Star Wars' upcoming Mandalorian era movie is all but confirmed to be an adaptation of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy, which means it's finally time to decide whether Legends Jedi Mara Jade is canon. When Disney purchased Star Wars in 2012, they declared the old Expanded Universe range of novels to be non-canon (or "Legends"). Since then, though, Lucasfilm has been absorbing the best elements of EU into new canon. Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy, for example, is clearly the inspiration for Dave Filoni's plans in The Mandalorian era – with many key elements already canon ahead of a movie generally expected to be called Heir to the Empire.
In Star Wars: The Bad Batch and Star Wars: Rebels, elements such as Mount Tantiss and the species of the Noghri were canonized respectively. Mount Tantiss served as Thrawn's home base during the Thrawn trilogy, with the Noghri being the species of Thrawn's personal bodyguard-assassin Rukh. Another element of the Thrawn trilogy that is also canon as of the release of Marvel Comics’ Darth Vader issue #11, written by Greg Pak with art by Raffaele Ienco and Neeraj Menon, is that the Empire is in possession of Luke's hand from Bespin, used in Zahn's books to create Luuke Skywalker. Despite this, one element is still missing from Star Wars canon.
