The Star Wars saga caused several snarls, with some caused due to conflicting Expanded Universe material, and some due to the series' jump from the original trilogy to the prequels:
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The Films
- Obi-Wan has several statements in the Original Trilogy that turn out to be Half-Truths at best (which does fit in with his character). He claimed he didn't own a droid in A New Hope, but did during the Prequel Trilogy (though apparently it was the Jedi Order's droid, not his personal droid). He never specifically stated that Yoda was his mentor, but it was certainly the implication in The Empire Strikes Back (before it's revealed that it was Qui-Gon Jinn, then subsequently patched up by showing Yoda trained young Jedi before they grow up and get another mentor as a Padawan). It is lampshaded in Episode VI, when Luke asks Obi-Wan why he didn't tell the truth about his father having become Darth Vader instead of the story he was killed by him. The old Jedi explains that the person Anakin Skywalker used to be metaphorically died when he joined the dark side, so what he said was true, "from a certain point of view."
- One particular point is that in The Empire Strikes Back, Obi-Wan does not seem aware that Luke and Leia are siblings. When he says "That boy is our last hope," Yoda adds "No, there is another," as if this is a revelation to Obi-Wan. He's aware of it in Return of the Jedi (since he's the one who tells Luke), but it's reasonable to assume that Yoda told him the truth after that scene. But then Revenge of the Sith has Obi-Wan present and accounted for during the birth and naming of Luke and Leia, and being one of the people who creates the plan to hide them away—meaning it comes across less as a revelation, and more as Obi-Wan somehow forgetting Leia existed until Yoda reminded him.
- Leia claimed to have remembered her mother in Return of the Jedi, but Padmé died in childbirth in Revenge of the Sith. Possibly explainable if she was thinking about her adopted mother Breha Organa, although Luke does specify "your real mother" when he asks, which implies Leia had a first adoptive mother or a nanny before Breha that she mistook for her true late mother. The novelization of Revenge of the Sith lampshades/handwaves this. When the twins are born, Luke is described as having his eyes shut tightly while Leia's are open as if trying to take in everything. Presumably, the Force then allows Leia to remember Padmé even though newborns don't have a working long-term memory. It's later lampshaded in Marvel's Princess Leia series, where she has a Force vision of Padmé while visiting Naboo, realizing at once that the former queen is her mother.
- In The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader does not seem to recognize C-3PO, despite creating him in The Phantom Menace (and remarking in said film that he's incredibly unique). The Expanded Universe attempted to rectify this in a (non-canon) story called Thank "The Maker"
, where Vader reminisces about his mother and 3PO when he's at Cloud City. Of course, at a glance he looks like every other member of a fairly ubiquitous model line. - The prequels showed that Obi-Wan and Yoda left Luke on Tatooine with the purpose of letting him have a normal life and not commit him to Jedi training early on, breaking tradition of Jedi younglings who start before the age of five. When Luke finally came to him as a young adult, Yoda acted surprised and even argued with him and Obi-Wan over proper Jedi protocol and said he was too old to be trained, despite this being the plan from the start.
- Within the original trilogy, Luke and Leia are set up as possible love interests (to the point that a deleted scene shows them about to kiss), only to be revealed as siblings later on. Neither of them has the slightest idea that they are, even though Luke's Force perception should have tipped him off at some point. The problem was that Han Solo clearly has a romantic interest in Leia in The Empire Strikes Back, and the last thing old-school George Lucas wanted was to end the trilogy with a messy love triangle.
- In Attack of the Clones, Naboo's planetary governor Sio Bibble claims that The Republic has never fought a full-scale war. Both Legends and the Continuity Reboot contradict this with the Great Hyperspace War, Mandalorian Wars, Jedi Civil War, and the New Sith Wars. The New Sith Wars in particular was the most glaring since it directly led to the decline of the Republic in Legends or the High Republic era in the new canon alongside Darth Bane and his Rule of Two. During Legends, the Darth Bane novel trilogy explained away the discrepancy, along with the conflicting accounts on how long the Republic had lasted, with the Ruusan Reformation, where the Republic adopted a new constitution and abolished its federal military after the final collapse of the Sith Empire. The characters who speak of a thousand-year Republic rather than a thousand-generation Republic are thinking of this predominantly peaceful postwar period from Ruusan to First Geonosis, and discounting the brushfire conflicts such as the Mandalorian Civil War that occasionally blew up.
The New Canon
- Tracking ships through hyperspace being treated as almost inconceivable, and certainly not something to expect, in The Last Jedi. A New Hope opens with Vader and Tarkin having seemingly tracked the Tantive IV through hyperspace. Rogue One implied that they were able to track the Tantive IV because they'd seen them make the initial jump, and various other possible explanations have been floated in the expanded universe, such as the limitations on hyperspace travel meaning there's only so many destinations someone could take, the damaged Tantive IV emitting a highly trackable kind of radiation, or Vader's Force powers, as potential explanations. In the Star Wars Radio Dramas it is implied that the Tantive IV had a mole on board who helped the Empire track them down. In this case, Rogue One is what seems to create the problem, because A New Hope begins with Darth Vader's star destroyer pursuing the Tantive IV at sub-lightspeed without any indication that they had chased it through hyperspace; later in the movie, the Empire is able to track the Millennium Falcon through hyperspace, but only because they had a homing beacon hidden aboard the ship.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars largely zig-zags it: This trope is mostly averted in regards to the canon, as not only did the Legends decision render all previous Expanded Universe material outside The Clone Wars and the six Star Wars films then existing non-canon, thus leaving it with very little to contradict, almost every work in the canon has consistently worked with elements that were introduced. However, The Clone Wars is part of both canon and Legends due to the series running before the decision. Regardless, The Clone Wars is notorious for contradicting a lot of previously written material from the latter continuity and, in some cases, retconning it due to being in the second-highest tier of the Legends continuity (which at the time, was created for installments produced by Lucasfilm, but since none of the other planned series got off the ground, The Clone Wars was the only work designated under this tier). Had The Clone Wars continued under the same tiered-canon system, many more snarls would have occurred (Season 7 and the other mediums are solely confined to canon).
- Star Wars: Ahsoka: When Ahsoka recalls her and Rex Faking the Dead, she mentions that dead clones are indistinguishable from each other. However, The Clone Wars episode "Missing in Action" establishes that all clones have an identifying barcode tattooed on their forearm, scannable by any astromech droid. While it's possible that Ahsoka didn't know about this, the odds of Rex not knowing about it are extremely slim, and it's stated that he worked on his fake burial with Ahsoka. Also, when Rex was captured by the Empire in the Rebels episode "Stealth Strike" (which aired roughly a year before Ahsoka came out), Admiral Titus makes no mention of Rex being presumed dead by the Empire. This could imply that the fake burial didn't work, but there's no definitive answer. It's also possible that Ahsoka and Rex covered up the barcode somehow while preparing the fake burial, or perhaps burned it off so that the Empire would never know.
- Season 7 depicts the Siege of Mandalore and Order 66 entirely differently than Ahsoka. To start, the Siege was over and Maul was in custody and on the way back to Coruscant by the time Order 66 went out. Second, Rex is presented in the book as having already removed his chip. Not the case in The Clone Wars. Ahsoka has to find his report on the Fives incident, subdue the very hostile Commander Rex, drag him to the medical bay, and use the Force to find the chip so the automated medical suite can remove it. She also freed Maul in order to create chaos on the ship, which culminates in it crashing into a nearby moon, killing the entirety of the 332nd except for Rex and Ahsoka, who escaped on a Y-Wing. Finally, Ahsoka buries all of the clones aboard, marking their graves with their helmets, meaning by the time Vader arrives at the crash site, there's nothing to suggest that Rex had perished in the crash at all. Ahsoka has a very downplayed Faking the Dead in this scene, as she leaves only one of her sabers behind.
- Kanan: Early in the comic, Caleb Dume is given a holocron by his master, Depa Billaba, shortly before Order 66. The indication is that this is the same holocron that Caleb/Kanan is shown to have in Rebels, 14 years later. However, in Kanan's first appearance in A New Dawn, set in 11 BBY, six years before the beginning of Rebels, it's stated that his lightsaber is the only thing he still owns that could reveal that he's a Jedi. The idea that he abandoned the holocron somewhere, then came back for it, is rather implausible to say the least.
- Similar to The Clone Wars depicting the Siege of Mandalore differently than Ahsoka, Star Wars: The Bad Batch drastically changes how Order 66 plays out for young Caleb Dume and Bepa Billaba. In the comic, the Jedi and the clones are sitting around a campfire after an intense battle, with a handful of named clone troopers in red marked armor led by Commander Grey when the order comes in. In the show, Order 66 is issued during the battle, with the only regular clone trooper in custom armor being the now green marked Captain Grey. The events in question were likely changed so that the titular squad, being adapted into this telling of the story, could have an Establishing Character Moment before everything goes to hell in a hand basket.
- Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith: Palpatine questions Vader if he knows why Sith lightsabers are red, and Vader responds that he doesn't, because the Jedi teaching on the subject was incomplete. However, in Ahsoka, published before this comic started, Ahsoka, Anakin/Vader's former apprentice, not only knows what bleeding is well enough to explain it to Bail Organa, she knows how to purify corrupted kyber crystals. It's rather strange that Vader's ex-apprentice is privy to Jedi secrets that he isn't.
- Queen's Shadow: Although the revelation that one term of office for a monarch of Naboo is two years clears things up regarding the various queens in Attack of the Clones, The Clone Wars and Revenge of the Sith, it starts another mess: King Veruna, Padmé's predecessor on the throne, is said to have reigned for 13 years. Now, in Legends it was said that Veruna was massively corrupt and the rules were changed as a result, and he's indicated to be corrupt in canon as well, but there's also the fact that Réillata is 23 when re-elected as queen, and her first term is said to have happened when Padmé was a child: doing the math, that means she was either first elected at the age of 4, which is young even by Naboo's standards, or someone done screwed up (though it's also possible that Veruna's terms weren't consecutive; he may have been king both before and after Réillata).
- Master and Apprentice, released the month after Queen's Shadow, then goes and adds even more confusion by mentioning that at the time the book is set, 7 years before The Phantom Menace, Naboo is ruled by another teenage Queen. All that can be implied by this is that, in all likelihood, Veruna is no longer Padmé's immediate predecessor on the throne, as that's the only thing that makes any sense anymore.
- Due to the rather heavy Writing by the Seat of Your Pants, it is very difficult to reconcile a lot of what's revealed in The Rise of Skywalker about Snoke, the First Order, and Palpatine with what the New EU revealed about them. One of the most pivotal starting points of the sequel-era EU is that Palpatine had a standing order to decimate as much of the Empire's infrastructure and fleet as possible, so the Rebellion couldn't use it, under the logic of "if I can't control the galaxy, no one can"—something that clashes rather horribly with the idea that Palpatine had a backup clone body and a massive stockpile of highly-advanced warships ready to take back the galaxy. Snoke is also depicted as being genetically engineered by Palpatine as a Puppet King, which doesn't agree at all with the prior information about him, which depicted him as an ancient being who remembers the rise of the Empire (meaning he had to have been alive during the events of Revenge of the Sith), and indicated a younger Snoke looked little like the growing Snoke clones. Likewise, the novelization of The Last Jedi indicated that Palpatine became aware of Snoke during the Battle of Endor, but had no idea who he was other than his successor.
- Poe Dameron’s backstory was initially clear cut, with Before the Awakening explaining that he was raised by a single father after the death of his mother at age eight, joining the New Republic Navy and an incident with the First Order resulting in him joining the Resistance. But then The Rise of Skywalker and Poe Dameron: Free Fall revealed that he used to be a spice runner on Kijimi with Zori Bliss, he was a teenage runaway who later joined the Resistance with no mention of his time in the New Republic Navy, his mother died during his teenage years and his father (who he was revealed to have a difficult relationship with despite Before The Awakening implied that they were close) suffered an Uncertain Doom after getting poisoned trying to find Poe. He was practically turned into a different character by the end of the Sequel Trilogy and many fans disliked the second backstory.
- It’s unclear where Join the Resistance falls into the main canon, as none of the characters are seen or mentioned in other material, despite them being on Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens and attending Snap and Káre’s wedding in Star Wars: Poe Dameron. They also suffer Uncertain Doom after the events of The Last Jedi decimate the Resistance and the book series is on indefinite hiatus.
- BB-8 is a supporting character in Season One of Star Wars Resistance, but he’s also in Star Wars: Poe Dameron, both of which are prequels to The Force Awakens.
