So did anybody read Queen's Shadow? I didn't even realize until yesterday that it had already come out last month.
It's release date isn't until next Tuesday according to Amazon. Regardless, my copy actually arrived earlier this week, though so far I've only managed to read the first hundred pages. So far it's alright, nothing spectacular, but it's holding my attention.
Oh, I could have sworn I saw a January release date when looked at it yesterday, I guess I was mistaken.
(I'm not actually watching the video, but I read the artist's blog post explaining the situation, so forgive me if I reiterate stuff that's in the video.) Hell, it's been happening to Ansel, specifically, for well over a decade. His Executor was used in the Family Guy Empire Strikes Back spoof, and his regular Star Destroyer was used in so many official productions it almost became a joke (IIRC, it was in the Force Unleashed cinematic trailer, for instance, which led to him no longer publicly releasing his models for community use). I mean, there was a happy ending (or, I guess, middle, at this point), he was hired to so some models and renders for one of the old EU guidebooks, but it seems kind of wacky to me that Star Wars is not only the sloppiest franchise I know about co-opting fan-art in licensed products, but they keep, apparently accidentally, ripping off the same one guy.
I kinda think Traviss came across a bit like her Mandalorian commandos in that story, in that she also seemed to act like the series was her own personal thing where she was the final arbiter, not something ultimately owned by someone else. They contradicted that? Crap. So much for "the books aren't really canon, but they are canon, just not canon canon thing" they kept saying all the time.
They were never canon. They were just done in coordination with someone from the show so the novels could stay consistent with the show. However, the show was never under any obligation to stay consistent with the novels. And now it isn't.
The continuity question was a whole mess of mixed messages from day one. Yeah, we all knew that going in (that's how all franchises work, even ones like Star Wars where the tie-ins are fully canonical). Still, it stinks, given how much emphasis the marketing put on the idea that the tie-ins would given you more insight into the TV show and its world. (For the record, what was contradicted? Was it a little detail that can be overlooked -- like how Saru's homeworld was given a different name in the books and TV show, or was it something that makes the novel's story impossible to fit into canon now?)
I haven't read the myself, but from the what I've read about the situation, the book is about the Shenzou and Enterprise crews working together, and we see Pike and Spock interacting with Burnham and Saru, but then when they show up in Discovery Season 2, Pike doesn't know them, and Spock and Burnham haven't seen or spoken to each other since they were kids. I think there have been some other smaller little bits that also don't really line up, but I'm not sure of the details. Apparently at least part of what happened is that the book was written while Bryan Fuller was still in charge, and he was never going to have the Enterprise appear on the show, but he left and the new show runners obviously had different plans.
Also You are never going to find a situation where a multi-million dollar show is held to ransom by a novel read by a few thousand.
I see. Too bad. While not the greatest book out there, it did do a nice job introducing everyone while it still fit. Sure, but when there's an actual position for trying to keep things straight, you'd wish that they would actually keep things straight, esp. when the marketing was glowing about how tight everything was.
People keep saying this, but nuBSG, for instance, managed to stay consistent with its own day-one writers' bibles for season after season, and it was read by a few dozen people at the time. I truly doubt it would've been prohibitive to not overtly contradict the book while doing the season two story (in much the same way they've managed to not overtly contradict anything established about Saru and the Kelpians while completely revamping the concepts behind them; I highly doubt that the descriptions in season one and promo/tie-in material were intended to be as, shall we say, selectively truthful and generally misleading as they've ended up).
^^To be fair, BSG kept the same showrunner from beginning to end. By the time Disco's third season begins, they'll be on their fifth.
Yeah, in situations like this is the people making the main product (movie, TV show, whatever) to set the tone, make the rules and decide where they're going with it and it's up to the tie-in media to keep up with them. It just so happens that in this instance the persons in charge were replaced and suddenly they're taking it in their own, new direction (as they were hired to do) and the tie-in media people found themselves suddenly going off in the wrong direction, through no fault of their own. That's just business. It happens. Same thing happened in the Star Wars EU all the time during the PT era and later TCW. The movies set the pace and everything else had to juggle things around and pretend that's how it was the whole time, because there's no way the movies made by the person who created the whole franchise were going to tiptoe around any material from a novel or a comic written in the "nobody really cares much about Star Wars anymore, so what the hell, just make it up!" era of the IP.
I get all that, my main objection was when people went all chicken little about how it's completely impossible to expect anyone to even feign at maintaining consistency in a franchise. It's not impossible, it may not even be particularly difficult, it's just a matter of whether or not it's a priority.
Every franchise has its own rules (some have everything canon, others have only some things, with additional non-canon materials made for more income, etc.). In the case of the DSC novel, the Powers That Be were within their rights to contradict/decanonize/overwrite/whatever the book. I just find it personally annoying, given how much it was stressed that they were trying to avoid this sort of thing and that, since the novels were the first part of the series I was able to experience (don't have CBS Access), it feels to me just like the did the same thing to an actual episode.
The Star Wars franchise projected the same attitude after the Disney takeover, but then Episode 8 contradicted the Episode 7 novelization.
Did the novelization not have Hosnian Prime blow up or something? (I'm kidding, I know what it is, I even think having Poe and Rey meet on-screen was a little too cute, since they were standing right next to each other in the last couple scenes of TFA, so it seems like a stretch they wouldn't have spoken at any point, but the odd line or scene being contradicted seems more in the spirit of the "canon until contradicted, we reserve the right but will avoid it if possible" ethos (which applies just as much to filmed material) than explicitly ruling out entire stories with stray lines and specific phrasing.)