It's quite late, but here it is my review of Star Wars: No Prisoners. Such a great (short) book.

https://hardcover.app/books/no-prisoners-star-wars-legends-the-clone-wars-star-wars-the-clone-wars-book-3/reviews/@factolvictor?referrer_id=7506

#starwars #ahsoka #clonewars #expandeduniverse #eu #legends #books #reading #bookstodon @bookstodon

Star Wars: La Vendetta dei Sith, il romanzo di Matthew Stover torna in edizione speciale per il ventennale

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.galaxyaddicted.it/2025/10/la-vendetta-dei-sith-romanzo-anniversario/

I don’t think being a fan longer than someone else is particularly a virtue, and if anything, you should be helping other people enjoy the thing you enjoy as much as you have.

However, in light of all of the recent discussion about Star Wars, inclusive of a whole lot of commentary about The Acolyte, I thought I might cast my ancient, hoary mind backward across the ages.    

Buckle up. 

Star Wars is My Life

I saw Star Wars when I was 3 years old, and I didn’t remember the plot, but I remembered images from that movie until l finally got to see the movie again on HBO years later. Because nobody had VHS players in my town.

I read the Marvel Star Wars comics when Carmine Infantino was drawing the book. I was there for Droid World and the Hoojibs. I had an emotionally dysregulated moment when Luke was infected with the Crimson Forever disease in Star Wars #50.

One of the first novels I read was Splinter in the Mind’s Eye. I read the Han Solo trilogy. Much later on, I even read the Lando Calrissian books.

I was there on day one when Heir to the Empire came out.

I read novels during the Bantam era and the Del Rey era. I read Shadows of the Empire, both the novel and the complimentary but separate story in the Dark Horse comics.

I read the Tales of the Jedi comics and the Boba Fett comics. Somehow, I even finished Dark Empire and its sequels. Palpatine just kept returning.

I played video games like TIE Fighter, Rebel Assault, Dark Forces, Shadows of the Empire, Empire at War, The Force Unleashed, Knights of the Old Republic, Knights of the Old Republic II, and played through multiple class stories in The Old Republic MMO.

I played the first d20 Star Wars RPG, and had every single book for Star Wars Saga Edition, and ran it many times. I have almost every Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion, and Force and Destiny book that was produced by Fantasy Flight.

I had Star Wars miniatures from WotC and even played the wargame that was marketed with the miniatures. I had way too many sets of the Star Wars Living Card Game and way too many ships for the X-Wing miniatures game. I played in casual games and tournaments for both (and wasn’t very good, but that’s beside the point).

I read the Knight Errant series, the Dawn of the Jedi comics, and the Dawn of the Jedi novel.

I say this to clarify that, yes, I understand that in the EU, there were retcons introduced to account for taking Obi-Wan’s comment about a thousand generations literally and Palpatine’s comment about the Republic existing for a thousand years.

I know that in the EU, the treaty of Ruusaan marked the “refounding” of the Republic and that often people (now at least) refer to the refounding as the Republic as a whole. I know that the Battle of Ruusan is when Darth Bane set off the Thought Bomb that destroyed all of the Jedi on the planet, as well as all of the Sith, so he could refound the Sith with the Rule of Two.

And I tell you, as someone who has experienced all of that, that Star Wars contains unreliable narrators, and it was perhaps a little silly for Dark Horse to have based their chronology on a single comment that they took as an absolute statement of fact (only Sith deal in absolutes).

Here is Where We Get Real

As someone who has experienced all of that, I tell you that Lucas never considered the EU canon, never felt beholden to it, and at most, would see something he thought was cool and reinsert it into what he was working on, often in a much different context. No matter what marketing copy said on this or that novel, in every interview Lucas ever gave, he’s reinforced the idea that he didn’t consider the EU canon.

The Expanded Universe had a canon. All of the EU was supposed to match everything else in the EU, but the prime directive of the EU was that if something in a project that George Lucas was involved with, namely the movies and the Clone Wars television series, the canon of the EU had to reflect that. That was the goal, but it wasn’t always the reality. A lot of Leland Chee’s job as the Keeper of the Holocron was to come up with reasons that things that contradicted one another, actually didn’t.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have fond memories of it. As a long-term DC Comics fan, I still love a lot of pre-Crisis stories. I should clarify what Crisis I mean, but I pretty much mean all of them. DC salvages bits and pieces of those previous continuities and reinserts them, sometimes with different contexts, into the next iteration of the story.

It does mean that once Disney bought the property and declared the EU outside of canon for what they wanted to do, that is what’s true for all Disney projects moving forward. It’s also true that if something is introduced from the EU into current projects, the only thing that’s “canon” about that thing is the thing itself. Nothing brings in any extra stuff in the backdoor just because it now exists in modern Star Wars.

Defining Canon

It is also worth looking at what “canon” means. Canon means absolutely nothing, except for the idea that the people working at Lucasfilm have a limited set of stories that they assume to have a bearing on future projects. That’s it. It actually means nothing to you, as a fan, or at least it means as much as a company directive that says “Everything is shot digitally” or “We’re not calling a form of music jizz anymore, are you kidding me?” The Expanded Universe, as a project, had a canon, that existed to guide creators in what they should and shouldn’t include in their work. The Expanded Universe had a canon, in this context. Star Wars doesn’t have a canon. It’s a property, it’s a set of stories, themes, and ideas, and that can’t have a canon. All those ideas, themes, and stories exist, even if they aren’t referenced by current creators.

People working on a shared property generally want to build together, not in parallel. Lucasfilm has a story group for that kind of thing. And unfortunately, if a project is big enough, you get Disney looking over your shoulder and handing out directives. Like, you can’t have another year to develop the next movie and they all have to come out every other year instead of giving you three years between movies.

According to what the creators and Lucasfilm have agreed will be considered for their media projects at this time, we have no idea how old the Jedi are. We might if James Mangold’s movie is, indeed, a Dawn of the Jedi-type story. But that hasn’t happened yet.

According to what the creators and Lucasfilm have agreed will be considered for their media projects at this time, there has been one Republic that lasted for probably around 1000 years, because contextually nobody seemed to disagree with Palpatine when he said it, and Luke grew up in a world without a Republic and had no context on which to challenge some old guy saying “generations” instead of “years.”

We know there was a previous Sith Empire because Palpatine mentions it in the Clone Wars, or at least that the Sith ruled the galaxy. Maybe we’ll find out that that’s only true from a certain point of view. When it comes to multiple Republics, at most, there is a throwaway line in the story arc where the Darksaber is first introduced in the Clone Wars series, where Pre Vizsla says something about the Jedi Temple being sacked during the Old Republic.

I personally think it was a throwaway bit of dialog referencing The Old Republic MMO, and using Old Republic kind of implies the New Republic, but the Old Republic, to consumers of the game, meant the same Republic that the EU had assumed was in place for thousands of years, so its a matter of using an “out of world” term for something “in the world,” and people jumping on that as proof of something.

But sure. There hasn’t been a galaxy-wide war in 1000 years, that’s sort of established in the current canon. So if the Jedi Temple on Coruscant was sacked, it either implies a galaxy-wide war . . . or it implies that maybe Coruscant wasn’t the capital at the time, and it was more of a regional conflict with the Mandalorians than a galaxy-wide war. We don’t have a definitive answer.

There may not have even been a galaxy-wide government before the Sith conquered the galaxy, which makes for some interesting speculation as to whether maybe trying to maintain a galaxy-wide government just because a previous one existed is a worthwhile goal. It’s fun to speculate, but it’s really all just speculation until someone makes a TV show, movie, or animated series about it. Maybe a book or comic.

Even the modern “canon” of Star Wars projects, stuff that translates across media “sort of” happened. Look at the beginning of the Bad Batch versus the Kanan comic book series. Everything is fuzzy around the edges, stuff is in the general shape of a canon, especially between media produced years apart.

Understanding Media

When I was an adolescent reading the Marvel Star Wars comics, and Splinter in the Minds Eye, somehow I understood that different media may not always take into account other media from the same property. In all of my issues of Bantha Tracks, there was never an official statement that the comics or the novels weren’t canon. I just kind of understood that.

In the Marvel Godzilla comics, SHIELD had a dedicated helicarrier to chase kaiju. I never expected to see that in a Godzilla movie. Spider-Man was in issue three of the Transformers comic, and Buster Witwicky and his friends were listening to Dazzler on the radio. I never expected to see that referenced in the Transformers movies, or even for Spider-Man to show up in the cartoon back in the 80s.

Yes, these are crossover properties, but it underscored to young, unwise-in-the-ways-of-the-world me that storytelling mediums are often distinct from one another, so you enjoy what you enjoy in the context in which they appear. In The Mandalorian, there isn’t one big, giant mythosaur skeleton proving that the creature exists, and that’s okay.

Why are we like this now? I don’t know. It would be easy to say “the internet,” but I think it’s more likely that we’re like this because bad people find bad ways to utilize tools that other people would use for fun or with more responsibility. Hate and outrage are stoked on the internet because grifters get something out of it. People who are nostalgic for the way things were can be stoked by grifters away from “I liked this better,” to “This was empirically better, and I’m owed the status quo.”

People have a selective memory when they get emotional and want to prove their point. I’m not going to pretend that I’ve never held on so tightly to my interpretation of a thing that I forgot that various elements of the property meant my interpretation wasn’t right, and argued vociferously for my version of reality. I thank every person on the internet who put up with me while I was learning and growing out of that phase of life.

I guess I would ask people to remember the words of Vision in Avengers: Age of Ultron, when he said, “A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”

You know, Vision. Who was Jarvis. Who wasn’t a butler, but an AI.

https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/06/13/star-wars-canon-and-you-2024-the-acolyte-edition/

#Disney #ExpandedUniverse #Jedi #Lucasfilm #RuleOfTwo #Sith #StarWars #TheAcolyte #TheHighRepublic #WhyDoesThisKeepHappening_

"The years from 1991 to 1998 were special ones in which to be a Star Wars fan. For during these years, more so than during any other time in the franchise’s existence, Star Wars truly belonged to its fans."

The Digital Antiquarian with a fantastic examination of my favorite era of Star Wars literature, games, and media. while proclaiming love for the Jedi Knight FPS :) 💕

https://www.filfre.net/2024/04/jedi-knight-plus-notes-on-an-expanded-universe/

#StarWars #ExpandedUniverse

📚 New video! 📚
I'm a really big fan of the #StarWars #ExpandedUniverse, and I'm often asked where to start with such a big collection of #books, #comicbooks, games etc. So, here's my primer for beginning your journey into the Legends Continuity! #bookstodon #readerlife

https://youtu.be/nx24bT6A_mQ

#Space1999 #ExpandedUniverse #ConceptArt

"A selection of concept ideas from Space:1999. This starts with a 'Flight of the Phoenix' Inspired stranded Eagle ship. Based on Gerry Anderson's Space:1999 Series."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu-Aakc7e1w&ab_channel=Space%3A1999NickMacarty

#GerryAnderson #FlightOfThePhioenix #Eagle #EagleShip #EagleShips #Eagles #SpaceShip #SpaceShips #Moon #Moonbase #MoonbaseAlpha #Mars #MarsOutpost #MarseBase #NickMacarty