This video sums up pretty well why I really love the Dark Empire comics and why so many people hate it. It’s a fun story that stretched the rules a little to allow a dead character to return so that we could further explore a set of ideas only touched upon in ROTJ, and I’ve always found it a little frustrating that the old EU, once it settled and hardened, never really dared to do something like it again.
I also find it funny that SW has ended up with some of the most nitpicky fans as it’s not really a franchise that ever seemed to care that much about the finer details to begin with. I can see why something like Star Trek need to adhere to more rules since it’s much harder sci-fi, but ironically they’ve always played very loose with the smaller details, sometimes even contradicting things within the same series.
The only time I’m really frustrated by a change or alteration on lore is when it breaks narrative cohesion or blatantly contradicts something important like how a character has always behaved or the overall theme of a series (though even these can be vague and highly subjective).
One reason the fans are so ‘nitpicky’ might be because Star Wars is famous for caring little for consistent canon and handwaving its details. Because of this, any current creator of Star Wars will feel (perhaps rightly) that the details don’t matter and everything is in service of adding drama to a story, dragging Star Wars ever further away from a sense of verisimilitude across stories. So now a fan who was okay with the moderate level of canon fragmentation during the OT may feel that the current level of extreme fragmentation is too much, and become a ‘nitpicky fan’.
This is all theoretical of course 😉
Yeah, and it does seem to be a much more “recent” thing as well. Though I think another big factor is the old EU which went through great lengths to connect everything and explain every little details. The generation of fans who grew up in the 90’s and early 2000’s seem especially effected by this as they grew up with all the sourcebooks and in-depth games that tried to explain everything. Patrick H. Willems wet into this in his What Do We Want From a Star Wars Movie? video. I think some generations of SW fans are simply so accustomed to getting every little details that they kinda freak out when its not give to them. And of course similar stuff happens to all franchises, including Star Trek, I just find it funny that ST lore is such a mess while SW always tries to keep everything as connected as possible.
This might all just be a side-effect of franchises that’s generally unavoidable as the stories start to pile up and the new generations of fans struggles to keep it all coherent as they go through it all retroactively. I think these continuity “errors” are easier to ignore when you watch/read stories over the course of decades. When you try to go through multiple moves/series over a short period of time the seams suddenly become much more apparent.