This will never happen, but I still want to propose a Star Wars Legends Continuity Coalition.
As much as I hate to admit it, it sure seems like Star Wars Legends is not going to be brought back officially anytime in the near future, even when it would be highly lucrative. The last Legends work was nebulously in 2015 (with those partial-Legends TTRPG books by Fantasy Flight Games), and the final ongoing work, the MMO The Old Republic, is nearing the end of its life with no major story expansion in three years.
So, essentially, it’s been a decade with the largest cohesive non-superhero shared universe in the history of popular media just… not releasing anything. Yeah, there’s a new Canon Continuity going on in Star Wars right as we speak, but it’s a different world with different stories. A different branch of the same franchise.
In the meantime, and especially if this end is truly permanent… we fans ought to take matters into our own hands.
This recent video really inspired me to write up a mini-manifesto about it:
There’s so many debates and arguments in fandom about “what’s canon” and “what’s basically fan fiction” and it’s all this hollow weak tribalism over something we should celebrate. Just because Legends is currently dormant doesn’t mean it retroactively loses itself. It still reigned supreme for 35 years as the best shared universe of them all, with hundreds, probably thousands of authors, artists, lorekeepers and toy designers directly contributing to one vibrant piece of pop culture. It’s still canon, it’s just canon to an old continuity that is no longer actively supported.
But it also ended unceremoniously, and extremely unfinished. The canceled Sword of the Jedi Trilogy hurts the hearts of far too many; the Legacy II and Dawn of the Jedi comics wrapped up at hyperspeed and left fans wanting; games like Star Wars 1313 and Battle of the Sith Lords were canceled before release. We’re still unclear about the fates of characters like fan-favorite characters like Quinlan Vos, Zayne Carrick, and Ken Palpatine.
And if Lucasfilm is uninterested in continuing this vast continuity, then fans should do the same thing in an organized collective.
There’s great precedent for it already. The Star Wars CCG Players Committee has existed for almost 25 years to manage this long-dormant game. They run tournaments, create card errata for balance, and release brand-new expansions, all as volunteers working under a nonprofit. In addition, the Rancor Pit community has developed and maintained a lively community of TTRPG resources and new material for the West End Games D6 System, also for about 25 years since the product ended. And there’s been a massive history of fan audio and fan film projects keeping fandom alive.
And there’s already a precedent for fan or fan-adjacent continuity collecting; the canceled Supernatural Encounters/Cult Encounters articles were expanded into a full novel-length work by the very passionate Joe Bongiorno, and there have even been Expanded Encounters inspired by the original work that further elaborate on the Legends continuity that Supernatural Encounters elaborated on.
That’s exactly where I want to go with this, only more ambitious and wide-scoped.
I want to publish brand-new stories that exist to propel the Legends continuity forward, to help expand the expanded universe, to tie up loose ends, and to give fan creators a great sandbox to play in.
Why Bother with a Legends Continuity Coalition?
People misinterpret the Legends/Canon split in Star Wars to be, “Everything in Star Wars Legends is fan fiction now.” Even people who are anti-ragebait about it will often say things like, “Who cares about canon? Just enjoy the stories that are good.”
That misses the point that trying to develop and maintain elaborate shared universes and fixing the inevitable mistakes is REALLY FUN. It’s incredibly silly sometimes trying to get Star Wars Demolition and Maverick Moon to fit in the same continuity as Shatterpoint, and it’s incredibly fulfilling to see it somehow get pulled off. You simply cannot do that when you treat each story as a standalone piece. A single author working for decades couldn’t even pull it off. It takes a bunch of people with different life experiences, different priorities, different skillsets, all working together for a common cause.
An Unofficial Official Committee
While fan creations will always be a lot more chaotic than anything by the actual rights holder, that won’t stop the Legends Continuity Committee from trying to be as consistent, collaborative, and creative as possible. In the same way that large Wikis keep things as transparent as possible, you’d want a real organizational structure, with an executive committee, with lorekeeping editors, with content editors, and with community votes. You’d need just enough bureaucracy to actually establish and maintain what qualifies as canon, and to make sure these fan creators don’t totally break each other’s work.
It’s sort of like creating a government or religion, only it’s done entirely for fun and entertainment, entirely by volunteers. If you don’t find that to be interesting at all, I’m afraid this is not a proposal for you.
Of course, I’ve been in a lot of fan projects over the years, and what you desperately want to avoid is “annoying ideas guys” who try to dictate things, usually poorly thought-out, but never do any hard work or “fanon wiki guys” who want to write one-paragraph summaries and keep everything so vague to be near-meaningless, or obstinate creators who refuse to compromise or collaborate.
You want a group that’s diverse, that’s passionate, that consists of writers and artists who actually want to have fun together, editors who care enough to keep things together, and a core team that has at least a little bit of a shared vision. Even “consumer fans” who want to read/watch/listen rather than directly create anything should still have some amount of voice.
It’s all just for fun, but the goal is still to flesh out our favorite shared universe ever, so we have to keep it organized.
Controversial things come up for a vote, any major work will have plenty of time for people to review it before it’s “released” to the public, and people try to be generally positive with each other.
Ultimately, this Legends Continuity Coalition can decide whatever it wants, and can create any organizational structure it desires, but I do have 5 base proposals to consider before even a single person has expressed interest in joining me:
Base Proposal 1: Only New Narrative Work is Canonized.
A massive amount of Star Wars lore entered the Legends canon through Topps Trading Cards, TTRPG blurbs, Starwars.com articles, and other “lore sources.” That’s a fun part of the Legends continuity!
However, I wouldn’t want it here.
It’d be great to develop a wiki to keep things organized, but it’d be horrible to create facts and histories entirely on that wiki. Articles and “out of universe” work is just a bit weightless, and a fanon committee is already really weightless to begin with!
So I’d say, any work that enters this Legends Continuity Coalition’s Creative Canon has got to be an in-universe narrative work. We can decide at the start, “Quinlan Vos is going to die in 13 ABY, killed by Lord Shadowspawn,” but it shouldn’t actually enter our collective canon until someone writes the novel featuring or at least mentioning it.
A lot of those old Hyperspace articles were in-universe historians rambling, or in-universe news bulletins… I love that! We can go that route for stuff that’s harder to depict in a story.
It’s a bit of a handicap, but a restriction that makes things more interesting for the fans who only want to read.
Base Proposal 2: The Clone Wars is S-Canon.
It’s been a debate for a decade whether to de-canonize The Clone Wars (2008), because of all the contradictions it beset on the Legends timeline that never got fixed before the New Canon reboot.
I mostly would support that, EXCEPT there’s so many tie-ins that it’d be impossible to fully de-canonize it. Works as diverse as Essential Guide to Warfare and Darth Plagueis heavily feature lore established from that cartoon, and nobody deserves to selectively pick out individual non-canon sentences; that’s insane. Plus, you’d lose all of the Legends tie-in content like “Act on Instinct” and No Prisoners that flesh out the Star Wars universe through new characters, settings, and fun ties to other Legends work.
So, I propose that the still-nonexistent Legends Continuity Coalition decide, right at the start, to place The Clone Wars in the “S-Canon” tier, from back when there were official canon tiers. It reverses the old paradigm from 2008-2014, where TCW was “T-Canon” and placed above all the main books, comics, and games. Instead, it’s placed below those, and at the same level as the 70s Marvel comic, most of the older games, and the choose-your-path adventure books, where things are canon unless a source above them contradicts it, then you can ignore it.
I don’t say this out of hate for The Clone Wars. Rather, I propose it to make Legends feel more different to the currently exisiting New Canon! No point in having the Disney-era Clone Wars and Legends Clone Wars be practically the same, when Legends already has its own fleshed-out multimedia project to pull from, and mixing the two causes so many pain points that you can’t keep both without cascading errors.
There should be further discussion about incorporating elements of the New Canon into our canon, as well as how to treat the plethora of unlicensed sources from the 80s-90s or even incorporating pre-existing fan-work, but this Clone Wars one is probably too fundamental not to mention upfront.
Base Proposal 3: Editing is Better than Retcons.
Contradictions will happen. There will be factual errors, successive creators who dislike each other’s work and snipe at each other through their characters, and other problems that have to be fixed after the fact. Just like the official Legends continuity was filled to the brim with cheap retcons and silly explanations, you just have to have fun with the mistakes and enjoy yourself. But… it’s definitely better to make sure things are consistent ahead of time. Editors are important!
I’m also not at all beholden to keeping the current Legends as “sacred.” There’s plenty of crappy stuff in Legends that I’d love to retcon out of existence if I could, plenty of old 90s “the Blatharian race is one of crafty criminals and thieves” type racial generalization that I’d actively seek to minimize–but, as Base Proposal 1 says, minimize only through new narrative work, and narrative work that’s well-edited for consistency. Overall, though, retcons have to be done carefully.
Base Proposal 4: All New Work Should Be in the Public Domain.
To make things easy, I’d recommend that any big endeavor like this go ahead and mandate that all creators release their work into the public domain. Everyone is fan volunteers already, and just to prevent future issues that always arise from dozens of people working in the same shared universe, we should give up all “ownership” of our original work.
Fan fiction, fan art, fan audio, etc. have a very murky legal status as far as copyright and Fair Use goes, so “public domain” only goes as far as “non-infringing material.” I am not a lawyer. Lucasfilm has never been hostile to fan work, anyway, so there’s not too much to worry about there… BUT, it’s good to make this as non-commerical as possible.
Releasing everything into the public domain would also legally allow Lucasfilm to actually view our new work; under legal policy, employees at big media companies generally cannot even look at unsolicited story ideas, pitches, fan art, etc. to shield from future lawsuits, and this would lift that a little. I doubt they actually WOULD view it, but still. I don’t want to accidentally prevent a future Star Wars writer from making their version of the Arkanian Revolution that’s very similar to the one I made, for example.
(Lucasfilm does have a fan film policy, but no policy for other fan work that I can find.)
Base Proposal 5: We Need a Different Label than Just “Legends.”
Most works deemed canon by the Legends Continuity Coalition should probably be released with some banner or stamp or “brand” label to help people across the internet know, “Ah, this is part of that fan project.” It’s not necessary, but something would be nice.
When I was a quirky teen many cycles ago, I dreamed up the “Ultimate Marvel” equivalent for Star Wars, which I deemed to myself as “Star Wars Infinitum,” as in ad infinitum. Something along those lines is probably enough!
And What if Legends Returns Officially?
Okay, that’s fine. Any official Lucasfilm-led return of our favorite shared universe would immediately trample over this fan-led continuation, and there’s nothing any of us could do about it. But… who cares? It’s not like being unofficial matters. It’s also okay not to accept this coalition’s continuity as canon in the first place. But it’s a cohesive universe of creators working together on art they love, and official or unofficial, that can never be changed.
In an optimal world, a coalition like the one I propose would never last forever; it’d last only until the collective of fans are satisfied with it. At least for me personally, convincing Lucasfilm that Legends is worth returning to would be extremely satisfying.
Our continuity would be a separate branch from the official continuation one. And just because it’s unofficial doesn’t make it less valid artistically. So I think nothing real would change, except for people’s enthusiasm I guess lol.
Conclusion for the Legends Continuity Coalition
It’s all a pipe dream, really. Are there even enough people out there willing to band together to make a community coalition like this? Unlikely! Will I still keep dreaming about this for the rest of my days? Likely!
I love Star Wars Legends.
