This tremendously inept post by Rob Bricken at io9 speaks volumes to how so many have such completely uninformed perspectives on life, the universe, and everything:
First, let’s admit one simple truth: There’s no way Disney is going to force J.J. Abrams or any director to adhere to the Star Wars Expanded Universe, as established through decades of books, comics, and videogames. The EU is too big and unwieldy, and furthermore, it’s too focused on Luke, Leia and Han to allow any kind of freedom to explore the characters anew — characters we already know are going to be in Episode VII at the very least.
"Adhere to the Star Wars Expanded Universe"? I had to re-read the whole piece to make sure Bricken wasn't joking. Contrary to what he says, Clone Wars was never considered a part of Expanded Universe. It's very much in-continuity. That this guy gets something like this so wrong makes me wonder why he hit publish on this pile of garbage.
"Hey girl, I wanna Expand your Universe."
The Expanded Universe (note its very name) has never been considered canon. Lucas made this clear a long, long time ago. "SWEU" was created so that those who wanted more Star Wars "world" could have it outside the more protected canon. Think of it as officially endorsed and subsidized fan fiction. This includes offshoot games like Shadows of the Empire, The Force Unleashed, and others.
Lucas never promised anyone that all those books and comics were part of the official movie/TV/"proper" Star Wars universe in the first place. Here's one of many instances where Lucas went on the record saying there is no "real" Star Wars canon that takes place after Return of the Jedi.
I'm baffled that comic book fans, of all people, are having trouble grappling with the notion of divergent, parallel continuities within a creative universe.
This guy is wailing over a broken promise that was never made in the first place. You will never seen Thrawn and Mara Jade in the movies, or anything outside SWEU territory. Lucas established that the waters would never be muddied by passing creations from within SWEU over to the canonical universe. There are nitpicks out there about whether Timothy Zahn created words like "Coruscant", but this is splitting hairs. There are elements of SWEU that may be legitimized, but at this point, it's impossible to empirically prove what was or wasn't created as part of the "core" continuity that may have been given to those creating SWEU works and vice versa.
Describing not adopting the SWEU wholesale as "destruction" of SWEU is beyond silly. It goes to hyper-plaid levels of silly not seen before. Much of SWEU is directly contradicted by not just the prequels, but even the original trilogy in many cases. Moreover, Disney doesn't have a time machine that can be used to delete it all from existence. SWEU is still there, and their Force Push into sub-licensing game development means that SWEU is far from dead. Whether they will be doing the same amount or less SWEU books or comics remains to be seen, but look at Disney's pattern under Robert Iger. They are a sub-licensing, profit-expanding machine. What sense does it make to buy something for $4 billion and not maximize expanding your profit?
I read and played a ton of this stuff over the years, and I think this is all much ado about nothing. Would it have been neat to see Trioculous, the three-eyed heir to the Empire, in a movie? I suppose so, but I'm totally cool with him living in a book I never expected to see made into a movie.
SWEU isn't dead and was never in danger. This is the same SWEU mega-fan wailing over the fact that they wish a paperback they read existed in film rather than Episode II: Send in the Clones.
That's what it was called, right?