Re: Kathleen Kennedy to step down from Lucasfilm?
What I'd be curious to know. Is how many people were big fans of the post-ROTJ EU that disliked TLJ, versus people that didn't care much for the post-ROTJ EU that disliked TLJ.
As was said upthread, while I've read nearly all of the old EU -- including the newspaper strips, young-readers stuff, and ancillary fiction in the Insider, Star Wars Adventure Journal, Star Wars Galaxy, and so on, played most of the PC, console, and role-playing games... There's a lot of stuff in there that's... not good.
I've found (IMO) that most of the stuff that works is from before and peripheral to the film period. After the Battle of Endor, it was like no one knew what to do. There were so many repetitions of the same themes -- something threatening the Solo kids, a superweapon or Imperial warlord of the week, repeated callbacks to bits from the movies to make sure we got that it was Star Wars.
There
were good offerings in that era, too, though. I simply love Tatooine Ghost and Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, for instance. I like a lot of what Karen Traviss did with Boba Fett and Mandalorians in general in her three Legacy of the Force books (and I like Aaron Allston's three in that arc, too, but Troy Denning's aren't worth the paper they're printed on).
But more than any other era of the EU, there were a lot of problems in the post-ROTJ period. One of the things I actually love about the new canon is how they're adopting what is appearing more and more to be a "certain point of view" approach. Luke
is teaching a relative named Ben, but it's his nephew, not his son. Han and Leia
do have a kid, but it's not what we are familiar with. There
is a young Jedi (and probable student of Luke's) named Jacen, who I can see them setting up to have become one of the Knights of Ren. If so, then just as in the EU, Jacen will have fallen to the Dark Side. Rey sure seems to be filling the role of Jaina, even though she's not (so far as we know) related to the principals of the prior films...
I can see the post-ROTJ EU as it was being a sort of "retellings of retellings of past events", where things get mushed together or switched around. "So Luke Skywalker was teaching a young Jedi named Ben, who was related to him somehow..." "Well, he was the one who knew Ben Kenobi growing up. Could it have been his son?" "That makes sense, but who was Ben's mother?" "Well, there was this Force-adept smuggler chick he spent a lot of time with. Maybe they hooked up. What was her name again? Mary something?" "Hey, didn't his sister have kids or something? You know, with Han?" "I think so. Wasn't it that Jacen guy who turned bad?" "That sounds right. Wasn't there, like, his sister or something who took him out at the end?"
And so on. Happens all the time. Heck, at the risk of dragging religion into things, look at the mixed up interpretations we have of text that's there in black and white about stuff that happened only a couple thousand years ago. It's been "known" for a few hundred years that there were three magi -- they've even been given names -- despite the original text not specifying a number (or names). It's been dogma for ages that Mary Magdalene was the prostitute who washed *****' feet, even though they're separate individuals in the actual text. It's pretty much a trusim that when there is more than one brain involved, miscommunications and miscomprehensions will occur.
I'm pretty sure one of ther reasons I like the sequel trilogy is because I never liked any of the post-ROTJ stuff, with the exception of Kyle Katarn and the Jedi Knight games.
Kyle's tricky. About half of his story is pre-ROTJ. A lot of that could still be in, from a certain point of view, unless and until specifically overwritten. At least some of his post-ROTJ story dovetails with what the new canon has shown us so far, as well. Further out we go, though, the more little problems creep in. Was Luke the sole instructor at his Academy? Might Kyle have been a student of his? Might Kyle have been an
earlier student and already "graduated" by the time things went down with Ben? We'll just have to wait and find out.
That's honestly been one of the fun parts of this new era for me -- playing "spot the Legends" in new-canon material. Everything from the reference to the Hundred-Year Darkness in the new Marvel comics to Solo making Coronet City, Corellian Engineering Corporation, and YT-1300 all canon. I'm looking forward to seeing what else makes it in, and in what form(s).