FanFiction

In the case of Timothy Zahn, it's a bit special because /gestures wildly/ Star Wars novels. Feel free to ignore if you're already aware of this mess, but for those not knowing the topic, an explanation =)

(Beginning of Star Wars rant)

Putting aside the fact that what's canon for Star Wars was changed by Disney, Star Wars is a canon that began with movies but very soon began expanding to novels, comics, and then video games. It's been from the very beginning A Glorious Mess because there isn't one author, nor even one specific group of authors working together, no, it's always been tons of persons basically being commissioned to write their own Star Wars fanfic to be published as Official Material. Which meant that after the first handful of novels it very quickly became impossible to keep track of every single thing introduced by other authors, which automatically led to plot holes/worldbuilding holes. So even if an author was very careful with their own creation, they had relatively high chances of contradicting something somewhere.

And then, Timothy Zahn, who had been writing for Star Wars from basically the start, apparently decided that his higher calling was to keep the universe together? This man has become known for taking several points introduced by different authors that appeared utterly incompatible and not only crafting an explanation for how it actually works that looks like it was planned from the beginning, which is totally not the case because different authors, but also tell an interesting story while he's doing narrative patchwork.

So yeah, Star Wars canon probably has more plot holes than black holes, but Timothy Zahn is the king of fix-it fic ='D

(End of Star Wars rant)

Planned "fake plot holes" are a super interesting narrative tool! I've mostly had a negative experience with it alas, because I used it when I was Storyteller for a Live Action RolePlaying game (LARP) and you wouldn't believe the number of times my co-Storytellers and I ended up metaphorically hitting our heads on our tables because the players just could not imagine for a second that we were trying to lead them somewhere. Anything "weird" was automatically treated as a mistake we made... and we were copiously mocked for it, to add insult to injury. While we were just wanting the characters to go "uh, this is weird, why is this weird?" because THE PLOT WAS THERE, follow the hints please! But nope, the players would rather complain about not having anything interesting to do and laugh at us for being so silly we'd forget how our own world was working. Grrrr...

That being said, I'm still firmly convinced that this narrative device is super neat and can be super satisfying. (Just don't use it anywhere near my former players x'D)