Star Wars: Disney scraps the Expanded Universe

delericho · Apr 27, 2014

darjr said:
but what happens when setting content informed rules contradicts the new supplements and setting details? I'm not talking about home games, what does ffg do when they have to contradict what they've already published or hon non canon? can they?

Have FFG published anything that draws on material outside the movie-universe?

IIRC, WotC had to run everything by Lucasfilm prior to publishing. I would expect FFG to have a similar requirement. That would suggest they will have to stick with the approved canon, whatever that turns out to be.

delericho · Apr 27, 2014

(Sorry for three posts in a row, but they're on different sub-topics...)

What I would expect to happen is something like what tends to happen after Marvel/DC culls - they cut back to a minimal set of 'accepted' material (the big characters, plot points, etc). Then, as time goes on, they gradually start to reintroduce material that was in the old canon. So, Supergirl comes back from the dead, Gwen Stacy dies again, or whatever else. Naturally, whoever is calling the shots at the time brings back whatever he or she thinks is the 'best' of the old material - and when they move on in a couple of years, the new guy brings back his own favourites.

Unfortunately, the pattern in comics has tended to be that things get brought back too fast, it very quickly becomes a sprawling mess again, and so they have another cull, and the cycle begins again. (And, worse, each time they do it things get shifted around just a little bit, which makes things even more complex as people have to remember not just who the key players are but also the details of their back-stories this time around.)

But... thus far, Disney have been very disciplined in their handling of the Marvel film universe, so I do have some hope that perhaps they do understand the dangers. In which case, maybe they can avoid them? I guess we'll see.

billd91 · Apr 27, 2014

delericho said:
Have FFG published anything that draws on material outside the movie-universe?

They have. Adventure Beyond the Rim is partly set on the Wheel, a location that first appeared in Marvel's initial Star Wars comics line.

billd91 · Apr 27, 2014

I think it's a great decision to not adhere to the EU canon. I'd rather they not be beholden to it and forge new territory given the conditions they have to work with... such as old actors no longer able to play the parts the EU stories would need them to play.

sabrinathecat · Apr 28, 2014

MarkB said:
This sounds like a bit of Fanon you've made up in your own head to reconcile the show's inconsistencies. It's certainly not anything I've heard of being referenced officially. In fact, in-show, it was firmly established in both the original and the new series that travel between parallel universes was practically impossible.

And you're proceeding from a false premise - that, in order for these continuities to all be 'valid', there must be some in-fictional-universe way to link them all together. That's simply not necessary. All of these continuities are entirely fictional, so there's no need to establish one of them as 'true' and declare all others as 'false' unless they can somehow be tied into the 'true' canon.

There is no One Truth - it's all fiction.

No, in the first NuWho ep with the cybermen, The Doctor said that it Used to be easy (as Mickey suggested), but without the Time Lords to keep control and order, the system broke down.
The only thing the original series had was travelling through a CVE was bordering on impossible. The CVEs were pocket universes created by Logopolis to combat entropy.
The third Doctor even managed to travel to a parallel universe with a broken TARDIS and sabotaged understanding of time travel.

Scorpio616 · Apr 28, 2014

darjr said:
What does this mean to the RPG? How much of it is now no longer Cannon because it came from the EU? That would be weird.

FFG will be trying to shove a revised edition into the market to resell you the books you just bought a few years back. Worked for D&D 3.5.

Jhaelen · Apr 28, 2014

delericho said:
Have FFG published anything that draws on material outside the movie-universe?

Yes. They use EU material in all of their licensed games: in X-Wing and in the Star Wars LCG, too.

Scorpio616 said:
FFG will be trying to shove a revised edition into the market to resell you the books you just bought a few years back. Worked for D&D 3.5.

This!

trappedslider · Apr 28, 2014

Here's at statement on it from Timothy Zahn

[sblock]Having now had a few days to process the news from LFL, a few thoughts:First, since many of you are wondering, I have *not* yet been asked to write any new Star Wars books. But that doesn’t mean I won’t receive such an invitation in the future. If that happens, whether or not I accept will depend on what kind of story I’m asked to write, what input I’d have on the content, what era the story will be set in, etc. I would certainly *like* to return to the GFFA, but at the moment that’s not my decision to make.

Second, as far as I can tell from the announcement, LFL is *not* erasing the EU, but simply making it clear that nothing there is official canon. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, nor does it immediately send everything into alternate-universe status. If nothing from the Thrawn Trilogy, say, is used in future movies (and if there’s nothing in the movies that contradicts it), then we can reasonably continue to assume that those events *did* happen. It looks to me like the “Legends” banner is going to be used mainly to distinguish Story-Group-Approved canon books from those that aren’t officially canon but might still exist.

Third, even if something from the Thrawn Trilogy *does* show up in a movie in a different form, we authors are masters of spackle, back-fill, and hand-waving. For example, if Ghent appears in the movies but never mentions Thrawn, I can argue that he simply doesn’t want to talk about that era, or else has completely forgotten about it. (Which for Ghent isn’t really much of a stretch.)

Finally, there’s nothing inherently demeaning in the term “Legends.” Think back (a little farther…a little farther) to Disney’s 1950s “Davy Crockett” TV series, (a show I grew up with) which presented stories and legends about the King of the Wild Frontier. Historians have Crockett’s genuine history, but there’s nothing that says these TV adventures *didn’t* happen, right? So until and unless the legend puts Davy in Tennessee at the same time the real history puts him in Virginia, we can still believe those adventures happened. That’s how I expect it to be with the “real” Star Wars history versus the “legendary” adventures of the EU.

Bottom line: let’s all sit back and relax and see what new adventures are offered to us, both in new books and new movies. It’ll be Star Wars, and that’s what counts. [/sblock]

jasper · Apr 30, 2014

Which canon are we talking about? because every time I get in geek fight over SW, I need the rules explained to me. I was always in favor of the "broadcast" canon. With broadcast meaning the movies on tv shows.