But they've
already gone off a cliff. From SDN:
Important note: for you people who ask why I don't take the moral high ground and adopt a firm, restrained, mature tone when dealing with these people, I would like to remind you that we are talking about whether the Empire would kick the Federation's ass! What the hell does maturity have to do with this? To most of its participants, this debate is a vacation from maturity. Those of us who have done this for a long time judge each others' efforts on skill and knowledge, as well as scientific accuracy and logical consistency. Maturity is simply a red herring, and as far as I'm concerned, the very idea of a "mature" Star Wars vs Star Trek debate is outlandish. In my experience, people start whining about "maturity" when they're trying to distract the audience from the fact that they're getting their asses kicked.
So they think that their pychotic rants are a show of victory-- no
wonder they think they're undefeated. Couple this with the obsessive cyber-stalking on the hate-mail page, and you'll see that they've gone off the deep end-- as in the cliffs of
Acapulco.
There's no question that SDN is at war with all things Trek, it's the entire
purpose of the site. And they've made clear that they follow a policy that "all's fair in war," including cyber-terrorism, as well as ignoring plain logic and fact in favor of weaving their own twisted canon.
And as a cult, they think that they speak for God-- and that anyone who doesn't obey is an infidel who must be driven out and killed, unless they swear alliegance to the creed:
When challenged by certain agenda-driven individuals who claimed that they studied George Lucas' public interviews and therefore knew his intentions better than people who worked with him professionally, Mr. Chee further clarified with
this:
"All contradictions are dealt with case-by-case ... Does LucasFilm Ltd. itself actually have a Canon Policy? No.
...
The quote you provide makes it sound like the EU is separate from George's vision of the Star Wars universe. It is not."
So in summary, the policy of Lucasfilm is that the books count, although not as highly as the movies. The policy of Paramount is that the books don't count at all, and amazingly enough, some of the TV shows and movies don't count either. The two companies have taken different approaches; Lucasfilm has gone the route of inclusiveness in order to weld things into a single continuity, while Paramount went the route of minimizing that which is canon so that authors would have more freedom to work independently of one another.
1. Who were these "agenda driven individuals," and when did they "challenge" Chee? Nobody knows-- Chee's statements certainly don't indicate any.
2. Note the arrogant
presumption behind Wong's statement of "agenda-driven individuals who claimed that they studied George Lucas' public interviews and therefore knew his intentions better than people who worked with him professionally"; isn't Wong studying
Chee's statements, and claiming to know what
they mean?
So while these "agenda-driven individuals" are reading Lucas's statements
directly, Wong cherry-picks an ambiguously-worded phrase from someone who simply works
with Lucas at best, and divines the meaning that Wong wants; and then calls them "certain agenda-driven individuals who claimed that they studied George Lucas' public interviews and therefore knew his intentions better than people who worked with him professionally."
This is clear delusions of grandeur; how the hell does Wong think he has the right to interpret Chee's statements, more than others have the right to interpret those of Lucas
himself? Clearly, the Wong believes that The Prophet Chee speaks to him directly as a messenger for Lucas, just like the Prophet Mohammed speaks to Osama bin Laden as a messenger for Allah.
3. From the following:
"The quote you provide makes it sound like the EU is separate from George's vision of the Star Wars universe. It is not." Wong derives the conclusion that:
"the policy of Lucasfilm is that the books count, although not as highly as the movies."
This is about as non-sequitur as on can get; Lucas
expressly stated that there IS no one Star Wars universe, but rather TWO of them-- the movies and the EU.
Note the following:
LUCAS: I don't read that stuff. I haven't read any of the novels. I don't know anything about that world. That's a different world than my world. But I do try to keep it consistent. The way I do it now is they have a Star Wars Encyclopedia. So if I come up with a name or something else, I look it up and see if it has already been used. When I said [other people] could make their own Star Wars stories, we decided that, like Star Trek, we would have two universes: My universe and then this other one. They try to make their universe as consistent with mine as possible, but obviously they get enthusiastic and want to go off in other directions."
- George Lucas, Flannelled One, Aug. 2005 - "New Hopes" interview in Starlog #337
Leland Chee, 2006 at StarWars.Com:
"The only relevant official continuities are the current versions of the films alone, and the combined current version of the films along with whatever else we've got in the Holocron. You're never going to know what George's view of the universe beyond the films at any given time because it is constantly evolving. It remains elastic until it gets committed to film or another official source. Even then, we know there's always room for change.
[...] Anything not in the current version of the films is irrelevant to Film only continuity."
- Sue Rostoni, Lucas Licensing (LLP Managing Editor), Sept. 2005 - StarWars.com forum post:
"Within the issue of Starlog magazine with the War of the Worlds cover is an interview article with George Lucas. He stated something which he had said before, which is that he doesn't follow the SW EU, he doesn't read the books or comics. He also said that when they started doing all this (which is allowing other storytellers to tell their own SW tales), he had decreed that the Star Wars Universe would be split into two just like Star Trek (I don't know nuts about Star Trek, so don't ask me about that), one would be his own universe (the six episode movie saga), the other would be a whole other universe (the Expanded Universe). He continued to say that the EU tries as much as possible to tie in to his own universe, but sometimes they move into a whole other line of their own.”
Ah, but that's where the Prophet Chee speaks to Osamike-Wong Laden, and
tells him Lucas's divine will, and what it
"really" means-- and so all "agenda driven infidels" (i.e. NORMAL, SANE PEOPLE who can read NORMAL, PLAIN ENGLISH) are branded as liars and vermin.
That's not going just off a cliff, like your brakes failed and you dropped into a 3-foot gulch: that's a perfect swan-dive into the Grand Canyon.