: 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.

Honestly it doesn't surprise me the least. It had grown so much it was flat-out unmanageable, especially if you were dealing with the more popular characters. I was a fan of Star Wars back when I was a child, but my few experiences with the EU were Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (an excellent game!), KOTOR, and probably a handful more of things.

However, even bigger die-hard fans than me admitted that it had become too large, and if the directors wanted to create movies that had a sense of surprise, AND after the mess that had happened with the lack of management in authors before Disney bought the IP, making a movie that would still be close to canon would be nothing short of a herculean task.

Kind of like firing the Halo rings. A big mess forms, a mad bastard's plan of somehow winning with a small force is unfeasible, so the only solution is a clean slate.

I won't be surprised if Halo does this someday ten years down the road, but I admit I'll be bummed. DC and Marvel had also rebooted their own universes, there are moments in which a franchise becomes far too big to handle its story properly, and as much as I love the Halo universe and follow it religiously, even during the Bungie era you had to be a goddamn scholar to follow the story as it was going, and you still need to now.

I've always been of the philosophy of seeing a canon as broad strokes rather than some rock-solid, unbreakable facts of history that cannot be broken, ever. While I do agree with Stephen Loftus' statement of a writer having to deeply care for his work (or risk having the reader fail to care for it), a solid management by many hands for the tiniest facts will simply be impossible, so the important thing for me is what the story itself conveys.

For the fans that used to have works of EU that they loved such as ones I've been hearing about, I hope Disney does get to see which works were both influential to canon AND highly loved and respected, to perhaps let them continue to exist or something else. Right now I regret I had never gotten into them while I had the chance. Nothing saddens me more than a book I want to read and possess that is out of print.