Why Making The Sith The Heroes Are A Bad Thing

I am not the guy to do a post-mortem on The Acolyte, the latest failing of Disney era Star Wars announced yesterday to not be getting a second season on Disney+. It seems that Disney can’t get a hit of their own, the only big product being an Australian kids show they simply have the license to, but given the failings of properties have taken over or out right bought out they’re better off keeping it a license. I noticed a lot more gay characters in the last season of Miraculous, a show that’s at least ethnically diverse by French standards, though I have notes on the season finale. Doctor Who has only gotten worse since they got involved alongside Bad Wolf Productions. Marvel Studios has become as antagonistic to its legacy as Disney is, not that Marvel Comics is doing any better, while Disney’s original characters are being done by other animation studios, if Disney even has one of their own anymore.

For that reason I have no interest in getting a Disney+ subscription when there’s only two shows I really want to see: Bluey and Hailey’s On It (which also has gay couplings just to have them there, including of course the tomboy, which I only bring up because a Disney exec running Disney Channel and Disney Junior outright admitted to a “not so secret gay agenda” in a business call that got leaked online). However, if I did, I still wouldn’t have watched The Acolyte because it presented a theme I reject rather heartily: the idea that the Jedi are the real bad guys and the SITH are to be celebrated. Set in the final days of the Disney created period known as the “High Republic”, it started as a story about someone murdering Jedi and then tried to convince us the murderer was in the right, the Sith are misunderstood, and the Jedi are really the baddies for keeping the users of the Dark Side of the Force, from witches to would-be Sith Lord “The Stranger”, which would make a good Renegade Time Lord name.

That makes two things this series gets wrong, the other being how fire works. Apparently fire can flicker in airless space and burn with only stone as fuel. Unless the witches’ fortress was made of charcoal that’s unlikely. This follows a recent trend in writers to focus on the villains and make them sympathetic while giving heroes the biggest flaws, originally in the name of complexity but now to redeem the villain while still doing evil things. Even the Devil of Judeo-Christian beliefs has gotten that treatment in Hasbin Hotel, where he’s depicted as a misunderstood artist rather than the Prince Of Lies and every other nickname that says “this guy is evil” outside of the one he had before falling to evil and trying to take over God’s position in Creation. Like I discussed with Autobots and Decepticons, the Jedi and Sith serve a narrative purpose, and trying to flip that is to totally miss the point of the Sith and the reason they exist.

Unfortunately we can trace this back to pre-Disney seasons of The Clone Wars. First we had the introduction of “Dark Jedi”, who claim to use the Light Side of the Force but do evil acts. This culminated in Ashoka Tano being framed for a bombing that one of her Padawan “friends” actually committed, framing her on purpose as part of some end goal to get the Jedi out of the war as the actual guilty Padawan thought Jedi shouldn’t be generals and were not fulfilling their true purpose by trying to end it without fighting. So she killed a bunch of people to get the Jedi to stop killing people. I guess it was okay because most of them were clones?

Only Anakin, Ashoka’s Master and the one who would eventually fall to the Dark Side and become Darth Vader, murderer of Younglings and scourge of the galaxy, believed in Ashoka and tried to prove her innocence while the Jedi Council wanted her caught and turned over in the hopes of showing Jedi did not think they were above the law. Fine, they have to protect their image, but they could both look for her and investigate the bombing. Once her innocence were proven is where they really failed, claiming it was the “will of the Force” does not excuse them for their actions and yet Mace Windu and Yoda themselves acted like it did, convincing Ashoka that she didn’t belong there and quit the Order, fighting the war her way. This was done for two reasons: get her out of the way when General Order 66 was instituted because Dave Filoni had to protect his fictional “daughter” and to drive a further wedge between Anakin and the Jedi that Palpatine could use to his end of corrupting the supposed “chosen one”. It’s still a case of making the Jedi look as bad as possible long after the prequels were over.

In The Acolyte, the Stranger claims he wants to be free to explore the Force in his way, the way of the Dark Side, in peace and without worry about Jedi interference. All he wanted was an Acolyte, which I guess is supposed to be the Sith version of a Padawan, an apprentice. So why not call her an apprentice? Probably for the same reason we couldn’t use “mechanic” or “ice cream” properly. Maybe they just thought “acolyte” sounded more mysterious or something. So in keeping, his declaration is a pile of Bantha doodoo. Disney may have declared everything outside the movies and recent cartoons was no longer canon, if it ever was, but even in the still approved media this was never how the Sith operated.

In the approved timeline of shows, movies, and games, the Sith have always been the evil ones. Sith Lords are manipulative a-holes who even took advantage of their new place in the Imperial Empire, as seen in Rebels and games set in that period, while in The Old Republic they even treat each other terribly to reach their goals. They’re worse than the Hutts or Black Sun in how they cheat, manipulate, and murder each other to gain power. You’d think they’d wipe most of themselves out before the Jedi ever got to them. They’re creepy, they’re hurtful, the nonsense in that clip that “I don’t make the rules, the Jedi do” was him pretending all the murder he and Mae did was right does not scream “misunderstood” and at the end he abandons Mae and corrupts Osha, replacing one twin with another, killing the only person who believed in her during her own accidental frame-up. These are supposed to be your misunderstood heroes, people who kill Jedi guilty or innocent, manipulate and betray each other, and have no respect for anyone or anything save themselves.

Depicted: how the Sith do “peaceful resolution”.

That’s the role of the Sith in the franchise: to be evil. The Empire and First Order are not the main villains in the Star Wars galaxy. They are merely the armies for Palpatine/Darth Sidious and Snoke respectively. It’s the Sith that are the true threat, again as seen in Rebels and the Fallen Order game, as you fight them and see how cruel and vicious they are. The Nightsisters are also shown to be dark, cruel, and revenge-driven when Dooku tries to end his apprenticeship with Ventris (forced to by Sidious but Dooku never mentions that), or their treatment of Savage when picking what they think is Maul’s successor. In Fallen Order the Nightsisters are all killed off but use not just unnatural but morally questionable methods of revenge, including defiling the dead with necromancy if memory serves from watching a playthrough. In a “death of the author” moment, a reading of the Witches from The Acolyte also brings up moral questions like the treatment of Osha not wanting to join the Ascension, being made to lie to the Jedi, then after she decides she wants to go with the Jedi instead, attacks the Jedi (including a mental assault of a Padawan boy that Mae ends up easily convincing to drink poison as an adult), and claiming they were going to let Osha go only after scaring them enough to attack. Fans say that killing them all was actually the right thing to do as self-defense and a belief that the leader was going to attack Osha by turning them both into smoke.

Villains of fiction have two roles: to show the audience the end result of extremist and self-important only actions and a threat for the hero to overcome, a stand-in for obstacles in the audience’s life. We’ll probably never deal with a witch that will turn into a smoke monster but seeing them overcome a serious roadblock and threat gives us catharsis and determination to deal with our own problems, whether it’s another person, an illness, or some other situation serving as an obstacle in our lives. A hero can have flaws but in the ends must look heroic, because that’s in the name. In the same vein, a villain can be sympathetic but must still be villainous. A person should be judged by deeds, not goals. The businessman who runs a morally upstanding company that works for the customer may only be doing it for the money, but he’s still choosing a moral way of doing it. Meanwhile the freedom fighter is not the hero when his path to freedom is slaughtering a village of men, women, and children who are innocent of restricting his freedom, and certainly not when he and his forces take over the country and become worse tyrants.

The Sith represent the darker parts of humanity, hence the “Dark Side” of the Force. The Sith believe in absolutes, mostly themselves. They seek power for themselves, will treat anyone who they consider beneath them as dirt and anyone who opposes or simply impedes them as something to be destroyed. They’re not the people you’re suppose to emulate, they’re supposed to be the people you eliminate. Again, that’s the role of the villain. By trying to make, as the Bible would state it, good become evil and evil become good, you miss the point. Jedi help others, put others before themselves, and try to bring a peaceful solution but know sometimes peace has to be fought for.

Better Jedi than the ones in The Acolyte, and they’re not even old enough to vote.

It’s why the only decent Star Wars out there right now is the Disney Junior Young Jedi Adventures, which also takes place during the High Republic period and rendered white males nonexistent while making one character the daughter of gay mothers. It also has children flying to other planets in a starship on their own (not unusual for Disney Junior) so it’s probably not even canon, and yet we see the Padawans training (without a master to apprentice with oddly, looking more like a school with a Master as teacher rather than the usual Master/Apprentice concept) to be better people, help others, and be good people while not giving up no matter how hard things may seem to do the right thing. Once again, the preschool shows are better than the shows for adults. They’re better Jedi than the Jedi we see recently.

For this mistake alone I’m willing to see why The Acolyte failed. This is not a case of rooting for the underdog, which the extremists not surprisingly do to extremes and anyone who tries to impede them is the “enemy”.  They completely missing the whole point of villains by rooting for the baddies because they’re kind of like the baddies. The fans are supposed to be supportive of the side they’ve seen as villains this whole time, played in the games for fun or curiosity but never wanted to emulate, and cheered for the defeat of because a win for the Sith spells trouble for the larger galaxy, not just the Jedi. By missing the whole point of evil, which I see in a lot of other places, and its place in fiction, while ignoring the evil the Sith have been shown doing in official, unofficial, and formerly official/semi-official sources is not only a narrative fail, it may make one question the morality of the people responsible for the fiction that used to cheer on the heroes and overcome the villains both in the fictional world and our own. Trying to use the villains to support your cause…really doesn’t help your cause at all.