Disney to Fans Who Have Spent Entire Lives Memorizing Minutia of ‘Star Wars’: Continuity Doesn’t Matter

It’s a good thing that Star Wars fans don’t have a reputation for being obsessive nerds who fixated on every tiny detail of the franchise for hours on end or they might have gotten angry when Disney basically said “Yeah, none of that stuff actually matters, who cares?” Lucasfilm

Executive Matt Martin proved he really has his finger on the pulse of the fan community when he said of Star Wars canon “it’s all fake anyway.” Come on, man, this isn’t religion we’re talking about, it’s Star Wars, this is serious.

To be fair, what he says is a little better in context. A little. Here’s his statement via The Playlist.

“So to summarize: there is a reason that we need to internally know what is and isn’t canon so we can keep our line of official storytelling as aligned as possible but that doesn’t mean fans can’t individually pick and choose what they want to accept as true,” Martin wrote. “It’s all fake anyway so you can choose to accept whatever you want as part of the story.”

He continued, “If you choose to only accept the real official canon: cool. If you like to mix and match between continuities: cool. If you like to make up your own stories: also cool.”

This would be more believable if Disney hadn’t made the third-worst film in the franchise just to explain a mistake George Lucas made in the first movie because he didn’t know what a parsec was.

This is basically a response to Disney getting rid of the Expanded Universe material when they took over Star Wars. Fans were mad about this because there was a lot of material and they had absolutely internalized every bit of it but there was actually a good reason for Disney to drop it: it was a goddamn mess that actually divided different things into different “layers” of canonicity.

Still, regardless of your intent, it’s pretty tone-deaf to say “hey man, this stuff doesn’t matter” to the one fan base on Earth that is the most devoted to making sure that all of this stuff does in fact matter. No wonder Disney managed to top the prequels in awfulness.

But since we’re being invited to create our own Star Wars canon, I thought I’d share mine with you. You can consider this the official list of everything Star Wars that’s actually worth watching or reading.

• Star Wars
• The Empire Strikes Back
• Return of the Jedi
• Revenge of the Sith
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars
• The Mandalorian
• Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
• Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
• Heir to the Empire
• Dark Force Rising
• The Last Command

And that’s it. I’d have included Star Wars Rebels, but it includes Thrawn and contradicts the novels so it’s out. But this is all the Star Wars you need; four movies, two TV series, two video games and three books. And that’s actually a lot. You just pretend that’s the whole franchise and you’ll be happy, you might actually like Star Wars again.