Two years ago, I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance on Tatooine that new Star Wars movies would ever be made. One Disney buyout later and here we are. Star Wars: Episode VII was announced in fall 2013 and the whole franchise has experienced a Death Star-sized comeback. The upcoming Star Wars: Rebels will launch on Disney XD in the fall. Girls star Adam Driver recently signed on to play a villain in Episode VII. Even Star Wars: The Clone Wars, that last bastion of pre-Disney Star Wars, is getting a chance to wrap everything up on Netflix.
All of this news is, for a lifelong Star Wars fan like me, exciting as hell. Well, at least it was. When I heard that there would be a Star Wars VII, my first thought was “What about the Expanded Universe?” As much as I want to see lightsabers and droids again, I had a bad feeling about this one, Chewie.
“But what’s the Expanded Universe?” one might ask. Let’s set the record straight. For everyone who thinks that Star Wars is just a few movies and a TV show, I’m sorry to inform you that you’re mistaken about a great many things. Ever since Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye hit the shelves back in ’78, people have been churning out Star Wars fiction left and right.
Creator George Lucas, while never bothering to actually read the stuff, was content to let fans write their own stories. While he didn’t seriously consider these works as part of his universe at first, Lucas adopted elements of the books into the movies, which gave these works a huge boost in credibility. For example, the capital world of the republic, Coruscant, first appeared in Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire before it was mentioned in The Phantom Menace.
Shortly after The Phantom Menace was released, Lucasfilm decided that all of these disparate Star Wars media needed to be accounted for. In 2000, they hired Leland Chee. His job was to maintain an internal database that kept track of everything in the Star Wars universe and make sure that the lore is all internally consistent. That database is called the Holocron.
The Holocron divides Star Wars fiction into a hierarchy. Get ready. First comes G-canon, which refers to anything George Lucas ever directed, wrote or dreamed about. T-canon, the second level, encompasses any TV shows in the Star Wars universe, like The Clone Wars. The novels, comics and video games all make up the C-canon, or the continuity canon. Afterwards are S-canon and N-canon, the former of which refers to older and simpler works that can either be ignored or utilized, the latter of which is comprises non-canon material like alternate universes that are never considered. Everything between G-canon and N-canon comprise the Expanded Universe.
It’s all needlessly complicated, especially considering that none of this stuff is real, and Disney apparently thought the same way. Earlier this year, Disney put together the Lucasfilm Story Group in order to sort through the morass of published work and arrive at a single, cohesive canon. Led by Chee and author Pablo Hidalgo, the goal of the group actually makes a lot of sense, and simplifying the Expanded Universe could theoretically make the behemoth Star Wars franchise approachable to people who don’t own Stormtrooper armor or Star Wars history books (no shame).
Here’s the thing, though. I grew up with the Expanded Universe. I know more Star Wars history than real history. I can name more Jedi Knights than U.S. presidents. I’ve stolen VHS tapes of the uncut original trilogy from house parties. Yes, plural. Star Wars is my life, and hundreds of tomes of it may cry out and be suddenly silenced. Technically, only the movies and the TV show are currently canon according to a tweet by Hidalgo (which has since been deleted). And yes, it does matter if stuff is canon. With Star Wars, it’s not about the stories or the characters, and it never has been. The stuff I’m worried about losing is the actual universe. The EU adds so much texture and lore to a vast and imaginative galaxy.
Take Bioware’s excellent videogame Knights of the Old Republic, which takes place around 4000 years before the Battle of Yavin (The Battle of Yavin is the final battle of A New Hope, and the standard metric for judging time on Star Wars). It has nothing to do with the movies or many of the books, but it shows a side of the Star Wars universe that had only been briefly explored before.
Now, KOTOR may be gone too. In the teaser for the new Clone Wars season, some mystics tell Yoda that the Sith homeworld is called “Moriband.” Excuse me, motherfucker, but the Sith homeworld is “Korriban.” It’s been Korriban since 1994. Is it a minor change? Sure, but the ramifications of this alteration of established continuity (known as retroactive continuity, or retcon), combined with the story group’s mission to strip down the canon, are pretty unsettling.
While stuff from the Old Republic era might be able to escape being retconned (although Moriband-gate is, in my opinion, not a good sign), the EU regarding the time after Return of the Jedi is about to be cut away faster than a Skywalker limb. As it stands, there’s not a whole lot of room between the shitty and the sublime for an original story to surface. Since Episode VII is going to be a direct sequel, great arcs like Thrawn’s invasion and the Crimson Empire will cease to exist.
The worst part, though, is that most people won’t care. Most of the people who’ll see Episode VII won’t have heard of Rogue Squadron or the Yuuzhan Vong, so what’s the point? The point is that while Star Wars is coming back for the masses, it never left for fans like me. I was always there, buying the comics and sinking time into Wookieepedia, and now most of it will be deemed irrelevant, and all the riches that they added to Star Wars will be erased. Obi-Wan Kenobi once said that Luke Skywalker had taken his first step into a larger world. In a lot of ways, that world is going to become a lot smaller.