10 Times Star Wars Broke Its Own Rules (And You Didn't Notice)
You might not realise just how loosey-goosey Star Wars' internal logic actually is.
When any successful franchise gets sufficiently huge, it becomes a major pain in the ass for those in charge to keep track of every last detail big and small.
And Star Wars is just on a whole other level in that regard - not even the Marvel Cinematic Universe can compete - enough that when Disney acquired the IP in 2012, they tossed most of the Expanded Universe in the trash, rendering it non-canon while establishing a new curated one.
All the same, there are at least some established truths in Star Wars which have been soundly contradicted over the years, whether implicitly or explicitly.
And again, considering the sheer wealth of mythology that comprises the franchise, fans can't be blamed for struggling to keep track of it all. It's basically a full-time job at this point, enough that Disney literally pays a group of lore-keepers, Lucasfilm Story Group, to keep it in order.
Yet those in charge evidently haven't gotten everything right over the last half-century, breaking their own established rules and concepts on the regular, albeit often in ways that might've passed fans by...
10. How Force Ghosts Work
Many elements of the Force are kept ambiguous throughout the series, seemingly intentionally, but one of the more irksome inconsistencies is the means through which a fallen Jedi becomes a Force ghost.
Obi-Wan (Alec Guinness) of course becomes one after being felled by Darth Vader (David Prowse), and Yoda (Frank Oz) and Anakin (Sebastian Shaw) follow suit in Return of the Jedi, but what about other Jedi who die throughout the series?
Namely, what about the 200-or-so Jedi who died in the Battle of Geonosis in Attack of the Clones? Why didn't we see them become Force ghosts?
Beyond that, the time it takes for a dead Jedi to become a Force ghost is totally all over the place - some near-instantly transmuting into ghost form, while others take considerably longer.
Elsewhere there are countless unanswered questions, like who Force ghosts can reveal themselves to, and how extensively they can interact with the physical world.
Again, this aspect of Star Wars is kept vague to give the writers leeway for how they use it, but the constant deviation and variation makes it frustratingly hard to get a bead on what being a Force ghost is actually all about.