends banner descended. It's not just that it's nice to see where it fits into the Legends timeline; the show itself had plenty of tie-in material that's now also considered Legends and knowing where they took place relative to the TV show would be really useful. Probably best to keep the Canon stuff separate, though.

It's tough to decide exactly where to draw the line, since the cartoon never got a proper ending. I'm inclined to include Son of Dathomir since it was published under Dark Horse, and the story reels would have been part of the continuity had they been released. (And I could be wrong, but I think some of the material released online in the last EU dump referenced the story reels.) Kanan should be 100% Canon and not Legends. Dark Disciple is tempting to leave out, as it only exists right now as a novel published under the current Canon system and there's some stuff that would require work to reconcile with Legends. Still, it too would have been part of the continuity if the episodes had been released.

Oooh, interesting. While it is Canon, Catalyst might be useful as a sort of timeline Rosetta stone for compiling an inclusive Legends Clone Wars timeline since it includes dated references to events from the TV show (something that wasn't often done in Legends) along with some references to things like the Shadowfeed/Holonet EU feature from the Star Wars Insider magazine. Another resource that came out recently is the Clone Wars Epic collections from Marvel--they don't seem to be collecting the ongoing series or Adventures with the Republic Clone Wars comics, unfortunately, but Darth Maul: Death Sentence is inserted into the main Republic/Clone Wars run.

TC

 

Huh, so even the first timeline had errors? Learn something new every day. Maybe we all just think too hard about this stuff. Still, I wish there was some way we could persuade Leland to release whatever there is of the revised timeline...

 

One thing I like about the Marvel Epic line is they also fit in stuff from Tales where appropriate, which helps them line up in a way that even the old EU never really made clear. I think the most recent Clone Wars Epic volume even had something from Visionaries in it, though sadly not the Wat Tambor story (yet, at least).

 

Also, interesting bit of trivia: we don't know what ultimately happened to Legendsverse Ahsoka and Maul. This is because TCW is in both continuities, while Rebels, which explains what happened to them, is only in the new one.

 

A theory about Legendsverse Maul that I heard, and one I like, is that Sidious turned him into the original Guardian on Wayland, before Joruus C'baoth disposed of him.

 

Yea, I remember when the micro series came out and the arguments over the over the top stuff and the droid that fires invisible only to have what I call crutches put into it to make it more realistic. The new 3D series was in my opinion way over the top and makes the micro series look possible in comparison. I could definitely do without the weird Mortis stuff, the Force Priestess stuff, the whole Darth Maul return and the green magic from Dathomir. It opened up the door to what we saw in TLJ and the Inquisitors flying with the lightsabers. But, that's all said and done.

The old clone wars stuff had one thing that TCW series doesn't and that is that it bridged into ROTS. The new stuff, well, it was never completed. So you have an empty series that hasn't been finished. The legends clone wars was. From the micro series to LOE, to the Obsession comic, all the way through the Dark Times issues and the Dark Lords of the Sith novel from Luceno. I can't give up the past because they had substance, contrary to some that now saw it didn't.

 

I think Ahsoka's story probably would have continued the same way it did in Canon, for similar reasons. The Clone Wars show would have continued, so she would have fought Maul on Mandalore in the finale. Killing her off then would be a little at odds with ROTS, and she's a popular character, so like Vos and K'Kruhk she probably would have survived into other eras. I don't know if some form of Rebels would have existed, but having her involved with Bail Organa and the Rebellion would have made sense from a story point of view. There would have to have been some kind of follow-up to Clone Wars, and surely she would have appeared in that cartoon.

Maul's original half-robot resurrection story was Old Wounds, which was originally considered Infinities and therefore non-EU canon, but was later alluded to in Abel's Skyewalkers and Lone Wolf stories. It's similar enough to Maul's canon fate that (although there are some contradictions between it and other sources) it seems likely that this was Maul's final death in the EU.

On the other hand, there was the cancelled Battle of the Sith Lords video game, which would have had Maul or his heir return to put an end to the One Sith in the Legacy era, so that's a possibility too. I'd like to think that you'd play as Maul's heir, only battle Maul himself for the final boss. I would also like to imagine that had the game come out, there would have been a nifty Insider article with retcons explaining all of Maul's previous resurrections, canon and Infinities, in the context of his predestined return to take down the multitude of Sith.

I guess it all depends on how one wants to imagine the EU's continued existence. If Star Wars had never been sold to Disney, we probably would have seen similar situations to Clone Wars all over the timeline--stuff like the Underworld TV show and the Lucas sequel trilogy would have re- and over-written a lot of stuff in the Dark Times and New Jedi Order and Legacy eras, but the EU probably would have continued rolling along in a highly retconned state without explicitly rebooting.

On the other hand, there's no need to account for projects that never materialized anyway, and one could just imagine the Legends timeline continuing on its own. In my headspace, I like to imagine an ideal but practically impossible fictional universe that now exists without contradiction, with the cancelled projects and some of the current canon material existing alongside the old EU with no conflicts whatsoever.

TC

 

By the way, Talon, I found the info that the original Clone Wars timeline was fairly glitchy and was revised itself at least once fascinating. Makes me less unsatisfied we never got the latest revision - which must've been Version 3.0 at least.

I also recall reading that Sheev's propaganda machine took a hatchet to the official records of the war, meaning that from the OT Trio's generation onward nobody's precisely sure exactly how it went down in-universe, either. That's pretty clever.

 

I remember way back in 2007 when concept art for the still-unnamed Force Unleashed was being released with images of the Togruta Jedi woman we didn't yet know was Shaak Ti, at the same time we were just getting first glimpses of the Togruta girl padawan from the upcoming Clone Wars, and (much like with Jacen becoming Krayt) everyone was making the logical assumption that Ahsoka was going to be the Togruta in TFU. I actually wouldn't have minded that; Vader's new apprentice hunting down Vader's old apprentice. Plus could still work for Ahsoka having a role in the Rebellion's formation.

Actually even as things were in regards to Shaak Ti, I think TFU 3 would have been a good vehicle to use Ahsoka in, especially if the game began with Vader escaping thanks to Ahsoka interrupting the Rebels in an attempt to kill him.

I always assumed that had that game actually came out, the Maul in it would have been a clone of the original but with his same consciousness resurrected (which I'm sure tie-in material would have connected to Palpatine's powers from Dark Empire). Actually, wasn't Plagueis originally supposed to be the villain in TFU? We all know how Lucas liked to reuse ideas. Having Plagueis not only resurrect himself, but then Maul in the Legacy era to take on Krayt would have been acceptable to me.

It's funny to think of a really out-there scenario where both the Battle of the Sith Lords game and the Lucas version of Episode VII featuring Darth Talon was made, and how people's minds would be exploding trying to fit it all together. Especially if the favorite fan theories of 2013 were true and Ania Solo was also the heroine of Ep. VII.

 

That last one's pretty easy, actually - Legacy Ania was named for her ancestor. Families do that all the time.

 

I could swear I remember hearing they had decided to extend the war to 5 years or something similar, but I feel like I must have imagined it.

 

The first timeline had all kinds of problems, that they were mostly able to iron out with retcons. Labyrinth of Evil and the final arc of the Clone Wars series both conflicted on which one actually immediately preceded Revenge of the Sith, and the whole reason K'Kruhk got a reputation as a character that repeatedly cheated death was because creators kept using him after his alleged deaths!

 

I agree that much of what happened in New Canon can be adapted into the EU. The one exception is that Ventress did not die - Obsession trumps the NU novel, definitively.