I think it might be simpler to just do it the way the Star Trek EU does and let people choose to integrate or not integrate whichever canon they want.
Well, no. Unlike most of you, I’m a person who actually cares about continuity. I would like Star Wars to be a multimedia project, a single universe made up of multiple media that’s basically consistent with itself and between the various stories, as much as possible. I’m absolutely in favour of the existence of and official continuity, I think it’s necessary. This doesn’t prevent the individual fans to create their own personal Canon, and in fact I am the first to do so. But I think the existence of a stable and consistent official continuity is important.
Why
Why not? Canon isn’t the biggest deal ever, but it’s nice to have everything in a fictional universe be roughly consistent with each other. That way, you get to avoid the confusion that comes with insanely tangled multiverse timelines, and every installment feels like it “matters” in the grand scheme of things.
I guess I just don’t see the value in that. I don’t think either Star Wars EU does anything especially interesting with the overarching history of the galaxy so I don’t think we’d lose much by moving away from an overarching continuity. It feels like more of a novelty that pretty wildly different stories have continuity between each other.
I’m not big on the idea of all these interconnected stories myself. I think a better approach is to let different creators do different types of stories however they want to. If they want to form a continuity, the only rule should be no contradicting other stories. I think at its inception, Lucasfilm marketing wanted the EU to work like this, but what ended up happening was authors started trying to interweave everything. Miss this one book that came out three years ago? Well looks like you’re not going to understand what this is all about then.
Its also one of my least favorite parts about comic books. Miss a story or read one you didn’t like? Too bad, here it is in another series and you have to deal with it here now! This is a very niche thing but still, I personally hate not having a full story like that. This is going to seem bizarre to some but I did not like the famous Thrawn trilogy. I do however, somewhat enjoy Jedi Academy. It isn’t a big deal, but it is annoying to see Thrawn and Dark Empire Palpatine brought up in Jedi Academy, a trilogy that I think should be its entirely own story.
Just my opinions of course.