Five Star Wars Legends Characters Who Can Stay Gone
When the Expanded Universe became “Legends” we lost a lot of good characters. But not these five. These five can stay gone.
There are pros and cons to the great Disney-Star-Wars takeover of 2012. On one hand, we get new content and neat new theme park additions. On the other, lots of media that people loved were stricken from the official record overnight. Some beloved characters were deleted from galactic history completely.
Recently though, some have been making their way back into the story. Most notably, Thrawn was reintroduced in Star Wars Rebels and is being set up to be the primary antagonist of the upcoming Ahsoka series. If you have a favorite long-lost character, there is always hope that they can come back somehow, some way.
But that’s not what we’re talking about today. Today, we’re focusing on the Legends characters who haven’t yet come back and don’t really need to.
Dash Rendar
Dash came onto the scene for Shadows of the Empire, a multimedia project that took place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Aka: that time in Star Wars history when Han Solo was frozen in carbonite and couldn’t do anything. So they solved the problem of no-Han by introducing a less interesting Han clone.
Han is rough-around-the-edges, but the thing that makes him likable is that the gruffness is a façade and a defense mechanism and we know that below that he cares about his friends and the rebellion very deeply. Dash just doesn’t have that same depth or charm. Dash Rendar is that unlicensed toy version of Han Solo that your grandmother would find in the dollar store and get for you because “You like that Star War right?”
Waru
Sometimes you find a character so incomprehensibly strange that you think you may have hallucinated the entire book a part of some fever dream. But no, Waru is real. A trans-dimensional creature who claimed to be a healer, this is a giant slab of meat covered in gold with a TARDIS-like bigger-on-the-inside feature. Science fiction is supposed to be strange sometimes, but Waru may be proof that it’s possible to take things way too far.
Mount Sorrow
It’s a sentient mountain on Endor with healing tears. That’s it. That’s the entire thing. Could you imagine watching one of the later Disney movies and seeing a mountain crying on Ewoks to heal them? We’ve put up with a lot of canonical weirdness and nonsense in Star Wars recently. But I still think that Mount Sorrow would be just a bridge too far.
Triclops
Triclops was the offspring of Palpatine, possibly through cloning, possibly not, with three eyes. Hence the name Triclops. Very clever, I know. Where is this third eye? On the back of his head! Of course! Why? Honestly, I wish I knew. This is a near-miss sort of character who could have been very interesting with a good backstory and an inspiring character arc, but instead, he’s just sort of lame.
Plus, not everyone has to be a clone or the Emperor‘s offspring. Sometimes characters who live in far future / far past space can just be interesting on their own. That said, the “we can’t stop (somehow) bringing back Palpatine” issue is still prevalent in Star Wars, so we’re not better than we were back then.
Xizor
In a word, Xizor is fake. He’s a character who is supposed to be incredibly intelligent but doesn’t really do anything particularly clever throughout his book. He’s supposed to be strong but has a bed that works out for him while he naps. Xizor is supposed to be seductive and smooth, but basically, he runs on pheromones and an extra rapey sense of entitlement. He is whatever the antagonist’s version of a Mary Sue is. The Galaxy’s Edge cookbook may have made him canon again a few years back, but he hasn’t made an appearance since, so I think it may have just been a deep-dive reference.
Which legends characters were you not sad to see taken from the canon? Which characters are still canon in your heart? How would you re-write some of these lost characters to help them fit in the galaxy? Let us know in the comments!
May the Force be with you, adventurers!
