Andor owes the Expanded Universe nothing

In April 2014 Lucasfilm took thirty years of novels, comics and games and moved them to a shelf labeled Legends. Every one of them stopped counting. It is still the most destructive thing anybody has done to a fandom's back catalogue, and I have never once seen it argued that Andor is worse off for it.

The Expanded Universe was not junk. Some of it was the best writing the franchise ever had, and plenty of people had spent decades treating it as real. Voiding it by memo was a genuinely lousy thing to do to them. That complaint was always legitimate.

Ferrix. Aldhani. Narkina 5. None of it existed before the show. Tony Gilroy did not go shopping in the archive. He built the places he needed, and then used them to answer a question the archive had never really asked: where does a rebellion actually come from.

Not from a chosen one. From a scrapyard where everybody owes everybody else a favor. From a heist that goes badly. From a prison where the sentence quietly never ends.

Here is the trick. Andor is enormously faithful. Just not to the material.

It is faithful to what the first film was actually about, which is ordinary people living under an occupation that has completely normalized itself. Everything that reads as new in Andor is a return: the grime, the paperwork, the sense that the Empire is mostly an administrative nuisance right up until it is at your door.

So the lesson is not "ignore the source." It is that source material comes in two parts, the events and the reason, and only one of them holds weight. Andor threw away the events and kept the reason.

Most adaptations do it exactly the other way round, and then act surprised when the people who can recite every event are the ones who leave unhappy.