Disney have destroyed the Star Wars Expanded universe

A small section of my Star Wars Library

It is as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...

Yesterday it was announced that the entire Star Wars Galaxy had been destroyed... Not by a Death Star, nor the Sun Crusher or the Galaxy Gun but by Disney.

I was born in 1980 and grew up watching the original Star Wars trilogy at Christmas every year, I was a teenager when the Special Editions came out and I was beside myself with excitement when I saw my favourite movies in the cinema, an experience I never thought I would get. Before that I had got into the Expanded Universe.

In the wake of Return of the Jedi many people wanted more. The Role Play Games expanded a lot so that gamers (like me) could experience more of the Galaxy far far away and do the things we had seen in the films, be it flying X-Wings against a Stardestroyer (I lost my port engine by the way) take on Dark Lords of the Sith or Boba Fett...

There were also works of Fiction. Timothy Zahn started the ball rolling with Heir to the Empire,  Dark Force rising and The last Command and if you haven't read them and call yourself a Star Wars fan you have to read them. These were followed by books by Kevin J Anderson, Dave Wolverton, Kathy Tyers, Aaron Allston and Michael A. Stackpole which I spent my teenage years digesting and falling in love with. My favourite character Imperial Admiral Daala has, in recent books, become head of the Galaxy's Government.

I bit my tongue through the prequels... OK not hard and I admit I did rant a little... and often... about how some of the stuff from the Expanded Universe had been neglected or altered by the early films but ultimately most was left in tact so my room for complaint was small and Timothy Zahn et. al started bringing in Prequel stuff into the EU including Luke Skywalker encountering a Droideka some twenty years after Return of the Jedi having never mentioning them before hand. It was OK... I accepted it, so did everyone else - it was a necessity to link Original Star Wars, the EU and New Star Wars.

Last night I read this....strw.rs/1nNvyUm

Disney have killed it all off. All those characters, all those planets, all those events... gone...

Oh yeah there will be new books and new stories based on the sequels and the new project Star Wars Rebels but everything else... all those books that made George Lucas and now Disney buckets of money are all irrelevant. They don't exist and they never did in the narrative of the Star Wars Universe.

Yeah it does mean that the film makers have a lot of freedom to write and create the new series of movies but...

It feels like a big middle finger to the fans who have followed the Expanded Universe for over twenty years. For me the films (even though Episode I and II were not great they did add to the story) and the Expanded Universe were Star Wars, for the majority of my lifetime and for millions of fans like me. 

This news will have sent ripples through the Star Wars fan base and a great many people will be most displeased.