When the Star Wars Expanded Universe began to take nascent steps towards building a world beyond the original movie trilogy, it dug into the same questions Disney and Lucasfilm explored decades later in creating the sequel trilogy. What does Star Wars look like in this new time? What parts of its world have evolved? Few ideas perhaps show a better example of both imagining’s divergent paths than a single snubfighter.
That starship was the E-Wing. While modern continuity presented us the idea that the way a victorious Rebel Alliance, now the New Republic, could improve on the legendary X-Wing starfighter was by simply building a newer X-Wing, the E-Wing’s entry into the Star Wars alphabet-fighter legacy imagined what they would do in creating something new. Although the two fighters would co-exist in legions of Star Wars books, comics, and RPG materials across the decades of the old Expanded Universe’s existence, the E-Wing never quite had the chance to outshine its iconic predecessor, both in the eyes of fans and textually within the Star Wars galaxy’s legion of pilots.
That’s perhaps why in part that when the EU became non-canonical legends continuity with the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm—and the announcement of a new canon to accompany a sequel trilogy in 2014—the E-Wing faded into those legends, and new canon simply decided to give the X-Wing a spruce up, familiar iconography winning the day. But now, nearly a decade later, the E-Wing is once again about to enter mainstream consciousness with its live-action debut in Ahsoka—and perhaps the questions of its fate are about to be repeated all over again.
