Star Wars is in a pretty good place right now, and right now that’s because of Andor. A near-perfect piece of entertainment, Andor is deep story about people in every level of society dealing with the effects of fascism that incorporated everything good about Star Wars, including ideas from Star Wars Legends, the pre-Disney canon. Star Wars Legends has a lot of great stories and Andor was able to show that it still has a lot to give to the modern Star Wars canon. Andor is a Star Wars masterpiece, and a big part of it was because its creators weren’t afraid of looking at Legends, finding the parts that worked, and incorporating them.
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The Star Wars fandom is a contentious place, and always has been. There are original trilogy purists, prequel partisans, and sequel lovers. There’s people who only care about the new post-Disney canon, and there are people that only love Legends. However, there’s a way to make Star Wars better for everyone by getting the Legends fans’ chocolate into the canon fans’ peanut butter. Fans want better Star Wars and the best way to get it is to reach back into the books of Legends.
Legends Has Even More to Offer Canon
Once upon a time, in the ’90s, being a Star Wars fan was very different. There were no new movies and no TV shows. Star Wars action figures had disappeared the decade beforem and the Marvel comics were no longer being published. 1991 started the change that would lead to the prequels, when the one-two punch of Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn, and Dark Empire, by Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy, blew the minds of both Star Wars and sci-fi fans. Suddenly, Star Wars was alive again in books and comics, which led to a new Star Wars TTRPG.
West End Gaming’s Star Wars Roleplaying Game began, with writers coming up with histories of the Empire, the Rebellion, and the various races of the galaxy in the sourcebook for players and game masters. For an entire generation of Star Wars fans there was only novels, comics, West End Gaming sourcebooks, and Star Wars Adventure Journal, a quarterly digest of short stories written by Star Wars authors like Zahn, Michael Stackpole, and Aaron Allston with RPG stats for ships and characters.
I grew up with all of this. Legends was my Star Wars and I loved the West End RPG material. I didn’t play the game — Star Wars and TTRPG fandoms weren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they are today — but I loved the lore. Watching Andor, as well as other pieces of new canon like Rogue One, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Rebels, Bad Batch, The Mandalorian, and others, I was struck by how much these stories owed to Legends. While they all changed a lot of the actual written history, they found a way to take the flavor of these stories and bring them into new canon.
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There are a lot of problems with Legends that canon doesn’t need, and there are lots of parts of Legends that canon will not be able to incorporate. There will be no Mara Jade or Grand Master Luke Skywalker or Yuuzhan Vong or Darth Caedus, and that’s a good thing. Legends threw a lot at the wall and not all of it stuck. We’ve seen that sometimes, canon takes ideas from Legends and mess them up. Canon has brought ideas from Dark Empire in, and used them in much worse ways. Canon has also brought in Thrawn, and unless Zahn is writing the character, the stories are merely alright. However, that doesn’t mean that the ideas of Legends can’t be brought into canon and make things better. Andor shows that Legends still has a lot to offer to Star Wars.
The Ghorman Massacre first appeared in Legends, and Andor actually used the Legends version — Tarkin landing a ship on a group of protesters — as part of its story building up the events on the series. The way the Rebel Alliance and ISB are portrayed in Rebels and Andor is right out of the West End Roleplaying Game’s Rebel Alliance Sourcebook and Imperial Sourcebook. There’s a reason that Legends got so popular among the most diehard Star Wars fans of the ’90s, and it’s because great creators took the sandbox of Star Wars and used it to populate a universe. Canon can do the same thing with the ideas of Legends, and create Star Wars stories that fans actually want, like Andor.
Legends Could Give the Canon the Kickstart It Needs
Andor has left Star Wars in an interesting place. Star Wars under Disney has finally gotten a work that is beloved by fans and critics alike, a work of brilliance and craft that had something for everyone. Disney has already begun ramping things up for Star Wars again; there’s a Rey movie coming, there’s the Dawn of the Jedi film, the High Republic is ending. There’s room in all of these for the best parts of Legends to be brought back.
It’s shocking that, for example, Lucasfilms hasn’t taken the ideas of the Old Republic and found ways to bring them back. The Jedi/Sith/Mandalorian Wars of 5,000 BBY to 1,000 BBY don’t have to be brought back exactly how they happened in Legends, but bringing something like them into canon, and writing them as well as works like Knights of the Old Republic, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords, and the Darth Bane trilogy, would definitely make things better. Legends actually made Star Wars feel like a universe, and canon needs that. Andor has showed the way Star Wars can tell better stories, and Legends stories might be the key ingredient.
How do you feel about Star Wars incorporating more Legends ideas? Sound off in the comments below.
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