Star Wars: What Is and Isn’t Canon, and Why it Matters to You

Canon; Essentially the events that unfold in any given tale that are part of the official storyline, whether that be a novel, a film, a video game, etc. 

Now, many Star Wars fans rejoiced when news broke that Disney had acquired the rights to make more Star Wars films. It also crushed others. With the announcement that when Disney purchased the rights, also came the announcement that nearly everything the fans knew as the Star Wars Expanded Universe was essentially made non-canon and re-branded as Star Wars Legends. Some of you may fondly remember the novels in The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn or Drew Karpyshyn’s Darth Bane Trilogy. Maybe you played the video games like Shadows of the Empire or Knights of the Old Republic. All of those stories and maybe more importantly, the characters, that those games and books introduced into the Star Wars universe are no longer official and are only “real” from a certain point of view.