re: #190 Dr Lizardo

“Canon” is whatever the latest group of screenwriters want it to be. Granted, they might have to do a bit of retconning if the plot holes they’ve created are too big, but the idea of canon material is, quite frankly, limiting to further development of a series or film franchise. You only need look at the screenwriting gymnastics between the films of the original Star Wars trilogy, especially in regards to the Darth Vader character. Look at the various iterations of Star Trek over the last five decades - though to their credit, the different writers have at least tried their best to maintain some level of story continuity.

Star Wars fans have only felt in recent years the stinging abuse that we Trek fans dealt with for decades. Between TOS and TNG, there had been no hard, fast rule on canon so a lot of fans filled in the gaps with novels and tech manuals, much of it drawing either from interpretations of on-screen info or from the writers themselves. Then work on TNG began and Gene came down from the mountain to declare that A) “canon” only applied to things seen on-screen or in licensed publications and B) everything fan produced up to that point was non-canon. And that remains the pretty hard and fast rule in Trek canon, that only things either on-screen or in Paramount/CBS licensed media counts.

Star Wars didn’t get the same treatment until the Mouse bought out Lucasfilms, assuming you don’t count the betrayal by Lucas that was the prequels that pretty much nuked any Extended Universe media concerning Anakin, Obi-Wan, and the Clone Wars.