Talkin' About... 'Star Wars': What Stories Do You Prefer? Canon or Legends?

I prefer canon.

Star Wars, after all, did not originate from a book or series of books a la Harry Potter, Hunger Games, or the Jack Ryan films. It was, first and foremost, a film that grew into a movie franchise, with tie-in novelizations, comic book adaptations, and even radio dramatizations.

With the exception of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, none of the first “Expanded Universe” novels published by Del Rey between 1978 and 1985 took place within the same time span of the Original Trilogy. Splinter stands out because it was an adaptation of George Lucas’s “Plan B” for a quick and inexpensive sequel to Star Wars in case the 1977 film was not a big success at the box office. But the Han Solo and Lando Calrissian trilogies that were published during the Original Trilogy era all describe events that occur before the Galactic Civil War.

The Expanded Universe that emerged after Bantam Spectra published Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars: Heir to the Empire started out, as someone else has said, on a solid footing. The Thrawn Trilogy was well-written and consistent to the themes and even the stylistic conventions of George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy. And some of the other authors who contributed to the EU - especially Michael Stackpole, Aaron Alliston, and Steve Perry - produced novels that were “true’ to Lucas’s vision and had the same “this feels like Star Wars” vibe that Zahn’s novels have.

Lucasfilm’s licensing arm, despite some fans’ claims to the contrary, never intended for the EU to be canonical. It asked authors to make sure there was a certain kind of internal continuity, not just between the books but with the films as well. But as is also the case with Pocket Books’ Star Trek novels, the tales told in the novels, comic books, roleplaying games, and other media were apocryphal unless George Lucas said otherwise.

As the years passed, the Star Wars Expanded Universe became….convoluted. Writers knew that fans wanted them to focus on the familiar characters from the Original Trilogy, and especially on Luke. And since The Maker, George Lucas, had only a peripheral role in handling the EU because he was preoccupied with the Prequels, writers were on their own regarding how the Force worked, why some people were more sensitive to it and became either Jedi or Dark Jedi, and especially the evolution of Luke Skywalker from the galaxy’s sole Jedi Knight to the Jedi Master of a new Jedi Order.

As other Quora members have said in their answers regarding the EU and why it worked/didn’t work, some authors depicted Luke so well that one could almost hear Mark Hamill’s voice speaking the character’s dialogue. Other writers - Vonda N. McIntyre and other writers known better for their Star Trek novels -failed miserably and turned Luke into a Force-wielding demigod whose powers were so great that finding new challenges for him became a game of “Can You Top This Supervillain?”

And, of course, any fan who read the novels and Dark Horse Comics without “fanboy blinders” understood that just as Star Trek canon was limited to the various TV shows and feature films, official Star Wars canon was limited to the feature films and (up to 2014) the animated series directly under the aegis of George Lucas.