Star Wars

All Disney would have to do is declare the EU an Alternate Universe, and suddenly Canon's irrelevant. And no, they don't need to make up some wormhole or something to do it. If there IS a Multiverse in reality, we haven't been in contact with any others. That doesn't mean they don't exist.

Then you can dive in and take whatever you want from the EU, and nothing needs retconned. You want Thrawn as the bad guy? Great! Understand that the particulars to the story will be different, but the guy himself won't be far off the original, and we won't make Zahn rewrite a thing. Mara Jade? Bring her on! Make it a true love hate, Slap-Slap-Kiss thing with Luke. No one has to rewrite a thing.

Hell, bring in Kal Skirata and his Clone Troops as a neutral third party. With it being an AU, they don't have to be the Mando-Sues that Traviss loves so much.

Pablo Hidalgo ?@infinata 5h

@starsymbiotes in the future... We're working on it.

View conversation Reply Retweeted Favorited More

Pablo Hidalgo ?@infinata 5h

@starsymbiotes and then everything else was EU. Stuff that might be true. Might also not be.

View conversation Reply Retweeted Favorited More

Pablo Hidalgo ?@infinata 5h

@starsymbiotes I can say that in the past, if it was intended for the screen and developed by George Lucas, it was canon.

edited 22nd Feb '14 5:39:18 AM by Stevron

Here's an interesting article about the Expanded Universe by Ars Technica.

Wow, that guy really doesn't like the EU.

Yeah, I know. I mean, I'm not a fan of everything that happens in the EU, but that guy really could be a bit more open-minded about it.

Zahn's stuff is some of the best, it's true, but I do feel that Stackpole, Allston, and Stover made some great contributions as well. I will also never stop championing Yoda: Dark Rendezvous and Brian Daley's Han Solo Adventures.

The only things I would keep from teh EU are Coruscant and Thrawn. With perhaps the Alan Dean Foster novels. The rest?

Yeah, chainsaw it. None of the points made in that Ars Technica article are ones I would heartily disagree with, let's put it that way. Why be open minded about stuff you despise?

I actually made it through that FIGURATIVELY Vomit-Inducing piece of shit op ed. There are things that need to go, but there's no need to axe everything post-ROTJ. Cut out the monstrously sized series, keep Thrawn, and work around him. There's other minor stories that can be kept, too. Personally I think they'll cut the stuff between the two trilogies, too.

There ARE interlude movies in the works still, right?

Well, with the EU being non-canon, it's really only a matter of what EU is canon from the story of the Lucasfilm Story Group forward.

On the subject of EU writings, Aaron Allston passed away on Thursday, apparently of heart failure.

I knew him more for his part in the manual for the original Wing Commander, "Claw Marks", and his work on Ultima, but what little I read of him in the SWEU was in general an entertaining read.

Well, that's two of my favorite Star Wars authors gone now.

Who was the first?

edited 2nd Mar '14 6:03:11 AM by Stevron

Brian Daley. He wrote the Han Solo Adventures trilogy. I'm pretty sure they're some of the earliest Star Wars novels written, though I haven't checked the publication date. He tends to go slightly harder on the scifi scale than Star Wars tech usually goes but there's nothing really egregious, and the books are really quite a bit of fun to read.

Aw shit :(

Well, guys, Mark Hamill is voicing an Expanded Universe character in the series finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

And it turned out to be Darth Bane.

edited 9th Mar '14 5:37:13 PM by Stevron

In a flashback to the past or a nod to what's to come for the franchise?

And I'm beginning to be annoyed by all the redheads coming out of the woodwork in the EU. Both Luke AND Han had Reds in their lives. And the wound up being the blonde sort, rather than the truly rare pure reds that you almost never see. It's a nice nod to reality but I prefer rubies over sunnies.

So, having read all but the last few pages of the Han Solo Trilogy, I gotta call the SWEU an Alternate Universe. The way Han acts in the movies doesn't seem to even begin to cover the kind of Hell the Rebels in the last book put him through. They welched a deal, and the love of his life in this trilogy turned into a Take No Quarters ruthless warrior for the Rebel Alliance who actually made the decision to screw Han out of thousands of credits for the sake of the cause. Hell, he was the representative of an entire contingent of smugglers, all of whom were denied the payment they were promised on a mission that was a Hell of a lot harder than they were told to expect. Han lost all cache with them because they thought he was in on breaking the deal.

There is no way in Hell that a Han Solo who went through that would be willing to trust the RA, or to fall in love with another Rebel leader. The way he acts in the movies is completely blank of that past history. So I'm calling AU on that.

Eh, it was one trilogy, and took place years before the OT. Things change, and Han is ambivalent about organizations. Luke and Leia made the Rebels a much better sell than Bria Tharen.

The EU really made me hate Han, though, as well as most Corellians post-LOTF. Must they all be such contrarian fascists?

edited 10th Mar '14 10:07:32 AM by CrimsonZephyr

No, it took place WEEKS before the OT, as the very damn end of the last book has Han hook up with Obi Wan and Luke, and it was apparent that it really hadn't been very long since the Ylesian fiasco, because the take from that lead directly to the mission that killed Bria. As in, the very night before he talked to Obi Wan, Solo was sending out the message about her death to her father.

That whole entire ending was garbled. RIGHT after the mission, Han was given his doomed smuggling run that forced him to ditch Jabba's cargo. He waited a week to contact Jabba, and was given ten days from that date to pay back the lost cargo's value. It was about a week into that deadline that he was told about Bria dying. So there were only two weeks, give or take, between Han getting screwed over and him being chartered by Obi Wan . . .

I'll admit it's only one trilogy, which also incorporated another one into its canon, but if that's the EU's accepted back story for Solo, it'd still be borderline AU.

This is why I pretty much just stick to the Han Solo Adventures. The only lead-in they have to the movies is at the end of the third book, where Han says they should do a spice run for Jabba since it would be easy money.

Han Solo is a wishy washy dude. I think people retroactively made him a more consistent personality than he actually was. He goes from being only in it for the money to being a somewhat committed rebel in the span of what must be a week.

These abrupt and unreliable changes in perspective are nothing new.

Not really. He was in it for Luke because the guy seemed like a little brother to him. Plus, you know . . . Death Star? If The Empire had been able to keep one of those, it wouldn't have taken much for them to hunt down smugglers like him. Even into the beginning of Empire Strikes Back, he started off waiting for his payment. He only stayed longer because of Luke.

He probably stuck with the Rebels between the first two movies because they were hard up for great pilots, and willing to pay him his worth to stay on. I think there's a good year or two between each movie.

And the Han Solo trilogy only really botched everything towards the ending. If Bria hadn't screwed him over so damn much, there wouldn't be any reason for lingering resentment. And I might have overstated that ending, anyway. There were nine colonies on Ylesia. Bria lead the raid on the strongest one, but she was the only rebel leader to stiff her smugglers of their payment. The rest of the rebel leaders kept things fair. So it was really only Lando and the pack of raiders following Bria that got cut out. So it is conceivable that the Rebels wouldn't get an automatic fail from Solo. I was just overreacting to it right after reading the story because I was pissed for Han.

Empire takes place three years after, Return a year after that. And, to be honest, I don't really like Han Solo, largely because the entire Corellian people have had his personality imposed upon them, and I don't really think Han is a guy who would transition well to peacetime under a legitimate government. Usually, people like him in real life, mercenaries and pirates and smugglers, get cut loose and hunted down because they don't know when to quit.

Every world was assigned a hat based on their first appearance. Alderaan as a peaceful planet . . . that one line turned the whole world into a gun control fantasy world where no one but the police can even get a weapon, and the only spice known is the weakest. You can't even filch stuff like Glitterstim there, as Han found out the hard way. And the Bothans? Folks took Zahn's portrayal of them and rolled with it, if there wasn't an earlier one that took place during the time frame of the movies.