The very many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XXV
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SouthernKing
crickety cricket
personally, I'll be happy if the KOTOR canon gets preserved, because that was pretty much the only major part of the EU I actually cared for.
Why? I wouldn't want to if they had been worth anything in the first place.
But it's more consistent, in that at least there was one. Trek has never been policed for cannon, not even in what's been on the shows and movies.
Synobun
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You're completely right. Their opinion is more right than my opinion because subjective entertainment is now entirely objective.
You get it.
Phrossack
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Hey, literature teachers and movie connoisseurs have always subtly taught us that their views are correct, and that there's a difference between liking art and
Synobun
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Watch. The reviews.
I have. They're linked to every single time by someone who laments about their hatred for the prequels. It would have taken determination to not watch them.
Regarding Star Wars, there is no such thing as "original six films." There were three original films. Then a decade and a half later, these other things came along. I don't know what to call them or how to group them, but let's not insult the original three films by trying to get them grouped together.
ParkCungHee
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If you really want to get into it, there's one film, and then two sequels, and then 3 prequels.
And so "entertainment is subjective" is your grand rebuttal? Of course entertainment is subjective- with enough psychedelics you could watch Mark Hamill scratch his head for three hours and have a blast- but art, by human standards, is objective, and your enjoyment of the prequels doesn't change or alleviate their utter failure in the slightest.
Hmm, I'll take a shot. Good trilogy is the originals, bad trilogy is the upcoming one, and ugly trilogy is the seven hours of synthetic acting that was released in the early 2000's?
Synobun
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You guys are hilarious. Now I remember why I came back to CFC.
hobbsyoyo
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What do you mean?
I'm not aware of any 'official' canon system, but the general consensus of the ST community is whatever shows up onscreen in a movie or TV episode (other than TAS) is considered 'canon' and everything else is not. It's kind of silly as it can cause a bit of controversy here and there when people get butthurt that their favorite video game or comic doesn't get included, but at least it's simple.
For what it's worth, ST is decent as far as policing their movies and TV stories for consistency. Also, apparently Gene Roddenberry went along with the unofficial canon system (at least nominally) though he caused his own controversy by allegedly declaring ST V and parts of ST VI apocryphal and 'non canon' as he hated them. Fans generally ignore that.
Anywho, the rule 'on screen = canon' is a lot more straightforward than the Star Wars universe, regardless of whether or not there is some body of authority in the SW universe who decides on what is canon/not canon. And at least it isn't Disney that's calling the shots.
Palpatine did have several clones. At first, he only had one, which Luke and Leia killed. Then it turned out that he had another, and another; they were all grown and kept in reserve so that he could transfer his Force essence or something to them when one body was killed. They popped up sequentially (shame; it would've been pretty funny to see two Palpatine clones go after each other) until the last one was killed by Han Solo during a somewhat bizarre confrontation on Onderon.
This is why Dark Empire sucked. Well, it's one reason why Dark Empire sucked.
The whole 'clone saga' was even heavily lampshaded in later Star Wars books. At one point, the character Mara Jade, one of the Emperor's personal assassins, told Luke that she was never convinced that those clones were actually him. And an in-universe source (Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force) written by the Jedi Master Tionne Solusar hypothesized that the clones were all insane and only believed each was the real Palpatine.
Timothy Zahn wrote many good ones: Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command are widely cited. Scoundrels, a newer effort, is also very good. All of these would be relatively easy for somebody who doesn't really know the EU to get into.
Matthew Stover's Shatterpoint, which takes place during the Clone Wars, is fantastic. He also wrote what is, in my opinion, the Best Star Wars Book Ever, Traitor, but you might not understand what's going on in that without reading some of the other books in the New Jedi Order series that preceded it. Stover's also written Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, which is quality, and the Revenge of the Sith novelization, which was amazing. [/fangirl squee]
The X-Wing series contains generally solid military sci-fi, if you're into that sort of thing; the Aaron Allston books in particular do it well and are also rightly counted among the funniest Star Wars books ever.
James Luceno generally puts out solid prose. His Darth Plagueis, the story of Palpatine and his Sith Master, is pretty good, as is Labyrinth of Evil, which is sort of an immediate prequel to Revenge of the Sith.
For older books, it's hard to do better than Brian Daley, who wrote an excellent trilogy about Han Solo. At Stars' End, Revenge, and The Lost Legacy are all really good and have held up quite well given that they were published in the late 1970s.
If you're into comics, Dark Horse had several good series, especially Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars: Republic, and Star Wars: Legacy. Another series, Rogue Squadron, was up-and-down in terms of quality but included one of the best story arcs in the entire canon, In the Service of the Empire, so there's that.
John Jackson Miller wrote for many of those Dark Horse comics. Lately he's also produced his own novels, which are generally pretty good. I enjoyed Kenobi in particular: it's basically a Western set on Tatooine during the early stages of Obi-Wan's exile there.
Originally, the G/T/C/N differentiation held. That's still, technically, the way things work. It's not that they were separate canons or anything like that, more of a guideline for resolving conflicts: it's all true, regardless of what level of canon it occurred in, but if there are contradictions the movies take precedence over everything else, and so on, and so forth. Often, there would be in-universe efforts to re-explain contradictions so as to allow aspects of the lower-level canonical story to continue to exist.
However, a couple months ago, Lucasfilm announced the creation of a "story group" that will unify canon. Some things will be cut out, some things will be kept, and whatever's left will all be on the same level: nothing supersedes anything else. We don't know what's being cut out and what's being kept. At all. We only even know two people on this story group in the first place: Leland Chee and Pablo Hidalgo.
Chee and Hidalgo are the most prominent Lucasfilm employees in the maintenance of canon already; Hidalgo in particular is regarded as something of an arch-nerd or super-fanboy who made his dreams come true when he went to work for George. They're the kind of people who would work to save whatever they possibly could, even if it's random statistics from the old West End Games sourcebooks, because they love it all. (Well, almost all.)
Now, of course the people writing the new movie's script are going to want to change things, regardless of whether that makes anything better. That's the way Hollywood works: it has to leave its own mark on a story, even if the story was perfectly fine beforehand. (And make no mistake: there's a lot in the EU that can't be described as "perfectly fine". Some, like Dark Empire, the Jedi Academy trilogy, or the Jedi Prince books...well, it would be charitable to refer to them as "bad".) If the writers are really determined to change something, one might argue, the story group is just going to have to go along with that. Maybe. The point is that there are pressures from both directions. If they wanted to bulldoze canon entirely, they wouldn't have brought in Chee or Hidalgo. Some things are definitely going to change; some things probably aren't. We simply don't know what's what, and there's not a whole lot of ground for guesswork.
This is why Dark Empire sucked. Well, it's one reason why Dark Empire sucked.
The whole 'clone saga' was even heavily lampshaded in later Star Wars books. At one point, the character Mara Jade, one of the Emperor's personal assassins, told Luke that she was never convinced that those clones were actually him. And an in-universe source (Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force) written by the Jedi Master Tionne Solusar hypothesized that the clones were all insane and only believed each was the real Palpatine.
Yes.
Timothy Zahn wrote many good ones: Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command are widely cited. Scoundrels, a newer effort, is also very good. All of these would be relatively easy for somebody who doesn't really know the EU to get into.
Matthew Stover's Shatterpoint, which takes place during the Clone Wars, is fantastic. He also wrote what is, in my opinion, the Best Star Wars Book Ever, Traitor, but you might not understand what's going on in that without reading some of the other books in the New Jedi Order series that preceded it. Stover's also written Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, which is quality, and the Revenge of the Sith novelization, which was amazing. [/fangirl squee]
The X-Wing series contains generally solid military sci-fi, if you're into that sort of thing; the Aaron Allston books in particular do it well and are also rightly counted among the funniest Star Wars books ever.
James Luceno generally puts out solid prose. His Darth Plagueis, the story of Palpatine and his Sith Master, is pretty good, as is Labyrinth of Evil, which is sort of an immediate prequel to Revenge of the Sith.
For older books, it's hard to do better than Brian Daley, who wrote an excellent trilogy about Han Solo. At Stars' End, Revenge, and The Lost Legacy are all really good and have held up quite well given that they were published in the late 1970s.
If you're into comics, Dark Horse had several good series, especially Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars: Republic, and Star Wars: Legacy. Another series, Rogue Squadron, was up-and-down in terms of quality but included one of the best story arcs in the entire canon, In the Service of the Empire, so there's that.
John Jackson Miller wrote for many of those Dark Horse comics. Lately he's also produced his own novels, which are generally pretty good. I enjoyed Kenobi in particular: it's basically a Western set on Tatooine during the early stages of Obi-Wan's exile there.
They might include one or two EU stuff if it is *actually* good. And that is *BIG* if. So a total or near-total post-ROTJ reboot is likely.
This is all correct, except for what PlutonianEmpire wrote.
Originally, the G/T/C/N differentiation held. That's still, technically, the way things work. It's not that they were separate canons or anything like that, more of a guideline for resolving conflicts: it's all true, regardless of what level of canon it occurred in, but if there are contradictions the movies take precedence over everything else, and so on, and so forth. Often, there would be in-universe efforts to re-explain contradictions so as to allow aspects of the lower-level canonical story to continue to exist.
However, a couple months ago, Lucasfilm announced the creation of a "story group" that will unify canon. Some things will be cut out, some things will be kept, and whatever's left will all be on the same level: nothing supersedes anything else. We don't know what's being cut out and what's being kept. At all. We only even know two people on this story group in the first place: Leland Chee and Pablo Hidalgo.
Chee and Hidalgo are the most prominent Lucasfilm employees in the maintenance of canon already; Hidalgo in particular is regarded as something of an arch-nerd or super-fanboy who made his dreams come true when he went to work for George. They're the kind of people who would work to save whatever they possibly could, even if it's random statistics from the old West End Games sourcebooks, because they love it all. (Well, almost all.)
Now, of course the people writing the new movie's script are going to want to change things, regardless of whether that makes anything better. That's the way Hollywood works: it has to leave its own mark on a story, even if the story was perfectly fine beforehand. (And make no mistake: there's a lot in the EU that can't be described as "perfectly fine". Some, like Dark Empire, the Jedi Academy trilogy, or the Jedi Prince books...well, it would be charitable to refer to them as "bad".) If the writers are really determined to change something, one might argue, the story group is just going to have to go along with that. Maybe. The point is that there are pressures from both directions. If they wanted to bulldoze canon entirely, they wouldn't have brought in Chee or Hidalgo. Some things are definitely going to change; some things probably aren't. We simply don't know what's what, and there's not a whole lot of ground for guesswork.
"Ignore it if you like cause it's all contradictory and probably didn't happen" isn't less dumb than anything, sorry.
They're not that good and are very strongly influenced by nostalgia. I wasn't overly impressed by any of them. Some of the points are okay, some of them are just as, if not more applicable to the first three movies, and some of them are patently unfair criticisms.Watch. The reviews.
Did you hear his New Hope commentary? He doesn't spend the entire movie rambling about how amazing it is; he points out plot holes and questionable acting wherever it is.
IMHO he actually gives the prequels too much credit, but whatever. Critics of the reviews tend to obsess over little details without picking at his real criticisms.
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