It looks like a certain faction of ‘Star Wars’ fandom has embraced the Dark Side. There is a closed Facebook group that boasts 3,648 members called The Alliance to Preserve the Expanded Universe and their nefarious raison d’être is to SPOIL ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ for EVERYBODY! The group plans to hit up early screenings of the most highly anticipated movie in a decade (at least) and then take to every social media platform in existence and spoil the sh** out of it for everyone who hasn’t seen it yet! Yep, they sound like real fans to me.
Google Chrome has introduced their extension Force Block that filters out spoilers for this movie and the wise have probably sworn off social media as a whole until they get to see the movie themselves. But is there any way to go online and avoid spoilers completely when there is a legion of malicious Force Fans on a mission?
And what motive could these supposed fans have for declaring war on their fellow enthusiasts? It’s all in their name. This is a gathering of longtime fans who are dedicated to the reinstatement of the Expanded Universe.
After ‘Return of the Jedi’ came out in 1983, it’s hard to imagine in this ‘Star Wars’ saturated world we live in now, but the property just sort of… went away. There were no plans to make more movies. Kenner even stopped making toys. Imagine, no Star Wars toys!
But it’s true. That was the world at the time. But there were still the diehard fans, so they kept publishing novels, comics, roleplaying and video games and so forth. And since these were endorsed by Lucasfilm LTD, fans considered these works– which introduced scores of new characters, worlds and scenarios– to be real parts of the mythology.
But when Disney acquired Lucasfilm in a multi BILLION dollar deal with plans to make new movies, they quickly declared that these Expanded Universe books, etc. were no longer canon. This made sense because there had been dozens if not hundreds of new stories and characters of which the general public were completely unaware. Introducing these concepts would take dozens of movies to explain and since they already existed in print, it would be impossible to do so with any element of surprise.
But for fans who spent hundreds of hours ingesting these works and taking them as official parts of the story, this was an act of aggression on Disney’s part, to simply wipe them away with no fanfare. This Alliance is demanding that Disney reinstate the Expanded Universe as canon… or else!
All I can say, is “Well, have fun with that.” There’s no way Disney is reinstating the dense Expanded Universe lore to an official part of the ‘Star Wars’ legacy. There’s just too much of it! And relatively speaking, it’s a bunch of stuff that most people aren’t even aware exists!
What do you think? Do you think Disney needs to honor all of the Expanded Universe works? After all, people spent a lot of time creating these books, etc. and fans spent almost as long consuming them.
Or do you think it’s a better idea that Disney keeps it simple and only considers the original movies as the beginning, middle and end of this mythology?
Source: Blastr