Lit The Essential Atlas and Galactic Cartography: Official Discussion

I don't know about in Legends, but in newcanon, the Darth Vader: Sith Lord book states outright that it's in the Republic, and that slavery is present, is due to Republic lax enforcement.

Hutts may control the planet, but they're not its legal rulers.

 

True but Luke and Shmi seem to imply Republic membership indirectly. Why would anybody talk about how far its Form the Core etc. And how neglected it is with lawenforcement like antislavery not reaching if they wernt part of something that should but does not enact it there.

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Do it explain why they don't accept Republic credits there if it is a Republic word? I mean it's like Puerto Rico not accepting dollars

Becouse they want to go to the Core but are stuck on Tatooine?

Is that how you read it? I understood it as showing how naive Padme was that she did not realise that just becouse the Republic had forbidden itslavery so was it not forbidden in Hutt space.

 

I tend to agree with you on that. Tatooine seems like it was meant to be the gas station in the middle of a long stretch of desert. It's an invaluable pitstop to get to more important places, but nobody actually cares about the Gas station itself. To me, every piece of lore that makes Tatooine more important or special takes away from the spirit of why it was created.

I'm not even a fan of RotJ having Jabba live on Tatooine, which was a decision made before I or the EU existed. It makes the Galaxy feel smaller, and also kinda weird that Han chose to hang out there with a bounty on his head.

 

Going by Wookieepedia, nowhere outside of the Core and Inner Rim were particularly fond of them by the Clone War. I'd speculate Tatooine's proximity to Hutt Space was a factor:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_Credit_Standard

During the Clone Wars, and even before, many of the galaxy's inhabitants were worried about the war's outcome and the effect it would have on the galactic economy. Because of this, an overwhelming majority of planets outside the Core and Inner Rim would not accept credits. These planets and regions began minting their own special currencies. In 22 BBY, the InterGalactic Banking Clan was creating new currencies at a rate of twenty per day, with the InterGalactic Currency Exchange System managing the currency.[1]

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Currency

Currency, also referred to as money, was used as a principal medium of exchange within a particular territory, and introduced into circulation by the appropriate regional authority on economic policy. Two main currencies existed in the galaxy: the Republic credit, which later became the Imperial credit before being replaced by the New Republic credit,[1] and the wupiupi, the latter circulating almost exclusively in the Outer Rim Territories.[2]



Something along the lines of the Core's neglect of the Outer Rim resulting in the Hutts effectively replacing them as the ones whose money people trusted most.

 

Can we then assume that the Republic Credit is a fiat currency? No real backing to it other than the Republic says it has value? And these other local currencies were actually made of precious metals and such and had an intrinsic value? I would assume if the RC had intrinsic value it would be accepted no matter what as it is made of some precious commodity.

 

Yeah, there were two roads with Jabba that might have been more logical -- he's a big-time crime lord and based somewhere far from Tatooine, or he's based there and a nobody. The storytelling chose one from Column A and one from Column B, and both Legends and new canon had to make that make sense.

Still, it's Empire that did that -- Vader offhandedly references Jabba by name, and we learn the rendezvous point's on Tatooine. Now, Empire is my favorite SW movie, and IMHO the story that transformed Star Wars from fun Saturday morning serial to epic, mythic saga. Which was 95% worth it and why we're on a discussion board about this story 40 years later. But the other 5% is Empire going places that I suspect overwrote some original assumptions, creating messes that had to be cleaned up or lived with. There's the identity of Luke's father, which I think nearly every fan would say was a terrific change even if it did require some not very convincing retconning. A less good change, IMHO, was Vader's role -- he's a has-been in ANH, a goon trying to ride Tarkin's coattails back to power and getting mocked by sneering young careerists like Motti, and then in ESB he's suddenly the (Force-sensitive) Emperor's right-hand man. I think the original conception was wiser, and scrapping it caused problems that reverberate through the saga. And we get the seeds of Jabba being both important and local. I'm sure there are a couple of others I'm forgetting, but you get the idea.

To bring this back to geography, totally agree with making the galaxy feel too small. When the EU fell prey to this recycling of places and elements I'd call it out as Star Wars Clue -- on Bespin, with a lightsaber, etc. But the prequels and the animated shows all doubled down on that to a certain extent. I always found the storytelling more interesting when it showed us places we'd never been with a feel we'd never had -- Lah'mu, Cantonica, Rugosa, Dathomir, Carlac, etc.

Another thing to toss out, while we're revisiting roads not traveled down: When the reboot came, I argued semi-seriously for scrapping the entire EU map and redoing it based on a close reading of the movie lore, mostly to get rid of the awkwardness of the Unknown Regions being snugged up against the Core. Yes, I did that! Heresy! And I'm glad for a number of reasons that LFL said no, they were keeping the same map. But I still think about that one sometimes.

 

I remember that was one of the things Curtis Saxton hated a lot about the EU, and tended to try rationalising away in many ways - among them, citing Star Wars: Rebellion of all things. Now I love that video game, but I've never taken its galactic map all that seriously. And Wookieepedia has brought up that more than a few of its locations were inaccurate even at the time.

 

The planet being controlled by the Hutts doesn't require it to be in Hutt Space though.

 

I 100% agree with wanting more original stories. I think that's why KOTOR was so amazing. It gave us something completely original in the universe with completely new characters and even going to planets that were in the movies and EU didn't seem heavy handed. I hate that everything new has to tie into main characters in one way or another.

That's a crazy idea for redoing the map from scratch, though I'll say I'm glad you didn't for purely selfish reasons. I'm glad that a lot of the EU is being brought back into the canon the way that it is, the original new canon map was way too empty.

 

So one of the things I think about a lot when it comes to rationalizing inconsistencies in the stories, at least relative to things people say, is what it's they're just wrong. It obviously doesn't work for problems that come up with events, but what if Han was just making **** up to sound impressive to Obi-Wan and Luke because he figured they were from a backwater and had never been off planet and didn't know anything about space travel. It's could have been a joke to see if they actually knew anything or to see how much he could get away with from them instead of a crazy black hole/space monster story.

 

I just noticed this, and remembered that I wrote that book. I'm sure there's some fancy Latin phrase for what this means for the in-the-Republic/not-in-the-Republic argument.

Star Wars really is unlike reality, in that sometimes you do get your own facts, at least if you're in a privileged enough place where you get to create them.

Anyway, found that amusing. As you were!

 

De facto vs de jure

 

Wait, you think it was a crazy idea, or you don't think it was a crazy idea? The way you phrased it makes me wonder. I don't mind either way, just curious.

 

Yep, and I think I used that somewhere. I meant something along the lines of "you're not allowed to win the argument by creating a fact and pretending it was always there." But said fancier.

 

Alternatively, a Discworld example:


"Is he allowed to do that?"
"I think that comes under the rule of Quia Ego Sic Dico."
"Yes, what does that mean?"
"'Because I say so', I think."
"That doesn't sound like much of a rule!"
"Actually, it's the only one he needs."

 

Closer to home: "I will MAKE IT LEGAL!"

 

Secrets of Tatooine, from the WOTC version of RPG, would be my guess. (For the first reference to Tatooine being in the Republic)

 

I think it's a crazy idea, but in a good way. If you're going for a clean slate then go for a clean slate.

But I'm still glad it didn't happen.

 

That's pretty much how I wound up feeling about it. It simultaneously would have been a good idea and I'm glad it didn't happen.

I do find the whole thing a little amusing, however, as a teeny microcosm of the Legends-new canon debates that get everybody so fired up, or did once upon a time.

At least where geography was concerned (because nobody gave a hang about my opinion on anything else or should have), I was the wild-eyed bomb thrower saying things like, "Let's redo the map from scratch!" or proposing overhauls of the Outer Rim, its sectors, how much of it the Empire formally controlled, etc. And LFL was consistently like, no, let's leave things the way we established them.

 

Oh believe me, they still do. I get emails every so often from people claiming to be a "real" Star Wars fan and demanding I remove anything Disney created from my map.

I definitely get why LFL would be protective like that, considering how much of the old EU is getting brought back into canon, keeping the old map left the door a bit wider open for that.

 

I don't think it's about a potential "in" for old stories. It's more that while they made a decision to wipe the slate to give future storytelling maximum freedom, they had no desire to overwrite the world-building, what I sometimes call "the infrastructure EU," because they figured future storytellers would want to rely on that work too.

I saw this early on when I was asking questions for the first Servants of the Empire book. There's an early scene where Zare and another kid are listening to TIEs going overhead and trying to identify the engines by their sounds. I knew what model the TIE engine had been in previous storytelling, but asked if that was still true now and how I should approach such questions. Their response was essentially, "Why would we change the designation of a TIE engine part?" The map was the same philosophy.

 

On one hand, having an established map does help storytellers have a consistent image of where everything lays in the galaxy. And it saves storytellers migrating from legends from having to relearn everything. But at the same time, it's a map that was shaped by legends history, which doesn't apply anymore. And now new stories have to be worked into fitting into the established map, rather than the map being shaped by their stories. I'm mixed about the decision too, both decisions have their pros and cons. But now that you've planted the idea in my head, I really want to see what a redone map would look like.

To be fair, it seems like they're not afraid to change/tweak the map as needed to fit canon. Garel and Lothal's placement in Guide to Batuu suggests the Dominus sector has been changed to the Lothal sector, for example. But I'm sure at some point we'll get a reference book that explains how the Lothal sector was known in antiquity as the Dominus sector, and that technically it's not a change at all.

 

I don't think one necessarily needed to redo the entire map from scratch to make the Unknown Regions have a not-stupid location, TBH.

 

I really like the infrastructure analogy. I wasn't thinking so much about it being an in for the old stories but more for reestablishing the old universe through new stories. It seems like everything exists in limbo until an author decides to include that part of the universe and suddenly it pops back into existence.