Revenge of the EU Completists

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Mr. Oragahn
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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Aug 01, 2015 7:50 pm

On another note, where are we with the EU unEU'd before being reEU'd?
Is all the old EU, including ICSes, still valid?

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by Sothis » Mon Aug 03, 2015 7:44 pm

I'm seeing some interesting parallels here. When ST09 was released it caused a lot of outrage on the (now defunct) ST.com forums. Even before the film came out, some fans were bitterly complaining it would render their TNG and DS9 boxsets worthless (of course, the Trek reboot went to great pains to establish itself as an alternate timeline, not that this was enough for some, who still argued the entirety of Trek canon was wiped out by the new films, never mind evidence to the contrary).

A few years later, and Star Wars fans get to undergo the same process.

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Aug 04, 2015 5:56 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:n another note, where are we with the EU unEU'd before being reEU'd?
Is all the old EU, including ICSes, still valid?

I'm not sure that all the EU is suddenly re-validated. We have odd pieces here and there picked from the Legends carcass, but we don't have the whole body of work resurrected. Now over time it is possible that the old Legends will become canon, but then they'd have to do so in a way which does not contradict the growing body of "immovable objects" that are the movies, TCW, and now Rebels.
Sothis wrote:I'm seeing some interesting parallels here. When ST09 was released it caused a lot of outrage on the (now defunct) ST.com forums. Even before the film came out, some fans were bitterly complaining it would render their TNG and DS9 boxsets worthless (of course, the Trek reboot went to great pains to establish itself as an alternate timeline, not that this was enough for some, who still argued the entirety of Trek canon was wiped out by the new films, never mind evidence to the contrary).

A few years later, and Star Wars fans get to undergo the same process.
No, I disagree here. The better parallel would be what happened in the late 1970s through 80s when Star Trek's own form of expanded universe books and other works were declared non-canon at Gene Roddenberry's request since he did not want the writers for the then new TNG series to be beholden to works they had never read, much less even were aware existed. There was an outcry then as fans found their favorite novels being contradicted left and right, but they eventually settled, and now only a handful of people still cling fanatically to the material, even though there is no way in hell you can reconcile most of those works with the movies and TV series that have followed in TNG's wake, which is why, I believe, that small minority of hardcore Trek fans choose not to accept any Trek shows as valid after Roddenberry's death in 1991, or that were not directly overseen by him. It is a way for them to keep their beloved stories, and in the case of a very hardcore fan, James Dixon, keep even unlicensed fan stories in their special little head canon.

The J.J. Abrams works clearly did not de-canonize anything previously and it really is the first time in Trek history that a parallel timeline got explored in more than just one or two 45 minute episodes. None of the Prime timeline is gone, its still there, but for the time being the attention is turned away from it to look at stories in this alternate reality.

So it remains to be seen if the talifan warsies get their way and reverse the current Disney and Abrams policy, or if guns will be stuck to and only isolated scraps of EU Legends lore get fed through into the new canon.
-Mike

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Aug 05, 2015 8:46 pm

But is the old SW EU treated as an alternate timeline? That is the point of Legends? That's not requiring lots of work, it's of little consequence on the organisation side.

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Aug 05, 2015 8:46 pm

Gotta wonder how many pre TNG books were used as a source of inspiration though.

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by 2046 » Thu Aug 06, 2015 11:28 am

The thing about old Trek off-screen stuff is that there was never much continuity anyway. So FASA could have its Avenger Class megaphasers and ST4-era transwarp drives on massive battlecruisers and not have them show up in a novel by some other author.

This author, without a science advisor within 2000 kellicams, could pull some EU author stuff and claim them capable of vaporizing the world's oceans for sport, even when we see them struggle ten pages later to penetrate a hull that was wax paper in another book or even on-screen. Then you play inflationist bingo and ta-da, you have hulls capable of withstanding ocean-vaping firepower.

I'm so glad Trek never got that way.

As for the Legends stuff, it should have been left behind completely as this was an amazing opportunity to go back to the Lucas basics. Instead, they are using many of the same authors and the same editorial staff and wrong-headed EU ideas like a corporatist Empire. By using the same authors, they wind up with losers like Luceno:
Q: "This book incorporates a number of EU elements in passing, such as the planet Nam Chorios and its prison, which refers to the EU novel Planet of Twilight. What do you think the relationship between authors like yourself and the EU will be going forward? How do you think writers will approach any impending contradictions as new books attempt integrate the EU the way you did?"

Luceno: "I’ve adopted this policy where—even with the new film that’s about to come out and certainly change the continuity that we’ve grown up with post-Return of the Jedi—to me, Tim Zahn’s books and all those Bantam-era books, they’re still going to be there for me. I appreciate them as stories. They’re well-told, they’re very interesting. So even if the movie is telling a different story, I’m not ready to dismiss anything that’s come before.

I don’t know how authors are going to handle it. I think this is what the Story Group’s role is going to be, in terms of making some elements canon, maybe working around something. I’m just not privy to what their plan is. Anything I say is really speculative. But that’s just my personal {take} on it. I’m not going to dismiss anything that’s gone before."
http://star-wars.suvudu.com/2014/11/int ... arkin.html

In other words, you've got the same old EU-philes running the publishing asylum saying "f*** you, nothing's changed, and we're canon now b****es!"

But the simple fact is, this new Disney canon is explicitly a new thing. The new Disney canon stories are not increasing the information content of the old Lucas canon. The Lucas canon and the EU are its parents, and this new canon is a mixture of the two universes.

So what we have is a ridiculous universe, technologically-speaking. On the one hand you have Rebels stories with atmospheric battles that don't disrupt clouds where missed shots puff the dirt, just like in TCW and the six films, where orbital bombardment is so unknown that even when Grievous was ordered to kill all the Nightsisters, a group that lived in a single village with some small caves, he had to land an army.

But in new published garbage like Luceno's you end up with planet surfaces like Murkhana's, with ground and atmosphere torn up from wild, seemingly-pointless orbital bombardment of the vacation capital of its region, where the temperatures of the seas had been raised by the bombardment and where radiation was now a concern.

That's just not Star Wars. We've seen the Clone Wars and sorry, they don't look like that. Whether it was worlds that had been fought over for the whole war like Felucia or one-off planets being invaded like Umbara or Ryloth, there was never any orbital bombardment, orbital bombing, massive cratering, atmospheric effects, mass extinctions, et cetera.

The new Disney canon is so schizophrenic that it defies reasonable technical analysis. It is as useful to try to understand its technological cohesiveness as it would be to try to analyze the technology of Harry Potter.

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Thu Aug 06, 2015 11:32 pm

In all honesty, Lucas has been quite disingenuous towards his own universe. How come men weild advanced metal cutters of formidable power, have small crafts with impressive abilities and more than decent dense firepower, not-so-large-after-all gun platforms capable of thousands of klicks of range and starships over a klick long capable of taking off of a planet, yet suddenly prove totally unable to achieve within the expected realm of militaristic abilities? Indeed, how come the Clone Wars neutered SW ships so much?
It's not like we're asking for ultra megatonnage pwnage and AU ranges. But hell, that's nonsense. I have little respect of the kiddy CGI show, that's nothing new, but let's take the example of Grievous facing the witches. Did the script make any attempt to explain why no starship could do the job from a distance, lob a couple missiles or fire from several thousands of klicks away at a miserable sitting duck target?
On top of that, nothing is made to alleviate this problem so we have essentially an EU enthusiast who writes books that do precisely behave as if the EU was still standing.
Honestly, I think it would have been much better if Lucas had been kicked out of his own SW a long time ago.
EU was hit and miss, but when it worked it worked well.
It's funny to realize that the movie that portrayed a rather decent war ability in Star WARS happened to be the one GL loathed the most.
There are many reasons to believe that some people might have understood SW better than GL himself.
Honestly, nothing of the prequels and even less of the CGI shows impress me in the slightest. It's stuff that I would have expected from any relatively well inpired SW fan.
And I'm very convinced that a really talented fan would have blown SW into a new orbit with much super prequel movies.
All I can hope for is for the new movies, and above all Rogue One, to give us something to chew on. Something mighty and not the same watered down uninspired stuff concocted by GL's mind.
Enough to actually nullify the worst elements of TCWS, in which I have no interest since the shit season 1 was, and give us a more adequate vision of SW where behemoth warships in space can actually engage in a proper space battle where her firing ranges rate farther than the warship's own length.
Lucas seems to have forgotten ROTJ, wherein warships fighting at such close range was unorthodox.

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by 2046 » Fri Aug 07, 2015 2:26 am

1. TCW1 wasn't great, but it could've been worse ... it could've been TNG1.

2. TCW didn't neuter SW ships. It is completely consistent.

The suggestion from RotJ that ships fighting at close range is unusual is from the novel, but even then there are qualifiers you are missing:
'But no one's ever gone nose to nose at that range,
between supervessels like their destroyers and our
cruisers!' Ackbar fumed at the unthinkable - but their
options were running out.
'Great!' yelled Lando, skimming over the surface of the
destroyer. 'Then we're inventing a new kind of combat!'
'We know nothing about the tactics of such a
confrontation!' Ackbar protested.
'We know as much as they do!' Lando hollered. 'And they'll
think we know more!' Bluffing was always dangerous in the
last hand: but sometimes, when all your money was in the
pot, it was the only way to win - and Lando never played to
lose.
'At that close-range, we won't last long against Star
Destroyers.' Ackbar was already feeling giddy with
resignation.
Only the last bit about not lasting long is in the film and script. The prequels and TCW could override the new-combat and know-nothing bits, but then Ackbar does specify supervessels like the ISD ... one could argue that nullifies the seeming contradiction.

3. You may loathe the Star Wars of Lucas, but it is the reality of Star Wars. Taken by itself, it is far more consistent and logical than, say, Lucas + the EU, and far superior on that same score to the EU all by itself.

Now that we have the Disney canon, we're worse off than the Lucas era because it is the Lucas+EU option.

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by Mike DiCenso » Tue Aug 11, 2015 4:05 am

I've split the topic on firepower into the Trek/Wars forum for discussions on Star Wars firepower. If you must bring it up in this topic, please do so in proper context of how it relates to the OP.

Thank you
-MIke

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by mojo » Fri Aug 14, 2015 2:51 am

2046, are you implying that you will still debate purely from the films? With the new Canon materializing, will you refuse to use it?

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by 2046 » Fri Aug 14, 2015 11:19 am

I hit that point in April. See http://weblog.st-v-sw.net/2015/04/tarkula-rasa.html and the follow-up http://weblog.st-v-sw.net/2015/05/tarku ... -list.html

I still haven't wrapped up the big formal CanonWars-style page with the logical defense of the view, but then I also never have polished off the "Not Our Spock" page about how Nimoy wasn't playing Prime Universe Spock in the JJ films (from the January 2014 interview), so at least I'm consistent.

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by mojo » Mon Aug 17, 2015 2:59 am

I know I'm not your favorite guy, but I read both of those linked posts and honestly came away a little uncertain. It's pretty clear you think the new Canon is b.s., but my question remains. Forgive me if I'm being dense.
Given that you've been right in the center of the debate for years on end, I can't be the only one wondering. Will you continue to debate, but refuse to use the new Canon? Will you walk away?

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by 2046 » Mon Aug 17, 2015 4:27 am

Don't feel bad. No one on here is my favorite person. That would require curves and close proximity.

To summarize, I think these two quotes from the first link answer the questions:

"As such, I am putting a hold on any analysis of the new universe and not including its separate facts into my analyses of the canon Star Wars universe of Lucas."

"But, if something changes and logic demands recognition of the Disney canon, then I will, again unlike my opponents, happily change my tune."

In other words, the analyses continue.

More directly, I continue to debate, and reject use of the new material (which is inconsistent with both the Lucas canon and itself).

It's a lot cleaner than having a hundred nitpick fights where someone references some new stupid crap and I point out the contradiction with other new crap and the Lucas canon, then that person ignores the contradiction or inserts their own idiotic re-reading or just says 'well this overrides', and the merry-go-round continues. That's just a damnable mess, and an all-too-familiar one.

It's best to acknowledge that this new parallel universe isn't the Star Wars of Lucas and just roll on exclusively with what they called the "immovable objects" of Star Wars, and ignore all the movement they're doing anyway.

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Aug 23, 2015 5:19 pm

2046 wrote:I hit that point in April. See http://weblog.st-v-sw.net/2015/04/tarkula-rasa.html and the follow-up http://weblog.st-v-sw.net/2015/05/tarku ... -list.html

I still haven't wrapped up the big formal CanonWars-style page with the logical defense of the view, but then I also never have polished off the "Not Our Spock" page about how Nimoy wasn't playing Prime Universe Spock in the JJ films (from the January 2014 interview), so at least I'm consistent.
#NotOurSpock

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Re: Revenge of the EU Completists

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Aug 23, 2015 5:24 pm

So, hum, you'd be ignoring Rebels and the two new movies, plus the Han Solo stuff too?

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