10 Years on, Star Wars’ Rebooted Canon Was a Cultural Reset

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 up to that point, with the classic Expanded Universe, now dubbed Legends, formally coming to its end a few months prior in April 2014. But now a decade on, the impact of this decision is not felt so much in the stories being told, but the broader Star Wars fandom’s relationship with them.

This is, of course, in part because of the kinds of stories that are being chosen to tell, and when those stories are set. 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—now left a creative canvas as broad as unlike anything the Expanded Universe had seen almost since its inception to tell new stories. But the new canon also came with a rule the EU had never really played with: 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 very specific selections of media, all Star Wars going forward “mattered” to exploring and filling in this newly condensed canon.

The Expanded Universe had long operated on a striated approach to continuity. By and large, most events were relatively in sync with each other, but tiers of canonicity could override one another, especially with the arrival of the Clone Wars TV show as a product created by Lucas himself, leading to several controversial retcons—like the show’s approach to Mandalorian culture. But even then, the EU had been around for so long at that point, and there had been so many different sources for material even without Lucasfilm creating new movies or shows beyond Clone Wars itself after the prequel trilogy, that some details often contradicted each other anyway, giving characters old and new arcane, complicated backstories that were a nightmare to navigate for all but the most seasoned of fans. But this new, all-in approach to canon—one beholden by the shadow of then-incoming movies sworn to secrecy—traded that problem for another. The muddled mess of contradictions and decades of lore the EU had developed was gone, but so too was the sheer breadth of storytelling it had almost immediately begun to play with.

In some ways, this makes sense. At least in terms of forward momentum beyond the original trilogy, the EU never had a particular issue with the thought of more “official” Star Wars on the immediate horizon like the new canon did, and constantly having to play around waiting for that content to establish the future of the franchise. The prequels didn’t come until almost a decade after the EU had formally began in earnest with the release of Heir to the Empire, but even before Heir, Star Wars storytellers almost immediately began exploring stories of what came after Return of the Jedi in Marvel’s Star Wars comic after it was done adapting the movie itself. When the prequels came along, that only served to push the EU’s breadth wider. New movies set a few decades prior to 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 the likes of Tales of the Jedi or Knights of the Old Republic. And when they were done, and gave the EU a whole new playground to mess about in, it still looked ahead hundreds of years beyond the films with series like Legacy.

Meanwhile the last decade of Star Wars has had fits and starts to expand the series’ horizon across mediums, but continuity has by and large stuck to the vague time frame around the movies, even with the expansion to 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 time of the movies, much material made since the reset has served to fill in the games between films, rather than beyond or even largely prior to them. The almost 70-year period that makes up the the “Skywalker Saga” is now stacked with official material, especially the time frame of the prequel and original trilogies. We 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, while our knowledge of the 30-year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens is largely constrained to a few events immediately after Jedi, the general period loosely drawn around The Mandalorian and its affiliated shows (a focus that is an ever-increasing priority for Lucasfilm as of late). For as reticent as Star Wars has felt to move on beyond this timeframe after the disappointing reaction to The Rise of Skywalker five years ago, as it now remains an ongoing, perpetually expanding franchise, it’s going to take a lot more than the 10 years it’s already taken for current continuity to get to the scope of the EU at its height because of that restriction.

And yet, the new canon also faces a restriction that neither it nor its masters could’ve ever really controlled: a fanbase that has been trained by changing cultural trends in the last 10-15 years to consume media and its canon. The rise of Star Wars‘ continuity reset came adjacent to what was the beginning of the apex of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and its popularization of the “all-connected” shared universe as a force to be reckoned with in popular culture. In 2014, the second phase of Marvel’s cinematic endeavors was well underway, having proved that it could pull off this kind of fandom-rewarding continuity across film and TV. DC and countless other brands were already eager to follow suit in their own attempts to chase Marvel’s dominance at the box office. But while it would be unfair to say that Star Wars was one of those brands doing the chasing, the new continuity came at a crossroads in pop culture fandom (and its rise as being increasingly co-opted by corporate entities) and media, and their shared approach to “It All Matters” continuities: placing an importance on the cultivation of facts above any other connection to the narrative.

Every time a new issue of Marvel’s relaunched Star Wars comic dropped, there came a new “confirmation” of a fundamental, additive factoid to continuity. Every new book was almost immediately picked apart for the raw information of events, characters, and references that were now being stitched back into the tapestry of the franchise. With everything wiped clean and so new, every new media release was a chance to learn something that would be the first of its kind in this new age, something that could be meticulously added to fandom wikis within minutes and hours of new material coming out. Everything may have mattered to continuity in a sense that it was all in lockstep with each other, but it became increasingly clear what mattered most to a good chunk of the audience was not the storytelling itself, but the facts buried within it. Even now, 10 years in, as Star Wars finds itself in looking to see what stories are told next, these attitudes are hard to give up, with details and loose aspersions to the Expanded Universe picked apart and re-integrated back into the new canon less for their thematic weight, but because they are a things fans can point at and recognize, and be lauded for doing so.

But neither of these are fatal problems facing the current Star Wars canon. If anything, that things keep expanding 10 years in is a testament to the fact that, despite the cultural sea changes the saga has faced in that period, there is still plenty of opportunity for new Star Wars stories to be told. Like we said, Star Wars is currently at something of a crossroads, in ways good and bad. The loss of The Acolyte seemingly heralds the slow end to one of Star Wars‘ freshest areas of exploration for the foreseeable future, and its concentration on stories that focus around the success of The Mandalorian threatens to condense Star Wars‘ potential and its worldview even more narrowly. But there is hope to expand those horizons again in projects like Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s New Jedi Order movie, the first canonical material to grapple with the Star Wars galaxy after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, or James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi project, set thousands of years in the past (if either gets to the big screen at all, that is). Star Wars books have thrived on this potential regardless of constraint, giving us stories that explore different forms, eras, and approaches to Star Wars that the live-action media has barely managed to scratch the surface of.

Ten years into its own lifespan, the Expanded Universe as we come to knew it was still only just getting started. Ten years into this latest era of Star Wars continuity, the feeling is much the same—and even with the cultural challenges it has faced, there is still a whole wide galaxy of potential out there to explore, a hope that burns just as brightly now as it did a decade ago.

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