While writing my two previous articles, which concerned the concept of fictional canonicity, I had three real-world franchises primarily in mind: Doctor Who, Star Trek, and Star Wars. The former two franchises have simple canon policies, but Star Wars‘ canon policy is relatively complex and has evolved over the franchise’s history. For after being acquired by Disney, Lucasfilm decanonized the Star Wars Expanded Universe, now known as Star Wars Legends. This move was accompanied by the introduction of a simpler canon policy. Whether simpler means better in this case depends upon one’s point of view.
Prior to the 2014 “canon reboot,” the term Wookieepedia uses for the change of the Star Wars canon policy under Disney, Star Wars had a tiered canon system, under which all Star Wars media belonged to a specific tier of canonicity. When the policy was first instituted, there were four canon tiers: G-canon, the highest tier, for material created by George Lucas; C-canon, for most Star Wars spin-off material; S-canon, for spin-off material preceding Lucasfilm’s attempts to ensure continuity across media; and N-canon, for explicitly noncanonical material. Eventually, another tier was added: T-canon, a tier between G- and C-canon, to which the Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated film and television series belonged. Had the animated comedy series Star Wars Detours been released, it would have belonged to yet another tier, D-canon, although, as far as I am aware, the exact relationship of this tier to the others was never publicly detailed.
This tiered policy worked as follows: all media belonging to a canon tier other than N-canon were considered canonical, all things being equal. But when two works of different canon tiers contradicted each other, the work of the higher tier would overrule the lower. This adjudication between sources occured on a point-by-point basis, rather than a story-by-story basis, meaning that, if only a specific detail in a source was overruled, the rest of the source was still considered canonical.
This system had its pros and cons, the most significant of the latter being its complexity. Questions of a work’s canonicity were almost never answered with simple replies of yes or no, as the system allowed for degrees of canonicity. Though I felt the system was easy enough to understand, I also imagine that more casual audience members may have found it intimidating (not that understanding the Star Wars canon policy was ever necessary to enjoy a specific work of Star Wars fiction). However, thinking from the prospective of Lucasfilm, I find that the tiered canon system had its advantages. Lucasfilm’s ability to add tiers to the canon system, as evidenced by their addition of T-canon, allowed for Star Wars canon to evolve and change over time. And when newer works contradicted older works, the point-by-point nature of the canon policy allowed non-contradictory aspects of older media to be retained, whereas these older works would simply have been decanonized in a simpler, binary canon system.
Yet in 2014, the tiered canon system was replaced with a new system, and Star Wars Legends was retroactively deemed noncanonical. This has been a sore point for some long-term Star Wars fans, and I will confess a certain amount of sympathy with this view: I found it rather impressive that almost all Star Wars media dating back to the publication of the novelization of A New Hope in 1976 was considered canonical and formed a vast, beautifully unruly mosaic of Star Wars continuity. That said, I understand Lucasfilm’s reasoning for doing so: the Expanded Universe had become rather dense, and preserving its continuity would have limited Lucasfilm’s ability to produce new stories, especially in regards to the then-nascent Sequel Trilogy. Moreover, the pre-reboot canon policy ascribed canonicity to works based on those works’ relationship to George Lucas’s vision of Star Wars; after Lucas’s departure from Lucasfilm, this perhaps made less sense.
The updated canon policy, instituted under Disney, is much simpler. All works produced before to Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm except for the Star Wars Saga films and The Clone Wars film and television series were decanonized, and the canon tiers were done away with: from then on, all Star Wars material has simply been either canonical or noncanonical. However, this new system seemingly does not allow for the gradual revision of continuity that the tiered system enabled. Also, I have no reason to believe that Star Wars continuity under Disney will not eventually become as dense as Star Wars Legends eventually became, and it will be interesting to see what, if anything, Lucasfilm will do at that point.
I will even make the case that Disney-Lucasfilm could have achieved many of the benefits of its continuity reboot simply by adding another tier to the pre-existing canon system. Given that most G- and T-canon material remained canonical after the reboot, Disney-Lucasfilm could have produced similar results as the reboot through the creation of a tier between T- and C-canon, with all Disney-era Star Wars material belonging to this third tier. This would have done nothing to reduce the complexity of Lucasfilm’s canon policy, but it would have preserved certain non-contradictory elements of Star Wars Legends. However, the reintroduction of certain Legends elements in continuity through such works such as Rebels and Timothy Zahn’s canonical Thrawn novels has softened the blow of this loss of continuity.
In closing, for all its complexity, I found the tiered canon system used by Lucasfilm prior to Disney’s acquisition to be workable—and even elegant, in its own way. The new system is much more straightforward, however, and therein lies most of its appeal.
