Starkiller is one of those Star Wars characters who never really leaves the conversation. A lot of us first met him in The Force Unleashed as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice—the guy tearing through stormtroopers, dueling Jedi in hiding, and dragging a Star Destroyer out of the sky. For a long time, it felt natural to treat his story as part of the same universe as the films and The Clone Wars.
So how did he end up on the Legends shelf instead of the main timeline? And what actually happened to push Starkiller out of canon in the first place?
Starkiller Was Canon Once – Until 2014 Changed the Rules
Before we talk about why Starkiller isn’t canon now, we should remember that he was part of the official continuity for a while.
Starkiller—real name Galen Marek—comes from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which Lucasfilm treated as a full-on multimedia project, not just “a game with a story.” It had the main game, a novelization, a comic, art books, and was positioned as the “official” tale of Vader’s secret apprentice between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.
In that era (the old Expanded Universe), his story sat alongside characters like Mara Jade and Kyle Katarn. He hunted surviving Jedi on Vader’s orders, turned against the Empire, and, in that continuity, played a major role in nudging Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, and others toward open rebellion.
The turning point came in 2014. After the Disney acquisition, Lucasfilm announced that almost all pre-existing Expanded Universe material—novels, comics, most game stories, including The Force Unleashed—would be rebranded under the Star Wars Legends label. The idea was to clear the board and build a single, streamlined canon going forward, centered first around Star Wars Rebels and the sequel films.
Starkiller was not singled out in some special ruling. He went out the same way Mara Jade, the Solo kids, and a huge chunk of post-ROTJ continuity went out: his story lived in the part of the timeline that Lucasfilm decided to set aside. So in the strict, technical sense, the reason he is not canon today is very simple. His entire storyline was placed in a continuity that the company no longer treats as part of the main narrative. Everything else we usually talk about is a separate issue.
The Usual Reasons Fans Give (And What They Miss)
When we talk about Starkiller in fandom spaces, we don’t usually start with corporate continuity decisions. We talk about how he looks and feels in the story.
The first thing that always comes up is his power level. In The Force Unleashed, Starkiller is turned up to eleven on purpose. He demolishes squads of enemies, carves through bosses that would be terrifying in any other context, stands against Vader, and, in the set piece everybody remembers, pulls a crashing Star Destroyer out of the sky. Next to the way the films portray Vader—slow, heavy, methodical—that kind of spectacle feels like it belongs to a different era of storytelling.
It’s easy to jump from that feeling to the conclusion that “he’s too overpowered, so he can’t be canon.” But that mixes two different questions. One is about how the old Expanded Universe liked to handle the Force, with big, dramatic feats all over the place. The other is about how the modern canon prefers to present power on screen and in its main stories. Starkiller’s strength never stopped him from being canon before 2014.
The “too OP” argument only really appears once we start comparing him to the tone of the new canon and try to drop him in unchanged. So it explains why the current story group might not want to copy his exact portrayal beat-for-beat, but it isn’t the reason his status flipped from canon to Legends.
The second thing people bring up is his role in the birth of the Rebellion. In the original Force Unleashed storyline, Starkiller becomes a key catalyst for the early Alliance. His actions bring important figures together and push them toward openly opposing the Empire. It’s a big, dramatic way to tie one original character into a major piece of galactic history.
In the current canon, those same story beats are handled differently. The buildup to the Rebellion is spread across Rebels, Rogue One, and a lot of tie-in material. We get scattered rebel cells, different leaders, and a slower process of connection and escalation, without a single secret apprentice sitting at the center of it all. If Lucasfilm tried to import the old Force Unleashed plot directly, it would trample over some of those newer stories and reshuffle who did what at a really foundational level.
Why “Not Canon” Doesn’t Have to Be the End
The last piece of this is what “Legends” really means for a character like Starkiller. Being moved to Legends doesn’t automatically mean a character is gone forever. Since 2014, Lucasfilm has treated that material as a kind of idea bank. They are not following those old stories as continuity anymore, but they have no problem reaching back and pulling out names, designs, and concepts when they find a good place for them. Thrawn is the easiest example: he started as an EU villain, disappeared with the rest of that continuity, then came back in Rebels and new novels, re-framed to fit the current canon.
Starkiller has already brushed up against that kind of second life. Sam Witwer has mentioned that Dave Filoni once considered using a version of Starkiller as an Inquisitor in Star Wars Rebels instead of lifting the entire Force Unleashed plot. That idea never made it to screen, but it does tell us something important. The character is not off-limits. People inside Lucasfilm have thought about how he might work in the modern timeline. They just haven’t found the exact version they want to commit to.
Sam Witwer says Dave Filoni Considered making Starkiller an Inquisitor for Rebels
by inStarWars
Realistically, if Starkiller ever appears in the new canon, he probably won’t look exactly like the player character we remember from the game. He’s unlikely to be the single person who secretly shaped the entire Rebellion. He’s unlikely to be casually dragging capital ships out of orbit in the middle of the Imperial era. A more likely version would be a very dangerous dark-side agent or Inquisitor working under Vader, still carrying some of Galen Marek’s personality and tragedy, but scaled to match the stories around him.