Yesterday, we first heard of threats from some members of the so-called ‘Bring Back Legends’ movement to spoil The Force Awakens on public Facebook pages. Apparently some of them made good on their threats, because the folks at Del Rey have deactivated their Star Wars Books page. They explain their decision – no, it’s not gone for good – on their Tumblr:
We don’t want to give people who wish to spoil the movie for others a platform to do that and we are under no obligation to do so.
The ‘Bring Back Legends’ (or ‘Give Us Legends’) movement is a rather scattered gathering of fans of older Star Wars novels and comics – almost everything published before September 2014, including several decades of storylines that continue past Return of the Jedi. Last year, Lucasfilm announced that the older fiction would stay in print as ‘Legends’ – but as an alternate universe that doesn’t count towards the new films. Most Bring Back Legends fans want the older storylines to be continued, but there is a rather wide spectrum of opinions and attitudes on how and why.
My policy has been – and remains – to not cover them, for the most part. Most of them seem rather harmless – bitter, sometimes annoying, but harmless. But this is not the first incident where they’ve crossed a very distinct line, and that I will not ignore.
This is not going to change anyone’s minds about Legends, and spoiling people for a hotly-anticipated movie may be skeevy, but this is not a matter of life and death. Still, no one should have to invoke the nuclear option because of what is and isn’t canon in tie-in fiction.
Meanwhile, look for Del Rey to publish Alan Dean Foster’s The Force Awakens novelization as an eBook on Friday – Facebook or no Facebook.
Odd move. Why not turn off comments and scrub the offending posts? That keeps the page live AND extend a subtle “Up yours!” to the group that did this.
You can stop non-admins from posting original posts, but you can’t turn off comments on a Facebook Page.
That’s a good point.
and scrubbing the comments would be a full time job, and if you read their tumblr post, even leaving a comment up for 2 minutes is unacceptable on their part. the GULs have radicalized themselves well past crazy.
Wow – that’s utterly tacky.
We only want the original stories to continue. Disney can do whatever they want with their new childish universe, I couldn’t care less.
As for the Del Rey issue, I think that was a tad bit extreme and won’t really help us EU fans get our point across. That’s basically asking people to hate on the Legends movement.
Though TFA’s plot ain’t really something that’d blow people away…