Sorry, I found the old EU to be mostly crap. Too many authors going after the cool factor to lure in fan boys and make their own little mark on Star Wars. When Disney announced they bought the franchise and we're going to do new movies that included origin cast, I prayed that it would mean wiping out the EU. And they did and I was so very happy. It's gone and I could care less if any of it comes back. And if whatever does comeback, I hope it is used better in new stories.
Other than the Republic Commando and X-Wing novels, I agree. Everything else was pretty crappy. I can guarantee you that nothing will change with the new books other than all the crap will rise to the top since it will be canon. You aren't going to be able to just ignore it like The Crystal Star (regarded as THE worst EU novel). There's no way to guarantee every book that comes out will be on par with the films.
I'll quasi-agree with both of you. The Crystal Star, while a decent story, totally wan't Star Wars. The Black Fleet Crisis was just bad (the only thing I liked about it was that it brought back a grown-up Cindel Towani, from the first Ewok movie). The whole New Jedi Order series felt off, even if I liked a few of the story elements and character arcs from within it. Likewise the Fate of the Jedi series -- if it had just been Luke and Ben dinking around on a personal quest, I would have liked it far better. Et cetera, et cetera. For all the good stories and characters and writing, it seemed there was at least as much that didn't work for one reason or another.
So when all the talking Disney bunny aliens are wrote into a book, which will happen, they will be the same level of canon as Luke...
What, you mean
these?
In the past, since LFL was not going to do any more movies, they were content on letting book publishers develop and create the ongoing saga. Problem is that publishers were pretty short sited. They cared more about selling a comic mini series or novel story arc but did not give much consideration to how it would effect Star Wars in the long run.
Enh... More that they went about it the wrong way. The editors and overseers of what would come to be called the Expanded Universe had a policy that no new work could contradict the films (duh) or any previously-published work. So when West End Games screwed up things like the length of the Super Star Destroyer or how lightsabers work, later authors were beholden to perpetuate those errors. When Tim Zahn gave us Rogue
Squadron due to a misinterpretation of what was seen in ESB, it had to be perpetuated by later authors. And so on. Inconsistencies and oversights and factual errors kept compounding as more and more new material got added. And the 501st Legion has contributed to that, too, with the group defining -- back in 2002 -- Storm Commandos as black Scout Troopers (they aren't) and Magmatroopers as red Stormtroopers (they've actually never been seen or illustrated or described anywhere, and the single appearance of red Stormtroopers in the EU specifically identified them as Royal Guards in red Stormtrooper armor on special assignment). So in 2003, Dark Horse published a miniseries where we saw Storm Commandos... as black Scout Troopers. And in 2009, Gentle Giant did an exclusive red repaint of their Stormtrooper statue as a Magmatrooper.
So yeah, the establishment of the Story Group back in '08 was a good thing, and they helped push back against some of that over the years since (Super Star Destroyers are now properly 19km long), but what they really needed was the retirement of Lucas and the opportunity to dump the entirety of the extant EU into a hopper from which to pull stuff that actually
works. I'm hopeful most of the "distant past" stuff, like Dawn of the Jedi and all the Knights of the Old Republic era comics and games, get plunked wholesale into the canon. They're pretty internally consistent and the three thousand years between those events and Episode I is plenty of room for anything to happen to bring about the state of the galaxy as we find it in the movie saga. Everything post-ROTJ is gone, but I hope some characters and elements make it in, like Daala and Thrawn and the R6-series astromech. And everything that had been set during the films is in an in-between state -- much of it works, still, and much of it doesn't, and it eeds to be gone through very carefully to determine which is which. Personally, I hope Shadows of the Empire is utterly deleted. It annoys me the same way the search for Boba Fett did in the old Marvel series. Why were they trying to find Fett? They
knew at the end of ESB where he was taking Han. Ugh.
As far as this game goes, though... Yeah, games are still out there that were published before the Big Announcement. They are Legends. But this game was first published then, and is still being added to now. Just a small single-page insert in new releases saying certain ships and characters released earlier are Legends, accompanying an announcement on their web site, would forestall things like what started this whole sidebar:
Does that mean Punishing One and Mist Hunter are now canon?
Sorry, SVS.
But since they are still being sent out to stores by FFG
after Lucafilm announced that all new books, comics, and
games were canon... You can hopefully see how that needs clarification.
--Jonah
