Started reading Heir to the Empire the other day, during breaks at work. It's pretty good! I am definitely giving Thrawn the voice from Rebels in my head, and it fits perfectly.
It's really fun to go back to the old EU where they were more free to just... do stuff. Luke Skywalker is a perspective character. He's got depression, and complicated feelings about living in Emperor Palpatine's house. They're talking about how hard it is to rebuild the republic. C-3PO shows up for comic relief. It's just... more star wars, really.
The state of modern star wars is very strange. On the official side, it's stuck between the fannish obsession of Dave Filoni and the overbearing control of his corporate masters. On the fan side, there's a weird generation divide that causes endless infighting.
There's a whole cohort of like truly old-school fans that I hadn't even realized existed before a few years ago. These are the people who are upset about Luke "being mean" in The Last Jedi, and about the jedi in general being portrayed as "bad guys" in shows like The Acolyte. In short, people who watched Return of the Jedi as children and never engaged with star wars again until the sequel trilogy.
This is so different from my own experience, I find it hard to even wrap my head around. To my mind, star wars has always been more of a setting than a story. That is, one story may have a wildly different interpretation of jedi, the force, the empire, characters, whatever, and it's not a problem, because that's just one story. It's a sandbox that lots of different people work in, doing their own interpretations.
I basically never considered star wars to be like one big story that had to have coherent themes and ideas. You could have some goofy YA books over here and some gritty military books over there and it's all fine! This is a shared fictional universe, the stakes are so low and everyone can play and keep their toys separate.
But now all these assholes are comin' out saying weird shit like "that's not my Luke Skywalker!!" and I'm like, yeah man, that was over 30 years ago. This is like the fifth or sixth version of Luke Skywalker, it's not my fault you weren't paying attention. He had a girlfriend and turned evil and got cloned and shit, it was wild.
Hm, really it's a difference in that a lot of people now thing of star wars as a specific vibe, rather than a fictional universe. It's a different thing. That's the approach that the Visions series took, where it was telling similar stories in a variety of subtly different star wars-esque settings that were explicitly not the "real" star wars universe.
Which, on the one hand, I love, because it's cool to see different interpretations, but on the other hand, why not just make 'em all canon? Set them all in the distant past or future, who gives a shit. There's nothing so outrageous in those shorts that it made me think "well clearly this couldn't be real" or whatever.
In conclusion, George should just buy the whole thing back and make more cartoons.
