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.”
I think what Lucas means is that rather than armies of Jedi and Sith fighting each other, the Sith split into rival warlords and then the Jedi took down each Sith warlord separately. Keep in mind that I think Lucas meant for the Sith to have followed the Rule of Two for most of their history (hence Yoda knowing about it) and the EU misunderstood the TPM novelization as implying that Darth Bane lived 1000 years before the movies rather than being part of the group of rogue Jedi who founded the Sith.
I don’t think Obi-Wan meant that the Republic had never been conquered for “over a thousand generations”, but rather he meant that the Jedi had always saved the day. I’ve never heard anyone say that KOTOR contradicts Obi-Wan’s line by taking place less than 1000 generations before the movies.
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.
This 1000x. When Anakin asked Qui-Gon what midichlorians are, he should have also asked what a Sith is.
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.
Agreed. So many fans think that anything that’s published must be hard canon and that for anything that’s ever been published to not be hard canon would be “confusing”, but I think having to track down everything that’s ever been published is far more confusing than just having to watch some movies.