Star Wars: Too much of everything

Every now and then I try some new Star Wars comics, because there's still some part of me that still thinks that Star Wars is just the best thing ever. But they don't really do anything for me, because so many of the big moments rely on me knowing who Jayden Fuckwalker is.

There's been so much extra Star Wars on top of the core movies, ever since there was Splinter of the Minds Eye. A huge continuity is built up in novels and animated shows and short stories and comics that only the faithful ever read, and only they ever really care about. Even in the dry years of the early 1990s, you'd get a book by Timothy Zahn now and then, or some weird thing with amazing Cam Kennedy art. It never really stopped.

Admittedly, it's always, always funny when so much of the established canon gets dumped on the trash whenever someone decides to make a proper movie (the same thing used to happen to Star Trek all the time). As a Doctor Who fan for life I'm used to this kind of continuity wipes on a regular basis, and can't really get upset when something like the New Adventures ever happened. I still love 'em.

For Star Wars, there was something of a clean slate when The Force Awakens came out, and massive amounts of canon got thrown right out the window. But in the seven years since that movie, there has been an extraordinary amount of ancillary material, and I lost track of it a long time ago. My eyes just slide right off the smooth animation in all the TV shows, I literally do not have time to read every novel that comes out, and I'm still kinda impressed that I never heard of a Bounty Hunters ongoing comic until Marvel had been publishing it for a couple of years.

And it's all interconnected and part of one giant saga and I get the appeal of all that - always have - but I just can't follow it all.

So when I do dip in, there are always these dramatic moments when someone with a name like Jayden Fuckwalker  - almost always some kind of jedi/rogue character - shows up and I have no idea who they are or why I should care, and nobody bothers to explain why this is a big deal, because they assume you're up to date, or can at least check out the Wookiepedia.

There's only room for so many universes in my head, and it's full up with Tolkein and Westeros histories already. And if I can't find a way to dip into all this stuff that happened a long time ago and far away without knowing all the lore, I'm less likely to bother in the first place.