Lit So if the EU was still going right now where do you think they would be?

So in an alternative timeline where George Lucas never sold and never did his own sequel trilogy (which would have overwritten the majority of the EU as well) where do you think the Expanded Universe would be eight years after the last novel was released?

Obviously Sword of the Jedi would be finished and likely another series or two as well. Do you think they would have finally been finished with Han, Luke, and Leia, and Jaina would be the star of the EU? How well do you think a post RotJ Expanded Universe without the big three would have worked? As it's no secret that in tie-in fiction characters that people see onscreen sell better long term than characters that are created within the book realm.

You can tell by my username that I am into High Republic characters but even I wouldn't be that interested in seeing ten years of books and comics where they were the stars. Sure a few books here and there would be fine but not as the stars of the entirety of canon novels.

 

What is likely is probably different to what is wanted.

Legacy vol 2 and Dawn of the Jedi would have likely got more time and better endings.

Denning or someone else woukd likely erase Legacy's future entirely by having Krayt being obviously active far earlier.

 

Yeah they definitely would have done more with the Dawn of the Jedi era. Probably a big reason people view it largely as a dissapointment is because the EU ended before they were really able to do much with that era.

 

Dawn of the Jedi and the Knight Errant periods, along with everything in between, was what they probably would have focused on. The other end of the timeline had turned into a physical and moral slaughterhouse. I guess they could still putter around with it, do stuff with Captain Cardboard Fel and Jaina/Allana along with druggo Cade, but that end of the timeline had become a real trainwreck.

 

I definitely agree that there would be more pre-saga Old Republic stories. I think SWTOR would be getting more of a tie-in push, and I almost think something like the High Republic would have been created anyway, even without the motivation of needing something the movies wouldn't touch.
There would have still been Rebels, and more Clone Wars, but if Dave Filoni had the same control over those characters that he does now, they might not have featured much in the broader EU.

 

Yeah I guess it's very possible that that was why they set a book 25,000 years into the past is because they were planning on moving their way forward. As far as I know Dawn of the Jedi is set about 20,000 years before anything else in the EU. Which makes little sense now that the EI was discontinued. But if it was still going it might have made more sense why they set it where they did.

 

Not to be overly pessemsic but I don't think not in a very great place.

At least the Post Endor stuff most likely.

Gotta remember 2008-2012 was sorta a winding down period for all things around.

Oh sure Clone Wars going strong in those last seasons but everything felt kinda ....I don't know....I don't wanna the dying years of Star Wars...But it felt that way.

Again some books probably would have gotten proper endings so that would have at least been nice.

But I don't feel like it would have been what anyone wanted if the EU was continuing.

 

I think most posts here so far are more wishful thinking or fearful complaining rather than an actual outlook at what the EU could have been had Lucas kept SW.

Yes the EU would have continued its cut short eras and open ended storylines, but for how long? If Lucas kept SW, that means he would do more TV shows or even the Sequels himself. And that would be big cornerstones going forward bringing major changes to the EU like the PT once had as well. So the question becomes, for how long could the EU continue its open ends until major shifts to these new projects would occur and put the other EU storylines on the backburner or unveiling in slower motion than before?

Lucas wants the post ROTS Underworld tv show as life action done, TCW still got material and a revival most likely, and Filoni might be pushing for Rebels even without Disney. Likewise Rogue One and other projects might still happen. In fact a lot of Disney canon could happen but with the EU in mind then and a very different ST by Lucas that is closer to the EU but still altering it quite some.

So the rather isolated pockets of EU that are TOR, DOTJ or even High Republic stuff could still happen without much influence on the eras later Lucas puts his focus on. But like with TCW we'd have some post ROTJ major changes when he opens it to TV and his ST. I'd not say he'D have rebooted SW EU like Disney did fully, nor partially like only post ROTJ or post YJK wiped clean. The EU would adapt as usual and retcon the hell out of the parts it would loose or have to reinterpret to keep.

Lucas could either set his ST late enough to not be bothered by the majority of the EU (post-Crucible Luke is single again has he prefers) and not use the Solokids but rather other heroes or the next generation thereafter, or he uses the Solokids and the EU has to retcon previous Solokid stories post YJK in a way that'd probably make use of flowwalking and likewise recently introduced timetravel shenangians as easy copout. Meaning it all happened but the NJO onwards becomes a Kelvin-timeline that sometime after Legacy will loop back to Lucas canon one with his ST.

But until then, we'd have gotten quite some EU stories to make it worthwhile and before the EU focus is on eras like TOR, DOTJ, High Republic, NSW, etc. to leave Lucas his playgrounds. If Underworld TV show is successful, he'd have worked on that rather than his ST for a while. And his ST as per Lucasarts, interviews and the Archives books would have featured Maul, Talon and more along with Solokids. So a lot lifted from the EU and Lucasified, which fits a new timetraveltimeline nicely. Would the EU, given it ends in a timeloop, have gone for a happy end to be reset by a lone surviving villain... or for a dark end that heroes need to reset to justify the Lucas canon timeline change?
Abeloth victorious? Allana on the Throne vision but its dark version?

Lucas would have no problem with the EU going totally all in with the supernatural and timetravel so long his SW vision is surpreme. And the EU could benefit from free reigns so long it maintains that. Maybe Lucas could adapt Dark Empire into animation.

As for the Looping end of the EU rebirthing itself with Lucas... the EU had an unused Lucasarts concept for a Maul game with Talon and him and Darth Krayt set in the Legacy era. Have that be the post Legacy comics end that ends up resetting the timeline to just during YJK. Have Darth Talon travel back in time and attempt to resurrect Maul earlier than Legacy and that be the beginning of Lucas ST with Solokids and them. And timetravel knowledge also explains why the Vong were unsuccessful and stopped early on before the galaxy noticed much of them as Talon sent forces with intel about them she provided to stop them. And Abeloth is never freed either.

 

Denning gave an interview once where he said that he operated under the impression that the Legacy comic was only one "possible future" the Galaxy Far Far Away might have.

Would be interesting to see if any others would've been explored. And also "interesting" in the same sense a train wreck is to see the fandom inevitably clawing each other's eyes out over which of those futures was the best.

 

Unfortunately, I would tend to agree with all this.

The only thing that I think might have been "what I wanted" is that there might have been more X-wing books, after Allston was able to go back to that well with Mercy Kill. It works as a self-contained book, but there were clearly plenty of stories left to tell with that crew (especially with Face now the New Republic's intelligence czar). But of course Allston died right around the time of the Disney sale, so the only way that could have worked is if they'd found somebody to fill his shoes, which is a tall order in itself.

That and... Towards the end of the old EU, I felt like they might finally be hitting their stride again. They were backing off from big galaxy-altering events like LOTF or FOTJ or Legacy, and giving us more small-scale and self-contained stories like Mercy Kill, but also Scoundrels, Kenobi, and that trilogy of standalone books focused on Leia then Han then Luke. I could imagine a period where the EU kind of calms down on the big picture stuff and does more stories like that for a while, and I'd be okay with it. But then the Great Decanonization happened, so we'll never know.

 

More Troy Denning and his brand of torture porn; Jedi Masters murdering one another; with a sprinkle of weird sexual innuendos.

 

You can see it now, can't you?

Han Solo versus impotence after having his nuts fed into a grinder.

Jaina being arrested for Force-assisted domestic battery.

Meanwhile, her Mum is on a casual murder spree, bisecting criminals with a saber, while Saba then consumes the fresh meat.

.....OK, maybe that last one is going too far, even for a mick take.

 

If they are not on Coruscant or are not Jedi, you can kill ‘em. They don’t matter.

 

The only Troy Denning I've read is his WEG work like Scoundrel's Luck, which did a lot with fringe elements. It's strange to me that his novels apparently went so far in the other direction that this is such a common criticism of them.

 

I wonder if they would've held to the OT Trio finally deciding to retire for good at the end of Crucible. No matter what you think of Denning, that was hardly a bad place to leave them. Given that like a third of the controversy over the sequels was about how we get to actually see their deaths...

 

I think that would have depended on if Lucas decided to do his SEquels

we know his treatment had Luke dying so who knows....

 

if the EU was continued we would have obtained The Force Unleashed 3 Battlefront 3 Star Wars 1313 Darth Zannah and Darth Cognus own book more Dawn of the Jedi and Legacy maybe

 

I endured the freak-show that is post-NJO(novelverse) up to and including Fury. I don’t know why I did that to myself(ten novels!) Maybe because I still trusted Allston… But after that I finally gave up and never returned. Especially not after witnessing the ridicule that Revelation and Invincible got(I still remember parts of YodaKenobi’s epic review of Revelation. That was a blast).

Denning seemed to be a really persuasive kind of guy. It’s evident from the way he managed to turn Vergere into a Sith(including the ridiculous backstory of Vergere once actually attacking Palpatine and then escaping; and being in league with Lumiya). Given how much control they seemingly handed Denning, I think he would have eventually swindled Lucasfilm into declaring Legacy infinities or some sort of alternate future.

Legacy comics I really enjoyed, even though in the second half of the run they somewhat lost their glitter.

 

I think there are two ways to go about imagining this. In one, you create a fantasy world where Star Wars magically continues to be outside of the mainstream consciousness and we inexplicably get another ten years of the EU blazing the franchise's future while flying under most of the fandom's radar. In the other, you acknowledge that in a post-MCU blockbuster world nearly every single popular intellectual property in existence has been revived, rebooted, or rejuvenated, and there's no chance in Hell that SW avoids that fate too.

In the latter scenario, let's say Lucas bizarrely refuses to budge and declares no more movies, ever, even as IPs like Jurassic Park, The Avengers, Superman, The Matrix, etc, etc, continually rake in billions of dollars in cash. Even in this world, Star Wars is high on its TV shows. The cartoons become bigger events, live-action shows still join the party, and maybe SW becomes like Star Trek in that its TV shows are the flag-bearers of the franchise. With social media as ubiquitous and all-consuming as it is these days, every TV show gets a hell of a lot more attention than The Clone Wars did in 2008. In this world, the EU likely gets de-canonized and relaunched anyway to allow the TV universe more freedom.

The former scenario has to reckon with the Filoni-verse, too, which even before the Disney buyout was probably maximum two or three TV shows away from rendering the entire EU irreconcilable with "T-canon" anyway. Which also leads to a de-canonization and relaunch.

Which leaves us with... what? A third scenario where the TV shows are declared the higher canon, but the EU gets to continue as its own Alternate Universe? Sure! Let's do it. In this world we grumble about all the dumb TCW-necessitated retcons that we had to deal with from 2008 to 2012, but we keep our chins up and count our blessings. More EU, baby! Yahoo!

Let's face it --- by 2012, the continuing post-ROTJ timeline had become nearly impenetrable to both new readers and new writers. Christie Golden and Troy Denning were both contracted for post-Fate of the Jedi trilogies, likely more than anything because it was next to impossible to initiate any new authors into the fold at that point. Sure, as late as FOTJ books were still being marketed to the "casual reader" with young-looking versions of the Big Three on the covers, but by 2012 they may very well have been ready to leave that approach behind, what with Crucible supposedly being their retirement and the next trilogy unabashedly being marketed as "Jaina, Jaina, JAINA!"

So yeah. The post-40 ABY timeline doesn't try anything new. The same authors do the same tired things, new books are as bad as FOTJ was, and diminishing returns rear their ugly head (both critically and financially, presumably).

Outside of that slice of the universe, I think what others have already said is the likely course --- more The Old Republic tie-ins, Dark Horse being allowed to do more with Dawn of the Jedi and Legacy Volume II, and some sort of multimedia project like The High Republic being created at some point.

But what happens to the Original Trilogy period? More retcon-heavy Big Three-centric series set just after Yavin, like Brian Wood's series, would always be in the pipeline. If new videos games were a part of the novel universe, rather than the TV show universe, they'd keep doing weird things like introducing more and more Jedi who were active during the OT. Although it's true that these sorts of messes aren't actually all that difficult to ignore as a reader, and are really more of a headache for Wookieepedians than for any other kind of fan, by 2012 the EU was still requiring more and more mental gymnastics in order to stay coherent. How long until its central premise of "Everything fits together!" was too laughable to take seriously? Especially if that video game with Maul, Talon, and a re-imagined Legacy era had retconned the Legacy comics right out of existence.

With hindsight it's easier to realize that in a lot of ways, the foundations of the EU were already well, well cracked in 2012, even without taking The Clone Wars into account. The truth is that Disney spared us a lot of headaches.

 

And on top of what the last post just said? IIRC Lucas confirmed that had he not decided to sell to Disney, he would've made his own sequels, which would have also negated at least the post-ROTJ EU. The honeymoon was over either way.

And yes, I clearly recall people fed up with Denning, Traviss, and other "grimdark" writers happily embracing the reboot.

 

I mean as far as I can tell the Honeymoon/Golden age of the EU started in 1991 ended with the end of Revenge of the Sith and NJO.

Honestly if they had rebooted after Revenge of the Sith that would have been a great time.

You could have then redone the EU with now all the films to take into account earlier instead doing the weird thing of "NOW Luke is learning about Padme how many years in?"

 

And I think the Legendsverse ended in a more positive place than a lot of works that are forced to sudden conclusions. As mentioned, Crucible leaves the Golden Trio in a pretty good place, you've got Supernatural Encounters, if you count it, for answers to "the Deep Lore"...

And the actual, literal last scene of the continuity? Pure gold. You could use this one image to sum up Star Wars to, like, a hermit living under a rock that had never heard it it:

 

The four or five years after Episode III can't be counted out. We were in a naive and hugely optimistic period when we thought that SW movies were completely behind us, and so many earlier rules and limitations were out the window. Legacy was trailblazing the future with an orgy of Jedi and Sith, the KOTOR comic was a damn delight, the post-ROTJ novels were... uh... well, not as bad as they would become later. For a few years after 2005, the EU was Star Wars, in a way that it hadn't been since the mid-nineties. We were on top of the world.

 

For some reason I feel like this would have been the approach even if Lucas had made a ST.

At least in a Lucas run Lucasfilm.

Granted again a lot of this feels more like Wookipedia's problem at the end of the day.

Except the post Endor stuff which by that point really has become impenetrable.

 

Between Solo’s failure and how Disney reacted to that and The Mandalorian’s success, didn’t this end up happening anyway?