Star Wars series -Spoilers galore

One thing I truly appreciates about The Acolyte is that it's given me a whole bunch of YouTube channels to block / ignore.

I am not watching The Acolyte because the only Star Wars I am really interested in features spies in cool jackets but it’s odd, as a Trek fan, to see canon show up as a Star Wars term.

For a conversation on Bluesky a while back I ended up looking up the old essay suggesting that people in Star Wars are basically illiterate. This ties into canon here:



Compare this to Trek—one of the earliest instances of inter-series continuity is in the second episode of TNG, where Riker remembers reading about some incident involving someone taking a shower fully dressed, and has Data scroll through Starfleet history at massive speed (pretty funny considering all the advancements we’ve had in search and summary since 1987) to find the reference. I haven’t seen Attack of the Clones since it came out and I guess they go to the library there, but in general history is always vague, legendary, and nearly un-referenceable in Star Wars. If everything forgotten in-universe how important is a canon anyway?

Looking up that old article, though, also led me to this newer one about how much writing there is in Kenobi, everywhere, especially graffiti, and apparently in multiple scripts. She compare this, in particular, to graffiti left behind by Cypriot mercenaries in Ancient Egypt. (admittedly, the main subject of the blog), which demonstrate surprising high (and multiscriptual) literacy. Poking around the blog further, Bronze Age Cyprus is an interesting analog—a lot of writing, in both private and administrative spheres, but no suriving literary or historical tradition, and no real evidence of any kind of centralization or standardization like one finds on the more organized civilization in Crete—potentially says a lot about the state of the galaxy during the late Republic and Empire.

This gets to something else about Star Wars—I think it’s more fun to talk around. Trek’s canon’s mostly an armature to tell stories, and if you push too hard on it Trek generally becomes less fun, I think, like you’re trying to pick at things to make the whole universe collapse. Star Wars works in the opposite way, I think. The ultimate origin of “canon” in Trek was the realization that, unlike a hospital or legal show, you couldn’t really screw up basic things because there’s no “reality” to fill in the blanks. If Perry Mason’s inconsistent about the organization of the court system it’s either dramatic license or just a goof. If Captain Kirk’s inconsistent about basic stuff like that he’s changed the shape of his universe. It’s not that there was’t evolution on the way to the Trek we know (UESPA! Lithium!), but since Trek saw itself as a drama competing with “real-world” dramas establishing a sort of background consistency (one that, by TNG, included a consistent “history of the future”) was more important.

Star Wars operates differently, where the world grews around the stories and there wasn’t that demand for absolute consistency (think even on the level of setting—when designing for Trek Matt Jeffries, Andrew Probert, and co. had to consider needs across a series, while the designers for Star Wars just had to worry about what was in front of them). There are fewer demands, which means there’s more room to fill in the gaps without compromising the structure. You can have something like a critical obituary of Leia Organa but if you were to write something like this for someone like Picard (or at least pre-Paramount+ Picard) you’d end up with something like the life story of Fridtjof Nansen—interesting, inspiring, but also not really shaped because Picard didn’t exist for one narrative, much like Nansen didn’t.

The Acolyte has been decent.  One nice thing about streaming shows is that episodes aren't constrained by a certain time block, so while the first was nearly an hour, the latest (ep. 4) was barely 30 minutes.  Like chapters in a book.  There are some 'idiot ball' contrivances, but overall, I appreciate how modern SW, at least since Rogue One, has explored more of the Force outside of the Jedi / Sith orthodoxy.

Arguments about SW canon have been around at least as long as the Marvel comics. Fanboys are crying about canon now because the perceived breaches give them a figleaf to cover their hurt butts over the non-white cast.

I don't know about literacy in the SW universe, but given how many myths about our own history people believe, the changing views on Jedi aren't terribly surprising.  They did go around taking toddlers from their families and indoctrinating them into their cult, after all.  And everyone knows that they have no qualms about messing with people's minds.  Heck, it would be easy to plant news stories about how they were sexually abusing the padawans.

'Back the Blue' types have no problem believing that 'we need the second amendment to protect against fascist government' while blaming the victims every time a cop kills someone because 'they just should have obeyed'. People today justifying Palestinian genocide, and completely ignoring things like Rwanda and Sudan, and think letting Putin annex Ukraine is 'standing up to Russia', somehow, and we have one of the most literate societies in history. 

tl, dr: people are idiots and lack internal consistency

sorry. thought this was the US Politics thread for a second....

Acolyte: Ep. V - I'm sure the haters will find something to complain about, but so far the series is better than 2/3rds of the sequels, and this has been the high point. Not as good as Xmen episode V, but solid Star Warsing.  There is some idiocy, but no one is as stupid as anyone in Rise of Skywalker. We do get the reveal of Darth Smilus, but I expect another nother shoe to drop before we get to the end - despite the sunrise at the end, I don't think we've hit the despair threshold of Act II yet. And, minor spoilers, while they telegraphed the TPK, we haven't spent enough time with the characters to really feel any of their deaths. All the characters seem a little undercooked.

The aesthetics are a bit all over the place.  Using practical sets instead of the volume works. For a 'dark night in a near jungle' it's awfully bright. The yellow / amber lightsabers look great mixed in with the greens and blues.  

Spoilers for the end of Episode V

I'm assuming it took him a bit to realize it because he was still in shock from losing his ENTIRE TEAM an hour earlier.

I lasted 8 months of having absolutely nothing to do with Star Wars. Didn't watch any shows or read any comic books or anything. Didn't play any of the games that came out. But all it took was a GIF of a guy that looked like a Street Shark headbutting a lightsaber to pull me back in. I've seen three (3) episodes of The Acolyte now and so far it's pretty okay. As someone that has long thought the Jedi were the worst part of Star Wars (see my last post in this here thread) I kind of dig that the Jedi here are portrayed as misguided idiots at best and outright criminals at worst. Also I am glad that in the grand tradition of all the Lukes and Bens and Tims and Kyles and other guys and ghals with regular-ass names populating that very far away galaxy this show has some lady named Jackie in it. Jackie is the worst and that cat from Squid Game can barely contain his disdain for her and I'm here for it.

The fight choreography across the board is some of the best I've seen in a Star Wars. Like the first scene in the bar was straight outta Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or House of Flying Daggers or some shit.

Interesting that it was entirely flashback without any framing. Also that it leaves a lot of presumably dead characters (we've seen them all in episode III, so not a spoiler), but no one actually stopped to check. If there's one thing that soap operas have taught me, and they've taught me quite a bit, it's that falling off a cliff is rarely fatal, and if you haven't confirmed that someone is dead, they're probably alive.

Episode V may have had the best lightsaber battle in SW, and if not, it's up there. But it's been great to see that each named character obviously has their own style. Fights in the movies have all been kinda samey. Lore says that Mace Windu is a master of Vapaad, but we don't see him do much more than basic padawan shit. 

Spoilers because I'm speculating about the finale

Shout out to that random Senator Guy who showed up for a quick conversation and 100% had the Jedis' number and then called them out for all their fuckin' bullshit and accurately predicted all the future (in terms of the in universe timeline) fuckups them Jedis would end up making. A+ Star Wars side character.