It is also the perfect example of Lucas choosing to ignore something that he approved earlier.
If Lucas can choose to ignore any aspect of GFFA that he wants, so can we.
Lucas is well-known for saying that he doesn't even read EU books or comics, and doesn't know (or care too much) what their content is, though. For whatever that's worth. One of the frequent comments from Filoni on the Clone Wars is that he has to fight with Lucas in development for episodes frequently to get him to accept minor details of canon that already exist. Watching his commentary on the Death Watch and Mandalorean stuff was especially intriguing, because Lucas had always had his own idea of what Mandalorean supercommandos, from way back when they were introduced in the early development stages of
Empire, and Filoni took the side of decades of C-canon stuff on Boba Fett that had been developed--thousands and thousands of pages of it in novels, comics and elsewhere. To use one example. There was a similar (although smaller) discussion on the reintroduction of Darth Maul into the Clone Wars, and the implicit backstory for him created with the introduction of Savage Opress.
Then again, as someone earlier said, he doesn't even shy away from contradicting his own movies, changing them, and whatnot. Despite the myth that he's built up over the years, he totally has not had a long-running story planned from the very beginning. As late as the second draft of the
Empire Strikes Back script, Darth Vader and Annakin Skywalker were still two separate characters who both made appearances (Annakin as an Obiwanesque force ghost--Vader as, well as Vader.) Luke and Leia weren't initially intended to be brother/sister either, until as Lucas was going into the making of
Jedi he realized that his cast and crew (not to mention himself and his family; his impending divorce no doubt played a role here too) were too fatigued to consider an ongoing series, and he needed to start tying up loose ends and plan on ending the arc after three movies. Instead of the 12 that he had envisioned at one point just a few years earlier. Making Luke and Leia twins neatly tied up several loose ends without having to introduce a lot of new material to cover it.
Folks who worked with him on the prequels have pretty much the same story; Lucas went into each of those with a very,
very vague notion of what the story arc might be, and a few ideas kicking around on the back burner that he'd had for action set-pieces or cool scenes that he wanted to work in somehow, and from that they had to craft the story more or less from scratch.
Keeping the continuity straight for the EU is a Herculanean task already, when even the G-canon alone isn't consistent, or predictably stable. I 100% agree that there's no reason to feel bound to it for an RPG setting, and frankly, LucasArts should probably demote a lot of current C-canon stuff to S-canon, and make the C-canon corpus much smaller, tighter, and much less restrictive.
Of course, like I said earlier, my preference is rather than to ignore or invalidate canon, which tends to annoy some of the fans of the canon, I just prefer to remove myself far enough from the immediate sources of the canon that it's a moot point.
