Star Wars Fans Decided They Hated The Acolyte Before It Even Aired

Summary

Star Wars: The Acolyte episodes have been routinely review bombed before airing as fans decry that it's 'woke' and 'feminist'.
Criticism about the lore, which is often based on outdated Legends references anyway, are constantly used to try and prove that showrunner Leslye Headland isn't a fan.
She very clearly is, but the fact that she championed for a diverse cast and brought outsider perspectives into the show upset a fandom so enraptured by its own gatekeeping.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Acolyte delves into an unseen era in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars history as it examines the lax arrogance and deep-seated corruption of The Jedi Order. It sows the seeds that would ultimately sprout the complacency Palpatine abused to usher in his Galactic Empire and all but destroy their religion. It’s an incredibl𝔍y interesting premise with some of the most exhilarating action sequences we’ve had from the space opera in a long time. But this is Star Wars, so any praise for this bold new direction is being met with vitriol, toxicity, and bitter resentment.

One look at the hatred flooding social media and it becomes Kyber crystal clear that Star Wars fans are working backwards. They’re not engaging with the show or giving it a chance, they hated it before it even aired and are now scrambling to find excuses to justify sꦅuch a passionately🎉 ignorant response.

Reddit posts, Twitter threads, and blogs decrying that The Acolyte is ‘woke’ and ‘feminist’ have been spilling out since before the show started. Just look at what drew fans’ ire as early as Episode 3—a coven of witches using the Force to create life. As though the Nightsisters, also a coven of witches, aren’t a fan favourite concept already. Fans aren’t mad at the plot, acting,💖 or even the concepts driving the show, it’s the lack of men that’s causing an uproar.

We then have the Jedi Order itself. There are a couple of major complaints levied against how it’s represented through♕out the season. Its incompetence is a big one, but what has fans especially upset is that a Sith Lord running rampant supposedly contradicts a line in The Phantom Menace where Ki-Adi-Mundi says, “The Sith have been extinct for a millennium”.

For one, Jedi incompetence is the backbone of the Empire’s rise. They sat face-to-face with Palpatine for three movies and didn’t realise that he was the all-powerful Sith Lord pulling the strings all along (and anyway, the Sith have been in hiding s⛎ince before Palpatine). They truly believed that nobody could trick them. This isn’t a new idea, it’s a continuation of themes George Lucas weaved into this world from the very beginning.

Secondly, it’s a TV show. You’re supposed to learn more as it goes on and uncover the plo🔯t week by week. As it proved, several of the elements fans demanded explanations for were, in fact, explained by the time the finale aired.

Spoilers for The Acolyte’s finale follow.

At the end of The Acolyte, Vernestra Rwoh pins all of the blame on Sol as a &ꦆlsquo;rogue Jedi’ (not a Sith) to hide the fact that her former apprentice, The Stranger/Qimir, t🐟urned to the Dark Side. Ki-Adi-Mundi doesn’t know the truth, nor does the wider Jedi Order. It was never a plot hole. But fans who wanted to hate The Acolyte because it’s ‘woke’ used this as fuel to justify their outrage when a few episodes later the argument would collapse in on itself.

Obsession with lore and minor details has been used as a gotcha to attack showrunner Leslye Headland, who has been at the center of a truly awful hate campaign, in an effort to prove that she isn’t a fan. Even if she wasn’t—she is, this is the same woman who put her own OC in the series and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:wants to 🐟adapt ෴Knights of the Old Republic—there’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:nothing wrong with that. It only points to the gatekeeping culture that🔜 has festered over the years. Andor was widely praised and made it a point to hire writ♓ers who weren’t fans to keep it grounded.

Fans were angry that Mae bled a Kyber crystal, acting like it was something The Acolyte introduced to sell toys. It’s been a thing since 2017, and fans loved when Vader did it in hꦯis own comic run.

Even Darth Plagueis, who fans have wanted to see in live-action for god knows how long, wasn’t enough to quell the anger. If you haven’t heard the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise, he’s Palpatine’s master who created﷽ life from the Force and could save others from death, b𓆉ut ironically not himself.

His briefꦛ appearance caused yet more outrage because we saw him hiding in a cave, watching Osha and Qimir from afar. Fans thought this was ill-fitting for a Sith Lord, even though hiding in the dark is their whole thing (and if you think that’s silly, Count Dooku ꦑin PJs is so popular it got added to Battlefront 2).

Fans are especially terrified that he will learn how to create Anakin Skywalker from those same “lesbian space witches&r🔜dquo; we mentioned earlier, as if a Sith Lord stealing from other cultures to serve ♚their own nefarious ends isn’t perfectly in character. But that quote right there sums up where so much of the hatred stems from. The Acolyte’s protagonist is a woman.

We saw this with Rey in the sequel era to such a point that executive producer Kathleen Kennedy said that to work on the franchise. Mae and Osha are also Black, and Star Wars has recent history with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:hate messages directed at Black women.

Fans want mindless action figures, who are men, kicking butt. Not women, not queers, and not a diverse cast. The Acolyte dared to put someone who wasn’t a man front and center, and like the sequel♛ era before it, has become the centrepoint for a culture war stoked by bad faith actors when, in reality, most fans would be jumping with joy at a Plaguei💛s cameo if not for this flimsy campaign.