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This page is exclusively about Star Wars Legends content, comprising material made before Disney-owned Lucasfilm gave the entire Expanded Universe a Continuity Reboot. If you want information about the new EU, look here.

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The legends of a galaxy far, far away...

"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."

Star Wars Legends, alternatively branded as Star Wars Vintage on Disney+ and originally known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe (or EU), was a collection of stories meant to complement and build upon the worlds of the Galaxy Far, Far Away in ways that the Original Trilogy, the Prequel Trilogy, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars would or simply could not. While it technically began with the novelization of A New Hope, which was actually released just over half a year before the 1977 film, it didn't properly get started until the likes of Marvel's Star Wars, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and even The Star Wars Holiday Special really got the ball rolling. From there, the continuity expanded in multiple, sometimes contradictory directions covering nearly every imaginable angle to the universe.

George Lucas had an interesting relationship with the Expanded Universe. While he generally regarded it as glorified fan fiction that he could utilize to market future movies and shows, he looked at it from time to time and found works that he liked, some of which he drew inspiration from and in some cases he even gave his own input or requests. For instance, he initially named the unseen planet that served as the Imperial Capitol "Imperial Center", but he was advised to rename it "Coruscant" after that name was established in The Thrawn Trilogy. Likewise, Aayla Secura first appeared in Star Wars: Republic, a tie-in to the Prequel Trilogy, but she appeared as a supporting character in the last two films of that series due to Lucas liking her character design. Conversely, several stories in Lucas's movies and The Clone Wars brazenly contradicted established lore in this iteration of the setting, leading Lucasfilm's authors to have to create elaborate explanations for every inconsistency to help everything make sense. Lucas also held veto power over certain concepts; he rejected the original pitch for Dark Empire to have a villain use the likeness of Darth Vader, but was supportive of the concept of Emperor Palpatine creating clones of himself.

A major shift took place almost a year and a half after Lucas sold his company to Disney. On April 25, 2014, Lucasfilm Ltd. announced that in preparation for the Sequel Trilogy and all future works, the original Star Wars Expanded Universe would not appear in any future Star Wars materials (which, as it later came to light, was Lucas's plan anyway). Past tales of the Expanded Universe were subsequently announced to be reprinted under the Star Wars Legends banner, and a new continuity was formally established, consisting of what Lucas considered canon (the Original Trilogy, the Prequel Trilogy, and The Clone Wars), and all future material released from that point onward (unless otherwise specified). In addition, Disney would choose not to produce new works in the Legends continuity — aside from things that were already in the pipeline (like Heir to the Jedi, which was retooled to fit the new canon), or new content for The Old Republic (which was still successful and was being produced by Electronic Arts, who they gave a contract for the Star Wars video game license to) — in order to put nearly all of their efforts toward fleshing out the new universe.

The move to wipe the slate clean was done in order to give new Star Wars creators free rein to work within the universe without specific restrictions, such as Chewbacca being crushed by a moon; his canon counterpart ended up surviving past the end of The Rise of Skywalker, over a decade after his demise in the old canon. Creators hired by Lucasfilm would later integrate various characters and concepts from Legends into the new universe, but did so in such a way that the new material would better serve the ground rules set by Lucas himself (between his movies, The Clone Wars, and various unmade projects of his like the Star Wars: Underworld television series), and serve the "one big story" that the new batch of creators wanted to tell. (Incidentally, both Rogue One and Solo, Disney's first two non-episodic films, were directly inspired by planned story arcs for Underworld.)

Word of warning: Legends is vast. Therefore, please only add works that have their own pages on this wiki. The books listed are each part of their own series. They are heavily outnumbered by standalones and two-part series. A list of all Star Wars media is here. Warning: Huge. To give you an idea, pretty much every background character seen in the films, even that alien guy just passing by the screen, has not only a name and a species listed, but a fully fleshed-out biography. Typically no more than that, but still. Oh, and even the movie's background props have received their own stories. As of mid-2012, the list shows 2,337 items. Thankfully, a book has been published that ties everything published up to its release date into a neat timeline and has summaries of most of it. Conversely, the new Expanded Universe established by Disney is easier to catch up on... for the time being.

Quite a few entries have a questionable canon status, since the new continuity has been porting in concepts and backstory pretty freely with Broad Strokes in mind. In the words of Ahsoka Tano... "There is always a bit of truth in legends."

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Note: BBY and ABY stand for "Before the Battle of Yavin" and "After the Battle of Yavin" respectively — that is, the number of years before/after the destruction of the Death Star in A New Hope.

    Books 
  • Go here for a list of all books in chronological order.

Before the Republic Era (prior to 25,000 BBY)

Old Republic era (25,000–1000 BBY)

Rise of the Empire era (1000–0 BBY)

Rebellion era (0–5 ABY)

New Republic era (5–25 ABY)

New Jedi Order era (25–37 ABY)

Legacy era (37–138 ABY)

    Comic Books 
  • Go here for a list of all comics in chronological order.

Before the Republic (37,000–25,000 BBY)

Old Republic era (25,000–1000 BBY)

Rise of the Empire era (1000–0 BBY)

Rebellion era (0–5 ABY)

New Republic era (5–25 ABY)

New Jedi Order era (25–37 ABY)

Legacy era (37–138 ABY)

Various eras

  • Star Wars: Boba Fett
  • Star Wars: Adventures, a six-book comic set with each focusing on a different character (Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Han, Darth Vader and Boba Fett). Not to be confused with the comic book series of the same name from the Continuity Reboot.

    Short Stories 

Published in Star Wars Insider

  • The Tenebrous Way (67 BBY): Published in Insider #30. A pre-release tie-in to the Darth Plagueis novel, introducing Darth Tenebrous.
  • Maze Run (0 BBY): Published in Insider #31.
  • The Guns Of Kelrodo Ai (17 BBY): Published in Insider #32. A pre-release tie-in to The Essential Guide to Warfare guidebook.
  • Hondo Ohnaka's Not-So-Big-Score (22 BBY or earlier): Published in Insider 144
  • Omega Squad Targets (22 BBY): Published in Insider #81. A pre-release tie-in to Republic Commando novel Hard Contact.
  • A Two Edged Sword (18 BBY): Published in Insider #85. A sequel to In His Image.
  • Odds (21 BBY): Published in Insider #87. A tie-in to Republic Commando novel Triple Zero.

Published in Star Wars Galaxy Magazine

    Webcomics 

    Animated Shows 

    Tabletop Games 

    Video Games 
  • Go here for a list of all games in chronological order.

Old Republic era (25,000–1000 BBY)

Rise of the Empire era (1000–0 BBY)

Rebellion era (0–5 ABY)

New Republic era (5–25 ABY)

Legacy era (37-138 ABY)

  • Maul (never released)

Various eras

    Other 

    "Infinities" 
"Infinities" is a term referring to Star Wars Legends stories that were officially considered non-canonical even before all of Legends was declared non-canon. These stories were often "What If?" stories, parodies or Intercontinuity Crossover/Fusion Fic tales.

Books

  • Star Wars: Jedi Academy (the illustrated children's novel series; first three novels written by Jeffrey Brown)

Comic Books

Animated Productions

Video Games


Canon Policy

Over the years, what counts as canon for Star Wars has been made extremely difficult due to the size of the expanded universe (made no better by George Lucas making a special edition every year or so). However, a very loose system as to what makes up the overall canon was created by Leland Chee, a Star Wars expert hired by George to keep track of everything Star Wars. Before the events of April 2014, the levels of continuity were:


Tropes used throughout Star Wars Legends:

  • Absurdly Dedicated Worker: Played for Laughs in The Essential Guide to Droids. The tech book tells an anecdote where a binary load-lifter, a barely sentient droid that amounts to a forklift with legs, continued to stack boxes on a section of floor despite increasing signs that it was about to give way. After it collapsed onto the floor below, the load lifter just got back up and went to get more boxes.
  • Abusive Precursors:
    • The Rakata. Galaxy-wide slavers and Force-abusing conquerors. Eventually it seems The Force itself took issue with how they abused its power, and they crumbled into a few primitive tribes on one planet.
    • The Ancient Sith Empire also qualify from the perspective of most of the later eras.
  • Academy of Evil:
    • The Shadow Academy is a Dark Side counterpart to Luke's Jedi Academy.
    • The Sith Academies on Korriban and Malachor V in Knights of the Old Republic and The Sith Lords, respectively. The former encourages backstabbing and killing your fellow students and even teachers to gnaw your way to the top, and the latter isn't very different. The Korriban academy has been rebuilt and reestablished by the time of Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's just as evil as it used to be. For starters, it's possible (even encouraged) for each of them to be the Sole Survivor of their training cadre.
  • Advanced Ancient Humans: While still used in the "modern" setting, many EU references state this technology has been used for a VERY long time.
  • Advantage Ball: Any practitioner of Battle Meditation. Bastila Shan, Nomi Sunrider and Darth Sidious are notable examples.
  • Aerial Canyon Chase: Legends loves this in general. If a book has "X-Wing" in the title (and even occasionally if it doesn't), expect there to be at least one of some sort. X-Wings are actually somewhat slower and less maneuverable than TIE fighters, but there are a few reasons why the canyon trick can work. TIE fighters, with those wings, have greater air resistance, and those pilots who haven't trained in atmosphere often don't compensate for that. And an X-Wing can turn on its side and use its targeting computer to get through a gap only a handful of meters wide, while TIE fighters are almost as wide as they are tall. As Iron Fist showed, a TIE interceptor can pull off a similar maneuver due to it having a narrower profile than a TIE fighter.
  • Airstrike Impossible: This trope is so prevalent in the franchise that the Legends continuity introduced the phrase "Trench Run Disease" to refer to the practice of small starfighters swarming and overwhelming large ships and stations at close range.
  • All There in the Manual: Darth Bane: Rule of Two ends with the Jedi apparently believing the Sith have been wiped out, in accordance with what we hear in TPM, so where did they learn about the Rule of Two? Well, a short story some years before explains that a fallen Jedi learned about the Sith, and before dying muttered out the rule. It was recorded, but the Jedi just generally ignored it as the dying ramblings of a madman.
  • Alternate Continuity:
    • As of April 25, 2014, the entire thing (particularly EU stuff set after Return of the Jedi), compared to the films (The 3D Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series is still considered canon, though). It's safe to say that Doctor Aphra, Ezra Bridger and Kylo Ren do not exist in this universe.
    • The Infinities comic series, which are three independent retellings of the Original Trilogy storyline after a Point of Divergence in each of the movies. For A New Hope, What If? Luke fails to destroy the Death Star? For The Empire Strikes Back, What If? Luke froze to death on Hoth? For Return of the Jedi, What If? C-3PO is accidentally broken by Jabba? In addition, the "Infinities" label was applied to anything else deemed completely non-canon, such as official parodies, the Star Wars Tales anthology comics and crossover content like LEGO Star Wars.
  • The Alternet: Some works feature something called the Commnet. More prevalent is the Holonet, a system of Subspace Ansibles that allow real-time holographic communication across the galaxy.
  • Ancestral Name: Leia names her youngest son Anakin, after her biological father, in hopes to redeem the Fallen Hero's legacy and to overcome her own fear of Darth Vader by seeing the man Anakin Skywalker could have become through her son. Leia acknowledges that she might have placed an unnecessary burden on her son by giving him that name, and, growing up, Anakin himself struggles with the fear that he might follow his namesake's journey by falling into the Dark Side.
  • Ancient Astronauts: Filled with these, the most famous are the Rakata (more Infamous to be precise), Gree, and Celestials. And as sources indicate, their devices were FAR more brilliant than those used in the current setting.
  • Anti-Human Alliance: The Diversity Alliance in the Young Jedi Knights series. Its leader is the sister of Oola (the slave Jabba fed to the rancor in Return of the Jedi) and its formation was motivated by the extreme anti-alien attitudes of the Empire.
  • Anti-Magic: Ysalamiri actually void the Force in a vicinity about them. This makes Force users much more vulnerable in their presence. However their rareness and how hard they are to transport them stop them being a convenient countermeasure. Justified in that the vornskyr, one of the main predators of their planet of origin Myrkr, in part uses the Force to hunt its prey. In a related note, vornskyrs take an irrational dislike to Jedi.
  • Appeal to Force: Deconstructed, in keeping with Leia's line in A New Hope, "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." Imperial brutality, rather than cowing resistance to their rule, just tended to make people either angry or desperate enough that they'd fight back even harder.
    • In The Han Solo Trilogy, one of Han's Space Cadet Academy classmates defected to the Rebellion after the Empire put down a peaceful protest by incinerating it with a starship's engines.
    • In the X-Wing Series, Imperial Intelligence Director Ysanne Isard's increasingly brutal tactics after the New Republic captures Coruscant from her gradually alienate the very allies she needs to maintain her grip on power (unlike Palpatine, Isard is just the most powerful warlord in what's left of the Empire and no longer has effectively unlimited resources). One remarks that a soldier working for Isard had just two outcomes: death by the Rebels, or death by her.
    • Called out directly by a disguised Grand Admiral Thrawn in Tatooine Ghost. As an object lesson to an overly zealous stormtrooper commander who had tortured civilians, Thrawn punches him out and then asks him if that made him like Thrawn better. He then states that the new doctrine of the Imperial Remnant isn't ever-increasing brutality, it's Pragmatic Villainy. As shown in The Thrawn Trilogy (written earlier but set about a year later), while Thrawn is willing to be a Bad Boss who executes subordinates for failure and even depopulate entire planets if he finds it necessary, he does carefully weigh the practical pros and cons beforehand: the subordinate he killed on screen had failed due to incompetence and then tried to pin it on his supervising officer (and in a Call-Back to this incident, he later promotes another man for being creative when faced with a similar problem, even though the attempt failed).
  • Arc Welding:
    • Some of Palpatine's actions are suggested to be pre-emptive measures against the Vong. Thrawn's definitely were.
    • Abel G. Pena ties a few elements together regarding the Sun Guard, including making a mini-boss from The Phantom Menace video game one (even though the game's cannonicity is sketchy at best).
  • Armed with Canon: Legends basically had three main warfronts between authors:
    • Timothy Zahn, Aaron Allston, and Michael A. Stackpole coordinated fairly closely in their books and spent much of their time retconning what were generally considered the worse stories to make more sense. This culminated in X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar breaking Wedge up with Qwi Xux from the Jedi Academy Trilogy and putting him back with Iella Wessiri, and The Hand of Thrawn which spent much of its time taking potshots at nearly every preceding book not written by the Power Trio.
    • There was also two sets of Ship-to-Ship Combat invoked over Luke Skywalker and his niece Jaina Solo. For a while it seemed every author wanted to pair up Luke with their female OC (Gaeriel Captison in The Truce at Bakura, Callista Ming in The Callista Trilogy, and finally Akanah in Black Fleet Crisis). Zahn got the last laugh in The Hand of Thrawn when Luke asks Mara Jade to marry him, but then Legacy of the Force stuffed her into the fridge. Dark Horse Comics and the Del Rey novel writers (particularly Troy Denning), meanwhile, fought over whether Jaina would end up with her childhood friend Zekk or with Jagged Fel (originally a Zahn character). Dark Horse won with the implication in Legacy that Jaina and Jag founded an imperial dynasty; a subsequent novel had the two marry.
    • Finally, between Karen Traviss and approximately everybody else over the Mandalorians, whom she tended to write as better than the Jedi in every possible way, and Denning responding in such ways as dropping biological weapons keyed to the Fett genome on Mandalore just to kill off her Fett clones and their descendants. The Disney EU for the most part kept Traviss's worldbuilding intact, but ignored the fights with Denning and preference of the Mandalorians to the Jedi.
  • Ascended Extra: Due to the sheer wealth of stories, some characters can go from "one-off note in a sourcebook" to "fully developed character".
  • Asymmetric Dilemma: The "bacon and eggs" variant is a favorite gag in various Legends novels, especially those from Timothy Zahn.
  • Badass Normal:
    • Han Solo is one of Star Wars' best examples. He pals around with Jedi — including, eventually, his own children — and always manages to more than hold his own. Oh, and he killed Palpatine's last physical body, as seen in Empire's End.
    • Boba Fett has certainly earned himself a reputation as a badass. The man took on Darth Vader and did better than most Jedi (mostly because he survived intact). Boba has badass dialogue at times as well.
      "I swear by the soul I don't have, I am going to kill you."
      "Here's the deal. You break her heart, I break your legs." ―Boba Fett to Ghes Orade, on Orade's relationship with Fett's granddaughter, Mirta Gev.
    • Wedge Antilles — Only pilot in the universe to survive BOTH Death Star runs... and still kicking 25+ years later. Per the Jedi Academy Trilogy, explicitly not Force-sensitive, and yet widely considered the finest fighter pilot in galactic history.
  • Bad Black Barf: Mnggal-Mnggal zombies drool and vomit dark gray goo. Worse, the goo is in fact Mnggal-Mnggal itself, and it can go on to infect the new victims.
  • The Bad Guy Wins: The Orinda Campaign, alluded to in Black Fleet Crisis and finally explained in The Essential Guide to Warfare. The Imperials under Pellaeon actually managed to take some territory back from the New Republic, and kept hold of it until the war finally ended in a negotiated peace about five years later in The Hand of Thrawn. Note that "Bad Guy" here = "Antagonist", since Pellaon's actually a pretty nice guy.
  • Batman Can Breathe in Space: Darth Vader's armor being able to protect him in the void of space is a fairly consistent ability (Fitting, as the armor exists in the first place because early drafts of A New Hope had him enter the Tantive IV on "foot", through space). There are also the rare research flubs where characters are shown piloting TIE ships without the trademark TIE Pilot suit.note 
  • Became Their Own Antithesis: Jacen Solo went from a compassionate Jedi Knight to a pitiless Sith Lord. Anakin Solo was originally planned to venture to the dark side, but he was killed off instead.
  • "Begone" Bribe: According to ''The New Essential Guide to Characters", Jar Jar Binks once found employment as a shudderup musician; people pay to shut 'em up.
  • Benevolent Precursors: The Kwa likes to use super-advanced-even-for-the-setting technology to get around and meet new races. Bad Things happened when they found a planet called Lehon, on which lived a race called the Rakata.
  • Big Bad: Several, primarily stemming from Sith Lords, but others carry on the role as well.
    • The original galactic Big Bads were the Rakatan Infinite Empire, a race of powerful dark side-using Abusive Precursors who are long gone during most of galactic history, but are basically the spiritual predecessors of the Sith. Oh, and they're alive and well during the Dawn of the Jedi comics, the earliest chronological works in the EU.
    • The first major Sith Big Bad is the prototypical Dark Lord, Naga Sadow, ruler of the original Sith Empire during their very first major conflict with the Jedi Order. He's not the first Sith Lord — not by a mile — and several other Sith from his era would cause problems for the galaxy — but he is the first one from the original Sith Empire to declare war on the Republic.
    • Fascinated by forbidden, Dark Side-laden teachings, Exar Kun would rise to become the second major (though self-proclaimed) Dark Lord to wage war against the Republic and the Order, as leader of the Brotherhood of the Sith (with allies in the Krath cult and the Mandalorians).
    • Although tempting to say "If it isn't a Sith, it's a Mandalorian", the only Mandalore that really earned being called a Big Bad is Mandalore the Ultimate. The last known Taung (original Mando species) to claim the title, Mandalore the Ultimate re-consolidated the clans under the Neo-Crusader banner and fought against the Republic in the Mandalorian Wars.
    • Formerly curious Jedi Knights, Revan and Malak came to be known as dreaded Dark Lords, and led their original Sith Empire (founded from splinter Republic armies) during the Jedi Civil War.
    • Following the Civil Wars' end, Darth Traya, Darth Nihilus and Darth Sion were the three Dark lords responsible for nearly driving the already-crippled Jedi order onto the brink of extinction, particularly during Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords.
    • The Sith Emperor commanded The Remnant from Sadow's empire, rebuilding that civilization for over a thousand years, before finally launching an attack on the Republic and the Order around 3600 years prior to the movies. In his bid for revenge, he was also the one that spurred the Mandalorians into waging war against the Republic, as well as persuading Revan and Malak into doing the same. His attack sets off the Great Galactic War, which lasts 28 years and results in a stalemate, leading to a lengthy Cold War. By this point, The Sith Emperor has become a Greater-Scope Villain and left running The Empire to his Dark Council.
    • Eventually, the Sith Empire finally collapses and the Republic enjoys a period of relative peace....until one Jedi Master Phanius underwent a Face–Heel Turn, abandoned the Jedi Order and united the surviving Sith remnants into a New Sith Empire under the name Darth Ruin. Ruin is defeated, but his actions set off the New Sith Wars, a Big Bad Shuffle which last a thousand years and sees a succession of Sith Lords and Sith Orders waging a series of violent and costly wars on the Republic, notable ones being Dark Underlord, Darth Rivan, and Belia Darzu. All are defeated, but both the Republic and the Jedi are left shadows of their former selves.
    • The Sith, however, are not much better off and devolve into an Enemy Civil War that only ends with the formation of the Brotherhood of Darkness, led by one Lord Kaan, who struggles to keep the Sith from devolving back into infighting while both the Republic and the Jedi manage to rebuild themselves and their strength and move to take out the threat. Eventually Kaan is duped into killing them all, including himself unintentionally, by one...
    • Darth Bane. Bane, disgusted by Kaan's joke of a Sith Order, reforms it based on the Rule of Two, which states there will be One Master and One Apprentice, to prevent such squabbling ever happening again. He also sets in motion a grand Evil Plan to conquer the galaxy, which he expects to succeed in roughly 100 years.
    • It takes The Sith another thousand. Exactly what they were getting up to in all this time is still a bit of a mystery, but eventually we arrive at the time of The Movies and to Darth Plagueis and, more importantly, his apprentice Darth Sidious, aka Senator Palpatine of Naboo. After murdering his master in his sleep Palpatine finally executes the Sith's millennia old Gambit Roulette, successfully getting himself elected Supreme Chancellor and, with the help of Count Dooku, initiates the Clone Wars, that ends with Dooku dead, the Jedi devastated, and Palpatine with dictatorial powers. He takes troubled Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker as his apprentice Darth Vader and has him lead The Purge against the remainder of the Jedi. Palpatine reforms The Republic into The Empire with himself as Emperor, and spends the next couple of decades ruling the galaxy with an iron fist until The Rebellion, including Anakin's son Luke and daughter Leia, destroy his second Death Star and Vader undergoes a Heel–Face Turn and hurls Palpatine to his death.
    • After the Emperor's death, Ysanne Isard took over as the main Imperial antagonist during the X-Wing Series.
    • The role was shared between Grand Admiral Thrawn and Joruus C'baoth for The Thrawn Trilogy. A succession of major and minor villains followed, such as Admiral Daala, Admiral Pellaeon, and the spirit of Exar Kun, plus a couple of Hutts, rogue Imperials, Dark Jedi and one or two Always Chaotic Evil alien races, as The Empire devolved into a Vestigial Empire, and eventually signed a peace treaty with The New Republic. Everything finally seemed peaceful, until...
    • New Jedi Order introduced the Yuuzhan Vong, with their Supreme Overlord being Shimrra, but it's really Onimi that's pulling the strings. Over the course of a good 19 books the war with the Vong, driven by their toxic religion, kills hundreds of trillions of sentient peoples and sees the deaths of countless worlds, and though they are defeated and peace is made, the galaxy is left in a wreck...and the Sith are about to return...
    • Lady Lumiya set the dominoes up for Legacy of the Force, but she was defeated halfway through and later got replaced by her protege, Darth Caedus, aka Han and Leia's son Jacen following his More than Mind Control-driven Face–Heel Turn.
    • Fate of the Jedi has a Big Bad Ensemble in the form of Abeloth, another Outside-Context Problem; the Lost Tribe of the Sith, descended from a remnant of the Sith Empire; and Daala, now the embattled leader of the Galactic Alliance. The Jedi themselves have gotten Darker and Edgier too.
    • And finally, there is Darth Krayt and his One Sith for Legacy, set in 137 ABY, long after all the other main characters are dead. The Republic is finished, and The Empire is back but is now the lesser evil, and Krayt sets about executing a plan to bring order to galaxy he has been preparing for more than a century. His Dragon Wyyrlok briefly contests the title, but Krayt puts him down before finally being killed off himself.
  • Bioweapon Beast: Sithspawn is a term denoting the various monstrous creatures created by the Sith to serve as living weapons. Notable examples include Naga Sadow's Sith Wyrm, mutated from a space slug to serve as a guardian for his temple-lair; the immense Leviathans meant to act as living siege engines; Exar Kun's two-headed battle hydras; the armored and force-sensitive terentateks bred to hunt Jedi; Palpatine's strain of chrysalid rancors; and Darth Krayt soul-eating Sea Leviathan released as a terror weapon against the Mon Calamari.
  • Blind People Wear Sunglasses: The Miraluka are a blind race who lack eyes and see through the Force. Sunglasses or on occasion cloth strips are standard attire, partly so they won't get stared at.
  • Break the Haughty: The Selkath from Knights of the Old Republic suffer this greatly. Neither the Sith or the Republic wanted to attack Manaan because it was the planet which provided Kolto, the best healing agent of the time, and the Selkath abused that to make neutrality laws and had no problem imprisoning people from both sides who broke those laws. Fast forward to the discovery of Bacta, a far more effective healing agent than Kolto and Manaan suddenly crawls to the Republic to join and retain a strong economy. Manaan was denied and later was conquered by the Sith, who made the Selkath their slaves.
  • Breather Episode: The Millennium Falcon novel, which interrupts the very dark Legacy of the Force series. Also counts as Lighter and Softer.
  • Breeding Slave: In some works, (they're mentioned in X-Wing: Wedge's Gamble and The Bounty Hunter Wars), Kuati nobles are said to keep telbun, slaves apparently used for both recreational and procreative sex. In Wedge's Gamble Erisi Dlarit and Corran Horn use a Kuati noblewoman and her telbun as their cover ID during The Infiltration, and Erisi tells an Imperial customs agent that she's come to Coruscant with her telbun to conceive, following family tradition.
  • Broad Strokes: Legends really is the poster child for how this trope works. Its fans consider just about everything in Legends canon in some way. See this article in Wookieepedia for how it all works. It basically boils down to a seniority: Movies > Television > Newer Material > Older Material (Subject to be ignored) > Non-Canon (What-If stories, game mechanics, and LEGO Star Wars).
    • Note that George Lucas, creator, owner, and final authority of the Star Wars franchise, had his own ideas on the subject of Star Wars canon. invoked
    • Prior to the Prequel Trilogy coming out, one of the biggest rules imposed in Legends was "Do not talk about the past". Specifically, writers were barred from depicting anything that took place before A New Hope (i.e. the Clone Wars, specifics of the Old Republic, how the Emperor came to power, how the rebellion stole the X-Wing prototype, the fall of the Republic and the Jedi Knights, the history of the Emperor and Vader, the history of the Mandalorians, and anything about the history of the Jedi Knights) with only broad allusions to the past allowed at best.
  • Bug War: The Dark Nest Crisis, mainly the Swarm War.
  • Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": All over the place. In-universe pop music, for example, includes genres such as jizz, jatz and heavy isotope.
  • Calvinball: Throughout the EU, Sabbacc has received some pretty detailed rules, making it difficult to follow scenes that focus on a sabbacc game.note 
  • Card-Carrying Villain: Before some rehabilitative Character Development, many writers had Flanderdized the Empire and its servants into this. Ship names like Tyrant, Eviscerator, and Corrupter reinforce the ethos, as does the infamous phrase "I bid you dark greetings!".
  • Chekhov's Boomerang: The Errant Venture, the Maw, Centerpoint Station, Dathomir... If it exists, it will either be completely forgotten about or become a central plot element repeatedly.
  • The Chessmaster: Most common are the heads of a Dark Side faction. A Sith Lord with multiple underlings is almost guaranteed to attempt to be this.
  • Chick Magnet: Of all people, Luke.
  • Choke Holds: Jedi are trained in martial arts. Choke holds are preferred by some as it leads to victory in a fight without causing damage to the loser or requiring much energy expenditure on the part of the Jedi.
  • The Chosen One: Both the Jedi and Sith have their version. The Sith called theirs the Sith'ari. It was told that the Sith'ari would destroy the Sith but would revitalize the Sith into a stronger group than ever before afterward. This was accomplished when Darth Bane eradicated the current Sith of his time, the Brotherhood of Darkness, and then established the Rule of Two, which lead to the Sith finally ruling the galaxy when Darth Sidious' plan was enacted.
    • The Jedi have their Chosen One in Anakin Skywalker. The Chosen One was to bring balance to the Force and destroy the Sith. While "bringing balance to the Force" is generally unclear, Anakin did destroy the Sith filling the spots of the Rule of Two (himself and Darth Sidious).
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
    • The Sith. It's practically built in when your philosophy encourages selfishness, but all the same...
    • Fey'lya.
  • Clip Its Wings: Rebel and New Republic fighter pilots find that the solar panels on TIE fighters make wonderful targets from the side.
  • Clone Army: Grand Admiral Thrawn recovered some Spaarti cloning cylinders capable of growing a clone to adulthood in a matter of weeks and giving it memories.
  • Colony Drop: In Star Wars Infinities: A New Hope, Yoda performs one by dropping the Death Star on Palpatine.
  • Comic-Book Time: Averted for a long time. Compare the in-universe dating of any story up to about a quarter of the way through the New Jedi Order with its date of first publication and you'll find that the difference between "years ABY" and "years since 1977" seldom exceeds 5 and the former never exceeds the latter.
  • Common Place Rare: Hot Chocolate is said to be an exotic drink.
  • Continuity Nod: "Kiss my Wookiee!" "I love you." "I know." "It's a trap!" "Perhaps you'd like it back in your cell?" "Great. I always wanted a walking carpet following me around." Some are painful.
  • Continuity Snarl: Has its own page.
  • Cool and Unusual Punishment: Palpatine would kill and then resurrect Bevel Lemelisk no less than 6 times as punishment. Among them is being slowly devoured by beetles and being thrown into a vat of molten copper.
  • Crazy-Prepared: These stories were among the first to expand on Boba Fett's character, who was an extremely enigmatic and undeveloped bit player in the movies, and it reveals that he is very good at planning ahead and preparing for emergencies. In one of the Galaxy of Fear books, it's revealed he always keeps the engine of Slave 1, his starship, running. In one of the Tales from Jabba's Palace stories, to ensure he doesn't have to remove his helmet, he has a extendable straw built right into it in case he wants a drink.
  • Create Your Own Villain: Oh, are the Jedi bad at avoiding this one. Nearly every major Dark Side wielder is a fallen Jedi of some kind. And it started with the Second Great Schism, where the Jedi got into a tiff. The survivors were beaten up, packed onto ships and sent off into the Unknown Regions in the hopes they'd learn a lesson. They found a remote little planet called Korriban and some friendly locals called "the Sith"...
  • Crushing the Populace: Taken deadly literally in the Legends novel Tarkin (not to be confused with the newer novel of the same name), where Tarkin orders his shuttle landed on top of a group of anti-Imperial demonstrators.
  • Cunning People Play Poker: Sabacc features quite prominently in the original expanded universe continuity as well, and the more cunning characters usually know how to play sabacc.
    • The Thrawn Trilogy:
      • While on the planet Abregado-rae Han Solo joined a game that Fynn Torve was part of in order to distract local security forces looking to arrest Torve for helping run food and other essentials to the hill tribes.
      • After rescuing Torve both Han and Lando Calrissian filled Torve in on how Han came to own the Millennium Falcon — namely that the two had been playing sabacc for several hours and Lando had run short of cash, so Lando offered him the pick of any ship from his spaceship sales lot, figuring that Han would go for one of the newer luxury ships instead of the old freighter Lando had quietly been upgrading on the side. But Han instead picked the old freighter upon winning the game.
      • Trying to obtain ships for Talon Karrde Han approached General Drayson but had little success in talking him into loaning a ship to Karrde. Leia suggested to Han that he challenge Drayson to a game of sabacc for a ship, but Han remarked he wouldn't know what to do with a whole fleet of ships.
    • Jedi Academy Trilogy: Han and Lando play a number of sabacc hands in a rematch of the original game where Han won the Falcon. Lando ultimately won but then gifted the Falcon back to Han as a token of their friendship.
  • Cut Short: So, what was the end of the Legends universe like? Answer: Didn't seem like they saw the end coming at all. It was supposed to be Jaina-focused moving forward, but her big planned series got cancelled after the buyout. (Jaina had been built-up as a character over the years and might've actually been able to take Luke's place without too much fan backlash.) They did try their best to tie the books to the future time period in the Legacy comics by setting up how Jaina and Jag were going to rule the Imperial Remnant and start up the Imperial Knights, and how Jacen's daughter was basically the Jedi equivalent of The Beastmaster and would eventually be Queen of the Hapes Consortium (that super-powerful independent system who were introduced in The Courtship of Princess Leia) like her mom.
  • Danger in the Galactic Core: The Deep Core is an enormous and extremely dangerous black hole cluster, even deadlier than the Maw outside the Kessel system. These black holes, and all the giant stars, tend to screw up any hyperspace lanes, making getting in or out (or in and then out) difficult at best. In the New Jedi Order series the Jedi build a base there after the Yuuzhan Vong capture Yavin IV, on grounds that it's next to impossible to reach the location alive without a Force-sensitive at the helm.
  • Darker and Edgier: Legends steadily crept this way and towards Bloodier and Gorier. Compare the main horror of the first major novel, Heir to the Empire , to that of one of the most recent, Death Troopers. One is an adventure novel, and the horror is of being hunted down and captured by someone who wants to take your children. The other is survival horror, and the big fear is of being eaten by/converted into a zombie. There have been zombies in Star Wars before, but never quite the classical type.
    • The Legacy comics are all about this. Cade Skywalker is a drug-addicted bounty hunter who wants nothing to do with the Jedi or their force and constantly betrays and abandons friends and potential allies... and he's supposed to be the HERO.
  • The Dark Side Will Make You Forget: Happens quite a bit. The gaining of significant power, wealth, and influence makes a lot of Dark Side practitioners forget their past.
  • Deadpan Snarker: By far the most prevalent form of humor in the galaxy. In way of characters, we have Mara, Ben, all of the Solo family, all of Rogue and Wraith Squadrons...everyone of any importance will get at least one snarky line in.
  • Death World: Kashyyyk is the usual example, but also Ryloth (the Twi'lek homeworld), Tatooine and others.
  • Decapitated Army: Subverted. The death of the Emperor at the end of Return of the Jedi did not result in the immediate end to the war or the Empire, with various Imperial officers, warlords, and other officials, such as Ysanne Isard, taking the reins. However, without Palpatine to keep them in line, they largely descended into an Enemy Civil War (and only got better when Palpatine returned in a cloned body, only to go back to squabbling when he died for good) until Daala exterminated several of the most powerful warlords and then, after a failed attempt to destroy the Jedi Academy, handed leadership over to Pellaeon.
  • Deck of Wild Cards:
    • In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, if the Player Character says that Knights of the Old Republic had the dark-side ending, they discover the Sith Empire's capital Korriban abandoned. Log entries from Darth Bastila explain that Darth Revan left after a couple of years, and without them to dominate the lesser Sith, they began fighting among themselves for control of the Empire and the Star Forge, which none proved strong enough to control. This led to the Empire collapsing altogether.
    • In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Sith Order is a mess of this during the class stories: the tenures of new Dark Council members sometimes last only weeks before an upstart (usually their apprentice) overthrows them. With the Sith Emperor in seclusion, this has the Surprisingly Realistic Outcome that the Sith Empire is woefully underprepared for the resumption of open war with the Republic — in part because Darth Baras intentionally provoked the Republic to war early to discredit his master Darth Vengean. The Ilum arc even has a full-on attempt at a Military Coup by Darth Malgus. Ultimately, Darth Marr and the Sith Inquisitor PC end up forcing a measure of reform, forming a Big Bad Duumvirate to take effective control of the Dark Council.
  • Defector from Decadence: A lot of Imperials who leave the Empire do so because they can't stand something about it anymore. Most of them join the Rebellion.
  • Democracy Is Bad: The government of the New Republic is so massively dysfunctional that it survives less than a generation. It is replaced by the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances, which is so blatantly incompetent that they totally miss the fact that a Sith Lord pulls off a repeat of Palpatine's takeover of the Old Republic simply by slipping an amendment into a bill that gets casually passed by the legislature without notice. The Sith Lord in question's mother is the only one who observes that this is unconstitutional, as the office of Chief of State can supposedly only be gained via election. The government seems not to notice or care, even when he proceeds to go on a rampage against any world that does not submit to his rule. Following this debacle, the GFFA government again allows the office of Chief of State to go to someone arbitrarily appointed, in this case an Imperial Admiral who once tried to destroy their capital planet. She likewise attempts to create a police state, once again largely unimpeded by a compliant legislature, forcing the Jedi to become defiant outlaws. In contrast, the authoritarian Empire is increasingly depicted as better-run, complete with leaders who are noticeably more competent and even-handed than their counterparts running the GFFA.
  • Depending on the Artist: Strongly evident in the comics.
  • Depending on the Writer: So very much. Luke or Leia: who is the calm, humble, quiet one? Who takes more after their father? Does Han Solo say "Please" without sarcasm? What expletives do specific characters use, and what word substitutions? Thrawn: a mere tactical genius, or so near-omniscient that taking him down was a fluke? What household animals might civilians have? How are droids treated? Are stormtroopers soldiers following orders and doing what they think is right, or near-mindless evil Mooks who are okay to slaughter? Chewbacca: a character, or just a background detail? Does everyone know Luke and Leia's parentage? Is Leia utterly badass or a Damsel in Distress? Are Jedi demigods, unobservant and pathetically easy to kill, or somewhere in between? Daala: a complete General Failure or the second coming of Thrawn? Can X-Wing pilots contribute to the plot in any way besides flying around during a battle?
    • The most prominent Depending on the Writer issue is undoubtedly the question "How much about the main characters is common knowledge among the ordinary people of the galaxy?" Many writers assume that the galaxy is essentially made up of people who saw the Star Wars films and therefore Luke can't go anywhere without being recognized. On the other hand, other writers reduce the in-universe prominence of the main characters and knowledge about them—The Thrawn Trilogy's plot basically relies on the fact that nobody except Luke knows what happened on the Second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, and the general public are still debating whether Darth Vader died there or just went missing. In this version of the Star Wars galaxy, nobody except the main characters knows that Darth Vader was also Anakin Skywalker and was Luke and Leia's father. However, by Legacy of the Force, everything is apparently common enough knowledge that Han Solo makes jokes about Boba Fett's childhood on Kamino.
  • Development Gag: Here and there, mostly in background materials, a few ideas from George Lucas's preliminary ideas for the films have snuck in, such as the world of Had Abbadon, or the Dark Knights of the Sith.
  • Displaced Origin: The Sith were not originally Dark Side Force users who opposed the Jedi Order.
    Vestara Khai: The term Sith actually refers to a species of red-skinned beings who were native to Korriban.
  • Distant Sequel: This is fairly, as the Legends continuity covers several millennia of galactic history:
    • Dawn of the Jedi takes place no less than 25,000 years before the movies, during the earliest origins of the force-using order that would later schism to form the Jedi and the Sith.
    • Tales of the Jedi is set 5,000 years before the movies and 100 years before Knights of the Old Republic.
    • Darth Bane is 1,000 years before the movies.
    • Star Wars: Legacy takes place about one hundred years after the original Star Wars movie trilogy, after numerous wars and political upheavals. The main characters are the descendants of the first trilogy's main cast, several generations removed, and when older characters show up it is typically as ghosts.
  • Disturbing Statistic: In Black Fleet Crisis, Luke recalls how disturbed he was to learn that over a million people were on the Death Star when he destroyed it.
  • Doesn't Like Guns: Doesn't like lightsabers in the case of Nomi Sunrider in Tales of the Jedi (after she used her husband's lightsaber to avenge him and was horrified at what she did to his killers) until Master Thon manages to convince her that they're as much a tool as the Force, not just weapons.
  • Dragon Tamer: After the draconic Basiliskans were defeated by the Mandalorians following a last ditch effort in which they poisoned their planet to deny them victory, the Mandalorians turned them into war mounts alongside their war droids. Eventually, they lost their sentience, and became little more than beasts for the Mandalorians to use in their future wars.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness: Suffers heavily from this, having started when A New Hope first came out. Ever since, there have been muddled interpretations of what the Jedi, the Sith, and the Force are and their depictions contradict how they're shown in the films, for starters.
    • The Dark Empire sourcebook released for the tabletop RPG in the '90s established that Palpatine had a distant 11-year-old great-niece named Ederlathh Pallopides, which would imply Palpatine was from nobility or a royal family. Well... the Darth Plagueis novel would say Palpatine is from a noble family, except he killed them all when he was young. Ederlathh was also never brought up again.
    • How Boba looked beneath the helmet was never established until Attack of the Clones, so as a result, Ailyn (whose appearance is based on a very light-skinned Greek-American model) looks nothing like her Space-Maori father.
  • Earned Stripes: Expanded Universe (Legends, at least) sources claim that the Corellian Bloodstripe that Han wears on his trousers is this also.
  • Eccentric A.I.: droids that go without a memory wipe (basically a factory reset) for long enough tend to develop personality quirks. For instance:
    • Cybot Galactica, manufacturer of the 3PO-series protocol droid, was actually forced to add creativity-dampening code in the droids' firmware to keep them from unnecessarily embellishing their translations when used as interpreters. They also have a reputation for developing annoyingly neurotic personalities (Exhibit A being C-3PO himself), which their competitor Industrial Automaton managed to greatly improve on when they produced the LOM-series protocol droid (before Cybot forced it off the market with a patent infringement lawsuit).
    • In the X-Wing Series: Wraith Squadron protocol droid Squeaky survived being captured on the Tantive IV and taken into Imperial service, and has full New Republic citizenship. He is prone to being a stickler for rules and regulations to the point of annoyance.
  • Eldritch Abomination:
    • Definitely Darth Nihilus, a Sith Lord who became a humanoid black hole in the Force; Waru, a more benevolent example and a mass of gold-plated flesh hailing from another universe; the Mnggal-Mnggal, a vast Blob Monster that covers an entire planet in the Unknown Regions and can possess living creatures by crawling inside them; and Abeloth, once a normal alien who became an immortal horror while trying to become a god. Arguably Palpatine in Dark Empire.
    • Alan Moore created a couple for several stories he wrote for a UK Star Wars magazine in the 1980s.
    • The Ones, also known creatively as the Force Wielders. Beings truly ancient beyond understanding, said to be Celestials, the first Precursors of the Star Wars Galaxy. Their power in the Force is so great that they can, without hyperbole, be considered embodiments of their respective sides: The Son, the Daughter and the Father. And that's not even mentioning the Mother.
  • Elite Agents Above the Law:
    • Recurring character Mara Jade is a Force-sensitive who was trained by Emperor Palpatine to be an "Emperor's Hand", a spy and assassin answering directly to him. The Thrawn Trilogy and later-written prequels such as Allegiance give some indications as to the scope of her duties and authority: in Dark Force Rising she tries (and fails) to Force-Choke Grand Admiral Thrawn after he betrays her, and implies that she was permitted to kill even Imperial military personnel more or less at will if she had a reason. Palpatine's death left her unemployed; she found work as a smuggler and gun for hire, and Luke Skywalker begins training her as a Jedi in The Last Command.
    • Discussed in the New Jedi Order novel Destiny's Way. Luke, by now the official Grandmaster of the Jedi Order, has a less-than-cordial encounter with a New Republic politician named Fyor Rodan, who wants to remove this trope from the Jedi. He seeks to make the Jedi Order a formal branch of the New Republic military, which among other things would make it possible to Court Martial Jedi Knights who fall to the dark side or otherwise go rogue. Luke prefers to keep the Order independent, feeling, as the Old Republic's Jedi did, that their purpose is to serve the Force rather than the political and military needs of the Republic.
  • Embarrassing Nickname: Luke's childhood nickname was Wormie, acquired because he was the smallest in his group of friends.
  • Endless Daytime: Ryloth, the Twi'lek homeworld, is a tidally locked planet where one side is always day, and always boiling hot.
  • Escape Battle Technique: If you fight Yoda, you have one of these. Usually a combination of Force Speed and distracting Yoda by endangering someone in the vicinity.
  • Evil Will Fail:
    • The Sith are just too evil to have any system they create endure for long, thanks to Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
    • Even non-Sith practitioners of the Dark Side very rarely meet any success which lasts. Greed, jealousy and arrogance all wind up leading to the end of some Dark Sider's life.
  • Exotic Extended Marriage: The Cereans (the species to which Ki-Adi-Mundi belongs) have a sex ratio unbelievably lopsided towards females, and that's why they are polygamous. Even Jedi like Ki-Adi are allowed and advised to practice polygamy, since every unmarried or not married enough male is a demographical hazard to the entire race.
  • Expansion Pack Past: Pretty much everyone. This is most notable in the Tales sub-series, which famously gave virtually every bit character in every crowd scene a backstory. Even the priest that married Anakin and Padmé has his own Wookieepedia page.
  • Face Death with Dignity: After being killed and resurrected countless times by the Emperor, Bevel Lemelisk is finally captured by the New Republic and is told by Wedge that, in no uncertain terms, he will be executed for building the Death Star. Bevel's response? "At least make sure you get it right this time."
  • False Prophet: Dark Side practitioners (usually Sith) lie for their own gain constantly.
    • Darth Baras' Evil Plan is to deceive the entire Sith Empire into believing that he is the Voice of the Emperor, whose job is to speak on The Emperor's behalf. If he were to succeed, he would become the de facto ruler of the Sith Empire, and everyone would worship and obey him just as they would The Emperor.
    • Darth Zash tells her apprentice that they're destined to become empowered by the artifacts they're hunting. The reality is that Zash needs them so she can take over the Inquisitor's body because her body is about to die from Dark Side overuse.
  • Fantastic Diet Requirement: The Arcona come from a planet rich in ammonia and need to supplement their diet with dactyl, a crystalline ammonia compound, while offworld. Conversely, common table salt is a potentially deadly Alien Catnip to them.
  • Fantastic Fighting Style: The seven forms of lightsaber combat that the Jedi and Sith use. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages in a sort of Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors, and each is associated with certain tropes:
    • Form I (Shii-Cho): The easiest style to learn, and so the first one taught.
      • Determinator: The mindset it espouses.
      • Fights Like a Normal: Shii-Cho was founded in the era where warriors were transitioning from common melee weapons to lightsabers, so much of the technique is based in classic swordsmanship, making it seem clumsy and awkward compared to later forms.
      • Flawed Prototype: The first attempt to establish a system of lightsaber combat, it does not utilize the lightsaber's unique mechanics as much as later forms, nor adequately prepare a Jedi to defend against another lightsaber.
      • One-Man Army: It specializes in fighting multiple enemies.
      • Overshadowed by Awesome: Fully trained Jedi rarely specialize in this style in favour of more advanced techniques.
      • Simple, yet Awesome: Despite its basic moveset, it's a perfectly serviceable combat style.
      • Slice-and-Dice Swordsmanship: Known for its broad, sweeping attacks.
    • Form II (Makashi): A classical style reminiscent of fencing. The choice of many a Master Swordsman in days past.
    • Form III (Soresu): The most defensive style, well-suited to a Technical Pacifist.
    • Form IV (Ataru): A fast-paced, agile fighting style that often draws on the Force to perform acrobatic moves like the Spin Attack.
    • Form V (Shien/Djem So): A style emphasizing overpowering an enemy by defending and launching counterattacks. Shien is meant to be used as a Long-Range Fighter style while Djem So is its Close-Range Combatant variant.
      • Attack Reflector: Shien does this literally, specializing in reflecting enemy fire back where it came from. Djem So does it more metaphorically, since it emphasizes parrying and riposting.
      • Mighty Glacier: Djem So is the most physically powerful style, but kind of slow and not very agile.
      • Reverse Grip: Shien practitioners are known for occasionally doing this.
      • Unskilled, but Strong: Djem So is this relative to some other styles.
    • Form VI (Niman): A mixed style that blends all the previous ones into a single generic but versatile form.
      • Boring, but Practical: Nothing special or interesting about it, but the most all-around useful style.
      • Improv Fu: Emphasizes the use of creativity and unorthodox techniques like Psychic Powers and Dual Wielding to make up for its lack of a strong advantage in combat.
      • Jack of All Stats: Has about evenly balanced strength, speed, etc. compared to the other styles.
      • Squishy Wizard: Niman is a less-demanding Form to learn, freeing the Jedi up to study other things like diplomacy, negotiation, or the Force itself, such that it's often called "The Diplomat's Form." As a result, it doesn't have the combat capability of the other Forms, resulting in Jedi who know only this Form being overwhelmed in all-out battle situations. Every dead Jedi on Geonosis? Guess which Form they studied.
    • Form VII (Juyo/Vaapad): A rarely used style that emphasizes a Tranquil Fury mindset and so requires a great deal of self-discipline to properly employ. Juyo is the original while Vaapad was created by Mace Windu.
    • Other techniques that may be used in conjunction with these styles: Jar'Kai (Dual Wielding); Sokan (Combat Parkour); Dun Möch (psychological warfare)
  • Fantastic Livestock:
    • Nunas are scaly, barbeled but otherwise very birdlike Armless Bipeds raised for their meat and eggs in a manner very similar to chickens.
    • Nerfs are shaggy, cow-lie creatures farmed for their meat and hides, while grazers are gigantic alien pigs.
  • Fantastic Nirvana: The B'Omarr Order pursue a form of spiritual enlightenment that requires them to gradually distance themselves from physical sensations, allowing them to hone their minds and increase their mental powers. At the very end of their spiritual development, the monks achieve enlightenment and attain a state of freedom from all physical needs in which they are free to contemplate the universe for all eternity. The only trouble is that this state is attained surgically, with the enlightened brain contemplating eternity from a jar kept deep in the vaults under Jabba's palace. On the upside, the enlightened brains don't appear to mind, and occasionally get to roam about the building on spider droids if they ever have business outside their meditations. On the downside, monks who have violated the rules of the Order in some particularly egregious way are punished by being jarred up before they're fully enlightened, leaving the offender silently screaming for all eternity.
  • Fantastic Racism: The Imperial policy of High Human Culture started as a justification for the lack of visible aliens in a clearly multicultural society and rapidly took on a life of its own.
  • Fantastic Recruitment Drive: Luke spends a lot of his time wandering around the galaxy looking for hidden Jedi as well as people with raw talent.
  • Fantastic Ship Prefix: RNS (Royal Naboo Ship) is used by ships of Naboo's security forces.
  • Fantastic Underclass:
    • The Empire is very openly human-centric, and aliens under its rule are consistently abused and discriminated against. Military service is, outside of a few notable exceptions, barred to non-humans, while most aliens on Coruscant are required to live in specific, isolated neighborhoods.
    • On Tatooine, Jawas are the lowest-regarded nonhuman species that can still be considered part of society. Subsisting mainly as scavengers, they're regarded as foul-smelling pests, and can be abused or even killed with little consequence — especially in urban areas like Mos Eisley and Anchorhead. It's for this reason that most prefer to live in hidden fortresses and sandcrawlers out in the deserts, where they generally fare much better — though this leaves them under threat of attack by the Tusken Raiders.
    • Among the Yuuzhan Vong, the Shamed Ones are considered the lowest of their Fantastic Caste System: they consist of anyone who has been recognized as "imperfect", most commonly those whose Escalation Ceremony failed, leaving them maimed by transplant rejection. Though officially ranked as members of the Worker Caste, even the workers look down on Shamed Ones, relegating them to only the most degrading jobs.
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Much more prominent than in the films: most EU material contains actual dragons (not counting Dewbacks or other counterparts), literal wizards (not just Jedi), actual swords, elves (Nagai), Endor from the Ewoks cartoon was a melting pot of this, magical artifacts, Magitek, castles, at least one vampire, giants, ghosts returning from the dead, gods and goddesses, etc. This is a big galaxy after all.
  • Fast-Roping: ARC troopers are seen doing this during the Battle of Kamino.
  • Fate Worse than Death: Bevel Lemelisk.
  • Featureless Protagonist: Several video games do that:
    • Rookiee One, the protagonist of Rebel Assault I was a typical Featureless Protagonist with no face, for whom you would select both name and gender. In the second game, he was actually played by a {male} actor in live-action cutscenes. Still haven't got a name though.
    • For Jaden Korr, the protagonist of Jedi Academy, the player would choose gender, species (Human/Rodian/Zabrak/Twi'lek/Kel Dor), facial details and costume. Years later he made several cameo appearances in various novels, which canonized him as dark haired Human male. He eventually got a major starring role in Crosscurrent and its sequel, Riptide.
    • The Protagonist of KOTOR, for whom players selected name, face and gender at the start, was later given the name of Revan within the game itself. The Old Republic MMO eventually gave him a canonical face.
    • Similarly, the Protagonist of KOTOR II received the name Meetra Surik in the novel Revan, while Star Wars: The Old Republic showed us her "true" face. Interestingly, she was canonizes as a woman by non-fiction sources back in 2006 and remains the only departure from "White Human Male" model the above 3 examples followed.
  • Fictional Political Party: The Expanded Universe details a very diverse political climate with a very large number of different political organizations and movements all across the galaxy. Some are parties that involve themselves in the local affairs of a single planet; others try to make an impact in the Galactic Republic or New Republic. Among them...
    • During and around the time of the Prequel Trilogy, the two main factions in the Galactic Republic are the Separatists, led by Count Dooku, who wanted to leave the leave the Republic as see that it was disbanded and the Loyalists, led by Senator Palpatine, who wanted to remain with it; as we all should know, this eventually led to the rise of the Galactic Empire.
    • The Rights of Sentience Party is a party in the New Republic that grew out of a lobbyist group with a similar aim, to protect the rights of sentient species.
    • The True Victory Party was a political party comprised of radical Bothans who wished to continue ar'kai (i.e. "genocidal warfare") against the Yuuzhan Vong.
    • The POWER Party (that's Preserve Our Wild Endangered Resources Party) of the planet Telos IV was an organization created in opposition to the Telosian government granting a MegaCorp control over the planet's national parks and sacred lands for the mining of resources, which the POWER Party believed should be illegal.
  • Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon: The Darksaber is a cylindrical ship that houses a superlaser and makes up the majority of the ship itself.
  • Foregone Conclusion: Stories set before or between the events of the movies may fall into this. For example, if you read a story of Darth Vader searching for Luke between episodes IV and V, you would know that unless the location is Hoth he won't find him, at least not Luke's home base.
  • Forever War:
    • The conflict between Jedi and Sith. Starts several thousand years before the films, and is still going with only the occasional period off while one side rebuilds itself. Legacy might've seen the final end, but only because that's when the setting ended.
    • The New Sith Wars specifically lasted, on-and-off, one thousand years. By the end of it, much of the Republic was in ruins, and regular folk everywhere were getting just a little damn sick of Jedi. It ended when Darth Bane tricked most of the Sith into wiping themselves out, after which point the Republic just called time.
  • Formerly Sapient Species: The Kwa, three-meter-tall reptilian humanoids who ruled one of the galaxy's precursor empires, mostly died out when their empire fell. The survivors were stranded on their homeworld, Dathomir, lost their civilization and gradually evolved into beasts. Their descendants, the Kwi, are essentially big, blue and featherless dinosaurs — their regained elongated bodies, long tails and muzzles somewhere along the line. They're no longer able to speak, and are simply intelligent animals.
  • Franken-vehicle:
    • There are many variations of "Uglies" (first introduced in The Corellian Trilogy and greatly expanded upon in X-Wing Rogue Squadron and the X-Wing Series), built by shade-tree mechanics from salvaged parts of other ships. There are several common variations that hybridize Rebel/New Republic and Imperial ship parts, ranging from reasonably competitive designs such as the Invids' "Clutches" and Twi'lek chir'daki that are actually built to consistent standards by professional engineers, to the utterly horrible TYE-Wing, also called the "Die-Wing" or "Why-Fighter", which mates the weak engines of the Y-Wing bomber to the poorly armed and unprotected cockpit section of a standard TIE fighter.
    • The Han Solo Trilogy: After winning the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian, Han Solo salvages some armor plate from the wreck of an Imperial Navy Neutron Star-class bulk cruiser destroyed in the Battle of Nar Shaddaa and welds it onto the YT-1300 freighter for added protection.
  • Frontline General: In all Sith Wars and Clone Wars materials, the Jedi lead Republic military forces against the Sith and Separatists. Being able to block blaster fire helps a lot.
  • Futuristic Jet Injector: While not appearing in the original movies or in the new Disney continuity, hyposprays had shown up in multiple pre-Disney EU novels.
  • Galactic Superpower: In chronological order: The Rakatan Infinite Empire, the Sith Empire, the Galactic Republic, the Galactic Empire, and finally the New Republic. After that the Galactic Alliance competed with the Fel Empire for a century before the Sith took over again.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Enforced with regards to the canonicity of video games. For example, there was a man named Kyle Katarn who defeated seven Dark Jedi and saved the Valley of the Jedi, but he was not capable of carrying ten different guns at once or regenerating his stamina merely by touching a med-pack.
  • Gatling Good:
    • Hapan Battledragon cruisers have their main Turbolaser battery built like a flat version of this; and it works much the same way. The guns are built in a rotating ring around the central reactor, and each gun gets adequate time to charge. During a fight with a Star Destroyer, it states that there's a huge chunk of time where the Imperial ship has its guns silent, while the Dragon just keeps pounding on them.
    • The Battlefront games have a gatling style blaster weapon, which has a Bottomless Magazine in exchange for massive heat buildup. The weapon also makes a cameo in The Clone Wars All CG Icartoon.
  • Genius Loci: Zonama Sekot, a living planet.
  • Genre Shift: Occasionally someone will use the setting to do something different. The Galaxy of Fear series is kid-lit horror, the Coruscant Nights trilogy is detective noir, and Death Troopers is a zombie story.
  • A God Am I: Many Sith Lords, especially the heads of their current organization, fancy themselves this. Occasionally an overconfident Jedi will step into this territory. A few other Force-sensitive characters from various groups fall under this, too.
  • Gossip Evolution: Often done by agents of the Galactic Empire to use fear as a means of control. Darth Vader fought against a group of eight Jedi at the Conclave of Kessel and required assistance from the 501st Legion to prevail. After a bit of fact editing, the story changed to Darth Vader single-handedly wiping out fifty Jedi.
  • Grand Finale: Star Wars: Legacy Volume 2 #18 serves as such for not only the entire Legacy series but of Legends canon altogether following the acquisition of the Star Wars franchise by Disney.
  • Heel–Face Revolving Door: Boba Fett is a good example of this. Is he the villain to Han Solo's hero? Is he the guy training Jaina to defeat one of the most powerful Sith of all time? Or is he just the man leading his people and avoiding galactic conflict while picking off certain people for money?
  • Heel–Face Turn: Done to death.
  • Hero of Another Story: The tie-in games frequently used this. For example, the games Battle for Naboo and Star Wars Starfighter reveal there were three separate stories going on at once during the Droid Control Ship battle. Besides the N-1 Squadron fighting, Gavyn Sykes, the protagonist of Battle for Naboo, went through his own little story arc before he managed to take out the outside shield generator just before Anakin unwittingly blew up the ship from the inside. On top of that, Starfighter has another N-1 pilot, Rhys Dallows, going through a story arc that concludes with him destroying the ships reciever dishes used to launch the Droid Starfighters, and then flying inside the other side of the Droid Control Ship to chase down and kill a mercenary that had killed his mentor Essara Till and had showed up at the battle to aid the Trade Federation, while also destroying the ships portside power grid from the inside just at the same time Anakin unwittingly destroys the ship.
  • Heroic Willpower: Luke. Fighting the Empire, Yuuzhan Vong, Sith and more and emerging alive should require more of this than any single person could have.
    • Han also displays notable willpower on occasion, all the more impressive considering he does not have Force training.
    • Boba Fett deserves a mention. He was able to resist Vader's attempts to mess with his mind in their battle. And to be able to successfully kill as many Jedi as Fett has is most impressive. So impressive that Jaina sought him out when she wanted training.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: At the end of Star Wars Infinities: A New Hope, Yoda hijacks the Death Star and turns it against the Empire's forces, obliterating their fleet with their own super weapon. He then one ups that by dropping the Death Star on Sidious's head, killing him.
  • Hold Your Hippogriffs: The books are notorious for this.
  • Hollywood Tactics: Any works featuring the prequel-era battle droids, who never, ever, use cover (necessitating the creation of more threatening droids with armor and intelligence). The clones started out acting like this, but it got quickly dropped in favor of the Space Marine trope for them (See Rookies, for instance).
  • Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Sith "alchemy" can allow even wildly different species to interbreed. Among other things, this is apparently why the Mon Calamari have traits of both arthropods and mollusks.
  • Hyperspace Lanes: There are major hyperspace routes that seem to be along natural "clear" paths.
  • I, Noun: I, Jedi, the only novel written in the first person.
  • "I Know You Are in There Somewhere" Fight: A frequent occurrence when a Light Side being tries to bring a Dark Side being back to the light.
  • I See Dead People: A side effect of Force Sensitivity? Seeing and understanding Force Ghosts. Not so bad when you're a Jedi chatting up their deceased master. Absolutely horrible if you're an untrained Sensitive and the resident Sith ghost is in a worse than usual mood.
  • In the Blood: Ben's a Chick Magnet like his father in Invincible. Before that, Anakin Solo is one in NJO, like his father. And Ben's the third Skywalker or Solo attract the romantic interest of the Hapan royal family. List of Hapan royal family members who Totally Have The Hots(tm) for the Skywalker/Solo clan (running count — 4):
    1. Taryn and Trista Zel to Ben (Invincible)
    2. Isolder to Leia (The Courtship of Princess Leia)
    3. Tenel Ka to Jacen (Young Jedi Knights, Dark Nest Trilogy) Had a kid
  • Incest Subtext: In an inadvertent example, several early works hint at Ship Tease or romantic attraction between Luke and Leia. However, almost no EU work written after 1983, and none set after 4 ABY, mentions this again.
    • Luke dwells on it briefly in The Truce at Bakura.
    • Allegiance hints a little, but it's set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.
    • There's a perfectly natural explanation for all of it, but Luke's first scene in Heir to the Empire could easily lead someone unacquainted with canon to believe that he and Leia are married.
  • Industrial World:
    • Mechis III is entirely covered with droid factory complexe. During the reign of the Empire it was even owned by a single company, Arakyd Industries. Less than 100 biological employees live on the planet, the rest of the population is millions of droid workers. And yes, Mechis III has plenty of volcanic activity, so it has elements of Lethal Lava Land as well.
    • Sullust is extremely rich in natural resources, and the local Sullustans are known as great engineers. This led the world to becoming one of the main starships manufacturers in the galaxy with pretty much no concerns for natural preservation, as the planet was never very hospitable anyway and not even the natives wanted to go outside if it could be avoided, instead living on space stations or large underground settlements.
  • Inexplicably Awesome: A few major characters have their backstories as a complete mystery, and considering how in-depth canon goes on everyone else, it's got to be deliberate.
    • We still don't know, and probably never will, where Mara Jade came from. Homeworld, parents? Complete blank.
    • Yoda has the nearly unthinkable status of never even having his species defined.
  • Inhuman Eye Concealers: The Miraluka are so Force Sensitive that they evolved to the point of no longer needing physical eyes. This leaves them born with only vestigial eye sockets, which they cover with cloth wrappings for the sake of not unnerving other sapient life.
  • It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: It really sucked for Anakin Skywalker during his lifetime. PROXY and Galen Marek even touch on the subject a bit.
    PROXY: I hate being him.
    Marek: I think he does, too.
  • Knight of Cerebus: The Yuuzhan Vong. New Jedi Order signaled a darker, more mature turn for Legends, and the Yuuzhan Vong were the villains in that series. Scary Dogmatic Aliens who view torture, especially of themselves, as worship, cause more death and destruction across the entire galaxy than any other conflict in history (and probably more than any two of them put together), and irrevocably alter the state of the Galaxy Far Far Away.
  • Legendary in the Sequel: Luke Skywalker. He's so famous as the first of the revived Jedi Order that a nascent bar fight aborts just because he happens to be in the room. Everyone, even the arguing interlocutors, stop and wait for Luke to mediate the dispute. He ruminates on the reputation of the Jedi, but we know who's really famous. An in-universe Memetic Badass Warrior Monk.
    • Played with in that, at least for a few years after Return of the Jedi, people don't recognize Luke on sight... but they do recognize a lightsaber.
      Talon Karrde: With a lightsaber clipped to your belt? Please, you're either Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight, or someone with a taste for antiques and an insufferably high opinion of his own swordsmanship.
  • Living Legend: See above re: Legendary status.
    • Also, the Grand Admirals. In order to be promoted to Grand Admiral status, you have to be the best of the best of the best. Acquiring this rank carries with it legendary status, a warrior to be feared beyond all others. Grand Admiral Thrawn, of course, takes this up to eleven by being so amazingly good that even the Emperor, a human supremacist, is willing to promote him. In-universe and out, Memetic Badass.
  • Living Memory: Holocrons.
  • Loose Canon: Before disney, Legends works were technically kept as canon, as long as no official work appears to contradict them.
  • Loophole Abuse: Darth Sidious was a follower of the Rule of Two, which states only two Sith may exist at once. However, Sidious had dozens of Dark Side followers besides Darth Vader, who was Sith #2. The loophole? They were taught the ways of the Dark Side but no Sith teachings.
  • Love Redeems: You'd think the Jedi would be more accepting of love considering it tends to work well at making people turn away from the Dark Side. Vader's love for Padmé almost redeemed him before Luke ever picked up a lightsaber (who then did actually redeem him in Return of the Jedi). Nomi Sunrider was being tempted but her love for Ulic Qel-Droma shook her out of it. Revan's love for Bastila brought her back to the Light Side. Luke and Leia's love for one another helped turn Luke back to the Light Side after Luke tried to destroy the Empire from the inside. Galen Marek was trained by his father as a Jedi, then was made Vader's apprentice for years. The love for a woman was what kicked off his redemption.
    Jolee Bindo: Love doesn't lead to the dark side. Passion can lead to rage and fear, and can be controlled... but passion is not the same thing as love. Controlling your passions while being in love... that's what they should teach you to beware. But love itself will save you... not condemn you.
  • Low-Tech Spears: The Myneyrsh are a sentient species native to the planet Wayland who are at a roughly Neolithic level of technology and use simple stone spears as their main weapons apart from bows and daggers. When Human Republic colonists first arrived on the planet, they were able to dominate both them and their Psadan rivals thanks to their more advanced technology, but due to an archiving error they were forgotten about, and due to their inability to maintain said weaponry were eventually brought down to the same tech levels as those they subjugated.
  • Lowered Recruiting Standards: Inverted with Sith. In the days of the Old Republic, almost any user of the dark side was considered a Sith, no matter how weak or unambitious. This reaches the point that a simple supervisor of recruits like Harkun was considered a Sith. With the arrival of the Rule of Two, the requirements to be a Sith were much stricter, this in turn allowed a Loophole Abuse in which a Sith could have several dark side users as subordinates, as long as they did not enter the new definition of "Sith".
  • Machine Empathy: Many of the novels state that pilots turn down their inertial dampeners so that they can get a feel for space flying.
  • Magitek:
    • While the films do not really give any indication of machines having any special connection to the Force, technologies and even outright magical items crop up quite a bit in the EU, especially the comics. Examples include the Rakatan Star Forge, Naga Sadow's flagship, his amulet later used by Exar Kun and Sith Meditation Sphere's. The Jedi and Sith Holocrons also probably qualify, as they appear to be impossible to duplicate with regular technology, and only work properly for Force-sensitives.
    • Lightsabers themselves zig-zag this trope. They waffled between "ordinary sci-fi weapons that are just very difficult to use" and "powered by the Force itself" in Fanon before settling on a compromise in canon: A lightsaber works on basic, well-understood technology, but a Jedi constructing their own lightsaber imbues the weapon's focusing crystal with the Force, and assembles the whole weapon using the Force to make it vastly more efficient (to the point that lightsabers flat-out give the finger to thermodynamics and never lose energy).
  • Maker of Monsters: Sith Lords often use a combination of the Dark Side and advanced biotechnology to create fearsome monsters known as Sithspawn to use as slave soldiers, guardian beasts and terror weapons. Some are one-off monsters bred in labs, while others are mutated from regular animals and others still, like the technobeasts, created by infecting living people with engineered viruses.
  • Medieval Stasis: Averted in some Legends material. Hyperspace Lanes used to have navigation buoys until the whole thing got miniaturized into navicomputers. Likewise, repulsorlifts (the antigravity phlebotinum), hyperdrives, and Deflector Shields used to be truly gargantuan until they also got shrunk. Finally, lasers used to need Gatling Good to fire rapidly (and were actually lasers, blasters are particle beam projectors instead). Black Fleet Crisis also indicates technological advancement by introducing new staple fighters (E-Wings instead of X-Wings and K-Wings for Y-Wings and B-Wings), but these are ignored in later novels (the reintroduction of the X-Wing in New Jedi Order is at least justified by their being improvements on the original).
  • Mile-Long Ship: Kilometer-plus length seems to be fairly standard for capital ships. In particular the Empire built dozens of ships collectively termed "super star destroyers", which were upwards of nineteen kilometers long. Most were one-off designs and only the Executor-class star dreadnought went into wide production. Meanwhile Mon Calamari Star Cruisers are often longer than Imperial-class star destroyers.
  • Mind Screw: The ambiguously-canon Sandstorm has a 10-year-old Luke run away from home into a sandstorm, where he sees a tall, dark figure and then meets a 10-year-old boy named Annie who is strikingly similar to him. Luke kills a krayt dragon, and when he's rescued from the storm there is no sign of it or Annie. It's pretty clear that Annie is a young Anakin Skywalker, but what is he? A hallucination? Some projection of the Force? It's weird.
  • Mind Rape: Darth Zannah uses this from time to time but arguably the most notable example is The Sith Emperor Vitiate, who is outrageously skilled at this. Most of the beings on his planet suffered this at some point and are under his control. He can do it to Jedi Masters and Sith Lords as well, as he was able to completely dominate the minds of Revan and Malak, two phenomenally talented Jedi. And he did it to them at the same time.
  • Mobile Factory: World Devastators from the Dark Empire series.
  • Mobile Fishbowl: Downplayed with the occasional note that other species find the humidity aboard ships crewed by Mon Calamari to be uncomfortable.
  • Modern Stasis: Or Future Stasis, possibly. The Legends timeline(s) extend over 25,000 years... but the technology and culture has developed over that time so little it's mind-boggling. Possibly justified due to the galaxy going through a Dark Age about a thousand years before the movies. The prequel games clarify a lot: the galaxy goes through cycles of expansion, golden age, dark-side-fuelled war, collapse, dark age, reconstruction, The movies take place in the dark-side-fuelled war part of the fifth or sixth cycle. The Old Republic games and MMO take place during the end of one golden age and the start of a war period, so their tech seems more advanced. Each cycle rebuilds some of the previous and loses the rest, but also discovers new things. There were no planet-sized space stations in the old cycles, but droids are generally far simpler now, and hyperdrives vastly slower, etc.
  • Monster Organ Trafficking: One of the novels has a spider monster that produces a spice called glitterstim, which needs to be harvested in complete darkness, as it's photoreactive. The spider uses it to make its webs, while other creatures use it for some kind of mind reading.
  • Motile Vehicular Components: The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels states that while Republic Acclamator-class troop transports are heavily armed, most of their guns are arranged in positions that are good for providing Orbital Bombardment to support ground forces, but less-optimal for ship-to-ship combat. The turbolaser turrets can be repositioned via a rail system for space combat in a pinch, but this takes several minutes.
  • Mouth of Sauron: Mosep Binneed is retconned into posing this for Jabba after being used as him in the comics.
  • Mugging the Monster: You'd think a lightsaber would be a good anti-mugging thing to dangle from your clothes. It isn't.
  • My Hair Came Out Green: In I, Jedi, Corran accidentally dyes his hair green while attempting to disguise himself as Kieran Halcyon.
  • New Powers as the Plot Demands:
    • Luke bears some of this, Depending on the Writer. It's explained as him spending decades traveling the galaxy learning esoteric techniques, including some that aren't Jedi techniques.
    • The mysticism surrounding Jacen's five-year journey. Some of the most interesting parts of the later series was Jacen using weird force techniques: White current, object reading, flow-walking, and so forth. Fate of the Jedi had Luke and Ben retracing Jacen's steps on his journey to learn what he learned.
  • Nicknaming the Enemy: The Rebels derisively call Imperials "Bucketheads". Later, New Republic troops would refer to Yuuzhan Vong as "scarheads," which the Vong actually find less offensive than shortening their species name to just "Vong."
    • The Rogue Squadron novels add a ton of these in the form of pilot slang for enemy ships. TIE Fighters are "eyeballs", TIE Interceptors are "squints", troop transports are "crates", and Imperial and ''Imperial-II" class Star Destroyers are Impstars and Impstar Deuces. In the New Jedi Order books written by the Rogue Squadron authors, Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers become "skips" and their massive, rocky ground assault creature vehicles become "ranges" (as in "mountain range").
    • I, Jedi, written by the same author as Rogue Squadron, gives us "wishbones" for Y-wings, "pointers" for X-wings, "slims" for A-wings, and "crosses" for B-wings.
    • In Star Wars: The Old Republic the terms "Imps" for Imperial soldiers and "Pubs" for Republic fighters are used freely in and out of character. It's not uncommon for guilds to announce they have "Imp and Pub side" equivalents or for someone to announce "I'm switching to my Imp/Pub toon"
  • No Canon for the Wicked: Per LucasArts fiat, with the exception of Imperial-aligned player characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic, all video games in the Star Wars franchise that have light and dark side endings canonically result in the light side ending.
  • Noodle Incident: It's a big galaxy, with several thousand years of history. Some details get filled in, and some don't. The Third Jedi Schism is one of the later. Some Jedi turn to the Dark Side, find an ancient artifact. One really bad mishap later, and the Vultar System is completely destroyed.
  • No One Could Survive That!:
    • Recalling his rescue from Jabba, Han wonders if he's really seen the last of Fett. This was the (wrong) answer he received.
    • Calo Nord in Knights of the Old Republic lampshades this when he tells Malak, "I am hard to kill, Lord Malak."
  • Not This One, That One: A reversal of sorts in the backstory for the Millennium Falcon. Han Solo wins a ship from Lando Calrissian in a card game, and Lando tries to get him to take one of the fancy-looking, worthless, all-style-no-substance ships he owns. Han pretty much says, "Not this one, that one," and picks the YT-1300 "junker" Lando had been quietly modifying for himself on the side. Lando was so mad he actually spread rumors for awhile that Han had stolen the ship.
  • No Unified Ruleset: Much like poker, the card game sabacc has a lot of different regional variants. This becomes a significant plot point in the novel Dark Apprentice, when Lando Calrissian challenges Han Solo to a rematch of the game where Han won the Millennium Falcon: the two men play "random sabacc", where not only the card values but the entire set of house rules changes at random intervals, refereed in this case by C-3PO. Lando ends up winning by the skin of his teeth when the rules switch at the last second and give him a winning hand where he previously had a losing one.
  • Off with His Head!: Marka Ragnos dueled Simus for the title of Dark Lord of the Sith. The battle ended with the latter's head being separated from his body. Darth Bane decapitated Sirak in their final duel. Shimrra Jamaane of the Yuuzhan Vong also lost his head in his battle against Luke Skywalker.
  • Old Magic: Sith sorcery and alchemy is something of a downplayed example as, while many of it's secrets have been lost in the millennia before the Rule of Two, often gets rediscovered by Sith lords who go raiding the old Sith temples for an edge on their competition.
  • Our Hydras Are Different: Battle hydras are creatures resembling traditional Western dragons with two heads mounted on long, snakelike necks, although some have more, and with tails tipped with poisonous stingers. They were created by the Sith Lord Exar Kun as war monsters during the Great Sith War. They're normally fairly reclusive creatures that avoid contact with sapient beings, but are easily dominated by Dark Side users. After Exar Kun's defeat, they largely retreated into the wildernesses of Yavin 4.
  • Outcast Refuge: The Rebel Alliance established New Alderaan as a safeworld for Alderaanians who had been off-planet when Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star. Initially the planet's location was kept secret in order to keep those Alderaanians from being further targeted by the Empire. Later on, Mon Mothma's daughter Leida recuperated from an injury or illness on that world, and former Alliance General Jan Dodonna retired to New Alderaan, where he died 24 years after the Battle of Yavin.
  • Outside-Context Problem: The Yuuzhan Vong launch a surprise attack from a completely different galaxy while utilizing equipment unlike any other civilization.
  • Person of Mass Destruction: Numerous examples, especially beings behind planet-destroying machinery. Bonus points to Sith Lords such as Darth Nihilus and Emperor Vitiate as they wiped planets clean of life with the Force almost instantly.
  • Planet of Copyhats: Nearly every minor alien character in the movies spawns an alien race with their characteristics in the EU.
  • Planet of Hats: Played straight, averted, subverted. There's a lot of species with a lot of stereotypes out there, so there's a lot to do with this trope.
  • Planet Spaceship: Zonama Sekot is hyperspace-capable.
  • Planetary Relocation:
    • The Corellian Trilogy: The Corellian system has an unusual structure containing five inhabitable worlds, two of which orbit their mutual barycenter, where the ancient Centerpoint Station is located. The system was created artificially: Centerpoint Station is revealed to be a Pointless Doomsday Device capable of moving entire planets through hyperspace, in addition to being able to destroy stars from afar. Some further Arc Welding happened late in Legends' production: Fate of the Jedi reveals the Killiks built Centerpoint Station and constructed the Corellian system under the direction of the Mortis Gods.
    • New Jedi Order: After conquering Coruscant, the Yuuzhan Vong go to work terraforming it into a replica of their original homeworld Yuuzhan'tar. This includes using their gravity-generating dovin basal creatures to move the planet closer to its sun to alter the macroclimate. They also shatter one of the planet's moons to create a ring system, and throw the other two moons out of orbit entirely.
  • The Power of Love: Jolee Bindo explains it to Revan. He believes love can save a person (see the Love Redeems entry for details backing his claim) but the passion in love is what should be monitored with great care.
  • Predecessor Villain:
    • There's a whole smattering of villains who have never actually appeared in any work, only been mentioned, usually in reference texts. The earliest were the Sith King Adas and the Dark Jedi leader Xendor, whose traditions would eventually be united under Ajunta Pall, the first Dark Lord of the Sith. Pall's tradition would eventually give rise to Naga Sadow, but before him were Lords Tulak Hord and Marka Ragnos (Marka would get a chance to be a post-mortem Big Bad in one of the Dark Forces Saga games). Similarly, there's a whole line of Sith Lords that sprang out of Darth Bane's teachings which is really only notable so far for producing Palpatine and his apprentices but which also included Darths Zannah, Cognus (these two at least have supporting roles in the Darth Bane novels), Millennial, Vectivus, Guile, Gravid, Gean, Ramage, and Tenebrous.
    • Among the non-Sith, Xim the Despot lived about 25,000 years before the events of the films and is regarded as one of the most infamous pre-Republic tyrants. Much of his backstory is even known, including his childhood and home planet, and stories of his lost treasures, plays, novels, and even Machiavellian self-help guides are referenced often in the EU. He has never made a single appearance outside of reference material talking about him millennia later.
  • Prequel in the Lost Age: There are many novels and games set in the time of the Old Republic, usually thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin.
  • Proud Warrior Race Guy:
    • Wookiees, obviously, but also the Noghri, the Chiss and many others.
    • Canderous Ordo makes the Mandalorians seem like space Spartans. As do Boba and Jango Fett.
  • Pun: Hoth chocolate. And before you ask how cocoa beans can grow on Hoth: It's just regular hot chocolate with tauntaun milk.
  • Punch-Clock Villain: A recurring theme of the OT-era EU is that there are a hell of a lot more Imperials that believe more in the Empire's Lawful side than its Evil side, fighting the Rebels/New Republic out of professionalism and patriotism rather than hatred and often displaying disdain or resentment for more monstrous compatriots and leaders. These often pull a Heel–Face Turn, but there are exceptions, chief among them Captain, later Admiral Gilad Pellaeon, Grand Admiral Thrawn's flag captain in The Thrawn Trilogy who is eventually made supreme commander after Daala takes one defeat too many in Darksaber and remains staunchly loyal to the Empire to the end. This despite him being the first on the Imperial side to sue for peace with the Republic in The Hand of Thrawn.
  • Red Shirt: If you're a Jedi in the Clone Wars who we've never seen before, chances are you'll be killed by either the droids or your own men.
  • Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: Played with. While no one's likely to forget Alderaan anytime soon, a lot of folks are quite willing to agree that it was the Emperor, Vader, and most especially Tarkin who pulled the trigger on that one and aren't holding the Empire as a whole responsible for it. But then we have Kyp Durron, who went Dark Side and literally blew up a sun. Whether or not he's a Karma Houdini very much depends on the writer. The Yuuzhan Vong also committed a very long list of atrocities on the galaxy in the New Jedi Order books but get left to live in peace by the end of the series after a species-wide Heel–Face Turn, though it's strongly implied that a lot of groups aren't going to be quick to forget or forgive.
  • Renegade Splinter Faction: This is frequently an Enforced Trope used to retroactively fix various Continuity Snarls.
    • The Jedi Order went through its share of schisms even outside of the various Sith Wars, with the mainstream Jedi Council often considering the schismatics to be heretics even if they were still light-sided.
      • For millennia, the Corellian system had its own indigenous Jedi sect, the Green Jedi, which maintained an independent Jedi Council.
      • The Republic Commando Series retconned the roving ship-based Jedi academy Chu'unthor, where Callista Ming trained, as being run by a renegade Jedi Master named Djinn Altis. In particular, Altis refused to abide by the Jedi Order's ban on romantic relationships.
      • Coruscant Nights has a secondary character, Laranth Tarak, who before the Jedi Purge was a member of the Gray Paladins, a Jedi sect considered heretical by the Jedi Council mainly for preferring blasters to lightsabers.
    • The Glove of Darth Vader:
      • The Empire is presented as being headed by the Central Committee of Grand Moffs, with Trioculous as a Puppet King and the Prophets of the Dark Side being the ones really pulling the strings. While this series was poorly received and mostly rendered Canon Discontinuity, later supplemental material shoehorned it back into continuity with some handwaving, the most prominent case being that this Imperial faction was actually a splinter that broke away from the central government on Coruscant, which was at the time under the control of Ysanne Isard and her pawns according to the X-Wing Series.
      • The aforementioned Prophets of the Dark Side are actually this twice over, as the same supplemental materials that retconed the Central Committee as a splinter faction reveal that they're not the real Prophets (which are a legitimate Dark Side cult recruited by Palpatine) but a bunch of fraudulent imposters established by Imperial Intelligence to act as a Propaganda Machine, only to eventually go rogue by means of setting up the Committee as their puppets to take over the Empire for themselves. Since Isard is Director of Imperial Intelligence, this means they're not just defying her pawns but her directly.
    • Quite a few warlords and splinter factions (to the point that Wookiepedia has an entire category page for them all) break away from the Empire as it falls apart over the years, for a variety of reasons, and regularly fight the New Republic, the "regular" Empire, and each other from approximately the X-Wing Series to The Callista Trilogy. In Darksaber, Admirals Daala and Pellaeon assassinate most of the leaders of these factions to reunite the Imperial Remnant under one banner.
    • The Hand of Thrawn features a power struggle between Pellaeon and a group of Imperial officers led by Moff Disra that seeks to derail his efforts to negotiate peace with the New Republic, nearly managing to start a civil war in the New Republic in the process.
    • The Second Imperium from the Young Jedi Knights was retconned to be one of these because the later The Hand of Thrawn duology established that a peace treaty was brokered a few years earlier between the Republic and the mainstream Imperial Remnant under the leadership of the relatively nice mustachioed Admiral Gilad Pellaeon.
  • Resolved Noodle Incident: For literally everything in the movies. Not only is a backstory provided for every character who appeared onscreen in the movies (and even some of the Faceless Goons), but you also get stories that explain exactly what a "nerf herder" is.
    • For an example: Remember that brief blink-and-you'll-miss-it glimpse of the Millennium Falcon in Revenge of the Sith? Well, there's an entire book out about why it's there.
  • Restricted Expanded Universe: Writers, besides following the regular continuity, had to abide to a certain set of rules established by Lucasfilm. Among those revealed to the fans are:
    • The Big Trio (Luke, Han, and Leia) cannot be killed.
    • Members of certain alien species cannot become Jedi. Even though several Wookiee Jedi characters already exist, no new ones should be introduced. The Star Wars: The Clone Wars series does, but makes mention about Wookiee Jedi rarity.
    • Yoda's species and homeworld cannot be revealed.
    • Before the prequels, writers were told by Lucas to avoid writing in that era. This was solved by creating the Old Republic stories set long before the prequels.
  • Retcon: The policy seemed to be that there's no inconsistency so big that it can't be patched up by some well-placed retcon:
    • Hand of Thrawn was a massive Fix Fic to set right a bunch of stuff other EU creators flubbed up along the way.
    • An early comic strip storyline named "The Constancia Affair" called Luke's father "Tan" Skywalker. This was later retconned by Abel G. Pena in Vader: The Ultimate Guide into a title for a particularly good pilot.
    • The comic strip story "The Second Kessel Run" depicted Kessel as a planet filled with giant mushrooms and populated by people called Kesselians, a far cry from the harsh mining world that the Jedi Academy Trilogy established. The reference book The Essential Atlas would clear this up by making the Kessel seen in the comics a separate planet near it called Little Kessel.
    • Porkins' first name was "Tono" in the original Marvel comics adaptation of A New Hope, but the later RPG sourcebook Galaxy Guide 1: A New Hope called him Jek instead. This was solved based on a suggestion from Abel G Pena for a 2002 Star Wars Gamer article by Josh Radke, which made "Tono" Porkins' middle name instead.
    • The Gameboy Advance game The New Droid Army featured Anakin killing Dooku as the final boss, long before his actual death at the start of Revenge of the Sith. Once again, Abel G. Pena would retcon this by explaining that it was actually a realistic, force-created doppelgänger that Anakin had "killed", not the real Dooku.
    • In Kenobi, Mosep Binneed using Jabba's name as an alias is a subtle way of reconciling Jabba's pre-Return of the Jedi appearances in the original Marvel comics, which based Jabba's appearance off the alien extra later established as Mosep.
    • Jaster Mereel was the original "real" name for Boba Fett in "The Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett" from Tales of the Bounty Hunters. With Attack of the Clones giving a very different backstory for Boba, Jango Fett: Open Seasons was instrumental in reconciling both stories: Now Jaster was the name of Jango Fett's adoptive father, and later material established that the name was used by both Jango and Boba as an alias, in tribute to him.
  • Ridiculously Difficult Route: The Kessel Run, a hyperspace smuggling route between Kessel and Tatooine, skirts a black hole cluster near the Kessel System where it's easy for a less competent pilot than Han Solo to get killed. Most people don't go that way.
  • Ripped from the Headlines: Many examples, e.g. the devastation of Honoghr from The Thrawn Trilogy is the Chernobyl disaster IN SPACE.
  • Running Gag: The Sith'ari eventually became this. Originally a Chosen One prophecy refering to Darth Bane, it eventually led to every notable sith lord declaring themselves the sith'ari. Except Bane.
  • Sapient Ship: Various space ships that are operated by droid brains.
  • Scary Dogmatic Aliens: In addition to dark side users, rogue Imperials, and the criminal underworld, one of the most common villain types. Most famously, the Yuuzhan Vong, but other examples include the Ssi-Ruuk, the Yevetha, the Vagaari, and in the backstory the Rakata, the Hutts (before their hat switched to organized crime) and the original Sith Empire (back when the Sith were still a species, rather than a religion). The Empire, of course, are Scary Dogmatic Humans, as alien characters in the post-ROTJ era will often be quick to point out.
  • Schrödinger's Canon: With the decision to shuffle the continuity into the Legends alternate universe, many elements established in Legends have the possibility to remain canon in the new "primary" universe. Examples that are still being pulled from Legends into Prime include Interdictor cruisers and the planet of Malachor.
  • Scoundrel Code:
    • Han Solo's mentor Roa has Roa's Rules: Never ignore a call from help, steal only from those richer than you, never play cards unless you're prepared to lose, don't pilot under the influence, and always be prepared to make a quick getaway.
    • Bounty Hunters in that universe also have an accepted code of conduct. No Bounty Is Worth Dying For; People Don't Have Bounties, Only Acquisitions Have Bounties (meaning that anyone you are being paid to shoot is just a target, not a sentient being); Capture By Design, Kill By Necessity; No Hunter Shall Slay Another Hunter; No Hunter Shall Refuse Aid to Another Hunter; No Hunter Shall Interfere With Another's Hunt (the rules of not sabotaging/killing other Hunters rule are not in play with the Great Hunt, where the goal is to compete with other hunters, however); and In the Hunt One Captures or Kills, Never Both (meaning you don't kill an unarmed target who has surrendered unless they try to escape).
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: If a Sith Lord has a tomb, do not mess with said tomb.
  • Sense Loss Sadness: What happens to Force-blinded Jedi or Sith.
  • Shapeshifter Longevity: The Shi'ido are a powerful shapeshifting species that — according to The Essential Guide to Alien Species — can live for up to five hundred years; their members aren't considered fully mature until they turn sixty, and can't mimic non-humanoid species until the age of a hundred and fifty. Senior Anthropologist Mammon Hoole — AKA Uncle Hoole of the Galaxy of Fear series — has been a scientist for decades prior to the events of the original trilogy, and is skilled enough to have taken on truly massive forms like Hutts and Whaladons.
  • Shapeshifter Showoff Session: According to Senior Anthropologist Hoole, this is how his fellow Shi'ido keep outsiders from getting too interested in their home planet; whenever explorers begin snooping around, nearby Shi'ido transform into hideous monsters in order to intimidate them into leaving — and that's if they don't just shapeshift into rocks and trees so they can pretend nobody's home. Consequently, in The Star Wars Essential Guide To Alien Species, the illustration of a Shi'ido is depicted right in the middle of a transformation into something terrifying; in fact, this practice is apparently so common that the only image of a Shi'ido in Shapeshifter Default Form available to in-universe texts is that of Hoole himself.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: The Boba Feet comic story Jawas of Doom, where Fett escapes the Sarlacc Pit but has amnesia now, falling into the hands of Jawas who mistake him for a Droid. The Jawas' sandcrawler was then attacked by Han and Leia, in an attempt to rescue R2-D2, who the Jawas had also picked up somehow. After helping Han rescue R2, Fett suddenly remembered he hated Han Solo — just in time for the Sandcrawler to drive directly into the Sarlacc Pit! Fortunately for Fett, he would truly escape from the Sarlacc in a future story.
  • Shapeshifter Struggles:
    • Clawdites have the power to disguise themselves as other humanoid beings... but unfortunately, the genetic mutations that led them to develop these abilities have made them a Fantastic Underclass on their home planet, segregated to slums and restricted from any kind of formal education. To add insult to injury, their shapeshifting powers can be quite painful to use for younger Clawdites, and even experienced members of the species require regular doses of moisturizing oils to prevent their skin from cracking under the strain.
    • The Shi'ido have it a lot better than the Clawdites, with longer lifespans and more impressive powers... but they still suffer from numerous drawbacks: because their powers were developed to hide themselves from predators, Shi'ido are extremely shy, to the point that even those who live public lives off-world are known for being cautious and withdrawn... and as Galaxy of Fear demonstrates, this can lead to their non-Shi'ido friends and relatives believing them to be uncaring, even if the shapeshifter genuinely loves them and the fact that Uncle Hoole is also struggling with the baggage of his Dark and Troubled Past doesn't help. Also, their powers and compulsive need to observe others has given them a nasty reputation as spies-for-hire, though Senior Anthropologist Hoole is doing his best to combat this stereotype.
  • Shed Armor, Gain Speed: The New Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels says that Rebel engineers would frequently strip off hull plating and extra weight from the Y-Wing in order to give it extra speed for some types of operations.
  • Shoehorned Acronym: In the books, the Galactic Empire's State Sec is called "COMPNOR," which is short for "COMmission for the Preservation of the New ORder," which is a doozy of a shoehorned acronymn, not only skipping multiple words, but using multiple letters from some of the words it does use.
  • Single-Biome Planet: Just as bad if not worse than in the movies: Kashyyyk is the jungle planet, Ithor is the forest planet, Dantooine is all grassy plains, etc.
    • This is partially justified/averted with Kashyyk. Partially averted in that we see that it has oceans, beaches — the areas around which are not so dense, i.e. the trees are only huge rather than ginormous, etc. It is partially justified in that KOTOR explains that Kashyyk plants were effectively fed steroids when the Rakata's agricultural farming went a bit... out of control.
    • Knights of the Old Republic makes it clear that Tatooine is a desert planet before the player even leaves the enclosed settlement.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: From all the way on one end to right down on the other end, depending on the media. The most recent ones strongly tend towards Cynicism. The final works end on happy note, though.
  • Sorcerer King: Several Supreme Chancellors of the Galactic Republic were also Jedi Knights. In fact, there was a 400 year period when the Republic was ruled by only Jedi chancellors. All of them were this trope, and the Republic lived another thousand years because of their leadership.
  • Sorting Algorithm of Deadness: Add "killed in Bantam: 1, killed in Del Rey: 4".
  • Space Elves:
    • There are some very physically elven beings in Star Wars comics, including the Jedi Master Fay, who resembled a tall, ethereal woman with pointed ears.
    • Star Wars (Marvel 1977) has a major story arc dealing with Space Dark Elves: the Nagai are a race of tall, slender, pale, androgynously beautiful aliens with angular features and pointed ears who try and conquer and enslave the galaxy.
    • The New Jedi Order's Yuuzhan Vong are what happens when the mindset of Space Dark Elves meets the appearance and brutality of Space Orcs. Their backstory revealed in the last book makes it plain that they were once more traditional examples before being attacked and nearly destroyed by a race of vicious cyborgs. The Vong succeeded in fighting them off, but in the process became even worse then their enemy. This is also, not incidentally, where their extreme technophobia comes from.
    • The Chiss are xenophobes who consider themselves superior to the other species in the galaxy and rarely leave Chiss space, going so far as to capture and imprison trespassers. They're taller than humans and are all in great shape due to their efficient metabolism. They have their own independently-developed technology, which is as good as, if not better than, the stuff everyone else is using, including their rather nasty signature weapon, the charric. They never strike first, but merrily crush anyone who tries to attack them. What does their (Obviously Just Better) society call itself? The Chiss Ascendancy. Anything you can do, they can do better, indeed. Worthy of note is the fact that Chiss Force-users are exceptionally rare, neatly avoiding the magic-user aspect of the trope.
    • The species that most resembles elves physically are the Sephi. They are intelligent, refined, and have a tendency toward haughtiness, though some can be just as ugly as baseline humans. Their lifespan is typically between 200-450 years. They do not dwell in their homeworld's few forests and force-sensitives are no more common than most races. Fay's species is never stated, but it is widely accepted that she is a Sephi.
    • The Arkanians are aloof, arrogant, and obsessed with politeness, not to mention tall and willowy with Prophet Eyes. They consider themselves superior to all other races and try and improve themselves further with cybernetics and genetics. Though they are featured most heavily in the Tales of the Jedi comics, two Arkanian Jedi appear in Yoda: Dark Rendezvous —- a Padawan Alpha Bitch whose arrogance hides insecurity about the war, and a Jedi Knight who leaves the Order over her concerns about the militarization of the Jedi. Obi-Wan and Anakin try to talk her into staying, but she runs philosophic rings around them.
  • Space Orcs:
    • The ancient Mandalorians were a society of warriors and marauders who were constantly at odds with the Republic, warring against it and raiding its worlds. They were often allies of the Sith, and armies of Mandalorians riding on the backs of the quadrupedal war droids were common sights during the numerous Sith/Republic wars. In the setting's present, long after the fall of the Mandalorian empires, they mostly live as clans on their homeworld or as Bounty Hunters and mercenaries in the wider galaxy.
    • New Jedi Order has Yuuzhan Vong warrior caste are dogmatic, skilled and fearsome warriors who live for combat and driving their species' conquest of the galaxy. The other three major Vong castes (shaper, priest, intendant), who run and direct the Vong civilization, are less savage and more cunning, and in many ways fall closer to dark elf status than anything. Indeed, the Vong's backstory has them as essentially Space Elves gone bad. In any case, they follow a narrative trajectory fairly typical of fantasy orcs, being initially portrayed as unrepentantly Always Chaotic Evil before being more fleshed out and finally doing a race-wide Heel–Face Turn.
  • Space Nomads: The Vaagari lost their homeworld around the same time the Infinite Empire was operating, roughly twenty thousand years before the films. Since then they've bummed around the Unknown Regions just generally being unpleasant to everyone, but never seem to have made any concerted effort to find their old home or just get a new one.
  • Special Effect Branding: Averted in at least one story, in which Leia's lightsaber is red. Jaina Solo's is also red when she builds it in Young Jedi Knights (in a bit of Genius Bonus, this is because she uses a synthetic lightsaber crystal, the same as the Sith are said to in factbooks like the Visual Dictionaries). Corran Horn also manages to create a lightsaber that can do two different colours depending whether it's set to its regular length or an Awesome, but Impractical setting that turns it into a BFS.
  • Star Killing: Naga Sadow could make a star turn into a supernova.
  • The Starscream:
    • An intentional part of the Sith philosophy. The apprentice is supposed to kill the master to "graduate," then train a new apprentice to eventually kill him. In Darth Bane's novels, he becomes disappointed because Zannah isn't murdering him when she has the chance.
    • The Revenge of the Sith novelization implies that Palpatine comes to feel the same way about Vader; he had groomed and tutored Anakin for years because of his literally unmatched Force potential. After Vader's dismemberment, his ability is cut in half and it is obvious that after being rebuilt he will never be as strong in the Force as the Emperor. It is unknown whether Palpatine was searching for a true heir to continue the Rule of Two someday as the Sith established dominance or simply wanted a powerful lieutenant to serve him as he claimed ultimate victory. Palpatine being Palpatine, either outcome is conceivable.
    • Downplayed with the Bothans and their view towards politics. You want someone's job or position, you set yourself up to go and take it. If/when that person stumbles, you jump in to attack them and take their spot. In the past, it was literal attacks with knives, but the Bothans have "elevated" it to more of a character assassination. Not only are Bothan politicians always on the lookout for people they can knock down to take their spots, but they also assume everyone else is doing the same to them, leading them to be incredibly mistrustful of others.
  • State Sec: COMPNOR (Commission for the Preservation of the New Order) basically is the Empire's equivalent of the SS. It has an executive committee, its own military and intelligence wings that are separate from the regular army and navy chain of commands, a social engineering agency, and its own youth group.
  • Strong as They Need to Be: Expect Darth Sidious to be capable of just about anything when he is not reserving himself. He killed 3 Jedi Masters in front of Windu before Mace could do anything. One of those Jedi (Kit Fisto) has recently been shown as a match for, if not a superior to, General Grievous. And Sidious can create Force Storms capable of wiping out entire fleets of capital ships.
  • Super-Speed: All over the place in the video games for Force users.
    • Post-movie comics also establish that Darth Sidious is very quick whether he is in a new clone body or even an advanced age as seen at the end of Return of the Jedi. By the time of Dark Empire Luke's mastery of the Force had surpassed Yoda's, and Luke had trouble keeping up with Sidious in their lightsaber duel.
  • Tabletop Games:
    • The first was from West End Games, which expanded a lot of the technology and equipment seen in the movies and wound up being the basis for a lot of stuff in later EU novels (shortly after Timothy Zahn was contracted to write the first "real" EU novels, he was sent a collection of all West End Games Star Wars RPG books, with the suggestion to incorporate that material into the books. Whenever Zahn needed a new ship or piece of tech for the story, nine times out of ten it already existed in the RPG).
    • Around the time The Phantom Menace was released, West End Games lost the RPG license, which moved to Wizards of the Coast. They produced a Star Wars RPG suggested by their 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons game. Then they revised it into a slightly different system, called Revised Core Rules. Then they overhauled it completely into Star Wars Saga Edition, which was arguably a prototype for D&D 4th Edition. They also produced two tabletop miniatures games, one ground based and one space based, based on the D&D minatures game. Then they also lost the Star Wars license.
    • Fantasy Flight Games picked it up, and has released a new Star Wars RPG game as well as another space combat miniatures game.
  • Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: All over the place, e.g. X-wings are the balanced fighter, A-wings are fast but have weak shielding and Y-wings are slow but powerful. The same applies to the different styles of lightsaber fighting that the Jedi and Sith use.
  • Teacher/Student Romance: Luke/Mara and Bane/Zannah.
  • Technology Marches On: In-Universe. In the Old Republic era, hyperdrives, shields and antigravity repulsors were absolutely massive, whereas by the time of the original trilogy, all three can fit in a ship the size of a limosine.
  • Technophobia: The Yuuzhan Vong are a race that utilize engineered organic creatures where other races would use mechanical devices or droids. They see any mechanical technology as an affront to their gods and seek to destroy it and those who use it wherever they are found.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Ships that can destroy stars, a gun that fires its ordinance through hyperspace, and a weapon that seems to be a combination of the former two.
  • Thread of Prophecy, Severed: A bunch of the early works in the continuity had the New Republic clashing with various dark side users, most famously the Emperor Reborn in Dark Empire. Then The Phantom Menace came out with the prophecy of a Chosen One who would "bring the Force back into balance"—meaning Anakin Skywalker destroying the Sith, which meant that other dark side-users emerging post-Endor made it appear the prophecy had failed. Eventually, the various writing teams settled on the idea that Anakin's role was actually more specific than the generically worded prophecy and the Jedi simply misinterpreted it: rather than eliminate all Sith and darksiders forever, he was meant to end Darth Bane's line of Sith specifically, due in large part to the harm being caused by the experiments of Darth Plagueis on the Force itself.
  • Tidally Locked P Lanet: The Twi'lek homeworld Ryloth has the sunward side an uninhabitable desert and the night side freezing cold. The Twi'leks mostly live on the terminator and use exile to the sunward side as a form of capital punishment.
  • Token Good Cop:
    • In the second book of the The Han Solo Adventures, Fiolla is a rare honest Corporate Sector cop who is trying to stop a slave ring.
    • In the X-Wing Series, Corran Horn's Back Story is that he was a cop who was forced to go on the run with three colleagues due to their insistence in pursuing pirates and other criminals instead of the Rebel Alliance.
  • Translation Punctuation: Timothy Zahn likes this. Vision of the Future has an instance where the various fleets of alien warships over Bothawui are given fraudulent orders to {Attack!}, [Attack!], and <Attack!>
  • Truce Zone: the Selkath take massive advantage of this with their planet of Manaan, making the Republic and Sith obey their laws. When Manaan's product Kolto become borderline worthless when the far more efficient Bacta is made available galactic-wide, the Selkath try to join the Republic to save the planet's economy. The Republic shoots their request down and the Sith conquer Manaan and make the Selkath their slaves.
  • Twins Are Special: Jacen and Jaina, Han and Leia's twins, have a "twin bond" which goes much deeper than the usual connections between Force-users. Notably, the telepathic bond second to their own is the one they share with their younger brother. Part of the reason the Yuuzhan Vong become so obsessed with Jacen and Jaina is precisely because they're twins, which according to the Vong's religion means that they should be destined to duel each other to the death, yet fight together.
  • Uniqueness Decay: Frequent, as different authors want their own versions of originally unique monsters/characters to play with.
    • The rancor beast from Return of the Jedi was originally described in the novelization as a mysterious, possibly mutated creature: "The size of an elephant, it was somehow reptilian, somehow as unformed as a nightmare. Its huge screeching mouth was asymmetrical in its head, its fangs and claws set all out of proportion. It was clearly a mutant, and wild as all unreason." Nevertheless, due to rancors being awesome, they would proliferate throughout the Expanded Universe. The 1994 novel The Courtship of Princess Leia got this ball rolling by introducing the previously undiscovered planet of Dathomir, to which the rancors are native. And it turns out that Jabba's rancor in Return of the Jedi was actually a small example of the species. Dathomir itself then propagated in the EU, to the point that the 2004 novel Ruins of Dantooine included Dathomirian beasts, a common biologist with detailed knowledge of Dathomir's ecosystem, and other characters who'd apparently been to the planet... 8 in-universe years before the planet became known beyond a small circle of individuals.
    • Grand Admiral Thrawn was initially presented as a member of an unknown species, established after 8 years OOU and 10 IU timeline years as the heretofore reclusive Chiss species from the Unknown Regions. After this, of course, Chiss proliferated in the EU, such in the novel Darth Bane: Path of Destruction a full 1000 years before the species was supposed to have been known to the galaxy at large. Meanwhile in Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Chiss are running around over 3,500 years before they're officially supposed to be known.
    • Obi-wan Kenobi and Yoda were intended to be the last surviving Jedi from the old Jedi Order, period. Of course, it didn't take long for EU authors to start creating their own survivors who went into hiding or were mysteriously overlooked. Not to mention the hundreds of Sith all over the place.
    • Force Lightning. At first, it was a very rare power only the most veteran and skilled Sith had, which was a testament of their power. In the EU, either be books, comics or (especially) video games, every Sith (or just a Darksider) can use Force Lightning, and thus becoming so common that it replaced the Force Choke as the signature ability of the Dark Side. Taken to a ridiculous degree in some works where Jedi can use it was well. Luke himself uses a variant of it in New Jedi Order that is instantly lethal. This could mean that Force Lightning is something that any sufficiently powerful Force-user could wield, but the Jedi generally refuse to because it's basically made only to cause extreme pain.
    • This is actually discussed about the Sith in the Darth Bane trilogy of books. Bane realizes that having more than two Sith Lords at any one time spreads the dark side of the Force too thinly, and the Sith as a whole are weakened because the Sith crave power to the point that they're willing to jeopardize their plans for galactic domination just to get a leg up on their rivals and thus leave the Sith vulnerable. Given how many times Sith empires had collapsed for precisely this reason, Bane clearly had a point. The line of reasoning behind the Rule of Two (that there should only be one master and one apprentice) is that there is one Sith to embody power, and a second to crave it.
    • Cortosis ore. Originally introduced as a rare mineral that was difficult to work with, impractical for armor (due to its weight and softness), and with the specific power to merely turn off lightsabers (and even then, they can cause it small amounts of damage), Cortosis was eventually woven (sorry) into the rest of the EU as part of something called "Cortosis weave", a process that allows weapons and armor to resist lightsabers. The Old Republic games in particular treat Cortosis as one of the most common materials in the universe, judging by how well standard swords and armor stand up against it.
    • The Kyber Crystal. In Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the Kaiburr crystal was a single unique gem that could enhance one's connection to the Force. Eventually, someone made the connection that lightsabers have crystals, so why not take part of the Kaiburr crystal and make a lightsaber out of it? By the time of the reboot, "Kyber" had become a kind of crystal, one of many that was suitable for lightsaber construction. As of the new continuity, Kyber has become the kind of crystal that lightsabers (and, ultimately, the Death Star) are made with.
    • Hilarious example with Boba Fett. Due to Wolverine Publicity, he became a central character in Attack of the Clones. Unfortunately, the EU had gone to strenuous lengths to preserve his mystique up to that point, most notably in refusing to ever reveal or describe his physical appearance. Come Attack of the Clones, it turns out he has the most common face in the galaxy. Star Wars Infinities The Empire Strikes Back celebrated the occasion by having the first scene of an unmasked Boba Fett, with Lando walking into his office in Cloud City to find Fett with his helmet off and his feet up on Lando's desk.
  • Unreliable Canon: The EU is official canon (conflicts are decided case by case, but generally novels are ranked highest, comics next, then video games, then RPG sourcebooks). But yeah, Lucas doesn't care about it, causing no end of problems in retconning the EU to match up with G-canon (the movies and any materials directly connected, such as the novelizations, Visual Dictionaries, and Incredible Cross-Sections). The continuity problems are one reason Karen Traviss quit.
  • Villain of the Week: The early Legends novels set after Return of the Jedi went way overboard with stories involving the villains digging up or making a new superweapon in the vein of the Death Star, including the World Devastators, the Eclipse Class Star Destroyer, the Galaxy Gun, the Centerpoint Station, the Sun Crusher, and the Darksaber. This led to the '90s era of Legends getting jokingly referred to as the "Superweapon of the Month Club". By the time of the latter, the formula had clearly worn out it's welcome with critics and fans, which prompted the later novels to shake things up with new villains like the Yuuzhan Vong.
  • Villainous Legacy: There is an entire subgenre dealing with the immediate aftermath of Return of the Jedi — just because the Emperor is dead doesn't mean there's nobody who is interested in continuing the Empire.
  • Villainous Lineage: Jacen follows in his grandfather's footsteps. When he learns how to use the Force to see the past he becomes obsessed, spending countless hours watching Anakin Skywalker's fall to the dark side. He's desperate to do what Anakin had set out to do without making the same mistakes. Jacen becomes like what Darth Vader could have been had he just killed Palpatine at the start and ruled the Empire by himself.
  • Vow of Celibacy: Legends works sometimes deal with Jedi rules about relationships in more detail. Different writers seem to have taken different approaches (some of them pre-Phantom Menace Backstory decisions that ended up getting disproved by the prequel trilogy, with associated retcons to make them fit), with the result that whatever rules the Jedi are said to have had, they must have changed over time or had lots of exceptions. Some characters seem to be married without repercussion, while others are told it isn't allowed. Specific examples:
    • Jedi Trial, set between Episodes II and III, has Master Nejaa Halcyon find out about Anakin's marriage to Padmé and keep the secret, as he himself secretly has a wife and a teenage son whom he's training as a Jedi. Other works indicate that the Corellian arm of the Jedi Order played by its own rules.
    • The Republic Commando Series has a cameo by Callista Ming from The Callista Trilogy, who is a member of a Jedi sect led by Master Djinn Altis that encourages romantic relations. The mainstream order considers them semi-heretical. Meanwhile Etain Tur-Mukan takes the Secret Relationship approach and has a son with Darman, one of the eponymous clone commandos.
    • The New Jedi Order founded by Luke Skywalker in the post-Return of the Jedi timeframe has no celibacy requirement at all, and some of their members, such as Corran Horn, were already married when they joined.
  • The Walls Are Closing In: References are made to the trash compactor scene from A New Hope on occasion, most notably in The Thrawn Trilogy.
  • Weapons Breaking Weapons: Reference books say that red lightsabers are produced with synthetically grown crystals. The Sith prefer them because they have a slight chance of cutting through an opposing lightsaber blade.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Thanks to Star Wars: The Clone Wars ending, the fates of a number of characters were only resolved in sequel series that aren't canon to Legends.
    • The fate of Ahsoka Tano was never followed up on, leaving it likely she was killed during Order 66, explaining her absence from later material.
    • What happened to Darth Maul? The ambiguously canon comic "Old Wounds" which has Maul hunting down Obi-Wan on Tatooine is the only resolution we get.
    • Captain Rex was involved offscreen in the event of Labyrinth of Evil, but command of the 501st was transfered to Appo, leaving his ultimate fate a mystery.
  • What Other Galaxies?: This continuity states that while there are other galaxies, there's a hyperspace disturbance at the edge of the main galaxy preventing travel in and out and there's only one known place where the barrier doesn't work.
  • Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Referenced by Han Solo during the Dark Nest Crisis. Instead of snakes, he says bugs.
  • Wise Serpent: The Sluissi are a snakelike species complete with tails instead of legs, sometimes even sporting cobra-like hoods. They're also known for their intelligence and mechanical aptitude: Sluissi repair crews are famous throughout the galaxy for their thoroughness, often spending long periods of work on details that other technicians would have skipped in order to save time; combined with their unusually relaxed demeanours, this makes them appear eccentric and sometimes even annoying to other species. However, Wedge Antilles confirms that their slow and considered approach has allowed them to solve issues that might have cost lives if overlooked. Even the Empire knows better than to rush a Sluissi repair job.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: In multiple ways.
    • Weaker beings who turn to the Dark Side are often consumed by it and lose their minds, resulting in a loss of sanity. Sometimes those who can control the Dark Side become so powerful that the arrogance overcomes their reason. Then there is the Force Insanity trick which allows a Force user to make others insane. Finally, the loss of certain power can lead to insanity, such as when Jorak Uln was booted from the top position of the Korriban Academy. Revan calls Jorak a madman when they converse.
    • Joruus C'baoth from the Thrawn Trilogy, though he was arguably more of a case of With Great Insanity Comes Great Power. A clone grown too quickly, he suffered from clone madness, which gave him no qualms about using the Dark Side to do whatever he damn well pleased (up to and including Mind Rape so thorough people were known to die when his presence in their mind was removed.)
  • Vampiric Draining: Some force users can devour the lifeforce of their victims. The strongest Sith lords (e.g.Sidious, Nihilus) are even able to drain life from entire worlds.
  • Vibro Weapon: Besides lightsabers, there are some older melee weapons (like swords) that are still used that use vibro technology to make them more dangerous.
  • The Warlord: Following the fall of the Empire, the surviving Imperial forces splintered as various moffs and admirals took whatever forces were loyal to them and retreated into their own territories, enduring mostly in remote frontiers such as the Deep Core and the edge of the Unknown Regions. One of the most notable of these is Warlord Zsinj, who remains a thorn in the New Republic's side for a number of years. Eventually, the Imperial Remnant begins to coalesce into a centralized government again.
  • Zerg Rush: A viable tactic against Hapan Battledragon cruisers, because their design team skimped on the targeting systems. Sending a swarm of bombers to take out the engines, which are directly connected to its reactor, is a great way to take them out.
  • Zombie Apocalypse:
    • Present in Joe Schreiber's Death Troopers and its prequel, Red Harvest.
    • Also the nature of the threat posed by the Rakghouls.

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General Otto's Defeat

Should he fail in the game, the unfortunate runaway imperial is brought before Lord Vader himself, where he can only nervously smile, knowing the fate that likely awaits him.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (2 votes)

Example of:

Main / OhCrapSmile

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