I know there are entitled EU fans who have been throwing around a lot of over-the-top butthurt, but at the same time, what I'm hearing from a lot of you here parses as: "Who cares if they shit all over
your fandom, so long as they catered to the part
I care about?"
It's honestly pretty selfish and heartless - on par with what it would have been like if Abrams had arbitrarily decided to completely change what the Klingon language is in "Into Darkness" - I mean, sure, learning Klingon is an extremely nerdy and esoteric pursuit that most people wouldn't engage in, but I still hope that we could all feel bad for the people who have put in the time to do so, if that had happened.
For the record, I'm NOT an EU superfan. I read the extra books from before ROTJ came out like "Splinter..." and the Han Solo books, and then the Thrawn Trilogy, Shadows of the Empire, and some of the X-Wing books, but that's really pretty much it - Trek has always been my thing, and I really couldn't get into the Vong *at all*. I don't mind setting it all aside for new stuff from ROTJ on - honestly, I think a lot of it was crap, from what I've been told. I just have friends who
are superfans, and I know how much of their time, money, and
lives they have put into it, and regardless of how any of us might feel about whether or not that's a worthwhile thing for them to do, I would hope we can feel bad for them when their efforts have been not just negated, but actually slapped in the face.
Which naming Kylo Ren "Ben Solo" did, in my opinion. If Abrams was ignorant of that fact because he only watched the movies, fine, but he should have had someone around who could tell him that that was actually going to anger a portion of the fandom,
for no real good reason - since I doubt seriously there is anything at all that hinges on that character's specific first name, and in fact, it's kind of a poor choice for the name since
Luke was the only one who knew Kenobi as "Ben". I'm perfectly okay with him not being constrained by the EU, but good grief, man.
And I'm not calling Abrams a "liar" (yes, I know I said he might have "lied", but I didn't mean to call him names or besmirch his character - just that his statement was in factual error) - but I've come to the conclusion that he has a very different idea of what it means to be "a fan" than the sort of people who spend a lot of time on a Star Trek webforum.
I realize that's a lot, so maybe I'd bring on a couple of superfans
And while you're at it, bring on a couple of people who have some concept of the scale of space.
Yes. That, too, please. Preferably, retroactively - before he made "Star Trek 2009", in fact. Get Doc Brown on the phone. He could probably get us back there, explain the scale of space, AND a bit about how adding a star's worth of mass to a planet should affect gravitational conditions there.
