What are your hopes for the new Star Wars EU/continuity?

What should the new EU be better at than the old legends EU?

 

Well, it won't be better, even remotely. I'm hoping that its entertaining, and worth experiencing, but for someone like me they'll never make it something I liked as well as the old EU. There are a lot of EU haters, but I loved the EU, its the main reason I'm a big SW fan, so honestly I have no expectations for the new stuff. I don't assume it will suck, but it will never be what the old EU was to me as a fan, even if stuff like the upcoming books are good.

 

The beauty is we are all on the same page again! Someone who has only ever seen the films knows as much as you people who spent twenty years reading this stuff.

 

"Oh please, don't take my Star Wars awaaaayyyyy..... I wrote the next paaaarrrrttt!"

 

What?

 

Hopefully not every background character is a spy/smuggler/jedi/rebel

 

I hope that they don't rehash old EU characters like Thrawn , Mara Jade, Talon Karrde or Corran Horn. As much as I like those characters, their stories have been told and should be left alone. The new EU should be just that-- new.

 

I saw some spoilers recently which, IF (and it's a big 'if') they're true, will mean some big differences from the old EU. The following isn't the spoilers, but my interpretation of some of their likely ramifications - read if you will, but you have been warned :

Spoiler: Spoilery stuff

Luke probably wouldn't have married or had a family, so no Mara or Ben.
Luke probably wouldn't have set up an academy or trained new Jedi.

Those would make a pretty big difference.

My personal hopes for the new EU are :

Fewer better quality novels. If it's not Zahn standard, don't publish, a maximum of four novels per year.
This is very unlikely !

Have less new 'novel only' characters but develop them more fully.

Feel free to reuse old EU characters where appropriate.

No new wars - there will probably be enough of that in the movies.

If they're not used in the new movies, either use the characters like Ashoka and Ventress or we should find out their fate.

 

Spoiler: something Lucas said once

"Once Vader dies, he doesn't come back to life, the Emperor doesn't get cloned and Luke doesn't get married..." - George Lucas

 

I won't mind erasing a vast portion of the Bantam Era...

the ridiculous and pathetic Imperial Warlords... the endless super weapons... the Solo kids being exiled from their parents for safety but always getting kidnapped anyway...

 

If you were asking about my little quote....it is from the fandom damning movie "The People Vs George Lucas".

 

My hopes? Better story cohesion, deeper world building and less of a focus on the central movie characters. It's a big galaxy, and the Skywalkers are hardly the only ones with stories worth telling.

IMO the worst thing about the EU of old is that it was hampered by being both unable to move away from the big three and unwilling/VERY slow to significantly alter the status quo.
It's why I generally prefer the pre-prequel era; TotJ, KotOR etc.

 

i think the best part is that i don't feel so guilty about not finishing all the Vong invasion books. and all the stuff that came after.

 

I'm curious if we'll see Marvel/Del Rey do tie-ins and stuff for Episode VII. We'll probably get a movie adaptation of course, but I'm interested in also any future novels/comics that will fill in the decades long-gap after ROTJ, since that slate has been wiped clean pretty much. Something like the now decanonized "Shadows Of The Empire", but probably on a larger time scale. Heck, maybe we'll also get a new ESB/ROTJ gap story at some point to replace SOTE.


Tarkin (novel) should be interesting as well. The novels/comics had their own backstory for Tarkin, but that started to unravel with his appearences in Clone Wars (Which is still canon). The Death Star's inception also got muddied over the years if you factored in the old EU. For instance the Jedi Academy novels seem to imply it was more or less Tarkin's idea from the start and went through several stages of development, but that's something that AOTC and ROTS did away with, and there were a lot of weird retcons over that.

So it should be interesting to have this new history of Tarkin and a hopefully simplified Death Star construction story.

It's interesting also that this new EU is using the same writers-Luceno, Miller etc. that the last few old ones have had more or less.

 

Quality control. It sounds like Disney wants it all to count, no multiple levels of canon. Ambitious but it requires you to not put out crap just cause you think it will sell.

 

It all counted before. The multiple levels of canon were about conflicts between films and lesser products. In other words, things haven't really changed much.

 

My hope for the new Star Wars movie(s) is that they don't suck. That is all.

 

Some crap books can be ignored. I wonder if there will be any YA stuff.

 

I would hope that they hired established authors instead of just getting fans who are too hung up on their own viewpoint to make a good story.

I don't know what the ratio of people who like the prequels to who know what made the originals good, but of the books I've read, most have been bad. I'm not a hater by any means, but I don't generally go for fan service.
The comic "Darklighter" was excellent. I know they can make good stories within the Star Wars continuity, but it's pretty rare.

 

My hope is just that they they are fun and readable and feel like Star Wars. My problem with the books I tried reading in the past, is that they were so damn slow or overly-detailed or overly-political that they read more like a Star Trek novel than a Star Wars one.

Obviously being a novel there's the opportunity to delve deeper into the world and characters than the movies have time for, but that doesn't mean I still don't want a story that's fast and funny and full of some swashbuckling OT-style adventure.