ST canon is inconsistent and contradictory.

There's an easy explanation for this one: we already know that Yoda and Obi-Wan were willing to play fast and loose with what they did or didn't tell Luke in order to train him to get rid of Vader. In ROTJ, Yoda told Luke that his training was complete for the plain and simple reason that he (Yoda) knew that he was about to shuffle off the mortal coil, and the choice was either to give Luke the confidence of telling him he was done, or to leave Luke feeling under-prepared and vulnerable from his unfinished training.

 

It's still a total retcon from what Empire established.

 

Maybe. There's a difference between the writers changing the actual facts, and a character being full of crap. lol.

 

While I agree that the Star Wars movies also have a lot of contradictions and retcons (case in point Darth Vader wasn't Luke's father at first) I strongly disagree with this one point.
They have just destroyed a terrible, planet-destroying super-weapon, so the celebration and medal ceremony makes perfect sense without the Empire being destroyed. Really the Empire completely falling apart just because the Death Star is gone would be weird.
After that victory the tide of battle turned against the Rebellion between movies, bringing us to the point of the beginning of Empire Strikes Back.

The only about the ceremony scene that doesn't make sense is where the hell they got the dress and necklace Leia wears.

 

Weren't all the love triangle scenes from before Luke and Leia knew they were brother and sister?

 

Star Wars does retcon and contradict itself . Like Princess Leia saying she could remember her mother's face, although she was infant when her mother died.

Or the rebels celebrating across the galaxy after the empire falls, in the last movie, then enters TFA, and everything starts all over again.

But for me, what makes up for it is the amount of detail in its world building. You know the people work and trade for a living. You even have crazy things like moisture farming businesses for money.

People go to bars, sell their vehicles for fast cash, smuggle things, gamble. People speak different languages. Droids have their own language we cant understand but the characters can.

Star Trek couldn't make up its mind--military or not, money or not, conflict amongst humans or not etc. That indecisiveness is what makes it so awkward at times. If it had a richer background, it could be easier to forgive.

SW even covered little details that didn't seem to matter at first, that the prequels ended up explaining.

Vader had a damaged body in a special suit he needed to stay alive in, even though this wasn't explained before they showed the prequels. Luke being raised by an aunt and uncle. The Emperor that controlled everything but we didn't really see him until the last movie.

It's two different types of franchises for sure. It's a fantasy world, but it has more rich details in it.

 

Because it is a fantasy world.

 

I agree. Yes, there will be contradictions, but, on the whole, SW is far more consistent, and that makes for a better story.

 

Because Star Wars is set up as one continuous story, with huge inconsistencies despite less screen time than Trek.

Trek, however, is designed as episodic adventure show, if loose continuity, at best. Fans have spent years trying to put together the continuity, but the production teams have not concerned them with that.

Apples and oranges.

 

This might end up being an "Unpopular Opinion" but I think Star Trek's continuity still holds up pretty well, 54 years in.

Star Wars doesn't have 750 episodes. As far as live-action sci-fi/fantasy goes, the only other thing that can be compared to Star Trek's run is Doctor Who.

 

I think Trek's continuity does very well for how long its been going on. I think that fans can continue to make it work just like they have done before.

 

It's true. I'll admit it's silly. It's sometimes goofy.

Idk, that might actually be the point. It has a way of putting a lot of detail into its story line and background so that fans like it a lot.

It took a small, green rubber, silicone puppet elf thing, that spoke backwards, and made it into a pop culture icon.

The thing with Trek is that some of the inconsistencies are related to actual basic world building ideas that should have been organized from the beginning.

One minute it says humans don't have or use money, the next minute they are. People are running businesses, but it doesn't explain how it works or why.

It's not the idea of not using money that's the problem, it's that they never explain any details or actually show how it works. So you have this weird background world that vanishes and reappears depending on the writing.

Like an Eugenics War that isn't noticed when the characters time travel right in the middle of it happening.

Or even smaller things like Data's chip. It has 3 or 4 different stories.

First it fused with his brain and it cant be removed or turned off. The next movie--Data can turn it on and off at will. The next movie-- Data can remove it. In the last movie and Picard, Data is back to acting emotionless as if he never had it in the first place. He wanted it his whole life!

 

Because it has to. It's a completely new world, which means that a lot of things have to be built somewhat from the ground up. Luke was the everyman character to ground that very alien world. Star Trek operates with a different conceit and operates in a bit of vague background. There is a reason why TOS avoided future Earth was to leave that to the imagination.

As Sisko would say, "The problem is Earth."

 

And Doctor Who has always been honest about the fact they suck at continuity. Terrance Dicks, a producer in the 1970s was quoted saying "continuity is only whatever I can remember." Even in the modern era, Russell T Davies who ran the show when it was first revived in 2005 until 2010 said that if it came down to a choice between does it serve the story or is it consistent with continuity/canon, serving the story too priority all the time, even when it meant contradicting continuity or canon.

 

Without detailing each and every example here (which I was tempted to do), I'll just say that everything doesn't have to be consistent for it to seem REAL. Reality is frequently "inconsistent" if you don't know what happened between two separate moments. If you meet someone while out on the town and they're with their wife, and the wife is a different wife than the one you knew them to have the last time you met, do you imagine/deduce that things happened between then and now? Or do you go rant on the Internet about how reality has canon violations? LOL. Leave room for imagination. And also remember that people can lie or make mistakes. A character saying that something is true doesn't make it the gospel.

 

As Obi Wan said...
"From a certain point of view."

 

That was more or less my point. Ben Kenobi wasn't full of crap when Star Wars was originally made, but the later movies retconned so damn much that Star Wars established that pretty much everything Ben tells Luke in the first movie is now a lie.

It reduces a genuine celebration that the Empire was defeated to a BS photo op, like George W. Bush on that aircraft carrier with the "Mission Accomplished" banner.

And if the Empire was still out there, the Rebels REALLY should be packing up and relocating, rather than wasting time handing out medals. IIRC, the Empire knew where the Rebel base was, and were getting ready to train the Death Star's guns on Yavin before it was destroyed.

Again, that was my point. Luke and Leia being brother and sister was a retcon that made several scenes in SW and Empire play as creepy and incestuous when they didn't originally.

 

So your complaint is that it made Obi-Wan a deeper and more complex character?

There is this thing... called troop morale. You're certainly correct that there is a lot of PR abuse these days, so I understand you being jaded. But it has a legitimate purpose, as well.

This might be a valid point: it really seems like they might have wanted to get the hell outta dodge before having their ceremony. Then again, Tarkin was arrogant and didn't even have a support fleet with the Death Star. So maybe he didn't even bother to direct other forces there at all, and the rebels had intelligence to that effect and knew they had some time.

Not really. They didn't know. And while it might be a bit uncomfortable, that sort of thing IS a relatively common sci-fi trope, especially during the era that George Lucas grew up in: that in a large enough society with adoption, cloning, etc, we can easily reach a point where two people could fall in love/lust and never even know their genetic relationship to each other.

 

This.

Exactly, and more than that is Leia's "Somehow, I've always known." There is so much subtext that Luke's comments from ANH on forward smack of creepiness.

More that his character was basically assassinated in to a liar and a manipulator, and that these supposed good Jedi who were the guardians of peace and justice just completely suck and the only way they felt they could correct their mistake was to lie.