New Star Wars to suck at the Retcon root.

[daboarder]

I hate retconning as a matter of principle...

It has its place, particularly in highly variable inconsistent settings (40k heres looking at you)

But in a setting as tight and constrained as the EU, where the value of the material is a HUGE chunk of the value of the product....

[Nabterayl]

except as per lucas's orders, the EU had to all be checked for consistency.

Yes, that's true. But it only had to be checked with itself. T canon never had to conform with C canon, and G canon never had to conform with anything. Even prior to this announcement you could never object to the contents of a TV episode, say, by using the contents of a book. It was only the books that had to be consistent with each other. Coruscant "remained" Coruscant because Lucas decided to stay consistent with the books, not because he felt obliged to. Similarly, Jango Fett magically became not Mandalorian because the TV show said so, and TV automatically trumped books under the old regime.

[daboarder]

Yes, that's true. But it only had to be checked with itself. T canon never had to conform with C canon, and G canon never had to conform with anything. Even prior to this announcement you could never object to the contents of a TV episode, say, by using the contents of a book. It was only the books that had to be consistent with each other. Coruscant "remained" Coruscant because Lucas decided to stay consistent with the books, not because he felt obliged to. Similarly, Jango Fett magically became not Mandalorian because the TV show said so, and TV automatically trumped books under the old regime.

but the mandalorian armour, its not from the books its from the supporting information of the original trilogy.

[Nabterayl]

The idea that what we know of as Mandalorian armor is Mandalorian comes from Lucas himself - even though it's never said in any of the movies, Lucas' notebooks always referred to a race of supercommandos called Mandalorians. Similarly, despite numerous EU sources stating definitively that Jango Fett was Mandalorian - and, indeed, was Mandalore himself during the period of the Clone Wars - The Clone Wars season 2 flat-out contradicted that, because under old/current canon rules, TV shows are allowed to ignore "canon" that isn't directly in a movie or a TV show. While I applaud the work LFL has done in the printed EU, I think it's kind of dumb that LFL doesn't consider it binding on TV or film. Now, it will be. If a second EU reboot is the price we have to pay to finally get a unified multimedia Star Wars canon, I'm totally down with that. The last reboot wasn't that bad. I doubt this one will be either.

[Necron2.0]

My thoughts on the matter are that the fans have been telling ol' George to go "pleasure" himself for years. Now ... they'll just tell it to a mouse.

[eldargal]

Meh, it isn't like they are going to take peoples books away or anything. I'd be more incensed if the EU were better, but it isn't. There are rare gems and I can still appreciate them as stories so whatever. Plus most things won't be retconned out unless they are directly contradicted and even if they are they remain in the SW Legends banner so they can even keep the EU as n AU and keep it going.

However, Lucasfilm did say some elements from the Expanded Universe like certain characters and organisations might make it into future “Star Wars” movies, books, etc.

I would imagine this would include technology like the TIE Defender and anything else that can be seamlessly integrated without explanation. Stories, characters and that sort of thing will be relegated to Legends.

Frankly EU amounted to 'Let's make a handful of white gary stus look awesome while killing off women and alien characters to make it look like they were in danger'. It's representation of women was almost as bad as the original films and everyone knew Chewbacca was going to cop it when they announced a major character was going to die because as a non-speaking alien he was clearly the most expendable. Don't even get me started on the fact that a 70 year old Han Solo was running around like he was still 30, leading commando raids and all sorts of stuff with no explanation.><

Heck maybe this way we will get some villain villains that don't start out promising and are they portrayed so poorly by certain idiot authors that later authors have to say it was an insane clone in order to justify how ****ing atrocious it was. *cough*Ysanne Isard*uncough*

[Kaptain Badrukk]

Meh, no big loss.
But then I'm no starwars neckbeard and I LIKED the startrek re-boot.

[eldargal]

Meh, no big loss.
But then I'm no starwars neckbeard and I LIKED the startrek re-boot.

I like the first one, the second basically had far too many problems with race and female representation. Liked it watching it, the more I started thinking about it after the less I liked it.

[daboarder]

haha, I always thought the second star trek was funny.

That movie was so phoned in....that spock literally PHONES the other spock to figure out how to beat khan....someone on the production team was very self aware there

Frankly EU amounted to 'Let's make a handful of white gary stus look awesome while killing off women and alien characters to make it look like they were in danger'. It's representation of women was almost as bad as the original films and everyone knew Chewbacca was going to cop it when they announced a major character was going to die because as a non-speaking alien he was clearly the most expendable. Don't even get me started on the fact that a 70 year old Han Solo was running around like he was still 30, leading commando raids and all sorts of stuff with no explanation.><

The EU went out of its way to make sure slavery and xenophobia was a MAJOR point of the empire and a basically one of the main reasons for the rebellion in the first place, In big shiny letters time and time and time again.

It wasn't all a subtle attempt by multiple authors to cover their own xenophobic, mysoginistic backsides.

Points off the top of my head,

Admiral ackbars backstory involves his slavery by tarkin.
Grand Admiral thrawn was renowned because he was made a grand admiral IN SPITE of being an alien (as in he was THAT good that the xenophobes thought they may as well promote him)
And the bacta war plot......that whole krytos trap was a thing.


Edit: took some of the edge off what I typed, if its still too confrontational I didnt mean it to be expressly so, merely pointing things out.

[YorkNecromancer]

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” ― Henry Ford

To those arguing against retconning, a simple analogy:

Would 'Batman Begins' have been improved by sticking to Tim Burton's canon? Would we have enjoyed seeing Christian Bale with batnipples fighting a day-glo, more toyetic Joker played by an increasingly sad-looking Jack Nicholson? There are undoubtedly people who think the answer is a yes. Adam West went on record saying he didn't like the new Batman when Tim Burton went all grimdark.

Here's the thing: some retcons are bad. Some retcons are good. The difference is entirely a matter of opinion, but to make a blanket statement that retcons in and of themselves is bad is facile. The only reason to hate retcons in and of themselves is because they mean a whole load of nerd trivia suddenly became irrelevant and the time spent learning it was wasted.

Hate a specific retcon, sure. For my part, Conan-Doyle probably shouldn't have brought Holmes back from the dead; the later stories were never quite as good, and he was clearly doing it for the money. Spider-man's 'One More Day' arc should never have happened, because it used a ham-fisted Diabolus Ex Machina which included all kinds of unfortunate implications about the value of life.

But retcons are just a narrative device, and they're often necessary, because any given work with more than one author is either going to end up with continuity problems over time and increasingly wonky characterisation and themes, or else it's going to end up with poor characters who never really grow and adapt.

Retcons are a tool and hating them is like hating a hammer. Feel free to, but it's just kind of a weird thing to do.