The star wars expanded universe is dead, long live the star wars expanded universe

Oh yeah! it's back, we're talking about star wars! The subject no-one ever gets bored of, or has differing opinions on.

So unless you are living under a rock, or you aren't interested in this stuff, way back around 10-ish years ago, Star Wars was sold to Disney, the first of many purchases Disney made. This came along with as well as the main films, 30 odd years of comic, book and video game stories set in The wider universe. Comics and books filled in the 15 year gap between the original and the prequel trilogy, games went off into way before the prequels to tell original stories. Characters were introduced killed off and original stars were fleshed out and went on multiple, if not predictable stories (Han would have bad feelings about things, Chewie would roar indignantly, Luke was trying to hook up, Leia was also there)

This posed a problem for Disney, as by this point the canon was a convoluted mess with a lot of baggage. And Disney wanted a surefire hit, like the original trilogy, not like the swing and a miss complex decisiveness that was the prequels.

So the decision was made, the canon was to be split. Everything other that the films and a couple of other bits were made cannon. The rest was to be labeled legends. This went as well as you can expect.

Now to start, I was upset. I had grown up with these stories. I had invested a lot of time into a big chuck of them. When I would have been reading real books that wouldn't get me sneered at. Anyway, eventually I came round to the idea of a fresh start. There was a lot of fluff over the years, and always the concept of telling stories in this massive universe filled with space magic, that was a great idea. Wonder how that went?

Yeah, as well as could be expected. Sequel trilogy a copy pasta of the originals. check. going in random directions in the middle of part 8 of a 9 part saga. check. doing a massive course correction and making an incoherent mess of the final film? also check.

everything else has been a mixed bag, some half decent shows. some pretty disappointing games. a very polarizing experience. you were either onboard with the disney revamp, and were a shill, or you were against the direction and were a hater of the fanbase, the concept and women.

The thing to suffer the most has been the lore. there is now nothing that happened between the end of return of the jedi and 30 years later when the force awakens kicked off. yeah, the odd book, TV show or game story here and there, but very much coalescing around the time of the original trilogy, almost terrified to write their own stories in their own created timeline

It was hilariously illustrated where in the new trilogy, the empire vs rebels struggle was talked about in hushed almost mythical terms. the main character was squatting in a robot tank from empire, how do you not figure out that stuff actually happened?!?!

But don't worry! even though multiple times having been said that the legends stories are staying in the bargain bin of knock offs, stories will turn up in canon that look suspiciously like things seen in the expanded universe. Emperor turning back up from the dead? yeah, comic from back in the 90's. Blue alien guy as a grand admiral? Book trilogy from same time. Luke starting a Jedi academy? Already completed it mate.

After multiple swings and misses (and to be fair, a occasional hit) Disney are now so terrified of making anything new, so everything is a blend of what we have seen before, nostalgic sounds, sites and tropes are the order of the day. Ironically, the best selling Star wars is the Original Films being re-released, and legends material being repackaged and resold.

There have been very meagre crumbs of new games (often online multiplayer, often riddled with cash grabbing idiocy, often closed very quickly after launch) but re-releases of older star was games have generally gone pretty well. There have been a few odd choices (who really wanted jedi power battles, bounty hunter and the phantom menace game?) and what should have been an easy win (battlefront releases were a buggy mess, as if the way with online shooters).

Is there any hope? not really, Disney are addicted to announcing things, the majority of which do not ever get made. Hopefully new projects that get to explore the far future or the distant past will break the stranglehold of sticking to the well trodden rebellion era, and tell some original stories.