Wookieepedia, the most popular Star Wars wiki, appears to have entered an unexpected moment of crisis. It’s impossible to overstate how important Wookieepedia, the fan-run Wiki, is to the Star Wars fandom. It’s one of the largest Fandom sites in existence, with 193,050 pages and counting, and the site has even been frequented by actors and writers as well as general fans.
There’s probably no better online resource when it comes to Star Wars, with Wookieepedia guiding viewers seamlessly through Legends and canon information. Even more impressively, over the last few years, the “Wook” (as it is often called) has become an important part of the online fan community in its own right. Unfortunately, over the last week, the Wook has found itself at the heart of a major controversy.
Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte has proved to be one of Lucasfilm’s most controversial releases to date, with an online backlash and a pretty transparent review-bombing campaign. One of the strangest controversies was over the age of Jedi Master Ki-Adi-Mundi, a character who makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in The Acolyte episode 4. This appearance contradicted a 1999 CD-ROM and a 2013 trading card, both of which established that Ki-Adi-Mundi shouldn’t have been born yet. Neither are actually canon, and Lucas himself contradicted the CD-ROM later in the prequel trilogy when he changed Ki-Adi-Mundi’s lightsaber color.
Ki-Adi-Mundi’s age became an unlikely flashpoint, especially when the canon page on Ki-Adi-Mundi was edited on Wookieepedia to reflect his appearance in The Acolyte. This resulted in death threat messages against the editor, and these were publicly shared by Jordan Wilson - then a key member of the Social Media Team and administrator of the Wook. Wilson had not been given permission to make these public, however, and has since acknowledged that doing so was a mistake. This seems to be the inciting incident for a major change at Wookieepedia.
The inciting incident was that the only canon that existed that had a birth date for Ki Adi Mundi indicated his birth as being a good number of decades after the Acolyte takes place, combined with more lore and canon stating that his species is relatively short lived.
Then, someone edited his listed birth date to be roughly 30 or 40 years before the Acolyte takes place, with absolutely no citation, so as to allow Mundi to be alive in the show.
That is what blew up into the insane drama which has apparently now resulted in death threats. Someone just took it upon themselves to invent a vague time frame of possible birth date with no actual source.
Cereans (Mundi’s species) who live to 60 years are considered ‘ancient’, and well, now that the Acolyte show exists, Mundi would be 120 or 130 in the prequels. This would be akin to a human living to something like 220 years old with 0 explanation.
The other reason people are angry about the retcon is because Mundi has nearly no lines in the prequels, but one of the few he gets is to express shock at a report of Sith:
Yet, in the Acolyte, he is shown to be aware of a rogue force user as he receives reports of this.
Basically, him being alive or not aside, this means that either he is a moron/incompetent who never followed up on this report, or a liar covering up a conspiracy… and because he says this amongst the Jedi High Council, this becomes transitive and means they are all some combination of either incompetent and/or knowingly going along with a lie, and have been for decades.
In the Prequels, the excuse for the incompetence of the Jedi High Council is that basically Palpatine was exuding some kind of Dark Side ‘confusion’ ‘mind clouding’ effect that made the Jedi never realize what was going on, being unable to sense a Sith in relatively close proximity to them.
This does not work going backwards about 100 years as Palpatine would not have been alive.
Who knows, maybe episode 8 will offer some kind of explanation for this?
EDIT: Ok, I have now seen episode 8.
While the show very much seems to be setting up for a second season… given that this is easily the most controversial, poorly received by fans and least watched of the Disney + Star Wars shows… I do not know if that is going to happen.
As it stands…
Err, well, ok:
SPOILER WARNING
Every single Jedi involved in the original Brendok incident is dead.
Every Jedi tasked with investigating Mae’s murders is also dead.
Osha and Smilo have escaped, Mae had her memory wiped for everything after she started the fire…
And Venestra is leading a coverup of the entire affair, and has pinned all of the recent Jedi deaths on Sol.
The last scene is Venestra approaching Yoda and saying ‘we need to talk’.
While this arguably makes Ki Adi Mundi less of an idiot and or liar, as presumably the cover up would involve a fake explanation for what he had heard…
…This now makes Yoda into seemingly knowing most of what has gone on as Venestra would presumably tell him the truth, and they would together mastermind a coverup.
Venestra is earlier shown force sensing Smilo and would presumably know he is a Sith simply from detecting him, and also later mentioning that he was her former apprentice who turned.
This means Venestra knows a Sith exists.
So now instead of Ki Adi Mundi, a minor character, being either a moron or conspiratorial liar…
Now it is Yoda who is almost certainly a conspiratorial liar in the Prequels and Original Trilogy, who knows that Sith have existed in the not so distant past, and has collaborated with Venestra to cover this all up.
As for what I would consider not major spoilers:
Welp, much of what was established and agreed upon by a great deal of I guess ‘formerly’ canon material about khyber crystals (sp), how they work, how lightsabers are constructed, etc, that has all been changed or just ignored.
(Which reminds me, the original article this whole thread is about says that Ki Adi Mundi’s lightsaber being a different color in a film as opposed to other stuff means that all of that is not canon anymore? No, it does not, it just means Mundi constructed another lightsaber at some point.)
(Further, the author just states ‘neither of these are canon’. The entire problem that older Star Wars fans have had with Disney Star Wars is that Disney is exceedingly inconsistent when it comes to what they consider canon and non canon.)
(Ok, I mean sure there are a bunch of other problems people have, some legit criticisms, others very stupid and based entirely in bigoted views, but damnit this is my sperg post.)
(Prior to Disney taking over, there was an entire established hierarchy of canonicity, and now with Disney, they throw out entire huge plot arcs, time periods and characters and world mechanics that were canon, invent new things that break existing mainline and more ancillary canon, and then also mix and match some things that they originally said were not canon but apparently now are, back into their new stuff)
Osha is… either able to do something that has, to my knowledge, never before happened anywhere in anything Star Wars before, or, more likely, it was just done as a visual metaphor with little regard to existing canon, which probably won’t be explained.
I have been adding to and editing my post as you replied, so apologies for that but…
I am seeing two ways to read this post, and I am not quite sure which one you are going for.
You are with me writhing in pain as older established characters continue to be significantly altered in a way that is detrimental to the overall narrative of pre Disney Star Wars
You are implying that Yoda is referencing these things that occured 100 years ago in a scene where he very clearly is not.
Sorry, I am in full autism mode trying attempt to understand how basically any of the canon works at all, at this point.
Mostly the first option, but the second option was also intended as a joking subtext about his new connection to these events
Damn, it has been a long time since I have seen or heard someone intentionally say or post something that has two or more distinct interpretations, and all of them are intended.
Bravo on that, haha.
Do you happen to know if Qimir’s force memory wipe ability is also new to the franchise/canon?
Memory wipe is new to the current canon, but it has existed in Star Wars “legends” previously.
Jedi(:?) Survivor is canon and includes kyber bleeding, and I think I read that a canon Vader comic includes it, but this is definitely the first live-action occurrence.
Correct me if I am wrong, but don’t kyber crystals need to be put in such a perfect alignment inside a lightsaber such that a tiny defect causes a saber to basically explode? That the whole point of lightsaber’s being unique to force users is that it requires force sensitivity to construct one?
The crystal in Acolyte 8 is shown to crack. So… in addition to kyber bleeding, Osha now appears to have a kyber crystal healing ability, otherwise that saber should have shorted out or exploded.
Ah that’s a good point, nice catch. I didn’t realize that’s what you were referring to. Big if true.
Can you elaborate? It was my understanding that from the time Disney erased the EU everything that was newly produced by Disney (plus the existing movies and the Clone Wars cartoon) were all considered canon. Disney originally proposed eliminating tier structure of canon the EU had, which I know has led to some canon snarls in Disney canon, but those snarls are exactly because everything they produce is canon.
EDIT: For what its worth, I did not downvote you.
Boba Fett escaping the Sarlacc pit is from the EU, Disney took that main concept and then disregarded basically everything else the EU had to say about that.
The entirety of lore around the history and traditions of the Mandalorians is from the EU, Disney took a few general ideas from that and then did their own thing.
So there are some examples of ‘the EU is not canon, except for parts of it, when we say so.’
Thrawn is in arguably the most confusing situation.
Originally he is the main bad guy of the Thrawn Trilogy storyline, and much of the EU dovetailed with this, including a good number of the earlier video games… but then Filoni gave him a backstory in Clone Wars and Rebels.
For a good period of time, no one knew if Disney would include Clone Wars and Rebels as canon, because Disney was not clear on this, but then they decided they are canon, but due to movies 7 8 and 9, the actual primary storyline of Thrawn is impossible, but then Asoka and the characters from Rebels get a Disney show, so basically some derivative parts of Thrawn are canon while the original works he is from are not.
I am just going off the top of my head here, but also in terms of spacecraft, there were a bunch of ships in earlier video games, such as K Wings and TIE Defenders, that many older fans who played the older games and read EU stuff are familiar with, which do not appear in Disney movies and are instead replaced by other spacecraft… this does I guess make sense if Disney just says none of those things are canon anymore, but a whole lot of older Star Wars fans absolutely loved that stuff.
I think it is now long defunct, but there may still be a downloadable version of Free Worlds, Tides or War, a Star Wars mod for Freelancer, on ModDB, that was able to build up basically an entire universe of factions and ships based around the EU, set something like 10 or 20 years after movie 6. It features a good deal of these ships, and was created before Disney acquired Star Wars.
If someone tried to make that mod today, it would be impossible, as the canon is now altered, confused, incomplete and inconsistent and far from detailed enough to provide the status of various factions and planets in the New Order timeline, whereas before, there was a mostly consistent EU to directly draw a multitude of specific details from.
I don’t think it’s confusing at all. The current canon can selectively incorporate elements of the old EU. Some classic EU being incorporated does not recanonize everything around those elements. It is best, for canon purposes, to treat the incorporated EU elements as if you don’t know about the EU.
I say this as someone who deeply enjoys the EU, and prefers it to the state of modern official canon.