For a lot of Star Wars fans, Dantooine has always been tied to one of the saga’s most famous Rebel references. By the time A New Hope mentions it, the planet is already being treated as a former Rebel location rather than the center of the fight, and official canon still identifies Dantooine as the first base of the Rebel Alliance. That is why Andor made things feel so strange for some viewers.
As the series moved deeper into the birth of the Rebellion, Yavin 4 already started to look like a real base of operations long before the events of Rogue One and A New Hope. So did Andor actually forget that Dantooine came first, or did it just make the Alliance’s old base timeline much messier than it used to be?
Dantooine Was Still The Alliance’s First Base
A lot of the confusion starts with A New Hope itself. By the time Princess Leia gives the Empire Dantooine as a Rebel location, that base is already gone, and official Star Wars canon is clear that she knew it had been abandoned long ago while the Alliance was really on Yavin 4. But that does not change Dantooine’s earlier place in the story. Lucasfilm’s own Databank still identifies Dantooine as “the site of the first base for the Rebel Alliance,” which means canon has not erased its importance just because the Rebels had already moved on by the time of the original film.
That point matters because it gives the old Rebel timeline a clear order. Dantooine came first, then Alliance High Command relocated to Yavin 4 later. The official Base One Databank entry says exactly that, explaining that “some time after abandoning Dantooine,” the Alliance transferred operations to a new headquarters on the jungle moon of Yavin 4. So even before getting into what Andor changes or complicates, the core canon detail is still straightforward: Dantooine was the Alliance’s first base, and Yavin became the better-known headquarters only after that earlier site was left behind.
Andor Made Yavin Look Like A Real Base Much Earlier
That is where the confusion really starts. Official canon still says Dantooine was the first base of the Rebel Alliance, but Andor shows Yavin 4 looking much more developed, organized, and important far earlier than many fans expected. StarWars.com’s Episode 7 guide for Season 2 does not describe Yavin as just a temporary stop or a hidden camp. It says that on Yavin 4, “the rebellion is taking shape with a true base of operations,” which is exactly why the older timeline suddenly feels harder to read. Once the series starts showing Cassian, Bix, Wilmon, and other rebels moving through Yavin as a real working center, it becomes easy to see why some viewers felt the show was already treating it like the Alliance’s main base.
What makes it even trickier is that Andor was clearly written with this issue in mind. In an official StarWars.com interview, Tony Gilroy said that while figuring out the setting, Pablo Hidalgo told him that “Yavin 4 hadn’t been built at that point,” so they decided it could still work as a rebel hideout. That explanation helps, because it suggests the show was not trying to replace Dantooine outright. But it also explains why the timeline now feels blurrier. StarWars.com’s own Season 2 coverage says Yavin grows across the story from “a trackless jungle” to “an upstart hideout” and eventually into the central headquarters of the emerging Rebel Alliance. So even if Andor did not erase Dantooine, it absolutely pushed Yavin further back into the Alliance’s early history than many fans were used to.