Star Wars, Canon, and Dead horses

Pablo Hidalgo, executive of the Lucasfilm story group and perhaps the most important man in the Star Wars franchise, recently tweeted that in his opinion minor details like who shot first or where exactly a character was standing are beneath the notice of “cannon” and naturally differ in various retellings. “It's my way of dodging the who-shot-first horse carcass.” He wrote. “All that's canon is that two people entered that booth, & Greedo died. Reports vary”. His words are actually very fair; in a world where we nerds often take issues of cannon as seriously as religious dogma Hidalgo rightly points out that so many story details are created by the needs of the medium. “So why are these guys standing so close as if they can't get enough of each other? Because they had to fit into the movie frame”, He writes. I am very sympathetic to this idea, there is "but" coming however. 

Nerds--and I am one--love technical details. I recently watched a Youtube video yet again hashing out the dead horse of Star Wars Vs Star Trek. It was pretty well done bu it was amazing how many people were angry over what they saw as cannon oversights on the part of the video’s creator. Among the arguments I saw were “are turbolasers really lasers?”, “what is a phasers output in watts?” and “do the values given for Star Wars weapon outputs match what appears on the screen?” Putting aside the question of whether such debates are worth pursuing we can see that at least one vocal subset of the fanbase is pretty serious about precision in cannon. To such people, and I am one of them, there is a value in keeping story elements such as this consistent. A star destroyer in the books should have the same physical description and abilities as one that appears in the TV shows or movies. If a light saber can’t cut through cortosis in one adaption it shouldn’t be able to cut through it in any other format. Things like retcons should be kept to a minimum. 

None of this means a writer shouldn’t be able to have a slightly different take on a character or events, but there should be some measure of consistency both for the sake of good story telling, and to satisfy the fanbase. 

-Gedaemon