Five years ago, the dead spoke this past week. Not within a Star Wars movie, thought, or at least, the first time there. Not even within the ancillary Star Wars tie-in material, such as comics or novels. However, the long-awaited return of the Skywalker Saga's Great villain Sheev Palpatine came as part of a Fortnite special event, and Star Wars Canonicity has never reached its most amazing point ever.

There are sure to be a lot of wild things going on Star Wars continuity-either its current estimate or the former Expanded Universe—but they are, for the most part, strange occurrences within the texts themselves. Beyond the limits of the ever-changing continuum, there are many surprises too, just from the sheer scope of Star Wars' impact on our culture. Taken separately is the idea of ​​Palpatine announcing his grand resurrection of the galaxy as the final revenge on the Sith, with the quote unquoted as "the end" Star Wars movie to sell itself through one of the biggest video game on the planet—these things are not exactly nonsense Star Wars has been in the past nearly 50 years.

And yet the veil is at its thinnest on December 14, 2019, and what emerges at the core of the two ideas is The Rise of Skywalkerof Fortnite special event. If you can do ityou can watch (or aimlessly try to beat) a digital recreation of JJ Abrams talking Sonic the HedgehogBen Schwartz and the Game Awards' Geoff Keighley to introduce a clip from the film. You can also see what remains, despite this half a decade later, being one of only two canonical sources of Palpatine's return to the galactic stage.

There should be no error in the message itself. it kindness Sheev Palpatine to announce that you have cheated the death of a large fleet of Star Destroyers and by sending the "I'm alive, bitch" meme across the galaxy. A person is nothing if not a person with a talent for the dramatic! But the madness remains that, five years later-in a franchise that LOVES endless contextualization of himself-this event, and its discussion within the novelization of The Rise of Skywalkerare the only two references for such a fundamental part of world-building.

It's weird enough that it wasn't in the movie, but, inevitably funny memes in the years since out, the real stupidity of Palpatine's Fortnite the broadcast is that it is kind of lost in history. That's a strange thing to say about something that just turned five, but it's true: you can't play it Fortnite in any case, it is simply archived in the player's recordings. The text of the broadcast itself can be found inside the novel at Rise of Skywalker—which, according to author Rae Carson at the time, provided by Lucasfilm, not specifically made for either Fortnite or his book—at least, but it's not the same. A piece of Star Wars history (mocked as it is!) is in this weird limbo in between Star Wars as a continuous text and Star Wars as a brand entity, also sits in an equally strange state of existence. The dead speak, but they are also silent.

And yet perhaps it is for the best that this is an example, among many years since Star Wars canon overhauled, perhaps the standout error exposure that's it Star Wars' "It's all important" approach to sustainability for the last decade. It was always a lie from the start, despite what Lucasfilm says, that is Star Wars will continue to grow and develop with exactly the same weight given to any given book or issue of a comic as a TV show or movie. We haven't returned to the level of broken retcons and recontextualizations like the old EU, but we have many instances where the modern one. Star Wars could not line himself up for the last 10 years. Hell, we're in the middle of the same Palpatine broadcast situation right now with Marvel's Battle of Jakku comics, themselves embellishing a previously canonized story from parts of a previously unplayable canon video game, maintaining history even if it was overwritten.

nothing Granted important to Star Wars canon outside the moment it should be, more than what is currently established in the main series of nine films (Palpatine's speech included in the proxy). And yet in that sense, everything is therefore actually important: a Fortnite The event that you can no longer play is as important to the climax of the Skywalker Saga as the movie tells that the climax, especially given the lengths. Star Wars media lost in the five years since its retroactive justification. And perhaps such an important message to convey Star Wars fans, obsessed with the truth of its universe as they are always, as to get the word in any way, Palpatine returned.

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