Star Wars had been part of pop culture for over three decades by the time George Lucas gave the reigns to Disney. That”s a long time for the lore to build up. Between the novels, comics, TV specials, and spin-off movies, the Star Wars universe had bloated into a contradictory mess. I was as sad as anyone to see Thrawn and Mara Jade tossed to the side when Disney detonated the Expanded Universe, but it made sense. Star Wars had fractured and trying to stitch it back together would”ve been worse than herding cats. Better to start from scratch.
But it only took one tie-in novel to set the chain reaction off all over again.
When Star Wars: The Force Awakens hit theaters last year, Starkiller Base had a lot of people scratching their heads. How did eat the sun”s energy? Wouldn”t that affect the gravity well keeping the planet in place? Did the planet move from one star to the next? If so, how did have an atmosphere and biomes? But then the novelization gave a different mechanic (skip to #4) – instead of solar energy, the tie-in novel had Starkiller Base running off of dark matter.
So far there has been no official word given for the discrepancy, but considering how methodical Disney and Lucasfilm have been about interlocking each piece of the new lore? This seems an odd oversight. Which is it? Is Starkiller Base eating the sun or sucking in dark matter to rip holes in space/time? I reached out official Holocron Keeper Leland Chee on Twitter for answers, asking which version was canon. Or if somehow BOTH explanations were. According to Chee, they”re working on it.
.@MildlyAmused The answers you seek are on this board. @tvaziri @vickschutz @pablohidalgo
– Leland Chee (@HolocronKeeper) February 27, 2016
The board in question:
That white board is somewhere in the depths of Lucasfilm. Whatever is on it has something to do with “the thing” that Star Wars VFX artists Todd Vaziri and Vick Schutz discussed with Lucasfilm Story Group Creative Executive Pablo Hidalgo. The meeting kicked off when Vaziri noticed “the thing” from A New Hope. Very mysterious.
Today, @vickschutz and I learned a detail about “Star Wars” (1977); it”s totally right there but we never grasped it.
– Todd Vaziri (@tvaziri) February 26, 2016
What does that have to do with Starkiller Base? It”s on the board. “Starkiller discussion is active and ongoing. If it weren't, it wouldn't be on the board,” Chee told me. So there it is. The Holocron Keeper has spoken. They know they gave out two different explanations for how Starkiller Base works, and they”re working on fixing it.