Lit When Canon is not Canon Anymore... is it Legends?

They'll do what they did on Legends before it was Legends - smokescreens and bullcrap. Loads of both.

"It's all accurate from a certain point of view."
"It's mythology, not history."

Etc etc etc....

 

It actually looks like the old canon system with its various levels is still around in some form

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Bingo! Just undeclared.

 

Do other franchises end up with a similar tiered canon system?

 

Other franchises are more honest so don't need it.

Trek does not count the books, TV and film only, but the books have to follow their lead.

Dr Who? Not sure but a series built on time travel can generally get away with anything and everything.

Only SW has gone from a creator who wants to sell products based on his story but without being bound by them, to a new set-up where film and TV producers don't want to work with other mediums in a multimedia story. And in both there was a lot of effort put into obscuring it all.

 

Regardless of any contradictions, it will all stay canon. That’s it

 

Something something based on a true story something something.

(No, for real. There are no canon tiers, nothing is moving to Legends, etc. They've simply changed the point of view from which they approach the concept of canon.)

 

As a general rule, none of this rubbish really gets in the way of my enjoying the SW stories I buy. But....

Before when Lucas owned SW, there was no solution possible. With Disney owning SW, this should be fixable. That they prefer to give some creators greater latitude to run roughshod due to the medium a story is told in does irritate.

 

Legends isn't just a dumping ground for anything contradicted by canon. It's its own continuity, which not all of the canon material would fit.

For example, if the YouTube grifters got their wish and the Sequel Trilogy was decanonized, it wouldn't be shoved into the Legends continuity, because it doesn't fit it at all.

 

My headcanon on this is that the events of TOTJ was simply a different occasion, there's not very much that directly contradicts it and the few things that don't make any sense (eg: the end conversation with Bail) I can just ignore.

Basically I really like that book and I think it told a way better story than one ten minute short.

 

Thing is, with that particular example, there were a couple of really good analyses that laid out why:

- The conflict wasn't needed, matching to the version in Ahsoka would have changed little.
- More importantly, animating the Ahsoka section would have boosted SW' diverse representation on screen.

So it would have been win-win.

....Unless you're a member of the Toxic Brigade.

 

That's still a tier though, right?

Also, are the Trek books consistent with each other, or do they just start with film/show canon and branch off in different directions?

 

Well, for one I don't think it would fit in with Legends either.

But honestly legends was full of stories blatantly contradicting each other with side articles and sourcebooks giving explanations to plaster over said contradictions, but without the stories themselves changing or being considered non-canon. Even stories that contradicted the movies were saved - like the comic that portrayed Jabba as a Nimbel, or the one that had Obi-Wan, Vader, and Anakin save a world. I imagine it will be the same here - at some point some sourcebook is going to come along and explain either that the stories were two incidents or describe an incident that combines the tellings but in any case I don't expect Ahoska will ever be officially non-canon any more than Tales of the Bounty Hunters was when the prequels gave their Boba backstory.

 

No tiers, no nothing. Books, comics, games don't count and don't have to align.

Where the Trek books get interesting is 2001-2021. As with no new Trek TV or film on the cards for the main TV series, Pocket Books decided to do non-canon continuity. The short answer is it really worked, only ending due to the Picard TV series coming along.

 

Does the new canon really do that sort of retcon patch-up job, though? It doesn't seem like it to me, but I admit I'm not as familiar with the minutia of this continuity.

I agree that LFL won't actually declare anything to be non-canon, but I wouldn't be surprised if any future stories about the Lartes, for instance, ignored the issue instead of addressing it.

 

The canon tiers are still there they just don't talk about it

The charm of the EU was how Patchwork is was in regards to lore

 

Legends just means "old".

Anything that isn't important enough to be remembered and have an impact on the next story is de facto "Legends" because it is old and forgotten.

And sorry, Legends is not some encapsulated universe that was perfect and uniform. It is the catch bin for anything from 70s Marvel comics to 80s children's books to 90s Bantam and 00s Del Rey.

Now, of course, the people behind the new canon will defend all entries to their canon as legit, regardless of contradictions, just as "Legends" once did.

If somehow, Disney were to can the whole mess and reboot the whole thing someday, I suppose the "new canon" would become just as "Legends" as the old EU...but not yet.

Not yet.

 

No offense, but this reads like a weird double standard to me. Lucas always had the power to choose to incorporate the EU into whatever he did, and you can/could find plenty of angry fans of the latter insisting that he had to. There was never going to be a world where that actually happened, but there isn't some special quality innate to being a big corporation vs a single guy that means the latter has to be less flexible.

 

Canon is for nerds

 

Lucas was always pretty clear that he didn’t care about EU continuity, or even movie continuity half the time. Whereas LFL’s sales pitch for their reboot was that finally all media would belong to a singular tier of canon where everything is connected and there won’t be one guy at the top arbitrarily discarding stuff that doesn’t fit his true vision that he keeps changing. So if anything they set themselves up for people to be disappointed in them.

 

I honestly don't think Lucas really cared if the EU was canon or not.

 

I'd be in very much favour of the Aftermath trilogy and Bloodline being retconned. Never was a fan of those novels really.

 

A fair point. Admittedly, the current canon doesn't seem to have nearly the same amount of sourcebooks and rpg books providing such explanations at the moment, and I can imagine a lot of contradictions like that just being kind of ignored until then like your example, but I just can't believe we won't get something like that in the long run.

Indeed.

In particular - while the jedi order's constant shift between strict and open interpretations of the jedi code and its break up into numerous sects and even entirely different force religions with their own sects originated primarily as a way to reconcile contradictory visions of the jedi, particularly after the prequels made them very different than what most people expected, it did contribute to it all feeling very...real and alive. Because religions and organizations do change and split and all that over time. It is not something we are likely to see again, since now the PT vision of the jedi is established in people's minds and imaginations, and there are no contradictions to reconcile.

Which we all are here, so what is your point?

 

Can't quite see what you're getting at here.

Disney were in a position to look at what worked and didn't, to learn from the last 30 odd years of experiments and mistakes, from creator arrogance and confidence, but didn't take it.

They've pretty much replicated Lucas' have-cake-and-eat-it view of SW books and comics, going with the same correct calculation that fans will keep buying, keep trying to make it all work. They didn't have to.