boomslovingthealien:
mosymoseys:
geoffreytoday:
Seriously.
I know you like the EU. I get it. Those stories are important to you for various reasons. Here’s the thing though: They have NEVER EVER been Canon. You have been confusing Official with Canon, and you need to understand the difference. The canon of the Star Wars universe has always been the films. Beyond that, the only canon articles of Star Wars are direct adaptations of the films, the novelizations and the radio dramas. And the films always trump everything else.
Movies > Novelizations of the movies > Radio Dramas of the movies.
Everything else is merely Official. They are stories set in the star wars universe with the approval of Lucasfilm. However, they have never been considered canon. If they had been, the prequels would have been very different indeed. The Heir to the Empire trilogy alone requires the clone wars to be very different than the prequels made them.
No one kicked up a fuss then that Lucas wasn’t adhering to the continuity created by the EU. We all understood that these books, entertaining though they may be, were not written in stone, and when new Star Wars movies were being made, they’d follow their own path regardless of what some random author wrote in one of literally hundreds of novels based in the galaxy far, far away.
So relax. Absolutely nothing has changed. The EU remains in print and will remain in print. The EU’s status in Star Wars lore has not changed one iota. The rebranding of the line under the “Legends” moniker is clearly a move designed to prevent confusion as the new trilogy is released.
I know you wanted to see Mara Jade, or Grand Admiral Thrawn. Seriously though, if these new movies had to take into account the whole of the Expanded Universe, it would be a disaster. There’s just way too much of it, and if we’re going to be honest, a lot of it is pretty bad. And you can’t pick and choose, you can’t say this part of the EU is canon while another part is not. The only reasonable way to proceed is with a clean slate.
We literally have hundreds of books in the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I think we can live with that. There’s more than enough there to occupy fans.
no it was canon. it was a lower level of canon but it was canon. literally no one is confused about this. lemme actually just quote wookieepedia on the subject:
In 2000, Lucas Licensing appointed Leland Chee to create a continuity-tracking database referred to as the Holocron continuity database.
The Holocron’s database includes an area for a single-letter (G, T, C, S, N or D) representing the level of canonicity of that element; these letters have since informally been applied to the levels of canon themselves: G-canon, T-canon, C-canon, S-canon, N-canon and D-canon. As part of his work with the Holocron, Chee was responsible for the creation of this classification, and he spent the early stages developing and refining them into what they are today.
G, T, C and S together form the overall Star Wars continuity. Each ascending level typically overrides the lower ones.
lucas licensing literally used the word canon in describing the eu continuity. like i don’t know how much clearer than can be. it was canon.
no one kicked up a fuss when the prequel contradicted parts of the eu because it was already expected. everyone had known since they titled esb “episode v” that on day there would potentially be prequels. (although i remember when i was little and they were more of a theory than an actual promise but the potential was always there.) which is why eu books were never set in that era. which is why post-rotj authors tried to tip toe and hand wave and generally be vague about the details of that era. because they knew a lot of it might be overturned.
but episode vii was something we’d explicitly been told we wouldn’t get. so authors spent literally decades building up this detailed world and we as fan spent the same amount of time getting invested in it with the expectation that there wasn’t a film looming to come in an wreck it all. and then boom.
so yeah it’s a completely different level of feeling betrayed at work here. they told us the saga was complete. they gave free rein to the literary exploration of this era. and then they saw the potential to make more money and said “whoops never mind!”.
and while there may be hundreds of books in the star wars eu, of the post-rotj books — ie the ones i actually want to read — i’ve already read them all. until this announcement i used to be able to look forward to new stories coming out each year — i was looking immensely forward to the sword of the jedi trilogy — and now i can’t. i’m not sure how being able to still buy books i already own and have already read is supposed to make me feel better about that.
Thank you! I’m so glad someone else said it because I was going to have a right freak out about the OP’s libelous statements.
Well I’ll be damned. Learn something new every day I guess. Let me clear things up: For a long damn time, a lot longer than the current status quo you’re all so upset about losing, the canon hierarchy was exactly what I said in my original post.
That changed officially in 2000 with the introduction of Canon “levels”. Let’s be clear though, it’s still basically the same as the original hierarchy. The Movies Trump All. The Movies are not beholden to anything else. They are not required to adhere to anything else. If the movies contradict the EU, it is the EU that loses that battle.
Even that is subjct to a caveat though, as the following year Lucas said this:
“There are two worlds here,” explained Lucas. “There’s my world, which is the movies, and there’s this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe—the licensing world of the books, games and comic books. They don’t intrude on my world, which is a select period of time, [but] they do intrude in between the movies. I don’t get too involved in the parallel universe." - George Lucas, July 2001, Cinescape Magazine.
The point is, even if Disney hadn’t made the announcement, the results would be exactly the same. Episodes 7 through 9 would tell their story, and where they contradict the EU, the EU loses.
It’s really not that big a deal. Grand Admiral Thrawn wasn’t canon for 9 years. Then he got promoted to C level canon for 14 years. And now he’s back to being non canon again. He survived the first 9 years, he’ll probably be okay. He seems like a tough fella.
For me personally, the whole levels of canon thing seems pretty silly. If the movies trump everything then technically only the movies are truly canon when you think about it. Canon by omission isn’t really anything to be stoked about. Being canon because a movie hasn’t contradicted you yet seems pretty precarious to me.
Anyhow, sorry to have offended, but you’re all still heinously over reacting. With or without the official announcement, the EU was destined to be made non canon by episodes 7-9. One can complain about “promises” that there would be no episodes after 6, but it’s not a very effective argument. If you are incapable of enjoying the EU if it’s not the official written in stone canon of the Star Wars universe (and it was never that, even when it was considered tertiarily canon) then perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate why you like these stories in the first place.