The current foolishness infecting the enjoyment of Star Wars is that episode 4 of The Acolyte changed the apparent age of Jedi Master Ki-Adi-Mundi, a minor character from the Star Wars prequels and Clone Wars children’s cartoon.
I simply need to list the reasons this is preposterous:
The first is that his prior birthdate was established as a bit of lore on a trading card and codified in an interactive behind the scenes CD-ROM for Star Wars: Episode I. At no point would this have been understood as fully canonical information. Before the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney, all “canon” was subject to change until such time as George Lucas himself saw fit to make a declaration; if it came from George, it was so. This “G-level” canon extended so far as the live action films and The Clone Wars TV show. Everything else was tenuous at best. Even G-level canon could shift; Darth Maul’s resurrection being the clearest example of this. So to act like this could have ever been seen as hard fact to a true Star Wars fan is preposterous. Spaarti Cloning Cylinders were far more “canonical” than Ki-Adi-Mundi’s birthdate, having been a key element in both the Thrawn and Dark Empire trilogy, but the second George established how cloning works in The Clone Wars, those essentially went out the window.
Then, of course, there’s the simple fact that all sub-G-level canon was labelled non-canonical “Legends” material at the point of Disney’s purchase of Star Wars, so it simply has been a fact for over a decade that anything before April 2014 simply doesn’t exist. Now, I’ve posted before about the conundrum of the Star Wars Expanded Universe strangely being more canonical post-Disney than pre-, but that still doesn’t negate the fact that nobody who actually cared about Star Wars continuity can claim with a straight face that an established fact of the Star Wars universe has been changed.
But the thing that really blows my mind is that actually, you can’t say Ki-Adi-Mundi’s birthdate has been changed, because no character in Star Wars has a birthdate, because there is no such thing as a calendar in Star Wars. There’s pedant Um Actuallies one might raise at this point, but the truth is all time in Star Wars is practically measured as estimations based on distance from the Death Star blowing up in A New Hope. There is no functional method of recording time in Star Wars. There are no consistent names of months, days of the week, concepts of seconds, minutes or hours; its all made up on the spot. Thursday is occasionally a canonical concept in Star Wars, but not always. So to say they changed Ki-Adi-Mundi’s birthdate is preposterous; he could never have such at thing, because Star Wars doesn’t care or allow for that kind of fact to actually be collected. They shifted his estimated age from something a Topps employee jotted down to fill space on the back of a low-value card to something… else!
This is what truly pisses me off about this specific bad faith attack, is that actually, actually, god damn it, actually, you cannot care about this microscopic pissant notion and be a fan of what Star Wars is. Actually, actually, to ascribe meaning to a birthdate in Star Wars is a kind of anti-fandom. Star Wars hates specificity. In Japanese sometimes the number 8 just means “many”. When we say Yoda is 900 years old, we mean his is 8 years old, do you follow me? He’s just fucking OLD, the point is that he is OLD, that’s why he was hand carved to be the OLDEST THING EVER. The meaning is in the generality of it, not the specific. Ki-Adi-Mundi is OLD. He’s got a white beard and wrinkles, the point of him has always been to be OLD. He has a big head because he is WISE. He has a big head for all the brains to go in because he’s OLD and WISE. God DAMN it, this isn’t fucking rocket science, it’s puppetry and theater! Its make up! The reason the canon was whatever George put on the screen is because Star Wars only fucking exists if its on screen because the thing is PICTURES and MOTION.
Star Wars only exists if the ships go fast and you can only have the ships go fast if they actually are going fast on your screen. No text is as visceral as the moving picture. Star Wars canon is the image on the screen because that is the only way it can tell its story. That’s why I love the fucking thing! That’s why it has tremendous value! It’s an artisan creation! That’s why I love even the horseshit bits, because GOD DAMN, the Star Wars is in the making of the Star Wars, not in the characters or the plot or the events. Its about the mise en scène, you reprehensible scumbags, you got that when you were children, how did it rot out of your hearts? That Star Wars can sometimes tell incredible, wonderful stories is great but you don’t begrudge an aesthetic if an individual piece produced within the aesthetic flops, you consider the aesthetic as a whole.
So I dunno, if you care about the dates in Star Wars, fuck, I don’t know. I’m not going to tell you to go to hell, I can’t restrict how you care about things, but I don’t understand how you survive or enjoy the world, I don’t understand how you breathe air, I don’t feel akin in species to you.
The thing is play and you’re trying to make it logistics. And even your logistics suck.
Rethink your life. Rethink every choice that got you to this point.
They had a little otter boy in this episode and you didn’t even like him, you know you fucked up something bad in your soul.
Repent.
Come back.
Let’s enjoy Star Wars again and forget the numbers next time.
