The Problem With Dave Filoni

dave filoni for the three or four of you who don't know is the man responsible for the critically acclaimed star wars the clone wars as well as star wars rebels and of course the mandalorian along with jon favreau he and favreau have also been working on the book of boba fett which at the time that i'm writing this is still producing episodes of its first season now i started my second channel to focus more on the lore aspect of the star wars universe everything from canon to legends and anything in between listing off nothing but the established objective facts as they are and not really giving my opinions on them which is why a video like this seemed much more appropriate for my main channel where i talk more about what i like and dislike about various pieces of media star wars or otherwise however the elements that i want to talk about in this video seem more important to the lore or moreover the fracturing of it because i like the clone wars series just fine despite as i'm about to discuss at length all of the lower inconsistencies that it brought to the old eu and what its successor series the bad batch has already begun to do to the new disney canon you see i grew up loving the clone wars and still do of the animated series of which there are now several it still remains my favorite and honestly i like the show even more than i like any of the movies which is high praise because the empire strikes back is up there as one of my favorite films of all time this video isn't going to be me bashing on the storytelling within that show because i think a lot of it is great and it introduced a lot of really cool things to the star wars mythos the problem is how exactly those things were able to happen that i want to talk about today because while dave filoni was out resurrecting darth maul and giving anakin skywalker his own padawan he was also directly contradicting a great deal of the extended universe lore that had already been established for years and as a huge fan of legends that just doesn't sit right with me but before i really get too deep into that i want to first explain something called the hierarchy of canon which for those unaware is a system that was established by lucasfilm way back when the expanded universe was just getting off the ground the new york times bestselling thrawn trilogy had just been released written by timothy zahn and it was because of this that star wars became popular again after the hype for the original trilogy died down the franchise was more or less dead in the water and it wasn't until a little book known as heir to the empire came along that star wars was saved from fading into obscurity without it in the subsequent explosion of books video games and comics that came from it we likely never would have gotten the prequel trilogy and say what you will about those movies but the quality of them is not really what i'm here to discuss today and you can't deny that without the prequels star wars just wouldn't be popular today but along with all these books comics and video games there had to also be established a set of rules in order to keep the continuity in order and i should mention now that these were sanctioned by george lucas himself when they were created because contrary to popular belief he actually did care about the eu and even read the comics the hierarchy of canon went as follows the first tier was g canon the g standing for george this was whatever was created by lucas himself and so was obviously the end all beat all when it came to continuity he created the franchise and obviously he can do or say whatever he wants he could have contradicted anything he wanted to from the expanded universe and it would have been his right whether that would have pissed off a lot of fans or not and i guarantee it would have in fact and i plan to make a video about this someday but as an example the original backstory established by the eu for boba fett was much different than what lucas established in attack of the clones and so the book and comic writers at the time had to essentially retcon it so that it still fit within the continuity and there weren't any blatant holes in the overall flow of the universe annoying yes but again it was within his rights and no one can really deny that the next tier that was directly below that was t cannon which stands for television canon i.e exactly what the clone wars falls into it pretty much trumps anything else except for the original six films themselves but i'm gonna circle back to that because i have a lot more to say about it below that was c canon or continuity canon this encompassed basically all the books comics and games that weren't contradictory to the higher tiers and that pretty much pertained to everything because despite what people will tell you the eu was actually pretty good about not contradicting itself for the most part and even when it did eu authors were able to retcon things to fit where they didn't previously make sense in fact one example that i like to use is one where they actually managed to fill in an inconsistency created by the movies in attack of the clones palpatine specifically says that the republic has stood for 1 000 years but all the way back in a new hope obi-wan said that the jedi knights were the guardians of the republic for a thousand generations i will not let this republic that has stood for a thousand years be split in two for over a thousand generations the jedi knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the old republic and you might say that that's a small distinction but not really a generation is like 20-ish years which fits with the eu timeline that they've established a thousand generations is more like 20 000 years give or take a few millennia that's obviously way more than one thousand years and is therefore an inconsistency legend's authors were able to retcon this with the old republic an era popularized by the knights of the old republic and star wars the old republic video games respectively in the darth bane book trilogy written by drew carpentine it's explained that there is a difference between the old republic and the galactic republic being that the government policies were radically changed after the battle of russon the conflict which is what finally caused the jedi to believe that the sith had been brought to extinction and yes in any post-revenge of the sith content that refers to the prequel era republic it's all just considered the old republic mainly because the galactic republic as it was known for that thousand years was now a bygone era and even after the fall of the empire when the new republic was established it was the new republic so yes technically the republic existed for something like 25 000 years but the republic as it was known by the time of the prequels had only existed for a mere thousand and again this is just one of many examples where sea cannon came in clutch but that then brings us to s cannon or secondary cannon basically anything in this tier could still be considered canon within the old continuity as long as it doesn't contradict anything from the tiers above see there were obviously still books comics and games released before this hierarchy was established and without clear rules for what was allowed and what wasn't there obviously had to be some inconsistencies here and there the aforementioned thrawn trilogy widely loved as it is actually did its fair share of contradicting what would later be established by the prequels regarding what exactly the clone wars were how they started and how they ended of course it was just one of many older books to talk about the clone wars many others did this as well and they were all pretty contradictory to one another but again retcons are a thing and so written material from the clone wars multimedia project which i'll be talking a lot more about later on in this video were able to save the thrawn trilogy from being completely wiped from the canon incorporating elements from its version of the clone wars into its own stories to sort of make it all valid this is an example of c canon once again saving the day because if you ask me it's the best here and finally we have ncannon or put more simply non-canon material this mostly pertains to various works like the infinities which are a whole other thing that i'm not even going to get into but essentially this category belongs to any work that was never meant to be canon in the first place and were just written for the fun of it things like skippy the jedi droid which a lot of eu criticizers like to reference in order to belittle the old canon or tag and are just a few examples or the star wars which was a comic series pulling from george's original drafts and ideas for the star wars universe before they were eventually finalized into what we know them as today these are just some of many that are honestly pretty interesting and worth checking out the only tier below this is d canon which i didn't even know was a thing before making this video because the only thing that falls into this category is the series star wars detours which never ended up actually coming out to begin with so it's irrelevant and i'm not really sure why an entire category had to be made for this when it essentially would have just fallen into n canon anyway like i said i want to circle back to t cannon which is obviously the most relevant for the topic of this video before i continue i have to address the fact that this canon sort of trumps whatever written material from sea cannon that i bring up if i mentioned for instance that baris offi was never a terrorist who bombed the jedi temple and turned to the dark side but instead continued to be a jedi all the way up until order 66 where she died on felucia the obvious answer would be well yeah but the clone wars is higher up on the tier list which means that's what really happened and you'd be right the thing is no matter what i say in this video t cannon was specifically created by george so that dave could do whatever he wanted in his show without worrying if it contradicted anything established in the eu and dave took that and ran with it and so objectively anything that happened in seasons one through six of the clone wars are considered to be part of the eu continuity whether i like it or not and that's why even though i don't personally consider it part of the eu when i read it i have to lament that obviously it is and as a lord channel i won't shy away from mentioning it if it pertains to a topic i'm bringing up but that's kind of the entire reason i'm making this video to refer to in the future if in a video i talk about something from legends that doesn't quite fit with what the tv series establishes and i ask you to hear me out because while some of you may not care about what happened in a continuity that's no longer even considered canon by the higher-ups at lucasfilm this still applies to anyone who enjoys the new canon and is hoping to get into the books and comics from that continuity i would also like to make it clear that dave filoni had leland chi on his staff aka the holocron keeper who if you don't know was in charge of keeping the continuity in order telling eu authors what they could and couldn't write in order to keep the timeline as consistent as possible it was his entire job to tell filoni if what he was doing was going to trample on something from the eu and i wager that he probably did just that on multiple occasions but dave didn't listen see dave filoni has mentioned before that he doesn't like being put into a box creatively speaking he doesn't want to have to adhere to any more limitations than he already has to and that's pretty evident in his work even ignoring the books he's so shamelessly cut to pieces there are also some admittedly minor things from the films that he decided to kind of ignore or bend so that he's still allowed to tell the story that he wants to tell just certain things like dialogue between obi-wan and grievous on udapal were grievous mentions that he's been trained in the jedi arts by count dooku and then proceeds to pull out four lightsabers and flex his skills at kenobi and i can't imagine why grievous would feel the need to do this since as we know he and obi-wan fought each other several times during the clone wars and i know this is a small example but it is still emblematic of the fact that dave filoni will ignore certain things that he thinks will go unnoticed or are otherwise irrelevant because he has a certain story that he wants to tell and i mean he gets away with it because technically just because grievous behaves this way in revenge of the sith doesn't necessarily mean that he and obi-wan never fought before it's a weird way to talk to someone you fought several times over the last three years but i guess grievous just likes announcing who his karate teacher was my powers have doubled since the last time we met count since when like last week a much more prominent example i suppose would just be the general existence of ahsoka tano after the events of the clone wars she pops up in rebels and later in the mandalorian which begs the question of where she was during the events of the original trilogy you'd think she would have a personal stake in helping the son of her former master return anakin back to the light side if she believed for even one second that it was possible right and again don't get me wrong i love tcw and the stories it tells and i think it's really cool that it resurrected darth maul for instance but when i take a look at how it happened it makes me kinda sad let's backtrack the only reason maul was discovered to be alive at all was because his mother sent his brother to go find him but his brother savage was only sent after him because of what happened during the arc where ventress was betrayed by count dooku just one of many things that contradicts the aforementioned clone wars multimedia project because in the comics we see that ventress was a servant of dooku all the way up until about six months before the end of the war she actually was betrayed by dooku in the end but that was during the battle of boz pity after which she then faked her death and fled to the far reaches of the galaxy never to be seen or heard from again but none of that ever happened now i guess thanks to t cannon which i suppose is just as well since the battle of boz pity is also where adigalia was killed by grievous oh never mind then or conversely if you're like me and you don't consider the clone wars to be part of the eu then boz pity did happen just as we saw it before but the only way that works is if ventress was never betrayed by dooku during the battle of solas and if that never happened then she would never have trained savage to try to kill him which means savage never goes off to look for maul so savage never finds maul and the two never take over mandalorian kill the woman that obi-wan loves which sucks because that's a pretty cool story and i'd like for it to fit within this continuity but it just can't oh and speaking of mandalore don't even get me started not only does the entire existence of a pacifist ruler go against what we see of mandalore in the republic commando novels but one single line from prime minister almec completely decanonizes the jango fett open seasons comics which are some of my personal favorites jango fett was a common bounty hunter how he acquired that armor is beyond me in the comics jango fett was a mandalorian accepted into the creed led by jasper murreal known as the true mandalorians after his family was killed by tor vizsla leader of the death watch yes house vizsla and the death watch were established in the eu before tcw but because the two were such conflicting material i can't really say that either of them exist in the same continuity there are also plenty of examples of changes being made that are completely needless and seem to exist simply to contradict things for the sake of contradicting things which is the most insulting part things like jedi master evan peel dying during the season 3 citadel arc when originally he was killed shortly after order 66 in the book coruscant knights jedi twilight there was no reason to kill off master peel and even if dave really needed a jedi to die here he could have used any existing jedi whose fate was unknown in the eu or even just made up one of his own and again i'm sure lee lin chi urged him against this decision so there's literally no justifiable reason that dave filoni would consciously do this or how about when he changed the sith home planet of korriban to moriban narratively it serves no purpose to the story that was being told yoda still traveled to the sith home world and had visions of the dark side the name of the planet was in no way a factor that would have added or subtracted to this story there was no reason to change it and of course there are several more examples i could use but i think i've made my point the thing is i'm sort of allowed to have my cake and eat it too because like i said i love tcw a lot and i don't want to just consider it non-canon simply because it contradicts some of my favorite books and comics that i've ever had the pleasure of reading but because it also exists within disney canon i don't really have to if it's perfectly within that continuity because that continuity was crafted around it as well as the films when disney bought the franchise back in 2012 and started putting out new canon books and comics in 2014 which means that for my own personal head canon i can just say that the clone wars doesn't exist in legends and there's pretty minimal damage to what that conflicts with in fact there's a movement within the community called give us legends which advocates for the continuation of the eu continuity alongside the production of new canon material operating as a sort of parallel universe since disney is more than willing to repurpose old eu novels and slap the legends banner on them and sell them at any given bookstore near you we figure they would benefit from the sales that they'd rack up if they continue to sell comics and books in a separate but equal continuity and the way this would work is that going forward tcw would be expelled from the eu continuity and left solely for the new canon timeline this would affect a few things but it's easily fixable for one thing there are certain legend series like fate of the jedi that reference events that happened in the clone wars tv series and so that would have to essentially be retconned or reprinted it sucks but it's sort of the best of a bad situation i'm not even saying that eu novels that reference tcw have to be removed entirely just reworked so that they fit independently of that show the only eu material that would have to essentially be stricken from canon are the supplementary books comics and games that were centered specifically around tcw although of the ones i've read i seriously think that a lot of that material could just be transferred to disney canon so fans of those stories can still have them but remember when i said that this applies to new canon fans as well as old if things continue the way they're going the new canon is going to be just as broken as the old one if dave filoni is left unchecked and he will be because right now he and john favreau are essentially the superstars of star wars they're the kings and no one is going to question a king over a bunch of silly books that no one reads right i didn't mention this in my bad batch review back when the first season ended because on shiv talks i only like to talk about the story as it is i'm a big believer that the on-screen media should not require the supplementary material to explain plot holes and inconsistencies because no casual fan is going to sit down and read an entire book just to understand how palpatine was able to inexplicably resurrect himself in the rise of skywalker fans like me who read the books are the ones who are going to read that stuff and while it's nice to have the holes filled in it shouldn't be necessary to tell your story that you're trying to tell if it is then you've written a bad story so on the other side of things i won't judge a show's quality based on how it may or may not align with the supplementary material that it's not supposed to rely on that's only fair i think in my review i gave the bad batch a pretty harsh score because i just don't believe it to be all that good just on its own but what i neglected to mention was that the pilot episode also sent a huge slap in the face to all the fans who keep up with the canon written material such as myself in the opening 10 minutes we're introduced to a young caleb doom and his master depa billaba who fans will recognize from star wars rebels if they've seen it however the events that unfold are contradictory to the canon comics that were released years back as supplementary material to rebels the broad strokes are mostly the same between the comics and the show deppa gets wiped out by the clones when order 66 goes down caleb gets away and eventually changes his name to kanan jairus and becomes a scoundrel and later a rebel however in the comic the scene on caller takes place at night as opposed to in the day and there's no snow devas lightsaber was also green in the comics but the show made it blue for some reason and speaking of colors the clone's armor is white and red instead of white and green plus captain gray was originally commander grey as the captain of this particular unit was named stiles who i guess just doesn't exist anymore which is a real shame because later on in the comics gray actually managed to go against his inhibitor ship programming and sacrificed himself to allow kanan to escape imperial capture it was a really nice moment if it even still happened but now the canonicity of the entire comic is called into question all because dave filoni wanted the creative freedom to do whatever he wants and disney hasn't really taken the time or care to establish a hierarchy of its own so you could say that t cannon still trumps c canon if you really want to but we don't know that for sure in fact i'd actually like to directly quote dave filoni himself here in a message he wrote at the end of a new dawn the very first novel released in the new canon which ironically is about kanan the same character whose comic dave would later stomp all over more than at any other time in its existence new star wars stories are being told every day more important the old concept of what is canon and what isn't is gone and from this point forward our stories and characters all exist in the same universe the key creatives who work on the films television video games comic books and novels are all connected creatively for the first time in the history of star wars now what he said about this being the first time that all the stories exist within the same universe is simply untrue but it's one of the most common lies you'll hear from the higher ups at lucasfilm nowadays pablo hidalgo who essentially is the go-to for explanations on the canon will be the first to tell you that the old eu was never considered canon not even to george yet back when that continuity was still being made he referred to it constantly while answering fan questions in star wars insider magazine he even wrote an essential guide in the expanded universe but even taking filoni's words at face value here then in theory everything is on equal footing within the new canon be it a lowly comic book or the next big cinematic event of the season obviously that's not how it's being treated but that's what he said if we are still adhering to the hierarchy of canon and it looks like we are since if you go to wikipedia and look up kanan jairus you'll find no mention of the comic's interpretation of how order 66 went down then it's only a matter of time before t cannon is inevitably trumped by a g cannon which would still apply to any of the movies even though they're not being made by george lucas so let's say 10 years from now some hot shot director gets hired on to make a star wars movie and he decides he really liked that darth maul setup in solo and wishes his story had been continued of course we know it was because at some point after solo he went on to be stranded on malachor got into a fight with ahsoka and kanan and eventually met his end on tatooine and one last duel with obi-wan kenobi as seen in rebels but hotshot doesn't know this because to know this would require having watched the shows and why would he have to watch the shows it's not like they matter anything he does in his movie automatically trumps anything from the shows so he decides he's going to make a follow-up story about darth maul and he's gonna set it sometime during or after the original trilogy and let's just say for the fun of it it ends with han solo killing him to i don't know avenge kira or something the movie makes a ton of money because why wouldn't it it's a movie about darth maul and all the rebels fans including myself weep silently because now the majority of that show's third season as well as the episode twilight of the apprentice regarded by many as the best episode in the entire series is no longer canon moreover this would probably get dave pretty upset too because rebels is a show that he worked on but the rules are the rules and i mean the movie exists on a higher tier than the shows that's just how it works i gotta be honest if this were to happen i'd be the first one laughing a day for getting a taste of his own medicine now of course you're probably telling me that the example i used is an extreme one that'll never happen and maybe you're right but we don't know that for sure and because of the precedent that dave filoni has set we can't really assume that something like that couldn't or wouldn't happen could we and like i said at the beginning of this video if filoni continues to be allowed to do to the new canon what he did to the old one then it's only a matter of time before things get just as bad and it's going to be fans like me who pay good money to collect these stories that we love that end up getting hurt by it and let me just be perfectly clear this isn't even the first time filoni has done this to the new canon either the bad batch was easily the most egregious example of it but just a year earlier he did the exact same thing to the ahsoka novel changing the events surrounding order 66 and the siege of mandalore from what's written in that book in the book order 66 actually happens while ahsoka is still on mandalore and she and rex who had already removed his inhibitor chip prior to the siege managed to fake their own deaths and escape maul was also able to use this distraction to his advantage to escape ahsoka after having been caught in a ray shield also once again ahsoka's lightsaber colors were their classic green and yellow but for whatever reason dave just loves to change those to blue i have no idea what that added to the story at all and like i said before just because i enjoy the story being told to me doesn't mean i'm happy that other material had to be discarded to make it work siege of mandalore is easily my favorite arc on the show and it tells a really compelling story but that just doesn't change the fact that it stomps all over something else in order to get there in closing dave filoni knows how to tell a really good story when he wants to but i just wish he would do it without stepping on other people's work i mean it's not like he even needed to include kanan in the opening of the bad batch that could have been any jedi master in padawan so it'd be great if we could just start holding him accountable for this sort of thing instead of just shrugging it off even if you're not someone who really cares all that much about the books and comics it would still be appreciated because i've talked to a lot of people who have said that it just doesn't matter to them because they don't read the written material but to them i say that just because you don't doesn't mean it doesn't matter to a lot of people and that ends my little rant for those of you watching this on sheavetalks i uploaded this video on both channels because it pertains to both if you like star wars a lot and want to learn more about the inner workings of the universe i started a lore channel so go check it out unlike this page i just sort of post on there for fun but i do love engaging with people and talking about that sort of thing so give those videos a comment but that's all for now it's been real and uh i doubt dave filoni is watching this but on the very off chance that he comes across this video and decided to stick around to the end um hey all right bye guys

Channel: Sheev Talks

Views: 413,103

Keywords:

Id: rWouW4U10j0

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 05 2022