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

Five years ago the dead spoke last weekend Star Wars movie, thought, or at least the first time there. Not even in the supporting frame Star Wars tie-in material like a comic or a novel.Instead, the long-awaited return of the Skywalker Saga the great villain Shev Palpatine came as part of a Fortnite: special event, and Star Wars the canonicity was never pushed to its weirdest point.

There’s definitely a lot of wild stuff going on inside Star Wars continuity – either its current approximation or ex Expanded Universe— but these are, for the most part, quirks that occur in the texts themselves. Beyond that ever-evolving continuum, there is also a lot of queerness, just exclusively Star Warsimpact on our culture. Separately, the idea of ​​Palpatine announcing his grand resurrection across the galaxy as final revenge on the Sith is unquote “final” Star Wars the film will be sold through one of them the biggest video games on the planet— these things are not so absurd, in the face of what Star Wars has become over the past 50 years or so.

And yet, the veil was thinnest on December 14, 2019, and at the heart of those two ideas: The Rise of Skywalkerof Fortnite: special event. If you could put it into actionYou can watch (or aimlessly try to beat) the digital recreation show talking to JJ Abrams Sonic the HedgehogBen Schwartz and the Game Awards feature a clip from the movie You can also see what remains of only two canonical sources for Palpatine’s return to the galactic stage after half a decade.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the message a lot to announce to Chev Palpatine that you have cheated death with a large fleet of Star Destroyers and basically sending “I lived, stain” meme across the galaxy, the man is nothing if not one a flair for the dramatic! But the absurdity remains that five years later loves in an endless context to itself, this event and its reference in the novel The Rise of Skywalkerare the only two references to such a fundamental part of world building.

It’s already weird enough that it’s not in the movie, but inevitably hilarious memes over the years, Palpatine’s actual nonsense. Fortnite: broadcast is that it’s just lost to history. It’s a strange thing to say about something that just turned five, but it’s true. you can’t play this Fortnite: event anymore, it’s only archived in the player recordings, the broadcast text can at least be found in the novel The rise of skywalker– which, according to by Rae Carson it was provided by Lucasfilm at the time, not made specifically for anyone Fortnite: or his book, at least, but it’s not the same Star Wars history (mocked as it is) exists in this strange limbo Star Wars as a continuous text and Star Wars as a brand entity is also in a similar state of existence.The dead speak, but they don’t.

And yet perhaps the best is this one example, among many over the years Star Wars The canon has been overhauled, which is perhaps the highlight revealing the fallacy it happened Star WarsThe “everything matters” approach to continuity for the past decade has always been a lie from the start, despite what Lucasfilm says Star Wars would continue to evolve and evolve with exactly the same weight given to any given book or comic book release as a TV show or movie. modern Star Wars can’t keep up with him for the past 10 years. Hell, we’re in a similar situation with Marvel’s Palpatine broadcast The Battle of Jakku comics themselves embellishing previously hallowed history from parts of a previous canonical video game that are no longer available to play, preserving the story even as it is rewritten.

Nothing indeed does matter Star Wars canon beyond what should, beyond what is now established in the main series of nine films (Palpatine’s speech included by proxy.) And yet, in that sense, everything therefore actually matters; a Fortnite: the event you can no longer play is as important to the climax of the Skywalker Saga as the film that tells the story of that climax, especially given the lengths. Star Wars The media is gone within five years retroactively justify it. And maybe that’s an equally important message to say Star Wars fans, obsessed the truths of his universe as they often are because they say that somehow Palpatine is back.

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