The Star Wars Canon is Confusing Fans

A simple story is easy to come up with, it’s easy to brainstorm, and it’s easy to follow as it continues to develop. But when a story is picked up by other writers, by directors, by fans, by anyone with an opinion that wants to see it head in a different direction, things tend to go off the rails. Star Wars, which was first introduced back in the late 70s, is one such story that has gone off the rails more than once but has been brought back by adhering to a continuity that has been nearly abandoned at times so that various stories within the franchise can be told, and it’s become a point of confusion for fans that have grown tired with the shifting continuity that doesn’t stay in one place at any given time. Add in the fact that the Legends canon, which was so “wisely”  abandoned by Disney after the purchase of Lucasfilm, and one should be able to understand why fans have grown a little tired of the Mouse House’s efforts to try and unify the many storylines within the current canon that they’re using for this franchise. 

To put it lightly, the franchise is kind of a mess at the moment, but it’s not hopeless. The fact is that the storylines that currently exist don’t necessarily clash with each other as badly as people think, but it’s not hard to see how confusion can spring up when trying to determine what’s happening at what point in time and how it might affect other parts of the story. The truth is that in a story that features multiple worlds in multiple systems across the galaxy, a lot of stuff can occur at the same time without anyone having to be in the same location. This franchise is big enough that quite a bit of what’s happened and what’s still to happen could be easily explained in several ways. But fans are still confused about the canon. 

Part of that, just, in theory, could be that the idea of ditching the Legends canon, which many feel is wildly inconsistent, was still a bad idea. The Legends canon had the types of stories that people had grown used to seeing in Star Wars, and there were plenty of them that could have been utilized for another trilogy and even more. The galactic wars, the new era of Jedi and Sith, and the insane battles that have taken place in the books are enough to wish for someone to come along and wrest Star Wars from Disney’s cartoonish clutches just to see if a truly fan-driven set of stories could still be created. That’s not likely to happen, especially since the 4 billion dollar price tag has probably doubled if not tripled by now, since even with a couple of lackluster movies that were still not as bad some say, Star Wars is still a huge name in pop culture and is nearly priceless at this point. But the griping about the consistency and the confusion over the canon is going to continue for a while to come since there’s not a lot of chance that unifying thread is going to be given as much value as it should be. 

When even the creator of Star Wars has been heard to say that the Legends canon is ‘not his Star Wars’ it’s easy to guess that quite a few people are going to be confused by this and are either going to rebel and claim that yes, the Legends canon is very much Star Wars, or will show how much of a fair-weather fanbase they are and continue to shift from one foot to the next. The Star Wars fanbase, at least a good portion of it, has been given the label of being toxic for several years now thanks to the diehard fans that won’t accept any viewpoint other than their own, and are often loath to admit that anything other than their own theories might hold even a little weight. The only real problem with the canon is the fans and their interpretation of it, and the fact that the Legends canon was scrapped in the first place, or at least suspended so that Disney could yank whatever they wanted from it now and again. 

The in-depth explanations and the justifications as to why the canon does or doesn’t work, the constant rattling of names, titles, years, and data that superfans tend to use so often when it comes to making their justifications is cute and all, but it tends to distract a person from the main point that the Star Wars canon isn’t that big of a deal since it can be sorted out in a much easier manner than many tend to think. The complications that people tend to bring up between one story and the next in the franchise are often the result of overthinking the story, which many superfans are great at doing.