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Incidentally, they have killed off major SW characters in the EU, and if you're going to complain about them gallivanting about the galaxy at the ripe age of 60... uh, SW has rejuvenat treatments, too, you know. Shoot, Eisenhorn was reaching three hundred years of age towards the end of the third novel.

They killed Chewbacca, arguably the least important of the bunch - and even that caused an uproar with fans, in spite of that single death being played up as a huge heroic sacrifice.
It's a far cry from, say, GRRM's gritty realism where everyone can die at every moment.



As for rejuvenat treatments in Star Wars - they do exist, though they are not quite as capable as those in 40k. It's too conspicuous when only everyone's favourite characters are treated that way and everyone they encounter is 20-40 years old.

It is one of those oldest crimes of established franchises that they drag along popular characters over decades in their timeline, instead of having newcomers replace them one by one. It is, of course, quite understandable - but that doesn't make it look less weird.

I rather like the somewhat haphazard apporach to things in the 40k universe. If you have a million worlds spread out over an entire galaxy is it not more likely that you will have weird and wonderful things happening, rather than a homogenous society. On those terms maybe the SW universe is too rigid. Considering the variety of societies and world views available just on this planet imagine what would happen expanded a million times.

For all Imperial Stormtroopers to be armed with the same marque of blaster rifle, the manufacturer must be huge and galaxy spanning, or there can't be very many stormtroopers. I think the GW version of having thousands of forgeworlds all producing their own version of the same thing much more believeable (and fun).

Maybe inquisitors have access to more advanced servitors that haven't been mind-wiped quite as much, maybe Fulgrim "throttling" a wraithlord is artistic licence indicating him breaking rather necessary bits in the machine.

Also terminators might not be able to back flip, as by definition that requires substantial arm articulation, but I see no problem with back somersaults. Powered exoskeletons are awesome, after all

Also also, you might know how a machine gun works. The whole point behind the GW background is that most humans actually have no idea how any of it works and assumes that its the power of the Emperor.

Flinty wrote:For all Imperial Stormtroopers to be armed with the same marque of blaster rifle, the manufacturer must be huge and galaxy spanning

It actually is:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/BlasTech_Industries

Corporations becoming that large has grown into a pretty big theme in the setting, playing a bit with the "evil megacorp" cliché we know from movies like Robocop and its OCP.
In fact, Star Wars even has the "Corporate Sector", which is essentially a collection of industrial giants governing hundreds of planets as they see fit.

For Star Wars, a setting where hyperdrives allow you to reach the other end of the galaxy in a matter of days, this kind of corporate expansion makes sense. You see it in our real world as well when you look at certain "giants" now supplying countries all over the world with their products. That this doesn't happen in 40k can only be explained by the fickleness that is Warp Travel, as well as the unreliability of interstellar communications. I'm quite sure that some companies would try to expand in a similar vein, but it would require much more time, and since they are unable to coordinate with their HQ they cannot bring the full brunt of the company to bear against local competitors, and as such will be at a disadvantage, making such ventures unattractive.
And that's not even keeping the various different tech-levels or the absence of a galaxy-spanning currency in mind!

Flinty wrote:Also terminators might not be able to back flip, as by definition that requires substantial arm articulation, but I see no problem with back somersaults.

For some reason, when I think of a slow and hulking suit of Terminator armour attempting a somersault, I can only think of this.

I get what you mean, though. Individual interpretations - formed by both our own preferences as well as whatever sources we grew up with. It's just that consistency gets lost when you are confronted with something that clearly clashes with whatever you've been reading before. Some people see this as an issue, others don't care, yet others refuse to acknowledge it actually exists. *shrug*

It would kinda defeat the purpose of having Black Library a separate company to begin with.

They chose to go down this way precisely, purposefully and explicitly so they would not have to be bound with being coherent with the Studio in all things.

Dan Abnett talks about it briefly in this video starting at about 17:30




In short, they publish novels under a different company - Black Library - and not simply as Games Workshop Novel exactly so they can be creative with it, add a new a different "interpretation" of the universe to it and would not be bound by the things established by the game studio.

[edit]
hmm youtube embed seems a bit bugged
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDZ0_lmcGy4&feature=player_embedded#!

Zweischneid wrote:It would kinda defeat the purpose of having Black Library a separate company to begin with.

They chose to go down this way precisely, purposefully and explicitly so they would not have to be bound with being coherent with the Studio in all things.

You're late to the discussion. I've already addressed this whole thing about GW purposefully sucking.

BlaxicanX wrote:

Lynata wrote:Lucas has a whole internal database (the Continuity Holocron) and Leland Chee dedicated to the task of keeping things consistent. One could argue that it's a matter of money (SW is a much bigger franchise), but ... yeah, I think it's more of a conscious decision as well. Not exactly laziness, just the opinion that it's actually better this way.

"It all stems from the assumption that there’s a binding contract between author and reader to adhere to some nonexistent subjective construct or ‘true’ representation of the setting. There is no such contract, and no such objective truth.
I understand that Tolkien took decades developing his setting before publishing the stories set within it, and still made mistooks. 40k is an ever-evolving setting designed first and foremost to house a really cool game, and as such things don’t always mesh or translate, or they (actually very occasionally) get changed outright. I know which I’d rather be reading and writing. "
-- Andy Hoare

BlaxicanX wrote:I think that ADB is the best in this regard, and while he made that lulzy comment about canon being a fallacy, I think he was just trying to not badmouth his fellow writers. Just looking at his work, especially with the "twist" in The Emperor's Gift, it's very clearly that he highly respects consistency within the universe.

The "canon is a fallacy" actually came from Gav Thorpe. ADB just flat-out said "there is no canon". That he has volunteered to try and respect the source material as best as possible would unfortunately seem to be the exception of the rule, as far as writers are concerned. Most value their artistic freedom - as well as the uniqueness of their take on the setting.

Matter of personal preferences - as this poll shows as well.

Yes, I'm aware that the their canon policy is what it is because that's how they want it to be. That's redundant. Obviously, if they didn't want their policy to be what it was then it wouldn't be. A personnel preference is not a justification, however.

The justification is that they're lazy, and don't care about the issue enough to do anything about it. LucasaArts does, and whoever manages Star Trek does, but GW does not. And they suck for it, imo. The universe would be a lot better if they made it more consistent.

Zweischneid wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDZ0_lmcGy4&feature=player_embedded#!

Thanks, I hadn't seen that interview before. Quite an interesting insight!
So the studio wanted consistency and creative oversight, but the authors preferred artistic license. The latter fits to what I've heard before, though I used to believe that GW itself didn't care much about contradictions as well. Abnett now makes it sound as if Black Library had to wrest this concession/compromise from them. Hmm.

BlaxicanX wrote:The justification is that they're lazy, and don't care about the issue enough to do anything about it. LucasaArts does, and whoever manages Star Trek does, but GW does not

'Whoever manages Star Trek' maintains canon by simply declaring that anything in the novels isn't canon. They don't actually manage it at all.

And for Lucasarts... well, ask Karen Travis about how well Lucas maintains established canon.

Why would I? All LucarsArts did was fix the bs she instated, thus proving my point. Karen Traviss' work was a blight on the Expanded Universe- rendering it non-canon is one of the best moves LucasArts has done. People need to stop paying her to write things. She isn't very good at it.

DOOMBREAD wrote:I actually found Star Wars canon quite consistent. For universes of that size, SW probably has the most consistent fluff of all.

The biggest problem for Star Wars is just Lucas coming along afterwards and changing stuff. While there were a few areas that writers were just not allowed to touch until Lucas made the prequels, there are any number of other details that he ignored from the EU and just wrote to suit himself for the prequels and the Clone Wars cartoon. So we now have canonical inconsistencies with, for example, the designer of the Death Star, Admiral Ackbar's backstory, C3PO's origin, Pretty much everything about Mandalorians written by Karen Travis, the reason for the Clone Wars, How many Jedi it takes to take down a Droidekka, ... it goes on.

Of course, even before the prequels there were some interesting holes created by the writers themselves. The biggest (literally) being that despite Han Solo's comment in the original movie that the big, shiny thing they were flying towards was 'too big to be a space station' the writer of the Corellian Trilogy thought it would be a good idea to write in a space station that had been in Han Solo's home system for as long as anyone could remember that was even bigger.

There aren't actually that many inconsistencies. Things get overwritten, but overwriting something isn't an inconsistency.

Lucas and the Holocron have made it very clear that the movies and the cartoons that Lucas have direct control over are the top canon, meaning anything that conflicts with them is non-canon. Thus, we know exactly what is and what isn't canon. The specific hierarchy IIRC is movies > cartoons > books and comics > games > "What-ifs" and everything else.

A "canon inconsistency" is when two things of equal canon contradict each other. That's why there's so many inconsistencies in the WH40K universe- because everything is of equal canon status. In a Space Marine codex you have Space Marine Bob kill five warbosses by himself- in a novel you have that same event, except in the novel's depiction Space Marine Bob kils twenty warbosses by himself. Which one is the valid portrayal? According to GW and the BL, they're both valid. There is no such hilarity in Star Wars.

BlaxicanX wrote:Why would I? All LucarsArts did was fix the bs she instated, thus proving my point. Karen Traviss' work was a blight on the Expanded Universe- rendering it non-canon is one of the best moves LucasArts has done. People need to stop paying her to write things. She isn't very good at it.

I think she started out good - it's just that the more she wrote, the worse it got.
I absolutely loved the first Republic Commando novel. The second one was okay. By the third it was all "blah blah mandos awesome jedi suck" fangasming, and at that point I simply stopped paying her any heed. Shame, really. She seemed to have a hand for military-style fiction, but her hard-on for Mandalorians has now reached a level like "Twilight meets Space Marines".

insaniak wrote:The biggest problem for Star Wars is just Lucas coming along afterwards and changing stuff.

Sad but true. Lucas doesn't care for the EU at all, though a few things like Z-95s and Juggernauts were adopted by him (I still suspect someone in the studio just smuggled those designs onto his desk rather than him looking for them).
This is where Leland Chee comes in, though. I imagine 50% of his job is cleaning up the mess left by Lucas, which ultimately ends with him either declaring that such-and-such gets retconned, or actually finding some explanation for how both sources can co-exist. The other 50% is actually making sure that the EU stuff coming in from dozens of different authors fits to each other.

insaniak wrote:Of course, even before the prequels there were some interesting holes created by the writers themselves. The biggest (literally) being that despite Han Solo's comment in the original movie that the big, shiny thing they were flying towards was 'too big to be a space station' the writer of the Corellian Trilogy thought it would be a good idea to write in a space station that had been in Han Solo's home system for as long as anyone could remember that was even bigger.

To be fair, Centerpoint a unique alien artifact, and nobody in their right mind would expect that something like that could exist twice in the galaxy. The human species has truly never built a station that big - up until that point.
At least I think that's what Leland Chee would have said.

BlaxicanX wrote:Lucas and the Holocron have made it very clear that the movies and the cartoons that Lucas have direct control over are the top canon, meaning anything that conflicts with them is non-canon. Thus, we know exactly what is and what isn't canon.

True.
With 40k on the other hand, we not only have the situation that nothing is canon, we have countless people believing that there are rules similar to those for Star Wars. And even then those people are disagreeing over how exactly they would apply and which sources should take precedence. Lots of confusion.