I have watch this speculation / debate for a while now and this is what I am seeing:
- All Nu Trek Novels pulled at the insistence of JJ / Bad Robot.
That's conjectural. We don't know whether BR "insisted" or whether they and Pocket came to an amicable understanding, or what. Heck, I wrote one of the books and even I don't know the specifics.
All of this needless heavy-handed approach is completely unnecessary. All that is required is a partnership between say Pocket books and Bad Robot on focusing / steering away from certain story / character elements. In the same manner Enterprise was asked by the studio to steer away from a direct Earth - Romulan War arch, because at the time a proposed Earth-Romulan war feature film was being considered.
That's your opinion, but different people have different approaches. Abrams & co. like to maintain a tight continuity among their tie-ins, and that's their prerogative. Just because they do it differently from their predecessors doesn't mean they're doing it wrong. Heck, a lot of Trek fans over the years have been unhappy with the way the books and comics could be suddenly negated by some new episode or movie. There have been threads in the past on this very forum advocating a tighter rein on tie-in continuity more akin to the Lucasfilm approach or something.
And you're wrong that a "steer clear" agreement is all that's necessary. That often
was the case in the past; for instance, DC's Trek comics set between the TOS movies had to steer clear of various things and that shaped their storylines and led them to focus more on their own original characters -- until Richard Arnold came along and told them to steer clear of original characters and focus on the main cast. The catch is, those "steer clear" arrangements go one-way. The tie-in creators are limited in what they can do, but the filmmakers or TV producers aren't obliged to avoid contradicting the books or comics -- and if the tie-ins are
not generated in-house, the filmmakers/producers don't have time to keep track of them all. So it's really not practical to maintain
mutual consistency between the canonical series and its tie-ins unless they're both generated by the same creators.
Such absolute approach to things, reminds me of the stance made by the previous show runners of this franchise, where the bottom line became control, control, control....
Umm, except that being in control is the showrunner's
job. That's the whole point of the position -- to provide a single guiding voice that keeps everything unified and consistent.
And aren't you kind of contradicting yourself? You're complaining that Bad Robot's approach is different from what their predecessors did, but you're also complaining that they're the same?
Or maybe that's not a contradiction. They are the same in that they have the same right to control the fate of the franchise that's been placed in their hands -- and the same right to make their own independent choices about how to handle it rather than just copying what their predecessors did.
