LogFAQs > #924332802

The only way I honestly see keeping the entirety of the EU canon working in the new movies would be if they skipped ahead like a thousand years. Every single character we've ever known is long dead and little more than a historical figure in textbooks, or forgotten entirely. The New Republic still stands (though maybe with a name change to the Second Republic, or something else entirely, because it's not all that new anymore), but the Jedi are long dead, gone, and completely forgotten. So you can say "Yeah, all the EU stuff actually happened and is canon, but none of it matters because it was so long ago we can do whatever we want with the new films and not have to constantly reference the EU or slavishly follow what it established."

We might want to avoid the Sith/Emperor motif because it's been done and doing it again feels repetitive, but having a Republic where the Senate itself has become a sort of corrupt oligarchy, or otherwise creating a threat from within while not rehashing the same old shit, could work. I'd also want to avoid ham-fisted political commentary meant to evoke current events (like everyone's groaning at the prequels' bullshit), but it's not as if pre-Imperial Rome or Athens or Venice (or other historical Republics) were always shining beacons of truth, justice, and the American way. Republics usually wind up being corrupt as fuck by the end of their lifespans.

For bonus points (and with a nod to the Thomas Covenant series, which I love), it turns out the new Jedi have slowly become corrupted themselves over the centuries, and are nothing more than an autocratic and totalitarian secret police for a corrupt oligarchical government. Senators scheme against each other, dissenters "disappear" or are publicly tried and executed, and the public is both cowed by fear and placated by ostentatious games and bribes ("bread and circuses" - the term post-dates Roman emperors, but the concept does not, as the entire pre-imperial Roman system of patron/client relationships and "mos maiorum" basically encourages pandering to the public, and can easily be subverted by the selfish or wicked). Peace is maintained, order is the prime virtue. Excessive emotion and sentimentality is discouraged, the needs of society always outweigh the needs of the individual - the Jedi Code at its most logical (but Dark Side) extreme. But even within the system, Senators indulge in the worst excesses, the Sith Code given free reign. Passion, gluttony, power - those with authority revel in the Dark Side without even understanding that it exists.

Then have a new protagonist discover some ancient ruins where they find a broken Jedi or Sith holocron or something, setting things in motion again. You can have Mark Hamill (the only actor from the original movies who seemed to enjoy being in them in the first place) come back and be a Force Ghost, and he can teach a new apprentice, maybe with some sort of "The galaxy needs the Jedi again. TRUE Jedi" sort of line to justify it. And a bit of "These new Jedi grew from a seed I planted. It's up to me to help cut down their tainted tree."

The problem with all that is that most of the audience would HATE it. And you'd be pissing off 95% of your potential fanbase to cater to a tiny sliver of a niche of it.

The other alternative would be to just do the time-skip and then redo the entirety of the plot of the first six movies in microcosm - Republic corrupted, rise of an Emperor, new Sith, Jedi cast down, lone survivor (or last few survivors) have to fight back, etc. Cue Third Republic and Even Newer Jedi Order. Which sadly WOULD please a lot of people, but which would feel so pandering and unnecessary (if people complained about The Force Awakens as being too nostalgia-driven, something like this would get savaged).


---

"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
"POwned again." --- blight family