A THING I FIND FASCINATING: Legends is a place of wonderful stories being told and exciting possibilities being played out, that it should be respected in its own way, but they were never canon by the creator’s intentions and George always made that really clear.
Disney has made more of an effort in a post-George Star Wars to do away with this approach and to instead have a more coherent canon (and it’s their franchise to do with as they will, their rules are their rules, we don’t necessarily have to abide by them, but they are still their rules, just as George’s rules were his own in his franchise, too) and I’m slowly coming to appreciate that, but this is why Legends will always be inherently useless when it comes to pre-Disney canon.
Reacting to those Legends stories and liveblogging them is an absolute blast, no way am I going to give them up! And that’s clearly not what Dave’s saying here or what George has ever said. I’m also glad that they do seem to care and respect what those things did, that they can be incredibly meaningful to an individual! But I also recognize they are not and never were part of the canon according to the people at the very center of the Immovable Objects of Star Wars History.
LOL, yes, I remember George being quite adamant in the 90s that he DNGAF about the EU, as he held the ultimate authority. Interestingly, the comic series he commented on liking the most – Dark Empire – is the one that most of fandom had reservations about because Luke went to the dark side for a brief period of time.
Awhile back, I went looking for interviews with the authors of some of the novels (the novelizations in particular) to gauge how much input they actually had from George and the first two novelizations were pretty much, “We spent about 3-4 hours talking to him about the film’s plot and he basically just said, ‘Make it a good story.’ and told us to do what we would.” (Stover is a different case, where George was super involved in that one, but that was a startling exception.)
I kind of strongly got the impression that there was a sense of, “But have you considered [thing from the EU]?” lobbed at George a lot, so he was pretty firm about how, no, they are separate universes and whatever happens in those things I don’t really read, that will not affect how I go forward with my own material.
He was aware of it and liked some of it, he pulled in Aayla from the comics for an example, but it’s always really interesting to hear from creators (like the above with Dave) how that stuff is really neat and cool, how they like some of it, but that it’s always been Legends to them, it’s always been Not Canon to them. It’s a fascinating contrast against how someone like Pablo is much more up on that kind of stuff–but, then, that’s half his job!
