Lit The Great River - The problem with the "the new EU"... A haven for Legends fans.

The concept of canon has nothing to do with continuity, except to us Star Wars fans apparently. Canon basically means "the greatest hits" or "the essential collection", and originates as a religious term meaning church law. What any of that has to with whether we all agree on what exactly happened in an imaginary galaxy is beyond me.

The Star Wars films and animations have been herculean efforts made to the highest standard - *that's* what makes them canon, and not how well they kept track of continuity, which is really an ancillary. Smaller budgets, smaller audiences, and even the delineating term "Expanded Universe" itself all seem to imply its own non-canon status.

Unfortunately this is a fandom which gives undue value to fiction as having occurred, so these continuity debates won't vanish. I for one am thankful that the Story Group has done a lot to make the continuity more accessible.

Kyber crystals are an interesting example. For years, the "kaiburr" crystal had been some sort of unrealized Force-related MacGuffin that made its way into Splinter of the Mind's eye, and mean while the makers of various RPGs had been inventing all sorts of lightsaber crystals like Rubats or Adegans or what have you. TCW material retconned these elements very elegantly in my opinion by simply making "kyber" crystals be what's inside a lightsaber. This means that when Kanan tells Ezra that they're going to look for a kyber crystal, we will know exactly what that means, and meanwhile I can continue to rely on my rubat crystal giving me a +5 chance to stun in SWTOR. And I won't be bothered by the lack of continuity because such a gap is simply not bothersome.

And it's not bothersome to the vast majority of poeple who buy Star Wars stuff, and that's also the literal bottom line for the people making it.

 

The chances are waaaaaaaay lower than it used to be, because of the organizational shift in LFL since the Disney sale. Right now, the same person in charge of greenlighting the films (the vicepresident of developement) is in charge of approving TV series, books and cartoons, and the same person vetting directors and screenwriters also approves novel writers and comic artists. It's not George doing his thing and not really caring about a licensing department that's trying its best to patch up things and keep them up to date.

Of course, conflicts will arise in time. That's completely impossible to avoid and it would be silly to pretend otherwise, but for now whoever approves a novel knows exactly the movies they are planning to do for the foreseeable future. As I said, the chances of contradictions are significantly lower.

 

Probably butchered that quote but it had to be said. The EU was discussed on here since the 90's. There is no way we are just going to stop talking about it now.

 

Okay, so you haven't actually read what people have posted.

Or anything related to the EU you're investing so much time criticizing.

 

Personal opinions? Georgie boy DID screw everything up. As much I love him for creating Star Wars, the most exciting thing about this "new" canon is no George Lucas.

 

True, but there are also a lot of people who seem to think the OT sprang fully formed from Lucas' brilliance and he somehow lost any and all talent by the time he made the PT, also apparently fully formed.

But what changed was that instead of taking full advantage of others' contributions as he did in the OT (sometimes by his choice, sometimes studio mandate or logistical constraints) he tried to do it all himself, and was either ignoring the feedback he was getting, or was receiving useless or no feedback, or likely some combination of both.

The people that think of OT Lucas and PT Lucas as some sort of Jekyll and Hyde transformation are the ones I was referring to. They're the same person, just one has the reins off.

 

Canon in a religious sense doesn't just refer to "canon law" but also the biblical canon, as opposed to the apocryphal books. It is in this sense that canon is used when discussing fiction. "Canon" is used in lots of fictional universes not just SW.

 

Did Rick McCallum actually do anything of use other than be an insulating yes-man to Lucas? Really his firing from Lucasfilm after the buyout was the first development that gave me hope that the sequels could actually turn out good.

 

Look, we all accepted that GL's vision came first. Fine. We just never expected him to then put his fingers into what, until he got involved on a basically full time basis, was to be a new television entry into the EU like any other entry into the EU. It's not even that GL's ideas were primary. It's the openly total dismissal of the EU as inconsequential that he ultimately came to express, and be expressed through Dave Filoni and others. It was like a slap in the face to long time fans of the EU, who were Star Wars maniacs during a time when it had waned as a cultural force and served to show him there was still a ton of interest in new Star Wars. Something that helped to convince him not only to do the Special Editions but also the PT. The fact that we were buying up the books as fast as they could get them written and shipped, the comics, the video games, the action figures etc.

Star Wars was a guilty pleasure for me in the years prior to the Special Editions causing it to rocket back into popular consciousness. And the EU is what really fed my interest. The movies were great, I watched them regularly. But the EU gave Star Wars in a whole other way. And I was sold the idea of all these stories existing alongside those three films. For 20 years. So it's a little irksome to be told this is one thing for 20 years, only to have it suddenly dropped and find out it's another thing all together.

I don't even care that much about Star Wars at this point. My consumption has pretty much fallen to just TCW on Netflix and Rebels. It does kind of bother me, however, when someone comes along and basically calls me an idiot for loving what I grew up with(the EU) and believing LFL when they told me it was the continuation of the Saga. I'm sorry, I believed the words on the packaging.

 

I'm going to just pull out this one quote since it encapsulates your entire argument and it literally couldn't be more wrong.

As Dawud786 and others have demonstrated, Lucas and the EU creators took many, many opportunities to do exactly what you claim they should have done, starting in 1978 with Splinter, continuing through surprisingly extensive discussions on Sith history for Tales of the Jedi with Tom Veitch and KJA, to signing off on major decisions in the New Jedi Order such as the Yuuzhan Vong history and Chewie's death, all the way to his answering of background questions for 2005's Labyrinth of Evil and a line-by-line review of the ROTS novelization. I could go on, but Wookieepedia has already done it for me.

And even though the vast majority of authors never got the chance to interact with him directly, there were people at Lucasfilm such as Roffman and Kausch (higher up than the publishers or folks like Pablo) who did and were empowered to speak representing his views and restrictions.

Pointing out that he repeatedly moved the goalposts for the subsidiary material is not saying "everything was all [his] fault and nobody else was to blame," it's just saying that, as mnjedi said, the EU did the best it could using what it was given and within what it was permitted to do.

Not knowing about all this behind-the-scenes action is perfectly valid, but don't flat-out claim that it didn't happen, when dozens of author and editor interviews across 35 years say the exact opposite, and don't take a lecturing tone on matters you clearly haven't familiarized yourself with before making sweeping and empirically disprovable proclamations.


"You have no frame of reference here, Donny."

 

I get the impression that darkchrono is trying to have a "prick waving dick fight," as George Carlin might have put it, about who is the more pure Star Wars fan. The one who puts all of GL's ideas on a sacred pedestal, or the "impure" EU fans.

 

Guys, I think we may be too hard on him. I mean, he's read four whole Walking Dead novels. That's clearly all one needs to do to know how the Star Wars EU works.

 

Steve I think you are taking your fictional universes just a little too seriously now. Relax and go drink a dr. pepper.

 

Nice dodge.

 

Let's all be friends together, I promise us LEU and NEU weirdos can get along right?

 

Getting on a bit of a personal soapbox here, but this is a terrible example to illustrate your (quite valid) point with. I have mentioned many times before that the old EU choosing to interpret Obi-Wan's poetic "thousand generations" line as a literal timeframe of 25,000 years was one of the sillier things it did. For that matter, while Palpatine's description of a Republic that has stood for a thousand years is presumably a bit more grounded in fact, it's a bit rhetorical itself. I think it's pretty obvious that Lucas didn't really have any specific timeframe for how long the Republic had existed when he wrote ANH, and while the AOTC figure does sound lower, it's not nearly as much of a flip-flop as, say, the apparently unending question of whether stormtroopers are clones. Or, heck, how many films the saga has and what it's actually about.

 

Not always. There was a Kyber crystal that, rather than being used in lightsabers, was used to store the List Of All Force-Sensitive Babies (Holocron arc).

And recently, the Unfinished Episodes had a super-sized kyber crystal - with Yoda saying that in the ancient battles between the Sith and the Jedi, there were terrible weapons - and at the heart of each weapon, a kyber crystal.

 

We are the True Eu-ians!

Our culture is, and will remain, far deeper and richer than the usurping "New EU" will ever be.

What need do we have of a permanent home when one Cantina or Forum or Thread does as well as another?

What need do we have of hard-copies when we have studied the Sacred Texts until we can quote them at length?

To aid in recruiting new converts, the Faithful are already transferring the Sacred Texts to 'Dot PDF' holocrons and spreading them across the Web.

We can walk among the New EU-ians unseen and unrecognised.

Some of the Faithful have even skilfully infiltrated the Empire.

When the cataclysm of the "Second Reboot" overtakes this prideful "New EU" and its followers....

We.... Shall.... Laugh!

 

Yeeeeeeaah yeah yeah, but we all forgot about that other one.

I think it's pretty cool that the Death Star has been retconned into basically a giant lightsaber as well.

 

I am an EU weirdo as well., but I enjoyed the ot greatly and was somewhat entertained by the prequels despite their major flaws. Hopefully the future is bright so we can all be happy

 

A generation is significantly longer than a year. The Old Republic didn't have to be exactly 25,000 years old to the day but if I was telling someone not in the know about something that happened last week I wouldn't say it happened a million years ago.

 

Yep, we trusted.

Not to worry, that ain't going to be a problem now, because we're going to be a whole lot more cynical!

 

That's an awful lot of poetic license, often used by teenagers, not adults. It's certainly not the kind of poetic license I would expect a man in his late 40s, who looks like he's in his late 60s, to say about a Republic he served just 20 years before.

I think saying 25,000 years because of a statement that covers a rather large span of time is one of the "sillier" ideas the EU ever had is probably one of the weakest attempts at absolving GL of his own inconsistencies. The "1,000 years vs 1,000 generations" is perhaps the perfect example of GL's inconsistency. One is a much more precise time stamp than the other, but the other, older, reference is a much longer period of time. And it was all anyone had to work with. And GL gave no indication of anything other than it meaning what it meant. Sure, they went with the rather arbitrary assumption of a generation being 25 years where they could have said it was 20 or 30. But no matter how you slice it, a generation is a significantly longer period of time than a year. So no matter how much poetic licence you want to grant Obi-Wan there... he's still talking about a longer period of time than 1,000 years when it would have been just as easy and more precise to say "for 1,000 years the Jedi were the guardians of peace in the old Republic." If the EU were to start now with just the OT to go off of, that line might be taken to mean the Republic was 35,000 years old since we are gradually coming to accept a generation can be longer than 25 years.

How can the EU be faulted with going with a number that nobody, not even GL if we are honest, knew was apparently wrong?

Yeah. I started A New Dawn... I'm cautiously dipping my toes in the water. It's almost too early for me to really care about the NEU at this point. There's basically nothing to it at this point, and there's too many variables for me to get all enthusiastic about it. And I have to unlearn what I've learned? For how long am I going to be thinking of how all the LEU that I grew up reading and loving, yes even the bad stuff before I was old enough to really know it was bad, can still work with whatever they are doing.

What really mattered to me about the LEU was the post-ROTJ period anyway. So, for me, interest in the NEU is really dependent upon what the ST does and how they work with that. So I guess I'm on hold for a year. It could also be that my time with Star Wars is at an end. I've got other fictions I'm more interested in right now, and better ways to explore metaphysical questions than Star Wars at this point.

 

Quick interjection: Some of you are getting too personal, here. Insulting one's character, reading habits or assumed soft drink preferences is not cool. Don't do it. In the words of our Lords and Saviours, "be excellent to each other".

Or at least apply Thumper philosophy when appropriate.