It’s Been 5 Years Since Palpatine Was Talking Shit on the Radio in Fortnite
Five years ago, the dead spoke this past weekend. Not within a Star Wars movie, mind, or at least, for the first time there. Not even within ancillary Star Wars tie-in material, like a comic book or a novel. Instead, the long-awaited return of the Skywalker Saga’s grand villain Sheev Palpatine came as part of a Fortnite special event, and Star Wars canonicity has never been stretched to its weirdest point since.
There’s definitely a lot of wild things that happen in Star Wars continuity—either the current approximation of it or the former Expanded Universe—but they are, for the most part, oddities that occur within the texts themselves. Beyond the confines of that ever-evolving continuity, there’s a lot of weirdness too, just from the sheer scope of Star Wars‘ impact on our culture. Taken separately—the idea of Palpatine announcing his grand resurrection to the galaxy as the ultimate revenge of the Sith, that the quote unquote “final” Star Wars movie would market itself through one of the biggest video games on the planet—these things aren’t exactly absurd in the face of what Star Wars has become over the past nearly 50 years.
And yet the veil was at its thinnest on December 14, 2019, and emerging at the crux of those two ideas was The Rise of Skywalker‘s Fortnite special event. If you could get it to work, you could watch (or aimlessly attempt to beat up) a digital recreation of J.J. Abrams talking to Sonic the Hedgehog‘s Ben Schwartz and the Game Awards’ Geoff Keighley to introduce a clip from the film. You could also see what remains, somehow this half-decade later, one of only two canonical sources for Palpatine’s return to the galactic stage.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the message itself. It’s very Sheev Palpatine to announce that you’ve cheated death with a big fleet of Star Destroyers and by basically sending the “I lived, bitch” meme across the galaxy. The man is nothing if not someone with a flair for the dramatic! But the absurdity remains that, five years later—in a franchise that loves endlessly contextualizing itself—this event, and its mention within the novelization of The Rise of Skywalker, are the only two references for such a fundamental piece of worldbuilding.
It’s already weird enough that it’s not in the movie, but, inevitably funny memes in the years since aside, the real absurdity of Palpatine’s Fortnite broadcast is that it’s just kind of lost to history. That’s a weird thing to say about something that only just turned five, but it’s true: you can’t play this Fortnite event any more, it’s only archived in player recordings. The text of the broadcast itself can at least be found within the novelization of Rise of Skywalker—which, according to author Rae Carson at the time, was provided by Lucasfilm, not made specifically for either Fortnite or her book—at the least, but it’s not the same. A piece of Star Wars history (derided as it is!) existing in this weird limbo between Star Wars as a continuous text and Star Wars as a brand entity, likewise sits in a similarly weird state of existence. The dead speak, but also they do not.
And yet perhaps it’s for the best that this one example, among many in the years since Star Wars canon was overhauled, is maybe the standout exposure of the fallacy that has been Star Wars‘ “it all matters” approach to continuity over the last decade. It’s always kind of been a lie from the beginning, despite what Lucasfilm said, that Star Wars would continue to grow and develop with the exact same weight given to any given book or issue of a comic as a TV show or movie would be. We’re not quite back at the levels of fractured retcons and recontextualizations as the old EU was, but we’ve had plenty of moments where modern Star Wars can’t line up with itself over the last 10 years. Hell, we’re in the middle of a similar situation to Palpatine’s broadcast right now with Marvel’s Battle of Jakku comics, themselves embellishing a formerly canonized story out of the parts of a formerly canon video game that is no longer accessible to play, maintaining history even as it overwrites it.
Nothing really matters to Star Wars canon outside of the moment it has to, beyond what is now established in the primary series of nine films (Palpatine’s speech included by proxy). And yet in that sense, everything therefore actually does matter: a Fortnite event you can’t play any more is as dramatically important to the climax of the Skywalker Saga as the the movie that tells that climax is, especially given the lengths Star Wars media has gone in the five years since to retroactively justify it. And perhaps that’s as important a message to tell Star Wars fans, obsessed with the truths of its universe as they so often are, as getting the word out that somehow, Palpatine returned is.
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