A Galaxy Far, Far Away: Ten Years of the "New" Star Wars Canon
Ten years ago this week, the publication of A New Dawn—a prequel novel meant to tie into the then-upcoming Star Wars Rebels, the first TV show made under Lucasfilm’s ownership by Disney—officially launched a revised Star Wars canon. It was news the fandom had known was coming for a while, with the classic Expanded Universe, now dubbed Legends, formally coming to its end in April 2014. But a decade on, the impact of this decision isn’t primarily felt in the narratives themselves, but in the Star Wars fandom’s relationship with them.
This shift was driven in part by the kinds of stories being chosen and their placement within the timeline. The reset of Star Wars continuity, down to its most basic elements—the then-six Star Wars movies and the 3DCG Clone Wars TV show—left a vast creative canvas unlike anything the Expanded Universe had seen since its inception. However, the new canon introduced a rule the EU never really embraced: everything going forward, including games, comics, books, TV shows, and the newly announced sequel trilogy, would be in narrative lockstep with each other. Outside of a few specific selections, all Star Wars going forward "mattered" in exploring and filling in this newly condensed canon.
The Expanded Universe had long operated on a striated approach to continuity. Most events were relatively in sync, but tiers of canonicity existed and could override one another, especially with the arrival of the Clone Wars TV show created by Lucas himself. This led to several controversial retcons, like the show’s approach to Mandalorian culture, which contradicted established lore. However, the EU’s vastness, with its many sources of material even without Lucasfilm creating new movies or shows after the prequel trilogy, meant that contradictions were frequent, giving characters, new and old, arcane, complicated backstories that were a nightmare to navigate for anyone but the most seasoned fans. The new all-in approach to canon, beholden to the shadow of then-incoming secret movies, traded this problem for another. The muddled mess of decades of lore was gone, but so was the sheer breadth of storytelling the EU had embraced.
This makes sense, at least in terms of forward momentum beyond the original trilogy. The EU didn’t see a major obstacle in the concept of more "official" Star Wars on the horizon, constantly having to adapt around its unknown future. The prequels arrived almost a decade after the EU had formally begun with the release of Heir to the Empire, but even before Heir, Star Wars storytellers explored what came after Return of the Jedi in Marvel’s Star Wars comic after it adapted the movie. The prequels further expanded this breadth, pushing the EU backward. New movies set decades before A New Hope? The EU went back to tell the story of the galaxy decades before that, and then thousands of years before that with Tales of the Jedi or Knights of the Old Republic. After this, the EU looked hundreds of years beyond the films with series like Legacy.
The last decade of Star Wars, however, has experienced fits and starts in expanding its horizon across various mediums, largely sticking to the vague time frame around the movies, even with nine entries in the Star Wars saga by 2019. Outside of one major initiative, Star Wars: The High Republic, which began telling stories several centuries before the movies, much material since the reset has aimed to fill in the gaps between films rather than expanding beyond them.
The almost 70-year period that makes up the “Skywalker Saga” is now stacked with official material, especially the time frame of the prequel and original trilogies. We now know arguably far more about the events in the 20-year gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope—the period now officially known as the Reign of the Empire—or the years between the original films in official continuity than perhaps any other period of Star Wars. Our knowledge of the 30-year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, however, is largely constrained to a few events after Jedi, the general period of The Mandalorian and its affiliated shows (an ever-increasing priority for Lucasfilm). Despite Star Wars seeming reticent to move beyond this timeframe after the reaction to The Rise of Skywalker, it’s going to take a lot more than the ten years it’s taken for current continuity to reach the scope of the EU at its peak.
The new canon also faces a restriction it could not control: a fanbase trained by changing cultural trends in the last 10–15 years to consume media and its canon in a specific way. The rise of Star Wars’ continuity reset came alongside the apex of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its popularization of the “all-connected” shared universe. By 2014, the second phase of Marvel’s cinematic endeavors was well underway, proving the viability of this kind of fandom-rewarding continuity across film and TV. Many other brands, including DC, followed suit, chasing Marvel’s dominance at the box office. While unfair to say that Star Wars was one of those, the new continuity arrived at a crossroads in pop culture fandom (increasingly co-opted by corporations) and media, coinciding with the rise of “It All Matters” continuities, placing an importance on the cultivation of facts above all else.
Each new issue of Marvel’s relaunched Star Wars comic brought a “confirmation” of a fundamental, additive factoid to continuity. Every new book was subsequently dissected for its raw information about events, characters, and references, which were then meticulously added to fandom wikis within minutes and hours of release. Everything mattered to continuity, but it became increasingly clear that what mattered most to a significant portion of the audience was not the storytelling itself but the facts buried within it. Even now, ten years later, as Star Wars looks to its future, these attitudes remain difficult to abandon. Details and allusions to the Expanded Universe are re-integrated back into the new canon, not for their thematic weight, but because they are recognizable elements that fans can point to and be lauded for recognizing.
Neither of these issues are fatal problems for the current Star Wars canon. The fact that things keep expanding after ten years is a testament to the potential for new Star Wars stories, despite the cultural shifts the saga has experienced. Star Wars is currently at a crossroads, with both positive and negative aspects. The cancellation of The Acolyte signals the end of its exploration of the High Republic for the foreseeable future, while the focus on stories around The Mandalorian threatens to narrow Star Wars‘ potential and worldview further. But there’s hope to expand those horizons again with projects like Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s New Jedi Order film (the first canonical material to address the Star Wars galaxy after the events of The Rise of Skywalker) and James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi project, set thousands of years in the past (if either gets made). Star Wars books have thrived on this potential, regardless of constraints, offering stories that explore different forms, eras, and approaches to Star Wars that the live-action media has barely touched upon.
Ten years into its lifespan, the Expanded Universe as we knew it was still only just getting started. Ten years into its latest era of Star Wars continuity, the feeling is much the same. Even with the cultural challenges it has faced, there is still a whole wide galaxy of potential to explore, a hope that burns just as brightly now as it did a decade ago.
