Batman wrote: ↑2020-05-17 07:55pm
Also for Marvel the comics were at the core of the franchise. Who but us gave a damn about the Wars EU? Or even knew about it?
I really hate having to point what I'm about to say over and over.
So the biggest gun board on the internet is the last place I'd expect to see a moderator of that board there talking about how Disney screwed up the Star Wars canon; comparing the "post-war" states of:
Old EU:
Empire slowly splintering over years from various warlords following Palpatine's death, allowing the New Republic to spread and take over.
Disney SW:
The Empire being defeated at the pyrric battle of Jakku and collapsing almost instantly; yet somehow the secretive First Order somehow grows to "take over galaxy" status without anyone noticing?
This was followed by posters on that board mentioning things like:
Vong
Thrawn
Karen Traviss (yes she has a reputation there as well)
Suncrusher
Various other EU stuff
How the Holdo Manouver broke SW, because why do you need a Death Star, when you can put hyperdrives onto asteroids and hit planets with swarms of them?
Etc.
Basically, NEEEEERRD stuff.
It also refutes the concept that "nobody read the old EU", when random people are mentioning it in the last places you'd expect it to be mentioned.
As was pointed out to me by a friend, the EU was basically what SW was during the hibernation period of 1987 to the 1997 Special Editions.
Basically, if you wanted new Star Wars during that decade; you had to read the EU novels or look at the stuff considered part of the EU (such as games like TIE Fighter or the WEG RPG sourcebooks).
This is where a lot of the problems are arising from, and it all goes back to the unprecedented decision in 1990 that Lucasfilm made:
1.) The new novel trilogy that they'd contracted Timothy Zahn to write would be considered "canon", as in the official continuation of the Star Wars story.
2.) They sent Zahn a box full of WEG RPG material and told him to use that where possible.
Before that, spin off novels and role playing games were considered kind of "licensed fanfiction" -- you had scores of novels, comics and games for all sorts of sci fi shows, from Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica, but they had no real effect on each other, everyone (including the writers of other books) ignored each other.
Case in point, the Star Trek licensed boardgame -- "Star Fleet Battles" -- outside the SFB universe, all the stuff in there doesn't exist. Same with FASA's Trek RPG.
Against this, LucasFilm's "SW-EU" was something new -- it was one of the first shared universes -- you could jump from novel series or to the comics or even video games -- and they'd try to respect each other and co-exist; making the stories feel like they COUNTED, instead of being disposable cash grabs for nerd dollars (Trek novels anyone?)
And it was popular too!
NYT Bestseller lists
Heir to the Empire:
26 May 1991 -- #11
02 June 1991 -- #6
09 June 1991 -- #5
16 June 1991 -- #2
23 June 1991 -- #2
30 June 1991 -- #1
07 July 1991 -- #2
14 July 1991 -- #3
23 July 1991 -- #3
28 July 1991 -- #3
4 August 1991 - #4
11 August 1991 - #3
18 August 1991 - #5
25 August 1991 - #6
01 September 1991 - #6
08 September 1991 - #7
15 September 1991 - #6
22 September 1991 - #8
29 September 1991 - #13
19 weeks in the list.
Dark Force Rising:
7 June 1992 -- #3
14 June 1992 -- #3
21 June 1992 -- #2
28-Jun-92 -- #4
5-Jul-92 -- #5
12-Jul-92 -- #4
19-Jul-92 -- #5
26-Jul-92 -- #5
2-Aug-92 -- #7
9-Aug-92 -- #9
16-Aug-92 -- #9
23-Aug-92 -- #7
30-Aug-92 -- #11
6-Sep-92 -- #15
13-Sep-92 -- #15
15 weeks in the list
Last Command:
25-Apr-93 -- #3
2-May-93 -- #3
9-May-93 -- #3
16-May-93 -- #4
23-May-93 -- #6
30-May-93 -- #7
6-Jun-93 -- #9
13-Jun-93 -- #9
20-Jun-93 -- #9
27-Jun-93 -- #10
4-Jul-93 -- #12
11-Jul-93 -- #13
11 weeks in the list
It's interesting to note that looking back, I ran across another book; showing how much different things were back then:
Imzadi by Peter David was actually on the bestseller list the same time Dark Force Rising was. Trek had a chance to become a shared universe back then, but they blew it with their "lol officially licensed fanfic" views towards multimedia (Comics, books, video games).
Basically lots of people liked having a shared universe that felt like it counted.
WHO KNEW *I'm a smarmy asshole*?
The current major shared universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is raking in cash for two reasons:
A.) It works because it locks down the back stories of Marvel characters to have a definite beginning, middle and end, like Captain America's story from 2011 to 2019. This isn't the case in the mainline comics; where it's always "Captain America was revived ten years ago" using a constantly sliding logarthmic scale of time where Peter Parker is only a few years out of college, etc.
B.) They've kept it tight -- it's mostly the movies (for now). That's a big reason Agents of SHIELD and the Netflix Marvel shows failed -- because they didn't count -- they were just disposable trashfic like the old licensed Star Trek novels.
Disney's big mistake with decanonizing the old EU was that even though it had become a bloated mess of itself, they failed to realize how dangerous decanonizing it was.
While it's one thing to say "this thing never existed" and strike it....the fandom will forgive you if what you struck was
genuinely that bad.
Case in point Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster -- that book was decanonized under the old LFL regime in 1991-1992, while at the same time they canonized the old Brian Daley novels (Han Solo at Stars End, etc).
A non-Star Wars example would be Galactica 1980. If you declared that G1980 never existed, and that your new Battlestar Galactica was to be a creative continuation of the first series, nobody would blame you for that.
Disney, I don't think realized how much people had become emotionally invested into certain EU characters and events:
Mara Jade
Talon Karrde
Grand Admiral Thrawn
Captain Pellaeon
Aaron Allston's "X-Wing Series" was full of minor characters, and such like Corran Horn (though it was a bit over the top for Horn to have Jedi lineage).
Hell, even Borsk Fey'la and his Bothans were nice to have around as scheming assholes.
But what really did in Disney was....
They took their own sweet time to bring characters and such back into the new continuity after going straight to global thermonuclear war on 25 April 2014 and nuking the entire EU, all 25+ years of it.
It took two whole years before Thrawn was reintroduced, and this time in a Children's TV show (Rebels Season 3 in 2016), and three years for Thrawn to get a serious book (Thrawn by Zahn in 2017).
When you do something like what Disney did, the fandom will never trust you again, and will be gun shy about emotionally (and financially/timewise) investing into the fandom again.
This is a dangerous move today, as Star Wars is in the 'mature' phase of it's life cycle -- in 1990, there really weren't a lot of options for sci fi franchises, you had Star Wars, Star Trek, and maybe Doctor Who.
Today, there's a franchise for EVERYTHING:
Halo (Video Gaming)
Mass Effect (Video Gaming)
Babylon 5 (TV/Movie Franchise)
The Expanse (TV)
Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Basically, today's preteen and teenager have more choices to choose; and Disney's own Marvel franchise is cannibalizing Star Wars' potential installed base in children as well.
Which means that the core Star Wars demographic right now is the Gen X and Early Millennial market in their 30s and 40s. This makes splintering the Fandom EXTREMELY dangerous.
Another example of splintering is over in Star Trek:
Right now we have three different timelines to follow in Trek:
Kelvinverse
Discoveryverse
Original Timeline with the PICARD Series and maybe the Star Trek Online game which has acted as a continuation of the original timeline since 2010.
ST: Online has had TEN years of backstory built up in the universe through missions and other stuff that even casual fans have played the game for; if nothing else but to see what happened 30 years after Nemesis.
ST:O had Denise Crosby reprise her role as Tasha Yar's daughter I believe back in 2013, players got to see Captain Harry Kim in command of his own ship, and an attempt to bring closure to the Temporal Cold War, with Walter Koenig and Michael Doohan's son voicing their characters in a time plot; along with trying to incorporate the Kelvinverse somehow.
It's an ambitious attempt to try and answer some questions the fans have, and if they throw that out (and probably will) with PICARD, it will annoy a lot of the ST:O fans and fragment the Original timeline fanbase AGAIN.
Pissing the fans off like this is never a good idea.
Why?
When you have a good (mostly) coherent universe running on all cylinders; the fandoms will make excuses and explanations for your goofs.
Case in point, Khan's "I never forget a face" to Chekov in WRATH OF KHAN, but Chekov didn't join the crew until Season 2 (Space Seed was Season One).
Most of Trekdom's explanation for that mistake is to postulate that Chekov was on the Enterprise in Season 1, but as a lower ranked non-bridge crew officer (offscreen), before being promoted between Season 1 and Season 2.
When you alienate them, they won't even bother to fix your mistakes for you -- case in point the new Disney Sequel Trilogy (TFA/TLJ/ROS) -- nobody really wants to expend mental energies to "fix" boo-boos anymore, particularly not after Rise of Skywalker.
A big reason for not wanting to expend mental energies is TIME.
A heavy chunk of the SW fandom isn't young anymore -- we don't have 20-30 hours a week of obligatory activity (school or part time jobs); with long idle breaks (summer break, spring break, etc). We're now pushing 40+ hours a week, with the weekends and maybe a few holidays a year off.
So we're more sensitive to the "invested time" of our youth; and if you want to force us to watch your "new" canon to get caught up (the Dave Filoni shows), we'll just shrug our shoulders and move on to the latest thing on Netflix (Justified, Longmire, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul).
All the more so when Disney EU quickly fell into the old bad habits:
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Phasma%27s_armor
Phasma had the armor polished in chromium, which had been salvaged from a Naboo yacht that had once belonged to Emperor Palpatine of the Galactic Empire, the First Order's precursor
Just look at Phasma's entry:
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Phasma
It's the equivalent of a fat man having liposuction and bariatric surgery, only to keep eating a cake every night, and it makes me NOT want to invest time in keeping up with whatever unholy mess Disney has cooked up.