I’m picking up a pervasive mindset here that the best way to go is to outright reject anything you don’t like, and I dig that that works for many of you, but I really don’t feel the need to do that with the current canon. I understand where you’re all coming from, because the NJO books absolutely didn’t jibe with what Star Wars is for me and I never felt comfortable “counting” them, but honestly nothing that’s official right now has been objectionable enough for me to cut it out. I know most of you aren’t keeping up with new books and/or comics (except maybe Haseo) and so you have little incentive to invest in the official version of canon, but one of the things I enjoy about Star Wars is that there’s always more of it, and part of that bargain is allowing the duds to exist on the timeline. I find it much easier to just acknowledge that AOTC happened even though it sucked than it is to perform the mental gymnastics required to make it all hang together when some comic references the events of that film. Doesn’t mean I’m going to start watching it all the time, but I’m fine with it occupying a point in the chronology. Part of what draws me to these sorts of sprawling sci-fi/fantasy epics is the convoluted history of it all; I get a certain amount of joy just from the way things fit together that’s separate from my opinion of the individual things. I guess what I’m trying to say is that rolling with the official canon doesn’t necessarily have to equal jumping through hoops to make yourself love everything Lucasfilm puts its stamp on.
I totally feel this.
As I said
I don’t really have a personal canon of what I think really “happened” but I do have certain pieces of SW that I like and certain pieces that I don’t. There is a distinction between the two concepts.
So there are certain SW things that I like and some that I don’t, but I don’t have any desire to make a “personal canon” out of them. Is there any chance something like Labyrinth of Evil and the original Marvel run really happened in the same continuity? Unlikely, but I don’t really care.
When it comes to canon I have no issue accepting the “official” one. Just because the prequels aren’t great movies doesn’t mean I have to strip them from the franchise entirely and scoff off any new material that references them. When Darth Vader formed an army of battle droids I thought, who cares? that’s pretty cool. Honestly, if people had never seen the offending films the concept of Vader rebooting an old army of droids would have jazzed nearly everyone.
I can accept the idea that all the new EU works are beholden to the facts and events of each other and I think that makes them interesting as it adds another layer to the proceedings. But trying to create a personal canon just doesn’t work for me, as then it really just feels like I’m trying to force another layer on where there wasn’t one before. This is obviously egregious when you’re reading something like those early Marvel books, but it still applies to something like Labyrinth of Evil. I mean, sure, I don’t think there’s much in there that’s contradicted by anything new, but the fact of the matter is it wasn’t written as beholden to this new continuity.
I’m definitely not explaining this well, but to be clear I don’t mean to say I care more about “official” canon stories. As I said, there are things I like and things I don’t and that has nothing to do with canon. The thing is that canon is just whatever the writers of a story were beholden to. And the truth is that the original six films were beholden to nothing but themselves and each other (mostly), and TCW was beholden to only the films, so they lay a solid framework for the new EU. The old EU was beholden to many different things, depending on the work. There was the original Marvel run, that was beholden to the film(s), but then there were plenty of other pieces of media that felt no need to be beholden to the details of that Marvel run at all. The key difference with the new EU being that every piece of media, from that framework on, is beholden to each other, which really is quite an interesting (and fun) thing.