Lit Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki

I think this is just part of a wider trend of what might be called the Wiki Effect (or maybe more accurately, the Wikia Effect) in genre fandom in particular. The drive towards the fetishization of "interconnected media universes" also builds off of that. No one cares about the plot of things, only if it references anything from the movie that came out three years ago and therefore proves that everything is connected and matters and the appropriate Wiki page can have that reference added.

 

The Clone Wars animated series is probably the poster child - "Here's something from the EU! But it's totally different from its appearance in the EU!"

What was the point of making the reference except to say that you were making the reference?

 

A LOT of EU material that I've read sucked HARD from both narrative and story-telling perspective. However, because they included some relatively obscure mentions that I recognized, I still got some enjoyment out of them. It's the familiarity effect - our brains like to recognize familiar things, especially if they were half-forgotten. It makes us feel good about ourselves and even superior to people who did not get those references.

That's the root of much we see in pop culture today: revitalization of decades-old properties, Memberberries, "I understood that reference" etc. The problem is, the continuity may save a short-story or an 8-page magazine comic, but it cannot save an entire novel or a 20-issue story arc. If the story itself sucks, you still wouldn't like it and will be angry for the time you have to waste.

It's one the reason the fans of fictional universes can obsess with them, and document them to the extent even their creators never did. Over time fans get to know and accept the rules of continuity: you can have a myriad of alternate and equally valid universes like Marvel comics, a continuity with branching timelines like Transformers, gleeful ignoring or accepting of continuity on a case-to-case basis thanks to time travel on Doctor Who, or a strict "everything not on the screen does not count" of Star Trek.

Star Wars had a set of rules too, that was not always the same. There were indeed eras in 70s and 80s when non-movie media were not aware of each other, evolving into 90s and early 2000s when Bantham/Del Rey and Dark Horse had a synergy, culminating in what can only be described as Continuity Porn for fans, where even Episode 3 novelization was sprinkled with multiple references to events in other media, and entire books (both fiction and non-fiction) were written with an explicit purpose to take existing characters and events from unrelated media and mash them together in a new and interesting way.

Disney first abolished existing rules (only movies and TCW count for New Canon), then established their own ("Everything going forward will be a part of a large interconnected story"), then did not follow them strict enough, leaving grey areas such as aforementioned FFG. It is a remained of the old rule system still limping along like SWTOR, or is it part of the new rule system? What do you mean, not oart of any rule system? Even LEGO canon references each other, how can a printed sourcebook not count? Follow your own rules, damnit!

 

It was Lucasfilm itself that rebooted the continuity, but you bring up some good points. I think it’s likely there’s just as many continuity errors under the Story Group as before. We’re just way more critical of them now, but as has already been said, they aren’t the continuity police.

There’s a good sized portion of the Wookieepedia community, including me, who have misgiving s regard our failure to real develop any sort of official policy surrounding the FFG stuff.

 

It's not canon to either of them.

That's pretty much the long and short of it.

 

I'm having trouble following how this last bit is a good thing.

Interpreting the April 2014 press release as defining the hard and fast "rules" by which Lucasfilm would operate a multiverse-type continuity probably wasn't the best way to look at that. In any event if you can figure out the "rules" for Transformers or Doctor Who or Trek, Star Wars ought to be child's play. Maybe they're different from what you wanted or expected, but they're there and not particularly difficult to understand once you free yourself from a "it must be canon or it must be Legends" mindset.

 

Sorry, I was not clear in my meaning. Things from those stories was referred to in other works (mostly in fact books & RPGs) but had we really characters act like those stories happened. Did Luke ever mention Ken or his adventure with him again? How long until a Boba Fett story referred to his Marvel origin and how many stories that contradicted that had happened before?

 

Ken disappeared sadly. Forever doomed to non-existence after The Jedi Prince Saga.
He has been remembered in at least some fanfictions (heck, I considered writing him into a version of Heir to the Empire thru The Last Command when I was younger, might pick it up again).

 

I heard an interview with Paul Davids a few years ago where he said he was fine with the reboot because all the stuff he wrote still exists in an alternate Star Wars universe.

With the MCU films and the new Doctor Who in particular I feel like there's also the effect where fans of the movie/new show hear that there's going to be something from the comics/old show appearing, but having never read/watched the actual comics/old show, just read the Wikipedia articles and form all of their opinions about whether those characters were good or not/done justice in the adaptations/whatever based entirely on what they learned from Wiki. Which is a big problem in its own right, related to but separate from the fetish of quantification that wikis encourage.

 

If that is the case, then it sucks. Both WEG and WOTC RPGs had an incredibly important effect on Star Wars, leading to many non-players buying and reading them just for the new lore (myself includd). Many OT on-screen elements were first named and elaborated by WEG before being picked up by everyone else, while WOTC introduced characters, locations and creatures that were later featured in actual stories by various authors. FFG seems to continue that trend, building and expanding on existing SWEU lore, except when it suddenly switches to clearly NuCanon elements. People aren't going to discover dozens of books worth of interesting material just like that, most of it clearly fits into EU timeline without any contradictions.

 

I don't think FFG is canon and the Story Book Group doesn't bother with it. I would just completely ignore it and ignore SWTOR as well. They obviously don't care.

 

SWTOR has been doing some pretty awesome stuff as well. Because of its sheer size, it quite possibly has more EU callbacks than any single other work. Super-obscure species, planets and concepts menioned off-hand in a single novel have entire quests build around them. It feels exactly like the Star Wars I know, while introducing new popular characters and moments of its own.

 

FFG is canon to the people who spend a portion of their lives telling their own stories using their products. THAT is who they care about, and they care about us very much (insofar as their professional reputations and livelihoods depend on us at least). If you want to sit around your dining room table (or get on Skype these days) with a bunch of your friends and have an improvisational Star Wars adventure together? I have never enjoyed that more than I have with this version of the RPG.

 

You are right of course. I just have severe OCD (documented and medicated for) and this kind of stuff nags at my brain and drives me crazy. OCD is a curse.

 

I got a very specific example to highlight my confusion: In Dawn of Rebellion, there is apparently an organization called the Imperial Artillery Corps. Among other units, they operate SPHA-T walkers. Is any of that canon, since it's not a thing that existed in the EU, but it's not referenced in any canon stories? I know some images shown only in rpg books is now canon, but what about non-story fluff that is in these books?

 

What images are you referring to?

 

The Imperial Palace and that one novel character with no previous art. Those are ones I think Pablo and Leland mentioned some time back.

 

Why does it matter? Are you in a position where you will soon be writing a Star Wars novel but can't consult any of the multiple professionals Lucasfilm keeps on staff for you to keep track of these things?

 

Can't I ask about something as a fan who's not going to play RPGs, just want some fluff, like in ICS and Visual Dictionaries? WEG and WOTC iterations had no problem with this. Why is FFG different? Does the Story Group, or Leland Chee specifically, the guy supposed to be maintaining continuity, actually register new info and names in FFG books or is it all out of their sphere? They use images as promo for official canon info, but does it go further than that?

 

You can ask, in fact you did! I'd wager that the answer to your question is on every other page of the last fifty pages of this conversation, though. "No." That's why I ask "Why does it matter?"

Also it's false to say WEG and WotC had "no problem" with this, given the whole system of "canon tiers" that existed at the time. FFG is "different" because the whole "canon" policy is different now.

 

FFG is different because they had to release a product that would satisfy people who want to play in the old setting and people who want to play with stuff from the new films/shows/whatever. WEG/WOTC did not have the problem of catering to two distinctly different universes sharing the same name and the same customer base.

Yes, this means they can't function as 'canon' world-building like the WEG and WOTC books did, on account of not fitting tidily into either the 'canon' or 'legends' boxes. I suppose that's a pity, especially for those who don't actually play RPGs and just see the books as reference books with some weird numbers like 'roll 3d6' thrown in. However, the primary purpose of an RPG book is to be useful and flexible for running+playing an RPG. If making it a better reference book makes it worse at this task, it is a failure.

I'm not sure why any FFG content not merely corroborating preexisting canon or legends info can't simply be included under a label of noncanon/infinities/whatever. Or included in articles in the same way non-canon character paths are in articles about stuff from the various video games. Then again I'm no wiki editor.

 

Well, I'm just glad not to be working on Wookieepedia, then. I see the FFG Victory is now on the canon Victory-class page.

 

There's a difference between "this is a painting of a Star Destroyer" and "this character can't be used in stories after X date because a game that was never intended to be in continuity said they died". I would hope that difference is obvious, but...

 

I think people tend to forget exactly how little non-film lore existed back when WEG first started cranking out their RPG books - and the little bit there was, WEG mostly ignored anyway (at least at first). There were no essential guides, no DK books, no endless stream of novels and comics and video games. WEG produced lore because they HAD to - the movies didn't offer enough to build an RPG out of. And they did it in a completely different time - before concepts like canon or the EU even existed. It's a different era now, and the reality is that the hole the WEG books filled in their time no longer exists for the FFG books to fill in this one.

 

I have always thought it a bit funny how much Heir to the Empire is always seen as the start of the modern EU (which it is certainly is in most senses of the term), yet it itself draws so heavily from the background that WEG had established over the prior few years.