Obi-Wan Kenobi’s story was hampered due to the confines of Star Wars canon, and this problem will only get worse as the franchise continues to grow. Star Wars storytelling is vast and sprawling, spread across films, television, games, novels, and comic books. This would seem an impossible thing to keep track of, but one of Star Wars’ strengths has always been its valiant attempts to remain faithful to the stories that came before – excluding most of the expanded universe. Now, however, as Star Wars’ narrative becomes grander, and the details of its worldbuilding more obscure, the question remains whether sticking to canon no matter the circumstances is truly the right thing to do.
One of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s writers recently proclaimed (via Gizmodo) that rigidly sticking to Star Wars canon hindered the show’s narrative possibilities. Obi-Wan is one of Star Wars’ most infamous characters, and his legacy is woven throughout many Star Wars eras. As such, any new content that included him needed to be respectful of what was known as well as present something new. This is a near-impossible task without re-interpreting certain canon details, which is exactly what Obi-Wan Kenobi did. But, while Star Wars should do everything in its power to produce the best possible entertainment, there’s an argument that ignoring canon for the sake of storytelling negates the need for canon at all.
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Obi-Wan Couldn’t Avoid Retconning Star Wars Canon
Events between Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope are quite well established within the lore, meaning that the more Star Wars legacy characters are used to tell a story during that period, the more restricted that story is going to be. The Obi-Wan Kenobi writers were left with an impossible task – how to tell a compelling story that brings something new to the table, without ignoring everything that came before. This is why Obi-Wan Kenobi’s story was initially expected to primarily involve Luke and Tatooine, and it came as a surprise when Leia was the co-star of the show instead.
This surprise made for a more unexpected story, certainly, but there was no way to tell it without reinterpreting certain events from the original trilogy. Leia and Obi-Wan’s aloof interactions in A New Hope now make less sense, and even Darth Vader and Obi-Wan’s duel in A New Hope has a completely different undertone since it became known that they met each other multiple times after their duel in Revenge of the Sith. These events don’t necessarily cancel out the entirety of A New Hope, but they certainly give the film a different meaning. If canon status was an issue in telling the best Obi-Wan story possible, perhaps fewer legacy characters should have been involved.
Star Wars’ Canon Problems Will Only Get Worse
With the advent of Disney+, Star Wars has only continued to grow. More creators are involved, and more stories are being told across bigger periods of the Star Wars timeline. Different creators mean different interpretations of certain characters, and changes to established canon are already being seen in more projects than just Obi-Wan Kenobi. For instance, Star Wars Rebels character Kanan Jarrus had his backstory laid out in a comic run entitled Kanan: The Last Padawan, but that narrative was later retconned by Kanan’s original creator Dave Filoni when the character cameoed in the pilot episode of Star Wars: The Bad Batch. Plenty of other similar Star Wars retconning examples exist too.
The bigger Star Wars’ story gets, the more fragile its canon will become. But maintaining a canonical history of events is one of Star Wars’ fundamental pillars as a franchise. If Lucasfilm wants Star Wars canon to remain mostly intact, it might need to start thinking about branching further from the original Star Wars trilogy’s timeline. Looking to the past and exploring the future might open up more narrative possibilities and give creators the freedom to explore the galaxy without being tied to the minutiae of certain characters and events. The legacy characters like those involved in Obi-Wan Kenobi will always be important to Star Wars, but there are plenty of other storytelling opportunities left to discover.
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