The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: The Acolyte (Part II)

(I really hadn’t planned to make this a three-parter but I had to stop and put together a valedictory for Bob Newhart. The third part should probably be up tomorrow at the usual time.)

The Star Wars Lore fifty-car-pile-up.

Why make a prequel?  

There’s rarely a good reason for it. There are exceptions of course.  The Silmarillion was a prequel that laid out just how vast the mythology of Middle Earth really was.  It worked for the Godfather Part II where you see Vito’s life being contrasted with his son Michael’s. But you already know the reason The Acolyte was made would be nowhere near as good.

 When you are dealing with Woke “creatives” the reason for a prequel is always retconning. Either to make a previously established character retroactively gay or to take something away from a white man and give it to a black woman. Doctor Who’s entire sixty-year history of lore was trainwrecked to make the first Doctor a little black girl. Instead of William Harnell. 

And while I am quite certain that LucasFilm will eventually make the relationship between Darth Plagueis and Palpatine a gay romance that ended badly, it is for the latter reason that this show was created.*  There are several achievements that are being torn from the grasp of undeserving white men who have had them for about two generations and handed to black women characters who didn’t exist until a month ago.

The first Star Wars virgin birth.

Before digging into it, I think you should know where I’m coming from.  In 1999 when Anakin’s mother declared that her son was a virgin birth, I nearly went blind in the theater from the force of my eyes rolling back in their sockets.  “Jesus Christ!” I groaned.

“Apparently so.”  The Mother of the Darkspawn replied dryly.  

In case that didn’t make it clear, I always thought Anakin’s virgin birth was completely retarded. I knew where it came from instantly, George Lucas was cribbing from his copy of Joesph Campbell for Dummies, again. 

“In mythologies emphasizing the maternal rather than the paternal aspect of the creator, this original female fills the world stage in the beginning. Playing the roles that are elsewhere assigned as male and she is a virgin because her spouse is the Invisible Unknown.” 

-The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joesph Campbell

Virgin birth in mythology is always someone born with a special destiny, usually a god.  In Egyptian mythology Nut (sky), spontaneolusly gives birth to the sun god Ra.  You can find other examples in Hindu, Babylonian, Maori, Greek, and you pretty much name it and you can find aspects of it.  There is an instinctive human reaction to view the product of virgin birth as someone divine.  It’s like God had a plan or something. 

However, using it in fiction is at best tricky business.  Maybe in very high fantasy, you can get away with it, if you are exceptionally good, and by that I mean Tolkien good. Star Wars is absolutely not that good, nor it is high fantasy. It’s just pulp. Sure I used to love it but it’s pulp. That doesn’t mean you can’t use virgin birth, you just need to use the Moses variation. Moses was found in the reeds. Superman was found in a rocket. Taliesin was found wrapped in a bundle of furs in a salmon trap, Momotaro is found in a giant peach. You get the idea. Mysterious baby of unknown origin who clearly has a special destiny is found by the humble but deserving. That honestly would have worked a lot better than what George did.

I’ve always viewed Anakin Skywalker’s virgin birth as being a product of ridiculous conceit on George Lucas’s part. He had no business going there.  Especially given how much of an abject failure Anakin was at everything except evil. 

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, Anakin’s virgin birth has been part of the canon for a quarter of a century.  It was part of what made him unique in Star Wars. 

As I said, this prequel to the Prequals’ purpose was to take this something special away from a white man and give it to a black woman.  In fact, they did it twice in this series.  First by making Anakin’s virgin birth no longer unique, Osha and Mae are the first.  Second Darth Plagueis and Palpatine’s creation of Anakin has been taken away from them and given to the twin’s mother Aneiseya. In the last episode it was made clear they were just copying her. Also, LucasFilm fucked up the monomyth, because Aneiseya should have made herself pregnant rather than her lover, that just made her a woman filling a man’s role and I’m damn sure they didn’t mean to do that.

The twins aren’t even twins. At the end of the show, it is revealed that they are one person divided into two. The audience’s reaction to this discovery is, “Okay then, what does that mean?”  To which Headland’s response is, “Isn’t that neat?  Didn’t I come up with something cool?”  Not if it doesn’t actually mean jack-shit Leslye.  And clearly, it doesn’t.  They didn’t even use the old cartoon cliche of; the twins were divided between light and dark, this is the good one and this is the bad one.  Although, that may have been in an earlier version of the story, and LucasFilm couldn’t tolerate the idea of any black woman being evil. 

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*Okay. The real reason this was made was spite. A rumor had broken that Kathleen Kennedy had been instructed by Iger and Chapek had ordered her not to green light anything.  Leslye Headland knows how Hollywood works and offered KK a chance to make a power play by publicly pitching a TV show to her. It worked, I think Kennedy greenlit it without ever looking at it.