: Loftus, I think this is the final nail in the coffin for approaching canon
: rigorously, and unwaveringly. You gotta be flexible. Someone on
: theforce.net posted "Fuck you Disney! 20 years, WASTED". With an
: attitude like that, they sure were buddy. They sure were…

: Halo Reach is not canon, and THAT'S OKAY.

: Do your worst 343, we are ready.

I loved a lot of of the Star Wars EU as a kid growing up in the 90's. Shadows of the Empire and the X-Wing series were my first "big boy books" when I was in third grade. The comics, too, were a lot of fun, and some of the old cover artists are still an inspiration to me today.

But I'm really surprised at some of the reactions I've heard from Disney's announcement...

-The current EU tended to overwrite some of the details in the early novelizations and comic adaptions and serials in the 70's and 80's, besides create all kinds of inconsistencies that WILL happen when you have as many entries into the EU as Star Wars does.

-Not to mention the Special Editions of the trilogy altered the old movies in parts, showing that even the flagship entries in the franchise aren't safe from canon revisions (and continual tampering in the DVDs later on)!

-And then the Prequels overwrote plenty of back history that the EU had hinted at or spelled out.

-Furthermore the recent Clone Wars cartoon overwrote huge swaths of the Clone Wars comics that Dark Horse had been publishing for years.

So really, Star Wars has been consistently rewriting and revising itself. And someday some other company may own Star Wars and declare Disney's EU not canon. Hell, Marvel, now owned by Disney, will be making new "canon" Star Wars comics, when they themselves had made a whole host of mostly-cheesy SW comics in the 80's that were ignored for the most part in the last EU incarnation. Kind of ironic!

As well, Disney said that creators will be encouraged to use characters and threads from past EUs in the new EU. Which is basically what has been happening all along!

In a multi-creator franchise, the only canon that matters is the canon that rings true to the reader, whether it's old or new, official or fan-made. Companies will trade IPs, original authors will come ago. The nature of franchises, and possibly stories as a whole, is always in flux, sometimes transforming from something you love to something you don't really recognize anymore, sadly.

You just have to remember the stories that resonated with you.