Splinter of the Mind's Eye and other pocket continuities

[tdenmark]

Btw. I mean soap opera with the highest compliment. They are the only way to tell long form stories over multiple seasons with engaging content. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, etc. Just all variant soap operas in my view.

Soap box? Well, if I want to get preached to I'd rather go to church.

[Deleted]

Regardless of what their intentions were, it's telling that they've already re-canoninzed several concepts from Legends and will likely continue to do so, because ultimately Disney wants to make money off their IPs.

To bring it full-circle back to Splinter of the Mind's Eye, one such concept is the Kaiburr Crystal, which gets mentioned a lot lately.* There's also Thrawn, and there's rumors KOTOR and its well-loved protagonists is making a comeback of some sort. This just goes to show that "canon" is a fluid concept, and at least partially fan-driven.


*The current iteration is somewhat weaker than the one from Splinter, and seems to be the power source for Lightsabers and the Death Star superlaser. 

[Zenopus]

Apr 23, 2021 6:47:25 GMT -6 tdenmark said:

purple haired admiral gender studies

Apr 23, 2021 8:13:27 GMT -6 tdenmark said:

Perhaps they are more concerned with contemporary politics ...

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Thread unlocked, but proceed with caution (fly casual)...

[tdenmark]

@zenopus good point. I just visited another RPG site the other day that was over politicized. I wouldn't want this place to get like that.

[Starbeard]

Good points about having too much of a good thing. Whatever impression people might get from looking at ticket sales or gross income, there's simply no way Star Wars could ever again match the cultural force it was 1977-83, maybe unless Lucas becomes the American President and constantly uses the Force as a metaphor for everything.

@ampleframework, your point about the irony of the Story Group is a good one and part of what I meant when I called Hidalgo's old post almost prophetic. I think the story group was never actually about policing continuity, at least in the sense that fans typically mean when they talk about continuity.

We have to remember that Lucasfilm was set to copy-paste Marvel's model right from Day 0, and I think the very concept of an in-house "story group" is part of that move. It's about presenting an image of bespoke, personalized cohesion to what is in reality a corporate paycheck machine for other media companies to produce and sell their own stuff with TIE Fighters in it. It's also about having a clear business policy of where and how to handle expert consultants for those outsourced projects, and probably with some fanbase-focused public relations thrown in. And it's also about organizing and directing the outsourced projects within certain areas of the setting, by defining marketable Canonical terminology. But if there's any aspect of policing for plot holes then it's incidental.

For example, there's a mixed message within the Legends books now. At the front of each one is usually a full in-universe timeline of all Legends media currently for sale. Not even Old Lucasfilm did that. Timelines were something for fans to make a hobby of. I'm not sure if Old Lucasfilm ever published an official timeline of all licensed content. But it sends three messages, all learned years ago by Marvel: it advertises exactly what's available, it tells the consumer exactly what to purchase next, and it shows the consumer that getting the full story requires extra purchases.

It's a mixed message for sure, though. On the one hand, the story group is all about locating new areas for expansion within the franchise, like a new "untapped story era" called "High Republic" that obviously isn't going to be used at all to cross-market the Mandalorian by diving into Baby Yoda's origin story. Timelines for them are issues of economics. And we see that as it becomes more clear that current Star Wars actually plays pretty fast and loose with continuity (unless it's specifically being tied into another product for sale: again, Marvel model). But on the other hand, I think Filoni is really the only in-house guy who consistently goes back to draw on Legends in his new work, which you'd think would be a good economic move to adopt officially, while everyone else seems really just intent on referencing themselves and pretending there never were Legends.

By contrast, take Dark Horse, who almost right away took their license and ran with it. Dark Empire was almost blatantly irreconcilable, but instead of shuffling it aside when Thrawn won the continuity race they just doubled down and made more of them, then followed it up with Splinter of the Mind's Eye (full circle!), and their adaptation of the original draft script for The Star Wars was I think their final swan song before handing the license over to Marvel, who have… strictly produced all of their titles according to a Canonical Timeline.

So weirdly, while in many ways New Star Wars is les concerned with plot holes and continuity than Old Star Wars, there's also now a lot less freedom to make anything new that isn't Canon, unless it's one of those hackneyed Franchise Crossover stories, while Old Star Wars had that pocket continuities spades.

Whew. Not even sure if any of that rambling made sense, so I won't reread it for fear that it won't.

[geoffrey]

Why internal consistency is, humanly speaking impossible:

Making a good Star Wars movie, or writing a good Star Wars novel, is hard enough on its own. Now imagine being second-guessed at every turn:

"Oh, you can't have the heroes go there because of what is written on page 217 of SW novel Z."

"Afraid not. This guy can't possibly be connected to this other guy because of the situation that occurred in chapter 16 of a SW novel written 2 years ago."

"What a good idea that would be for the new movie! Too bad that SW novel X made that impossible."

Etc., ad infinitum.

And with each new movie, book, comic book, etc., it only gets worse. The "canon" grows apace.

[Deleted]

Apr 24, 2021 8:59:40 GMT -6 geoffrey said:

Why internal consistency is, humanly speaking impossible:

Making a good Star Wars movie, or writing a good Star Wars novel, is hard enough on its own. Now imagine being second-guessed at every turn:

"Oh, you can't have the heroes go there because of what is written on page 217 of SW novel Z."

"Afraid not. This guy can't possibly be connected to this other guy because of the situation that occurred in chapter 16 of a SW novel written 2 years ago."

"What a good idea that would be for the new movie! Too bad that SW novel X made that impossible."

Etc., ad infinitum.

And with each new movie, book, comic book, etc., it only gets worse. The "canon" grows apace.

Hence the idea of micro-continuitues. Each story can have a short list of movies, books etc. that are canon to this particular timeline. This is how it works with the aforementioned Godzilla movies. The Godzilla timeline fragments a dozen different times, but sometimes two or three of them follow the same thread. For instance, Godzilla 1985 is canon to Godzilla vs. Biollante, but not to Godzilla 2000. It would be simple enough for SW writers to follow this format.

[Starbeard]

I think there are generations and groups who have a much easier time handling multiple continuities than others. What you grew up on or first sucked you in has a big impact. Those who first got into Kirk Trek are probably a lot more lax about keeping details straight than those who grew up on Worf Trek, for example.

In the late 80s to mid 90s, the most prominent fantasy franchises for youths were all video games. Zelda, Final Fantasy, Megaman, Myst, Castlevania, Wolfenstein, etc etc etc. The very nature of continuity in video games used to be different: every Zelda title was like its own retelling of the same thing, with the same characters and places but shaken around. Final Fantasies hardly ever referenced each other except for when they did, and it was actually cool that Cid the Airship Pilot always showed up somewhere in a different role. Later I read FF and Zelda books where they try to retcon everything into different worlds and branching timelines for continuity, but it just feels unnecessary: back then we knew it was the same Link having the same adventure over and over, but it didn't matter that none of it made sense from game to game. Trying to Canonize a set of Timelines out of it feels like something for another generation that isn't mine.

I suppose the big difference is that if your default is to work with limited continuities then Canon simply isn't a concept: this story is a sequel to the original, and that story is someone else's take on a sequel to the original. Both exist as stories, but neither is deemed the real story even unto itself, it's just it's own story and it either references another work specifically or it doesn't. But if you start from a Canon point of view, creating hierarchies of what Definitely Did and Didn't Happen, then pocket continuities will always be seen as Branching Canons, and I think they will also be a harder sell for fans who come to expect Canon as their main point of interaction with the franchise.

[tkdco2]

There will be inconsistencies in any genre if it lasts a long time. There's a lot of them in Star Trek, Highlander, and other works. While some fans grumble, I've never seen the level of outrage present among the Star Wars crowd compared to other films. The only other place I've seen so many fans get so hung up over canon is the Forgotten Realms (they put Tolkien fans to shame here), and they don't even have any movies.

[doublejig2]

Is it right to be partisan over a campaign setting? Like with politics, good for the game but hard on the discussion. Enter the bridge builders! 

[tkdco2]

Partisan in what way? I know there are a bunch of opinions, and I consider them equally valid whether or not I agree with them. While some folks have very strong opinions, I'd hesitate to classify them as partisan or as belonging to a certain camp. The sort of thing tends to become divisive to no good effect.

[doublejig2]

That's the worst.

[tdenmark]

Apr 24, 2021 8:59:40 GMT -6 geoffrey said:

Why internal consistency is, humanly speaking impossible:

Making a good Star Wars movie, or writing a good Star Wars novel, is hard enough on its own. Now imagine being second-guessed at every turn:

"Oh, you can't have the heroes go there because of what is written on page 217 of SW novel Z."

"Afraid not. This guy can't possibly be connected to this other guy because of the situation that occurred in chapter 16 of a SW novel written 2 years ago."

"What a good idea that would be for the new movie! Too bad that SW novel X made that impossible."

Etc., ad infinitum.

And with each new movie, book, comic book, etc., it only gets worse. The "canon" grows apace.

And yet somehow Marvel did it for over a decade across 23 movies and counting, with only a couple duds. And arguably those duds weren't even that terrible.

[tdenmark]

Furthermore, how do long running television series manage their canon across multiple seasons and multiple changes in writing staffs and show runners?

Having some respect for what has come before isn't a humanly impossible task. It just takes a little extra elbow grease and Care.

[Falconer]

I think about the great lengths that Tolkien went to to reconcile inconsistencies in his world and stories. The result is that, while, sure, we are left with unresolved inconsistencies and uncoordinated facts, by and large Tolkien’s Middle-earth can not be reasonably understood to exist as pocket continuities—it is a cohesive, magnificent whole. I don’t think anyone can question the grandeur of Tolkien’s creation. And that’s the benefit of ironing out inconsistencies — you don’t have to compartmentalize one part in order to enjoy another part.

But perhaps what makes that possible and even desirable is the factor that Tolkien’s creation is finite by mere fact that it can only truly exist in the writings of a man who had a finite lifespan. No such equivalent limit exists within Star Wars. The pocket continuities are therefore inevitable, I suppose. This is all the more magnified by the very nature of Star Wars—it shines when it is light and pulpy loosely-connected action, and falls flat when it pretends to be a grand, interconnected myth or saga.