The myth: George Lucas feels that there would be marketing and brand confusion to have two heroes named Anakin at the same time, one in the Prequel Trilogy and one in the Expanded Universe. Because of this, he orders Anakin Solo to be killed in the New Jedi Order books. Troy Denning is given the instructions from Lucasfilm itself to kill off Anakin.

Murdered by George Lucas!?

The investigation: To get to the answer, Nanci went to the Twittersphere and all-around-awesome Lucasfilm person Pablo Hidalgo dug into his notes to get to the bottom of the issue.

Has the Anakin Solo death coming on high from George ever been confirmed? What I’ve heard is that he said Anakin couldn’t be the hero. #SWEU

— Nanci Schwartz (@nancipants) April 16, 2013

@nancipants the note says “Change person who is responsible for ultimately saving the day to Jacen – not Anakin”

— Pablo Hidalgo (@infinata) April 16, 2013

@nancipants and that was listed under the header “Too redundant to movie storylines – books should be more original” (5/6/98) BB memo

— Pablo Hidalgo (@infinata) April 16, 2013

@nancipants circled specifically in the outline is a mention that Anakin Solo “that he is the prophesied one”

— Pablo Hidalgo (@infinata) April 16, 2013

The reality: It turns out that George Lucas and Lucasfilm itself didn’t order that Anakin Solo be killed. Rather, they stated that he couldn’t be a prophetic hero and that role should be changed up to someone else. Hello, Jacen.

It appears that the decision to kill Anakin was made somewhere lower on the chain, perhaps the editors and/or authors working with Del Rey at the time. Whoever made the call, what’s clear is that there wasn’t a directive from on high to off Anakin Solo. The decision to kill him rather than change his role or put him on a bus appears to have been made by the people actually producing the books.