Calendars as Meaning: a Brief Look at Star Wars

Calendars say a lot about a society, the lack of a Star Wars one is interesting.

I think in a very temporal way. When experiencing a story what happens when and what that means in relation to other events is very important to me. As people have probably seen by the way I discuss art, I have a very relational brain. I feel the need to compare and ground things by looking at them in the context of some other piece of art or event. I feel the need to have a clock or calendar in mind. This often leaves me lost in stories that span large periods of time, Such as Three Kingdoms, where I often felt lost because my particular translation of the story only gave me a date I could relate to rarely, far more often using the traditional ancient Chinese dating system which I do not know how to use. In fiction, I find calendars interesting because they are more often than not relative dating systems. That is to say, one event is selected as crucially important and marks year 0 or 1 in a dating system. By far the most well-known example comes not from fiction but reality, the standard calendar most of the world uses today. The year Jesus Christ of Nazareth was born is marked as year 1 A.D. or CE, depending on how politically correct one wishes to be, with years before that being marked as B.C. Or BCE, with year 1 B.C. Being the year before Jesus’ birth. The fact Star Wars does not have a calendar system is both very interesting to me and also very frustrating. I want to begin by explaining the frustration than discussing the typical calendar used buy fans and the series now, before explaining my problems with that calendar and what I think should be used as a year 1 in the setting.

The lack of a unified calendar system in Star Wars in frustrating on an in-fiction level as well as a logistical story telling level. The Galaxy is Star Wars as we see it in current Disney canon has been dominated by one large polity for a large period of time, the Galactic Republic and then its short-lived successor state, the Galactic Empire. These states controlled vast swaths of the galaxy and would have had immense sway over places the didn’t control just due to their sheer size. In order to function properly as states, particularly large territorial ones, they would have needed to have a single unified calendar in order to allow for administration and commerce to flow properly. Yes, they were both made of a staggeringly diverse population with different cultures and also different species under their control, but a patchwork of different timetables and calendars would have been unworkable on a logistical level for both states. There is also the fact that the while the Galactic Republic was a democracy attempting to represent all these vast people, the Galactic Empire was a human supremacist state and thus would not care about destroying many cultures in the name of efficiency, it did so in many cases in the fiction of the universe. There is absolutely no reason for the galaxy to have a a stated calendar. That it doesn’t robs a fairly believable world of a large amount of its believability. It is understandable how this started. The first movie was a surprise hit no one say coming and thus the original idea wasn’t to create a whole universe to explore but to tell a singular story (Acura, 2021). Thus, the world did not need to be supremely believable with world-building things such a calendar but instead to give more of an impression to be a believable place, which it greatly succeeds at. It was only after Star Wars became a runaway smash hit and had a whole extended canon that it needed a calendar system if anything just to make telling stories in the world easy to understand where in the timeline a story takes place.

The Star Wars a lazy is filled with stories from all over the timeline. There are the core 9 films that make up the main plot of the series, A bevy of side stories that exist along side those films, and even an entire separate non-canon extended universe due to Disney changing what is considered to have happened in the galaxy when they purchased the series. The lack of a set calendar leads to finding out when exactly a story takes place in relation to another very confusing. For the main 9 movies, no calendar was particularly necessary. They are all easily able to be marked in relation to each other due to things such as characters aging and having children. The problem starts with all the side stories, particularly ones set between the prequel trilogy and the original 3 films. There are a bevy of shows, games, and other things that take place in this time gap and knowing what happened first is largely impossible without a wookiepedia dive. This effects my enjoyment of these shows. As discussed previously, I feel the need to understand stories in relation to each other. Due to this, I need to know where exactly in relation to Andor the Obi-wan Kenobi mini-series is in time. However, due to those two shows decided to use different reference points to orient them on the timeline, I have no idea where they fall in relation to each other. Obi-wan decides to use the end of Revenge of the Sith as its grounding point, taking place ten years after the fall of the Jedi. This makes sense for the story it is trying to tell. Andor decides to anchor itself to A New Hope, this makes sense as Cassian Anor’s journey will culminate in the movie Rouge One, which is about stealing the plans for the Death Star, which is blown up in A New Hope. What makes Andor interesting is unlike Obi-wan which uses text that says it takes place 10 years after the fall of the Jedi, it uses a kind of calendar system.

Andor opens with a shot that attempts to tell the audience when it takes place using text that reads “BBY 5”. If you are a casual Star Wars fan or like me, only really engage with the setting through story based content, you probably do not know what this means. I personally only know due to a podcast and nothing official. BBY stands for before the Battle of Yavin. The Battle of Yavin is the fight at the end of A New Hope where Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star. This is the official dating calendar system for the Star Wars series. It is convoluted and has changed over time as new errata was released. To explain the calendar fully, things that take place before A New Hope are in BBY with 1 BBY being a year before the film, for example Rouge One takes place in 1 BBY, while the earlier in the timeline Andor TV show starts at 5 BBY. Events that happen after A New Hope are labelled ABY, after the Battle of Yavin. For example, The Force Awakens takes place in 34 ABY. So far so normal. However, things get confusing because unlike the real-life calendar we use, there is a year 0, the year the Battle of Yavin took place. This leads to fun things such as Rouge One taking place in 1 BBY, but A New Hope taking place in year 0. The end of Rouge One is supposed to take place directly before the beginning of A New Hope. Happy New Years Leia, your dad will take you prisoner now (wookiepedia, N.D.)

From my tone you have probably guessed I do not like this calendar system. Despite how some people get confused about BC/AD having no year 0, it makes sense. In 1 AD we live in a world with the light of Jesus Christ, his birth being year 0 does not particularly make sense as it is the start of something, it being year 1 does. But I have two other main problems with the BBY system. The first, it is used primarily as a fun fan thing rather than an actual grounded calendar. Many works do not use the system at all. I am a fairly casual Star Wars fan having only really engaged with the core 9 films, the Clone Wars TV show, and a smattering of video games. It took until I watched Andor a few weeks ago to run into something official that used the system. Even as a child when I would read a Star Wars visual encyclopedia I got as a present, I do not recall the dating system being used. This leads to the problems mentioned above. The second problem I have is that the Battle of Yavin is a terrible starting point for a calendar.

The Battle of Yavin does not particularly change much. Yes, the Death Star is blown up and that is a good thing, tyrannical empires should not have the power to blow up whole planets. The political system is largely unchanged, however. The empire still exists as it did, the abolishment of the senate that happens at the start of A New Hope is still in effect, the emperor is still alive. The rebellion has won a battle, but the war is far from over. It does not make sense to mark this as the triumphant victory to start a new calendar with. Additionally, choosing the Battle of Yavin has an unintended effect of splitting up the original trilogy. Dates have meaning. Despite being only 6 years apart, 1 BC feels significantly further away than 5 AD. This effect means that events that take place very close in time feel disjointed. Year 0 does somewhat forestall that issue however I do not think it completely removes it. The resistance to the empire happens across both BBY and ABY, they are not just connected but the exact same movement working towards the same goal. It feels as though the Battle of Yavin was chosen not because it makes world building sense, but because it was the end of the first movie. As such I would like to propose a better start to the calendar.

My preferred start to the calendar is very simple and follows a similar idea of the choice of the Battle of Yavin but takes into account the state of the world. I would choose the death of Emperor Palpatine at the end of Return of the Jedi as Year 1. The calendar could be referred to as VG, victory for the galaxy, or something stupider like FY 1, Free Year 1. I am terrible at naming things. By celebrating the successful end of the rebellion rather than it striking a blow against the empire, it allows for the galaxy to move on and put its past behind it, literally. This way w get all the main 6 George Lucas created movies all in the same time period and not spread out across BBY and ABY. These two reasons make Palpatine’s death a great choice for year 1. I also believe it is a better starting point that their other date I had in mind, Palpatine’s ascension as emperor. Palpatine is a savvy politician and gains a substantial amount of his legitimacy from being the chancellor of the Galactic Senate. He would want to show his reign as emperor as a continuation of that democratic institution and the powers it voted to give him. He would not call attention to his dictatorial power by creating a new calendar system. That would show he is all powerful and would harm how he keeps the senate around for a significant portion of his reign as emperor because just by existing, the senate gives his power a fig leaf of democracy. This leaves his death as the best place to start a calendar that makes sense both from a franchise logistical sense, as well as one that makes sense for the world to choose for itself.

Star Wars’ lack of an internal calendar system is an act of bad world building that made sense to be skipped at the beginning of the franchise but now leads to confusion. Works will choose to ground themselves on the timeline in relation to varying works depending on what makes sense thematically for the work. This leaves the audience confused as to how the works relate to each other. The franchise has attempted to fix this using the external BBY calendar system. The system largely only exists in supplementary media however and it is a fix that fails to take into account the reality of the world of Star Wars. A such, A new year 1 should be chosen at it should be the year Sheev Palpatine is killed. This allows for there to be a set time for the supposed end of tyranny in the galaxy, while still keeping the benefits of the BBY system. Now every show, game, movie, novel, and comic book should include this in their opening crawl.

References

Acuna, K. (2021, May 4). George Lucas was convinced 'star wars' would flop and refused to believe it was a hit until he got a call telling him to turn on the news. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/when-george-lucas-knew-star-wars-was-a-hit

Wookiepedia. (N.D.) 0 BBY. Retrieved June 28, 2025 from https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/0_BBY