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Post #1463324

Author
Servii
Parent topic
George Lucas: Star Wars Creator, Unreliable Narrator & Time Travelling Revisionist...
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1463324/action/topic#1463324
Date created
23-Dec-2021, 12:43 PM

I’d never seen George’s quote about there never being a war between Jedi and Sith before. That’s really interesting to see. The Sith having ruled the Galaxy makes sense with what Palpatine says in RotS, but this version of events doesn’t explain why the Sith want revenge against the Jedi, or rather what they want revenge for. People would naturally assume from that that the Jedi and Sith must have fought in the past. Also, having the Sith rule “about 2000 years ago” still contradicts Obi-Wan’s talk about “over a thousand generations.”

George said he fleshed out this larger history of the Jedi and Sith, and that he didn’t get the chance to show it, but a prequel trilogy seems like a pretty opportune time to do exposition on that. The whole trilogy is about the Sith plotting revenge against the Jedi to regain control of the Galaxy, so a little bit of history and context would make sense there. We needed that more than we needed an explanation of midi-chlorians.

The old EU’s greatest strength came from the fact that was it was optional and not really canon. It meant that George had a more hands-off approach with the different authors and their stories, and that those authors had the creative freedom to shape the world and storylines in creative, experimental directions. And if an attempted story direction didn’t work out, well then, authors could course correct from that in future stories, and it’s not like the stories were hard Canon, anyway, so they wouldn’t negatively affect George’s mainline Star Wars.

As much as I enjoy much of the old EU, George made the right call to compartmentalize it as an “alternate universe” and let there be different “tiers” of Canon. It was a mistake of Lucasfilm to throw out the tier system and try to make every new material Canon. That was never going to work out.