Lately I have been thinking about “Yoda”. The strange little man from Star Wars. I have been contemplating Yoda. Based off my general impression with absolutely no collected evidence of any kind, I feel like people are sort of turning on Yoda. More people online are being mean to Yoda than ever before. Don’t look this up in case I’m wrong. I’m sure you’ve felt it too…I see memes and jokes about Yoda all the time- people joking about feeding yoda chocolate, yoda smoking weed, etc. I could go on. I have a theory as to why this is happening. I think the canon is buckling under Yoda.

I think this ironic perspective on Yoda could be blamed on the Star Wars Prequels, and their current cultural reappraisal- all the kids who grew up with them are adults now, and they’re trying to Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius-style manifest into our reality a secret, good version of those movies that might even be better than the originals. And it’s only gotten worse with the massive success of The Mandalorian on Disney Plus, a whole tv show that was shot inside the holodeck from Star Trek and has a Precious Moments-looking ass adorable baby version of Yoda. Not sure why I’m describing this part. Do you not know about Baby Yoda?? Whatever, it’s important for my point.

I think Star Wars (and our entire culture) is reaching sort of a breaking point with all of its shared-universe internal consistency stuff. Honestly I think the whole thing is inherently inside the breaking point. I’ve always been generally opposed to the codification of fictional settings and our culture’s eagerness to apply enlightenment-era liberal scientific reality to america’s biggest fairytale franchise (STAR WARS!) has always rankled me- despite my own delight at seeing Things I Recognize. Sincerely: the magic is often contained inside the mystery.

Expanding a narrative world -into a sequel, a spinoff, whatever- necessitates taking a bit of mystery or novelty out of your original work. Doing anything like that is Repeating Yourself, and often a little repetition is good for rhythm! Ultimately, I just dont think fiction and our modern conception of scientific reality are meant to intersect quite so much as they currently do, no matter how fun it can be to explain that the guy the guy from Cloud City carrying the ice cream maker was actually doing a super important mission.

I think Yoda is the biggest victim of this contradiction in the Star Wars setting. Lucas introduced him as a sly little elf: a kung-fu master in the Shaw Brothers tradition, dispensing platitudes and pulling silly pranks. And he was beloved in that role. People LOVED that little freak. He was perfect as a freak! He is in every respect, a little Tom Bombadil silly guy. Then, the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s fizzled out, Reagan ushered in a new era of evil, and George Lucas’ wife left him for the artist who designed the giant stained-glass window at Skywalker Ranch.

Then came Desert Storm and Bush II, and eventually, after Attack of the Clones was already out the door, 9/11. It seems that Lucas returned to his massive career-defining franchise with a newfound cynicism and calcified creative instincts- the Prequels are, suffice it to say, “not good”. But in many ways, they are his most personal movies: The “Star Wars” are a toxic force that drives our hero apart from his great love, the heroic Jedi are dogmatic assholes, and the US is a fascist dictatorship (he made some points!). Yoda has been transformed into a septic Donald Rumsfeld-type guy who does CGI wuxia backflips and has a tiny green lightsaber. “Around the survivors a perimeter create.”

Like so many things in the Prequels, the Yoda of this story makes no god-damned SENSE compared to the Yoda of the originals-and honestly, that’s fine- George doesn’t care, he calls the lightsabers “laser swords”, and he’s right to do it. He can fuck around with his story as much as he wants. He clearly had a lot to work out about his hopes for the future of digital filmmaking, America, and his complicated relationship with his life’s work. So why SHOULD it be compatible with the source material? Those were different movies (they were also better movies, but thats beside the point).

Well, to the modern nerd, that is unacceptable. The Yoda of the prequels IS the Yoda of the originals, after all. He is a real guy, and he went from one movie over to the other movie. Perhaps he also met like 50 other guys you’ve never heard of while he was at it. So why is he so different? I guess losing a fight to a 70-year-old pervert evidently drove him insane and made him into a goblin, somehow, or, he was just inexplicably lying in the original movies. Whatever it is, it has to make just enough sense to justify everything that came before. There is a real, incontrovertible history here. Nobody MADE these movies, no decisions went into them, they are simply historical documents.

This is the approach Disney has taken. They have teams of guys determining if Han Solo has ever eaten pizza so some person writing a comic book can pull the trigger on the Han Solo Pizza Arc. I can’t fault them- it’s nice to have consistency, and people love exploring the margins of a compelling setting. But making Yoda a coherent figure is a bit too much to ask. He’s too silly in the first place. Making him such a dramatic character in the prequels was already wayyy too much to ask. Watching that guy bounce around elicits a similar feeling to when your edible hits a bit too hard.

I mean, Yoda is an important FIGURE in the Star Wars universe- he has big arcs in the Clone Wars cartoon where he’s like, idk, getting space Colombia to open up its Lithium trade and so on. And he’s a little FREAK! And now there’s a baby version of him, or his ‘species’, in The Mandalorian. His species?? Answer me, before The Mandalorian (and Yaddle), did you ever seriously wonder about Yoda’s “species”?? My impression of Star Wars aliens as a kid was that aliens were all completely different, that “Alien” was a type of guy you could be, like if a bug alien and a blue alien had a kid, it might come out as a Chewbacca. They were just “Aliens”.

Because why would you ever want to see a guy you’ve seen before, when you could see a NEW guy? They’re not FROM anywhere- or if they are, we’re not going there. Just like the blue milk or the fact that there’s no written text, zippers, buttons, or wheels anywhere, that the ships don't look like rockets,- it’s all meant to evoke a feeling of intuitive magic and wonder. Everything that could be mundane is exciting. Even the MILK. There was never any underlying logic beyond that instinct.

Now, we are being forced to examine things about this setting that were never mean to be investigated. The only answers are utterly ridiculous. Are we seriously going to eventually get an emotional scene in The Mandalorian season 5 where Din Djarin hands Grogu off to his fellow Yodas on the fucking Yoda Planet?? Yodatopia? Little Yodas flying around in Jetsons cars and shit? Yoda taxonomy? Blue Yodas? Where does it end?? If you think I’m being too harsh on The Mandalorian, remember that the last season had a cgi neural-net-voiced Luke Skywalker rescue Grogu from a bunch of Bionicles that were going to use his magical eugenics-blood to bring Sheev Palpatine back to life so he could appear in The Rise of Skywalker, a Star Wars movie so universally hated that it united the entire political spectrum (that had just been viciously Culture-Warring over The Last Jedi) in glorious concord over how fucking appalling it was. All this for TROS! Dave Filoni would GLADLY take you to the Yoda Planet. I bet he thinks about its social structure at night.

My point is, we made Yoda too real. We made everything in Star Wars too Real. It used to be Hyperreal -the ideal realm of the fairytale- now base liberal conceptions of “Reality” intrude into our cultural imagination: morality is good vs evil- not a holistic and spiritual relationship with the self and the universe, material concerns do not motivate action-only being Good or being Bad, and the world is full of concrete scientific answers- magic is a list of easily reproducible scientific equations reliant on your genealogy, and it comes from a Magic Planet that is half Good and half Evil. And some beings are just Not ever going to be connected to the flow of all life. Star Wars is (unwittingly) saying that your slaves won’t go to heaven. There’s a distressing trend in our culture of every long-running franchise eventually bending towards Eugenics in one way or another.

I think people might be, on some level, rebelling against the demands that they take Yoda seriously in the same vein that our entire culture sort of immediately agreed that Thanos from The Avengers movies was a very stupid character. Once he started taking center stage, Thanos became the focus of thousands of increasingly ironic and self-referential memes. Thanos can’t sustain the scrutiny of being transformed from a bombastic maniac into an underwritten ecofascist Johnny Cash’s-cover-of-Hurt dad who BRUTALLY massacres the entire cast. He’s a big purple guy who casts spells. He’s not cerebral, and certainly not the type of cerebral that the Russo Brothers were trying to evoke. It’s just stupid. Its stupid!

There is a creative void underneath Yoda and Thanos. The teams in charge of these characters necessarily cannot acknowledge the real problem with them- that they just fundamentally don’t make sense as consistent or credible characters in the sort of story they are trying to tell. They stretched him too thin, fitting this character into contexts he's tonally incompatible with for whatever reason. That contradiction grows like a tumor into the entire work, with every new appearance trying to paper over another bizarre contradiction, forever.

As these Brands try to expand, searching for more and more narrative territory to exploit, they start making weirder and weirder bets while still trying to smooth those choices over for mass-market appeal- or they back themselves into a corner like they have with Yoda. But there are some things so indelibly stupid that you can’t really smooth them out- the weirdness WAS the point. The audience can sense the void, and they are going to fill it with whatever their instincts lead them to. Once, Yoda delighted us by being a little freak- now he torments us, and we punish him for it.

i think part of the thing here is the transformation of these things from the space of like... nerd lore to the zeitgeist itself. like it used to be you could find all this baffling weird expanded stuff, but to do so you dove into... weird paperbacks that got sold at thrift stores with art on the cover that's truly stunningly weird. and in those spaces i really don't mind people writing 25 different lore stories about yoda because like. go for it dude! have fun with it, make up your lore, have fun; even if i disagree with your personal perspective on star wars you're fine because i don't have to, i can enjoy star wars however i want

but we don't live in that world anymore. we live in a world where star wars is The Thing, disney wants every person on earth to own disney + and watch andor, they don't want you to be allowed to enjoy star wars casually or as a weird special interest where you're obsessed with luke skywalker's love life, they need to make sure it All Lines Up so the next movie can be Perfect and have the Edges Sanded Off

it doesn't feel like people are putting yoda in things because they spent 12 hours a day thinking about yoda because they're incredibly brainfucked about star wars like a lot of my coolest friends, it feels like they put yoda in things because Yoda Make Money Known Character

or to summarize: it's okay to like, fail to approach a franchise correctly and do it "wrong" in this way, to treat yoda like an alien that you can understand the history of, so long as you're some weirdo writing great fanfiction and not The Disney Company trying to get people to Buy Yoda Toy

THIS is what star wars obsession SHOULD be like look at what disney TOOK from us

(gf edited out of image for privacy. book she owned not edited out because anyone can drag her for that)

also I have complex feelings about this as The Last Continuity Defender, but like, I can't deny that it's basically right. I have the kind of brain that rankles when Spongebob Squarepants doesn't quite line up with itself, it's just the specific kind of autist I am, and I still believe theoretically in the promise of a kind of historical materialist approach to shared world fiction, where the subject isn't characters so much as it is place.

but like, I keep going back to reread bits of The Infinity Gauntlet where Thanos at one point conjures up a female version of himself to try and goad Death Herself into jealousy because he's a weird incel with power of God. I haven't bothered watching the second Infinity Whatever movie. we're watching Doctor Who for the first time and just jumping across the entire span of the franchise almost completely at random and I'm enjoying it a lot for how figures like The Doctor, The Cybermen, The Daleks &c become more like actual mythological figures tossed together to build new little interesting self contained science fiction stories (so far I'm pretty lukewarm on the big Season Finale Events). one of the most engaging parts of Lost is putting aside the question of "what's true" and asking instead "what does this character THINK is true, and what do they want everyone ELSE to think is true". god, why does so much discussion of continuity in these settings not ever include the question "hey what if this character is just... lying? or just wrong?" the possibility that characters might have a fundamentally limited perspective on events, like they do in uh real life, seems to not be a part of most people's conception of "canon". which yeah doesn't leave a lot of room for questions of the numinous or awe or magical delight!

it's probably telling that the parts of the Expanded Star Wars Universe that still pique my curiosity when I page through this silly character book are the bits where weird guys like Vergere show up going "ah maybe there's a different relationship we could have to the Force". it's telling that, just like all the interesting greys and complexities in THe Last Jedi were immediately shut down real fast, every time the EU introduced a character like Vergere or a species like the Yuuzhan Vong that seemed to exist entirely outside the established consensus reality of the galaxy, they quickly did an about-face and slotted everything back into the categories of Sith and Jedi, Evil and Good.

and no one's asking the real questions like "is this guide book large enough to cover my tits"! (it was not)