In the SW threads I don't get all the hate for the Expanded Universe. People complain about how Lucas ruined SW, then they either don't like or are dismissive of the EU. So who do you think is the new authority on SW? All the new SW is EU unless the story comes from George Lucas personally according to Lucasfilm's policy. The people writing the new movies and cartoons are doing exactly what the EU authors and game creators have been doing a LOT longer. Most people who have read the EU stuff can give you a list of books and games that are better than the Prequels, which these same people despise, yet they hate the EU because Lucas didn't show it in a movie.
So you have this:
George Lucas created the OT - great
EU is created, but it's no good because Lucas didn't personally create it.
George Lucas created the Prequels- ruined everyone's lives, hence Lucas is crazy and anything he touches is awful now.
For some reason the EU is still bad because Lucas didn't create it and put it in a movie, but Lucas is crazy and everything he does is bad.
It's not as simple as that for me.
As has been stated, there's good stuff in the EU, but there's also a LOT of garbage. I read just about every book from the Zahn trilogy up through the Black Fleet Crisis book. I kept hoping the series would get back to the quality that Zahn wrote, but it just never did. It never felt like Star Wars to me. So, I choose to ignore large portions of it. I still enjoy other portions, though. The original KOTOR comics from Dark Horse, the Goodwin/Williamson comics from the 80s, Zahn's books and some others in the EU novel series, hell, even some of the games out there, all were entertaining and fun and I incorporate them into my experience of Star Wars.
The real problem comes from Lucas himself. In essence, he destroyed the notion that there is some "official" version of Star Wars due to a lot of licensing of crappy product, and his own mucking about with the story and telling a REALLY unsatisfying story in the prequels.
As has been stated, in my youth, Lucas was just this amazing visionary who could do no wrong. He did two amazing trilogies and...that was about it, really. With the Special Editions and PT, though, and particularly with his "revisionist history" approach to the special editions and the phrase "I always intended...." I became really disillusioned. Rodneyfaile said that it feels like the TRUE Star Wars is just...gone. That's about how I feel. And Lucas was instrumental in its dismantling.
First, with the SEs, he undid character arcs, changed things that seemed arbitrary and random, added scenes that really added nothing to the film (the Jabba/Han scene in ANH, for example, lifts a good portion of its dialogue from the Greedo scene). He justified this by saying that what we were seeing was what he "always intended" to do. Even some of the DVD releases with their OBVIOUS technical flaws were passed off as "Working as intended." Or "Feature, not a bug."
With the PT, he told, in my opinion, a story that was not what I was interested in or envisioned as the story of this great war that led to the destruction of the Jedi and the rise of the Empire. But again, it was what he "always intended" to do, apparently. As a result, the PT ended up feeling a lot like the crappy aspects of the EU.
But wait. This is GEORGE LUCAS OFFICIAL material, right? That means it HAS to be taken seriously, right?
Well, that's where I decided to part company with Star Wars in an "official" sense. In the early and mid 2000s, I was bitter about what had happened with Star Wars. The versions of the OT that I loved and had grown up with were being dismantled, and Lucas was flat-out refusing to release them at all. That version of Star Wars, he said, was dead, and sorry-but-not-sorry if you fell in love with this flawed version that he "never" intended to make. They were "his stories," so the rest of us can just suck it. That was the attitude. Then he relented a bit and put the OT out on DVD. Oh happy day! Except, wait a second, it's just a crappy Laserdisc rip, and you can get a better quality version of that off of Ebay without the SEs!!! WTF?!
Couple this with a focus on licensed products that were oriented exclusively around Jedi and Prequel-era stuff, and I just...gave up on Star Wars altogether. It wasn't until I finally decided to approach Star Wars from my own perspective that I was able to enjoy taht again. What that meant was picking and choosing those elements I liked, and ignoring/discarding the rest.
With the Disney purchase of the franchise, to me, it breaks the notion that there is anything canonical about what is handed down from on high. Although admittedly, I was moving in that direction anyway. "Canon" is no longer "What George Lucas says" plus whatever Leland Chee determines based on some hierarchy of other materials (e.g. "Well, the radio dramas trump the novels, but only for the original films. The EU novels are below all of that, and the comic books are below the EU novels, so this is GCFI-Canon or whatever."). This is why I say Lucas is just another EU author to me now. His word is no longer the final say, either for me, or for the Disney Corporation. The same way I can say "Nah. The Vong thing didn't happen and Chewie's still alive," and the same way I can dream up my own version of the Clone Wars and the PT because it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than the crap Lucas offered, I can do that with ANYTHING related to Star Wars. Star Wars is now MINE. I decide what is and isn't canonical for me, not Lucas, not Disney, not anyone else. I incorporate what I want and I dump the rest.
If Lucas had not done some really unsatisfying stuff in the last 15-ish years with the franchise, I might still look to him for guidance, but while he (and others) created this terrific universe, he hasn't shown himself to be a good steward of that universe in my opinion. In that respect, he is now just another author in a line of authors creating uninteresting stuff with the Star Wars logo on it. It's not even that I hate him or the EU as a whole. I just don't like a lot of the stuff that's there, and see no reason to pay attention to it.
I suppose if we maintain the quasireligious take on things...I'm more of a Star Wars Protestant than a Star Wars Catholic; I don't recognize any authority greater than myself to determine my personal experience of Star Wars. I don't treat Lucas, LFL (or Disney now) as the entities which determine what is and isn't "official." I make my own decisions based on what's out there.
