It’s been 5 years since Palpatine talked crap on the radio in Fortnite

Five years ago, the dead spoke this past weekend. Not in a Star Wars film, mind, or at least, for the first time there. Not even in the accessories Star Wars tie material, such as a comic book or novel. Instead, the long-awaited return of the Skywalker Saga grand villain Sheev Palpatine arrived as part of a Fortnite special event, and Star Wars Canonicity has never been stretched to its weirdest point since.

Of course, there are a lot of wild things that happen Star Wars continuity – either the current approximation of this or the former Expanded Universe– but they are, for the most part, oddities found in the texts themselves. Beyond the limits of that ever-evolving continuity, there is still much strangeness, just for the sheer purpose of Star Warsimpact on our culture. Taken separately – the idea of ​​Palpatine announcing his great resurrection to the galaxy as the final revenge of the Sith, that the unquote “final” Star Wars The film was marketed through one of the the greatest video games on the planet– these things are not exactly absurd in the face of what Star Wars has become in the last almost 50 years.

However, the veil was thinner on December 14, 2019, and emerging at the heart of these two ideas was The Rise of Skywalker‘s Fortnite special event. If you could put to workyou can watch (or aimlessly attempt to beat) a digital recreation of JJ Abrams talking Sonic the HedgehogBen Schwartz and Geoff Keighley’s Game Awards to present a clip from the film. I could still see what remains, somehow this half decade later, of one of the two canonical sources for Palpatine’s return to the galactic stage.

There is nothing wrong with the message itself. Is it a lot Sheev Palpatine to announce that you cheated death with a large fleet of Star Destroyers and basically sending the “I lived, bitch” meme across the galaxy. Man is nothing if not someone with a talent for the dramatic! But the absurdity remains that, five years later, in a franchise that loves contextualizing without end – this event, and its mention in the update of The Rise of Skywalkerthey are the only two references for such a fundamental piece of the world.

It is already strange enough that it is not in the movie, but, inevitably funny memes in the following years, the real absurdity of Palpatine. Fortnite broadcast is that it is just a little lost to history. That’s a strange thing to say about something that’s only five years old, but it’s true: you can’t play this. Fortnite event more, it is only filed in the registrations of the players. The text of the issue itself can at least be found in the update of The Rise of Skywalker– what, second author Rae Carson at the time, it was provided by Lucasfilm, not made specifically for either Fortnite or his book – at least, but it’s not the same. A piece of Star Wars history (derided as!) existing in this strange limbo between Star Wars as a continuous text and Star Wars as a brand entity, it also finds itself in a similarly strange state of existence. The dead speak, but not yet.

But perhaps it is for the best that this one example, among many in the following years Star Wars canon has been reviewed, is perhaps the standout the exposure of the error that has been Star Wars“Everything counts” approach to continuity in the last decade. It’s always been a lie from the start, despite what Lucasfilm has said Star Wars continue to grow and develop with the same weight given to any book or issue of a comic as it would a TV show or film. We’re not back to the levels of fractured retcons and recontextualizations like the old EU was, but we’ve had a lot of modern moments. Star Wars can not align with itself in the last 10 years. Hell, we’re in the middle of a situation similar to the Palpatine broadcast right now with Marvel Battle of Jakku the comics themselves embellishes an ancient canonized history except for the parts of a previously canonical video game that are no longer accessible to play, keeping the story even when overwriting it.

Nothing indeed matters to Star Wars canon out of the moment it should, beyond what is now established in the primary series of new films (Palpatine’s speech included by proxy). But in this sense, everything therefore really matters: a Fortnite The event that you can no longer play is as dramatically important to the climax of the Skywalker Saga as the movie that says the climax is, especially given the lengths. Star Wars average has gone in the five years since justify retroactively. And maybe it’s such an important message to say Star Wars fans, obsessed the truths of his universe as they are so often, as they get the word that somehow, Palpatine is back.

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