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Notes -
At this point the majority of the total high budget content-hours are about this, despite the fact that the majority of the years and cultural influence are not. It's all over the Disney content.
I think what you're saying is a misread of the Lucas era (although if you quotes from him in that time frame please pass along*). It's clearly not a part of the original trilogy. The prequel trilogy, some of the text has it with stuff like this:
"OBI-WAN: But he still has much to learn, Master. His abilities have made him... well, arrogant. YODA: Yes, yes. It's a flaw more and more common among Jedi. Too sure of themselves they are. Even the older, more experienced ones."
But that's not really a lot.
Per an /r/StarWars thread on the matter:
"Fans have projected an awful, awful lot onto Lucas's intentions for the Jedi. His intentions were to show them get outmaneouvered and trapped by Palpatine. You can reasonably argue that he presented them as complacent and too comfortable.
Yoda observes that many of the 'older, more experienced' Jedi are becoming arrogant, but not in a way that suggests this is massively damning or concerning. It's the kind of observation which a wise, elderly leader whose job is to be mindful would note. Their arrogance plays out in the films where they take gambles which don't pay off in ROTS - but this is very human and mild overconfidence and arrogance.
But Lucas absolutely, 100% neither wanted to make them, nor accidentally made them out to be, a cult of emotion-denying warmongers who kidnap children and whom the Force wants culled for the sake of its balance - which is what an awful lot of people on this board seem to believe."
This contrasts with what has been produced by Kathleen Kennedy - her writing team is clearly ULTRA woke and political. It's not shocking that they are interested in portraying a white male presenting hierarchal organization as ineffective or preferably evil. It's also BORING at this point given these people rule most of media and everything they've put out in the last 10 years has this ideology all over it.
Playing them straight (pun intended) would be novel and interesting at this point.
*I don't know what he is saying now, but that is going to be tightly wrapped up in the contradictory interviews he has put out in the Disney era.
Really? I think most of it still shows the Jedi as much less flawed than they should be. What Lucas said or intended and what he actually showed, wrote and licensed are very different things. Even prior to the Disney take-over. I stand by my argument that a lot of the people criticizing the shows for being woke transfer that energy onto other elements of the show that are arguably exactly as they should be way before Disney ever got involved.
If you think the lead characters being black and asian or the lesbian witches vs Jedi is a woke overreach and this impacted the quality of the show, I think that is understandable. But I think a lot of people then want to criticize everything about the show through the same lens. Especially people who weren't around during the heyday of the expanded universe before the prequels where for example Palpatine gets resurrected and corrupts Luke. And that wasn't anything to do with white men bad or whatever.
In the end I would rate the Acolyte as 6/10. Lovely choreographed saber fights, recanonization of cortosis, the Corporate Sector (Han Solo at Star's End was one of the first Star Wars books I read all the way back in 79.), an interesting look at how even good guys can do the wrong thing for the right reason. Some sub-par acting (especially the child actress), some creaky dialog and a little too much fan service without pay off (Darth Plagueis and Yoda). Though at least Plagueis feeds into the Legends idea that he directly or indirectly created Anakin using dark sorceries gathered in secret.
I absolutely agree and that's part of my argument, sorry if that wasn't clear.
One of the things that is happening here is that you absolutely get a pass when you providing fun escapist entertainment. Lots of trash (or perhaps less judgmentally pulp) suffers in one dimension or another or has inconsistencies. Star Wars is burdened by meaning something in a lot of people's minds (which makes what it is "supposed" to be somewhat sticky, occasional to its detriment) and it's also moved away from just being fun escapist fiction and some of that is the politics which have been injected into it with avowed intentionality, part of it is the "okay but lets subvert" and other adjacent attitudes.
They decided to play a different game and now they are being judged by different rules. A taut political thriller demands more internal inconsistency than a Roland Emmerich film.
Parallel to this - once you've pissed someone off they aren't going to cut you a lot of slack. There's an entire genre online criticism that is essentially calling out woke entertainment on stuff that would have been fine in a generic Hollywood action script in the 90s. I can see how some would want to paint this as unfair, but frankly stuff written by people who hate you is going to be judged by a higher standard and I'm not sure that's wrong, especially with the way a lot of this involves people who hate their fans reaching for a replacement audience that doesn't exist.
To sum, it's not that it is bad so much as what it represents makes it bad. Woke themes that could be forgivable are another ongoing attack on me. Meaning it gets exactly zero slack.
It is also a deliberate lack of course correction which means that even though it's probably in the same ball park as the other recent SW shows it's worse for it. If someone keeps slapping you in the face and you keep telling them not to it doesn't matter if it's all the same strength, at some point you go ENOUGH. For me this one was the first one I didn't watch (with the last two being relegated to being watched at 1.5-2 speed).
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