Asha said:
Yeah, at least half of the EU makes for pretty bad fiction (Palpatine clones etc.).
The thing that pisses me off is that a huge chunk of the EU that I followed from the 70s up until the prequels was rendered non-canon. So following it was a big, fat waste of time and brain space.
Right from the start, Splinter of the Mind's Eye was a moot point the moment ESB came out. Same goes for the Marvel comics.
Jaster Mereel was no longer Boba Fett. Owen Lars was no longer Ben's brother.
Really, who in his/her right mind would pay any attention to the EU after getting burned for over 20 years?
I like some of the Clone Wars stuff (particularly Ventress and the original cartoon), but when I'm in the mood for new science fiction or fantasy, the EU is the last place I'd look.
Actually, a lot of the Marvel stuff seems to be considered canon to some extent now. And I think Splinter is considered canon too, even though that makes no sense, because no way did Vader fight Luke before ESB. But the whole question of what EU is canon is pointless, because the EU is just merchandising and it makes no sense for any of it to be considered canon.
Lucas himself doesn't seem to consider the EU canon and on that one thing I agree with him. It's self-evident that the eu isn't the real Star Wars and thus shouldn't be considered canon. Sure, some guys at Lucasfilm will tell you certain EU things are canon, but that's just for internal consistency of EU products and for selling stuff. It isn't some great significant truth. And they seem to change what they consider canon. So their canon doesn't have a lot of validity. What's in it and what's not in it doesn't count for a lot.
Sure, it can still sting a bit to find that the favorite eu stories you knew as a kid are not taken seriously nowadays as much as some Zahn book is, but a lot of that old stuff is taken seriously to one extent or another anyway. The Chronology book they put out in, I think, 2005 references a good dose of Marvel stuff. The rule is when some Marvel stuff is referenced by modern canonical items that Marvel story becomes canon as they count it. Various Marvel stories are referenced elsewhere in "canon" too. Once the Marvel stories came back into print in tpbs in the 2000s they started taking them more seriously and referencing them in more works. Splinter seems to still be counted as canon, even if that makes no sense.
Personally I never considered Splinter as any sort of canon, not back in the early 80s, not now. And while I got a great kick out of the Marvel stories as a kid, I knew back then that they weren't real Star Wars and didn't really happen in the Star Wars universe. When the Zahn trilogy came out I got the message that they were instead of the sequel trilogy Lucas wasn't making, so it seemed like they being pushed as canon, but I knew they still weren't the real thing. In fact, Lucasfilm in the 90s only considered the films, novelizations, screenplays and radio dramas to be canon, but the Zahn trilogy was taken more seriously than earlier EU and it was with the Zahn trilogy that they started paying attention to eu continuity and coordinating it.
Nowadays there's a guy called Leland Chee who decides what's canon and what's not and he runs a database called the Holocron, for Star Wars canon. But as far as Lucas is concerned, the films and the eu exist in two different universes. He's said clearly that Luke doesn't get married and the emperor doesn't get cloned -denials of two core EU things. To Lucas, the eu isn't real. Sometimes he likes something in the EU and borrows it to stick it in his work (like Aayla Securua or Quinlan Vos), but he's not bound by it and his new tv series has caused continuity troubles in the eu by running counter to eu continuity, as did the prequels. Lucas will surely continue to merrily ride roughshod over the eu, because he knows it isn't the real thing.
Asha said:
... but the SUCK TO ENJOYABLE ratio within the EU gives SUCK the advantage.
At least two decades of EU works were packaged with an implicit promise that they were pieces of a larger story/work of fiction.
There was no such promise. Back before the 90s they didn't even bother to try to coordinate eu continuity between different works and that shows they weren't taking the stuff seriously as one unified fictional universe. It was just a lot of stories and continuity and canon weren't considered or important.