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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW THE ACOLYTE WOVE QUEERNESS — AND LESBIAN SPACE WITCHES — INTO
STAR WARS  
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Abby Monteil
June 13, 2024
Them
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_ Writer-director Leslye Headland’s new series takes a nuanced
approach to representation. _

, Disney+

 

Contrary to what online trolls and Hollywood CEOs might have you
believe, a franchise can’t coast by on fan service and nostalgia
alone. In 2017, after _The Last Jedi_ sparked backlash for digging
beneath the traditional hero’s journey tale, the _Star Wars_
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trilogy sputtered to a hollow, utterly risk-averse ending with _The
Rise of Skywalker_. Somewhat ironically, the beloved sci-fi series has
since fared best whenever its creators dare to build upon and even
interrogate the rich mythology it has sustained for nearly 50 years.

Luckily, queer writer-director Leslye Headland’s new Disney+
series _The Acolyte_ is another very welcome breath of fresh air in
the galaxy far, far away, and its most recent episode, centering on a
coven of lesbian space witches — yes, really — is its most
absorbing yet. It’s the kind of representation I’ve been craving
from a _Star Wars_ story for years. In the hands of Headland and her
team, queerness isn’t a checkbox, it’s an additive way to question
institutional power and norms, and to interrogate the kind of
attachments that are considered “right.”

Set a century before the prequels, _The Acolyte_ is the earliest
live-action _Star Wars_ story to date, taking viewers even further
from overtrodden tales of the Skywalker family. Even so, its
foundation is built upon a narrative conceit that will be immediately
familiar to fans: conflicted space twins.

The pilot wastes no time revealing the carefully held secret
that Amandla Stenberg
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not one, but two characters: Mae, a Sith apprentice whose master has
tasked her with knocking off the Jedi she blames for the deaths of her
family, _Kill Bill_-style; and her twin sister Osha, an
ex-Jedi-in-training who reluctantly reunites with her former Master,
Sol (Lee Jung-jae), to get to the bottom of Mae’s killing spree.

[Mother Aniseya  in Lucasfilm's THE ACOLYTE exclusively on Disney]

Disney+

Having assumed that the other was dead for 16 years, each twin is
forced to reckon with their pull toward one another. Osha remains
convinced that Mae is fully responsible for the fire that killed their
entire community. Still, when one of Mae’s Jedi targets begs for her
forgiveness, adding, “We thought we were doing the right thing,”
it’s clear there’s more to this story than meets the eye.

Episode 3 brings us closer to the truth, introducing us to
eight-year-old Mae and Osha, who live with their mothers, Koril
(Margarita Levieva) and Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith) in a
witchy, all-female space coven hidden away from the larger galaxy.
Like the Jedi, the coven believes in sacrificing part of one’s self
for the good of the collective. But while the Jedi adhere to a
stricter “Light Side” and “Dark Side” binary, the witches
reject this in favor of a morally grayer, more holistic life in which
the ways people use the Force aren’t so heavily regulated by an
elite few. Like queerness itself, their approach eschews the rigid
social codes around them, building community where they might
otherwise be ostracized.

“This isn’t about good and evil,” Mother Aniseya tells her
daughters at one point. “This is about power, and who is allowed to
use it.”

As the twins prepare to take part in an “ascension ceremony” to
officially join their coven, we learn that the witches were cast out
from the larger Galactic Republic, hunted and persecuted to the brink
of extinction because some would consider their powers “dark” and
“unnatural.” Mae and Osha, created by Mother Aniseya and carried
by Koril with no father, were a miracle to their coven, the only
children left to carry on their legacy.

“Like queerness itself, their approach eschews the rigid social
codes around them, building community where they might otherwise be
ostracized.”

Here, _The Acolyte_ draws clear parallels between Mae and Osha’s
origins and Anakin Skywalker’s downfall in the prequels. After all,
Anakin was conceived through the Force and eventually turns to the
“unnatural” ways of the “Dark Side” in hopes of saving his
wife’s life. It’s easy to see how the same Jedi who condemned the
witches’ “dark” magic could view the coven’s… unconventional
lesbian family-planning methods as a dangerous abomination (reciprocal
IVF [[link removed]] is
expensive, okay?!).

Because the latest _Acolyte_ episode is the rare _Star Wars_ story
to _not_ foreground a Jedi perspective, we see the Order instead as
the witches do: as aloof, threatening monks with laser swords who
trespass into their village and wish to indoctrinate their
Force-sensitive children into their all-encompassing religion, never
to be seen again. Given that the coven is largely made up of queer
women and women of color, Mother Aniseya’s warning to her children
that “the galaxy is not welcoming to women like us” makes the
Jedi’s intrusion into coven life feel borderline sinister.

[Jodie TurnerSmith in The Acolyte]

Christian Black / Disney+

While George Lucas famously drew inspiration from Buddhism and Taoism
in creating the Jedi, framing them as devout bureaucrats who hope to
put these women’s children on the “right path” has not-so-subtle
colonialist and anti-queer undertones. Likewise, their penchant for
avoiding “attachments” in order to avoid darker emotions comes
across as cold and repressive.

Crucially, though, no side is presented as being totally in the right
or the wrong. The Jedi Order has plenty of problems (see: the
prequels), but Sol’s warm empathy toward Osha when she expresses a
desire to forge her own path through Jedi training shows a more
rational, humanist path forward for their kind. Mother Aniseya insists
that Osha is too young to truly know what she wants, struggling to
accept her daughter’s desires. Neither party are clear-cut baddies,
but the Jedi’s meddling in the coven’s lives are certainly to
blame for at least part of the tragedy that unfolds. Unchecked power
and a rigid adherence to authority — pretty bad for marginalized
people, actually!

And really, who better than queer creatives to blow open _Star
Wars_’ approach to power and rebellion? _The Acolyte_ might not be
the misandrist, hyper-leftist propaganda that online trolls are eager
to paint it as, but its incorporation of queerness into its sci-fi
trappings make the world feel, for the first time in a long time, full
of possibilities.

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* Star Wars
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* the acolyte
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* queer representation
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