Lit Retconned Sources and Reading older material with Retcons in mind...

The novels and comics aren't contradicted because, frankly, they are little more than typical secondary tie-in fiction. Nothing of substance will come out of them. It's why the High Republic was created, as a playground for comics and novels that the movies and TV shows will never go back to.
There's nothing wrong with that. But the days of the freedom of the EU are over; the whole 'everything matters' is just PR.

 

When the prequels first came out, people on this very forum complained that they were decanonizing the EU.

 

You're making two contradictory arguments. Your previous post posited that novels and comics still exist on a secondary "canon level" and can be contradicted at any time; here you're saying they're not being contradicted for essentially the same reason. And ultimately neither argument lines up very well with what we're actually seeing from current live action and animation, where we see live action neither ignoring nor contradicting the novels and comics but instead directly referencing specific characters and stories.

Regarding the EU's "freedom" to tell stories of "substance" that "mattered" - that was always pure illusion, existing only so long as GL wasn't telling his own stories in the same timeframe. When he did, he trampled the existing storytelling more often than he honored it. I see no evidence that vestiges of the "their universe and my universe" paradigm still exist in the canon era; mostly the opposite, in fact.

 

I can agree to that, there has been just a wider consistency in general compared to EU over here and GL over there.

 

'Pure illusion' - it's all make believe. That's the entire point behind 'retconing' - these are just stories. There's a good chance in our lifetimes that what is 'official canon' now will be sent into the dustbin, with something new replacing it. That's just how corporate IPs work. As I've pointed out many times, however, is that 'canon' and 'official canon' are not the same thing - the entire concept was created originally by the fans of Sherlock Holmes, and as an agreed-upon fan concept. I mean, 'official canon' does matter from the perspective of what gets published by the official IP... but stamping "Legends" on material didn't magically decouple the EU. There still remains a singular continuity for it.
And the issue is that, again, that people want to pretend the new secondary material has the same freedom as the old Expanded Universe for storytelling. It doesn't. That it did was a fluke, a result of a series of circumstances that aren't going to be duplicated, any more than the Golden Age of LucasArts that coincided with it. Because they referenced a character that appeared in a comic doesn't mean that the TV show and a comic are on the same level. You're talking about a show that reaches millions of viewers, and a comic book series that... doesn't. Don't forget that when the PT came out, and the Clone Wars cartoon, how much material about planets, and races, and starships were all pulled from the Expanded Universe? On that score, the old and new EU are the same.
The difference, as I stated, is that nothing of significance happens in the new secondary material. They can't. What if the movies or TV shows want to cover the same topic, or the same time period? What do you think is going to happen? So, like any good tie-in fiction, it's going to tell stories where we know the stakes are low. And that's fine. But the movies and the TV shows are always going to be the primary form of storytelling over everything else Star Wars related. And what's wrong with that?

... and the same thing when Del Rey got the novels contract.
... and the same thing when Disney took over and StoryGroup said 'we're decanonizing the EU'.


Yeah, the PT needed some retcons, but that, honestly, was part of the fun - watching Abel Pena finding a way to make the old and new material work was always a great experience.
The "One Canon" thread on the Lit Forum is a wonderful example of a fan attempt to make everything fit. I'm a "Two Canon approach" person myself, but probably because that's easier and I'm lazy.

 

What is likely to happen is that the movies and TV shows won't cover the same topic, because that's precisely what "aligning stories" is all about. That's why we're getting shows covering the ROTJ - TFA period and the ROTS - ANH period, and none covering, say, the year after ROTJ, or the ANH - ESB period. The hypothetical scenario where some maverick creative rolls up to Lucasfilm one day with a story idea so good they can't pass it up, but it irreconcilably blows up some part of the canon established by novels and comics, looks more hypothetical with each passing year. Might happen someday, I suppose, but thinking such an event inevitable is just cynicism.

There's nothing wrong with that, and I don't dispute it at all - live action, by virtue of the size of its audience, is (and frankly, always should be) the prime mover of Star Wars storytelling. But at the same time, there's no reason to assume that automatically relegates the novel and comic stories to some lower tier of relevance in relation to them. Also I think at this point it might be worthwhile to better define what you mean by "significance." The distinction you're trying to make between the EU and canon hinges a great deal on that. When you say "nothing of significance" happens in the novels or comics, what do you mean by that?

 

Probably sadly why we haven't gotten and post Rise of Skywalker content yet outside of lego specials, they wanna wait to see if TV and Film does anything with it first.

 

I think the company overall is in no particular hurry to move into the post-TROS time period. They want to do it strategically, and live action (specifically films) will almost certainly be the way forward.

 

Retcons folks, not canon or policy debates please. Very offtopic...

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They were starting with it, certainly - some novels, the animated show that everyone forgot about. And then there was the theme park attraction at Disney that was uniquely its own sand box, set in the NT era, that started strong before having little follow-through.
Right now, all the secondary material is focused on the OT and the High Republic. Nothing at all in the "Mandoverse" era, certainly.

You really think that it's because they don't want to step on the toes of book and comics?
As per your example with TPM, movies and TV shows will do what they want, and the secondary material will have to adjust. Casual viewers aren't going to care that a comic got contradicted.
Now, there's nothing to say that a creator might be a more deep level Star Wars fan, and want to respect secondary material on their own - but I sincerely doubt that they will be held to it. It's less of "contradicting" them, and more of "not being aware about them in the first place". StoryGroup isn't going to say "You can't do that", they're going to present the material.
I'm not sure what's so 'cynical' about the idea that media will a much vaster viewership being treated differently, or about that corporate IP might make statements that they don't necessarily hold to. They're aware of the Expanded Universe's unique reputation, as are you - and are trying to capitalize on it. It's not the same. And, like I said, there's nothing wrong with that. The EU was a unique experience that won't be duplicated within Star Wars.

I'm not sure what's puzzling about that, but let's take a look at where the EU and the current "NEU" align on that.
The EU was not permitted, in the pre-TPM era to do two things - one, have any details about the Clone Wars. A few minor bits got snuck in here and there, true, but overall that was held strictly. And as someone that saw the original in the theaters, let me tell you - getting details about the offhand reference to this event was an exercise in frustration. In fact, in the broader sense, they weren't permitted to really describe anything of the recent past of the SW universe, except in broad strokes. (The "Old Republic", when it came out, was far enough in the past to not matter).
The second major part of the SW universe they weren't permitted to touch was a galactic map. West End Games was forbidden to create the 'shape' of the SW universe, which is how "The Slice" was invented - initially they decided to create a specific area that most of the game material would be set in so they could define it, like a location-based version of the High Republic. Even then, they never mapped it except in the most general sense. The largest-scale maps were a handful of sector maps.
This was all opened during the PT, of course. But the point is that they couldn't create anything of 'significance' in these time periods. And on that, let's talk about something else from the pre Disney days, the Marvel Comics series.
As you know, the Marvel Comics series basically ended up paralleling the development of the movies. And after ROTJ came out, they soon began going beyond the OT... and quickly ended. The reason? Not because LFL pulled the licensing, but because they put on so many restrictions, that they didn't see the point. Luke couldn't restart the Jedi. Han and Leia couldn't get together. The New Republic couldn't be formed. And so forth. Nothing of significance.
And then, Bantam was permitted - with novels that had 'the official continuation of the Star Wars story" in the blurb on the back - one of those corporate IP statements I was referring to.
Now, I know what you're going to bring up - the whole start of all this, "Road to TFA", the story of the BATTLE OF JAKKU that we heard about a million times over and over, with Wendig's trilogy and a comic miniseries. But that was all planned and plotted out by StoryGroup ahead of time, to 'prime the pump', so to speak. I think we can agree, though, that it certainly wasn't the Thrawn Trilogy. In any case, we haven't seen the like of it since... and let's be honest, do you think that maybe that LFL feels they might have shot themselves in the foot with the "The Galactic Civil War quickly ends, nothing really happens until the TFA era"? If anything, that drives the point home harder that they won't limit themselves in the future. While it's possible they might do a multimedia support project like that again (and certainly it had shades of Shadows of the Empire), the odds are certainly much less than before. Certainly, we really haven't seen much in the way of support for the "Mandoverse" era, have we? We haven't even gotten a proper "Essential Guide" to it yet. In fact, looking at future book releases, I'm seeing various reference books geared towards kids, novels in the OT, the High Republic, even one from the Clone Wars, and the only NR material being... reprints of classic EU novels. (I'm sure it's not a coincidence, either, that a series where Thrawn is the primary antagonist happens to be set... exactly when the Thrawn Trilogy was set in the EU).
We're not going to see novels and comics 'advance the timeline' from the NT. We're not going to see major crises for the NR not alluded to prior. We're not going to see anything about Luke's Jedi Academy, unless something in the TV series or a movie (brief scenes notwithstanding) covers it first. We're not going to see significant historical events detailed in the secondary material.
Why would we? None of that makes good business sense. Movies and TV shows have the much vaster audience, and they aren't going to limit them. That's all.

 

I don't recall what TPM example you're referring to, but as far as your question about stepping on the books and comics goes you can turn on Disney+ and see the answer for yourself. If the comics and novels could be trampled at any given moment, why aren't they? Why do we instead see live action going out of its way to respect that material? You're making big assumptions about what Lucasfilm will or will not do in a given circumstance that are rooted deeply in our knowledge of how things used to be a decade or two ago.

Actually, we have already seen exactly that. See Marvel's "The Rise of Kylo Ren."
In deference to @ColeFardreamer I'll go ahead and wrap up my comments here, except to say I think I do understand your definition of "significance" better and appreciate the clarification. I don't entirely agree with it, but I get where you're coming from better.

 

Anyone wanna make a new thread to continue he conversations

 

Yep, I ended up posting an overlap with that. Consider the derail over.

Back on the topic at hand, just a reminder that we've had retcons since... well, at least the late 19th century, with one of the most famous retcons of all - the death of Sherlock Holmes!

 

The Universal Horror films of the 1930s and 40s would go on to make retcons a staple of their shared universe, becoming so commonplace that it eventually became routine for monsters that died in the previous installment to simply reappear in the new one without even a token effort to explain how they'd been resurrected. Of course, this sort of thing was a lot easier back in the days when the only way to see a movie was to go to the theater, and thus filmmakers could enjoy the benefit of audiences' sketchy memories of minutia from the previous installment.

 

Where?

Reminds me of Godzilla a little bit.

 

Arthur Conan Doyle was tired of writing Sherlock Holmes, so he killed him off in "The Adventure of the Final Problem". And he was meant to be dead - sacrificing himself to take out Moriarty, he had no intention of continuing his story.
Years later, he wrote a serialized story, one of the four Holmes novels, the famous Hound of the Baskervilles, but that was set prior to his death.

... and then he changed his mind, and wrote "The Adventure of the Empty House", where Holmes shows up after 3 years, provides an explanation on how the scene which Watson saw showing his death was actually staged, and then continued his stories through (chronologically) the start of World War One.
But it was a definite 'retcon', it's been well-documented that Doyle had originally 'killed him off'.

As far as the Universal Monster movies, they had a surprising amount of actual continuity for the time, moreso than I expected. For the Big Three - the ones that are intertwined (Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein's Monster), you had - for instance - Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula's Daughter start literally at the end of the prior movie; in the latter case, Dracula is still dead, and in the former, the Monster plunged into the waters underneath the mill and managed to escape due to an enraged villager who stayed to ensure he was dead. For The Invisible Man series, each movie had a different one (including a true delight, Vincent Price as the second Invisible Man) but sometimes had a loose continuity - the scientist who creates the Invisible Man in the second movie is the brother of the Claude Rains character in the first.
Not to say it was great. The Mummy was completely unrelated to its 'sequels', and the third Dracula movie had no real ties to the rest. Plus, the final 'all hands on deck' movies played fast and loose with how they came back, whereas the earlier movies at least provided some explanation. (Also, the weirdest retcon of all: in the final movie, the Wolfman is revealed to not be the result of a curse - which were told in every single film that was the case - but rather, a head injury! And he's 100% cured by surgery!)

 

Thinking about it, it could be argued that Dark Empire was pretty much retconned into the wider tapestry of Star Wars.

 

... only to inexplicably return to being a werewolf again in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein! (Dracula and the Monster also returned without explanation in that one.) I don't care how bad the continuity gets, I adore the later "monster fest" entries.

Continuity across the Godzilla films is best described as "complicated." I always recommend not even trying to make sense of them from that perspective and simply enjoy each film on its own terms.

 

Thinking about it, the different feeling post ROTJ storylines kinda followed a few ideas that are not mutually exclusive but kinda put the a different focus on the era.

Dark Empire was all about Dark Luke and Palpatine being back. Working off of abandoned Lucas sequel idea snippets that had at that time featured Palpatine survive ROTJ and Luke search for his not-Leia sister. Only they worked with the changes ROTJ had made to these plans.

Zahn's Thrawniverse operated on an Emperor free version post ROTJ that rather built off of Luke's quest for his sister but replacing a sister with a love aka Mara Jade and complicating it by making them affiliation wise polar opposites. Interesting enough that he had an echo of Palpatine calling to Mara Jade plaguing her despite his death (which is retcon material for Palpaclone actually being behind this!) Also his using Luuke made from Luke's lost TESB hand is clever and allows for a strong Darksider, stronger than any Dark Jedi he also had, without having to bring back Palpatine.

Kevin J. Anderson ended up winning the post ROTJ era as he kinda is the bridge between both stubborn creators Dark Empire and the Thrawn trilogy and does honor and adress both, seeing them compatible. He kinda was the @Sinrebirth of his time OneCanoning DE-verse with Thrawniverse in the JAT. While he was not without flaws with his own superweapon of the month theme, he truly did SW good.

Then there was the odd one out, Jedi Prince series that also adressed a couple of the same points as if it was its own timeline rather than connected to the others. Here we, so far, had no Solo children but rather the Skysolos discover an heir of Palpatine that was not evil and needed protection from leftovers of the Empire and Darksiders. It has paralells to DE in that it had a Palpatine but not THE Palpatine post ROTJ and yet was like the Thrawniverse rather with Imperial leftovers and Darksiders rather than actual Sith.

And lets not forget the cut short post ROTJ run of Marvel that loved its extragalactic invasions and evil redhead woman aka Lumiya, who kinda did it all first and prototyped Shira Brie as Mara Jade and the Invasion as a NJO precurser idea that involved new enemies neither Empire nor Sith post ROTJ for one, yet connected some Empire and Sith characters still around to them.

Dark Horse longrunning idea that never fruited until stolen/given to the books and twisted into the NJO would have been interesting in its own right as it featured an invasion from a kind of dark sider race, be it Sith or else. An idea that is remniscient of Zahn's Noghri species being Sith originally as well as the later True Sith threat from KOTOR and TOR MMO.

Over all media and major post ROTJ storyline ideas, we see some similarities and some differences that only through many hands and retcons got fitted together ultimately and even with some repeats of storylines, found home in one cohesive Legends universe.

Darksider threat?
Imperial leftovers?
Extragalactic invasion?
Clones?
A good Palpatine heir?

What was the goal of post ROTJ? If it is to unite the Empire and NR into a unified galaxy, either by the NR winning over the Empire or a peace treaty, they tried to bring bigger threats that would have them unite against, be it Darksiders or invading forces.

Star Wars was saved from breaking into various timelines by many clever retcons!

 

@ColeFardreamer

A famous trope among shipping your main hero with a polar opposite rival character...aka Enemies to Lovers


I guess this all calumniates then into NJO as the definitive Post Endor story of Legends...at least in my opinion. Just because of how much it dominates.

I mean that wasn't the goal at first the goal was "Tell more stories with Luke, Han and Leia and make us lots of money" ....then you just gotta hope it all ties together when you got a bunch of people doing a bunch of things and not everyone is gonna wanna do the same thing.

 

There was also just general tonal differences between all of them:

• Given Timothy Zahn's background in Military SF, the Thrawniverse is very much in that same wheelhouse. The Force is de-emphasized, most obviously with the Force-repelling Ysalamiri, though not gone entirely as you see with Joruus and Mara Jade. But Thrawn is just a master strategist with no force sensitivity, and is overall a morally grey and sympathetic character. By extension this lead to an overall more sympathetic and less outright evil Empire, the bigoted elements getting phased out as the timeline moved forward. They were now just a militaristic force Zahn could use for his own personal love and fascination with militarized space forces.
• Dark Empire, by comparison, focused far more on the mythical and fantastical elements, with hints at deeper lore relating to the Sith and speculatular Force powers. Palpatine's "Force Storm" could've never happened in a Zahn book, but it did here.
• Kevin J. Anderson is often seen as going against Zahn's approach (not helped by how Zahn's friend Stackpole wrote I, Jedi like a jab against the JAT, though Stackpole's since downplayed this) but, as you note, he really did meld the two approaches together, and tonally feels closer to the films. The parts of Darksaber that were just imperials talking on Star Destroyer bridges felt straight out of Zahn (right down to having Pellaeon there), while in JAT Luke's Jedi Academy and views of the force are more in line with Dark Empire.
• And then there's Jedi Prince... we may laugh at the Dark Greetings and the Mofferences, but I'm still glad the books exist. That weird tone is nothing else I've seen in the EU, before or since.

Funny you should say that, it's a term that would just fit with ALL of Zahn's Star Wars work, even his "written to work in both timelines" New Canon books. If you just read them as a standalone series you would get a coherent, singular story of all his favourite characters (Thrawn, Mara, Pelleaon, Karrde, Winter, Jorus, etc.) with a beginning, middle, and end.

 

The Thrawniverse as part of the wider Star Wars universe is one of those things that reminds me of wider comic book IP's like DC and Marvel.

It's al one big universe but every smaller universe has it's own unique flavor to it.

Like Batman and Superman come from to completely different tones but both live in the wider DC universe.

I'll argue this issue doesn't seem AS prevalent in canon, i'm sure it's somewhat there but not as much.

 

Been thinking about this for a bit more but I think that one of the reasons why Canon has retcons they don't come off as so extreme as say Legends is that i think their is a bit more control over what is being putting out.

Their isn't so much a comic vs book divide as we saw with the Thrawniverse vs Dark Empire vs KJA

While i guess technically a Thrawniverse is still going on in Canon it isn't really going up against the mainline stuff in any other way.

Plus we've already had inter book/comic stuff crossing over with one another.

 

I think there's a few main reasons:

a) There was a body of pre-EU work that was, at first, mostly ignored, and then later merged with the EU, but required some retcons to work (the most infamous - the 'surface' of Bespin)
b) The EU wasn't formed in an instant; as mentioned here, there was lack of coordination between the early DHC material and the novels.
c) Until the Del Rey days, there wasn't really a 'plan' - the post-ROTJ era, for instance, was developed in bits and pieces

However, I think that there's one important difference that (hopefully) Disney will start to catch up on: the true unifying effort of the EU was preponderance of the "Essential Guides", which brought all the disparate elements together and provided small retcons over a broad category of background information. (There was also the RPGS by West End Games and WOTC which worked with authors and LFL to develop backgrounds, but StoryGroup has made it clear that a pnp RPG, if and when it ever returns, will never have as much - or any, really - influence on official canon).

 

All the best Essential Guides came out a few decades after the fact. Honestly if they came out now there won't be much to work on.

We have a few Star Wars Essentially things like "Secrets of the Sith" but I think we need more story content before we can get some really interesting essential guides again.