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The Acolyte received’t be making a return to our screens, but its world is preparing to are residing on in a plethora of latest comics and books—starting off with this week’s release of Star Wars: Kelnacca, a new one-shot comedian from Marvel about the lifetime of the advise’s mysterious wookiee Jedi. It’s a straightforward, composed tale, but one that adds a additional twinge of remorse to the advise’s premature stop… as correctly as Kelnacca’s.
Apt as he was in The Acolyte itself, Kelnacca is a taciturn, secondary figure even in his bear comedian—written by High Republic stalwart Cavan Scott, and with art by Marika Cresta, Ariana Maher, and Jim Campbell. Rather us getting to watch his interiority and even approach him as a singular figure in the highlight, powerful of the one-shot is framed thru the storytelling instead of another Jedi, Yarzion Vell. First as an aged Jedi Master on his deathbed, and then thru flashbacks to his time as a younger Padawan for the duration of the occasions of the High Republic tranquil and comics series, Kelnacca tells a story about the Jedi and their approach to loss, and most crucially how they transfer on from it.
When we first chronologically bump into Vell, it’s in the wake of the destruction of Starlight Beacon, a calamity that saw his master killed in the aftermath. Apt as speedily as he’s left to strive and grieve the lack of his master, Kelnacca swoops in without a phrase and picks things up the place they left off: the chilly obligation of a Jedi is to compartmentalize these attachments even as they are shaped, one connection breaking in the 2nd completely for a new one to be cast the next. It’s an piquant alternative, one that peaceful frames Kelnacca powerful as he was in the advise: there’s a distance, a lack of understanding to what we all know of who this character really is. We’re left to infer things in the silence, and in Vell’s standpoint both recounting this story to his bear Padawan near the stop of his life, and when he was a younger boy likewise dealing with the lack of a mentor figure.
That will likely be frustrating to the extra or less reader who, perhaps, may have most popular to watch Kelnacca’s backstory laid out and categorized extra explicitly, but even the one real “fact” we bag about him on this story is less about a singular fragment of information to his character, though it does tie this story of attachment and be troubled back to Kelnacca’s premature stop in The Acolyte. At some point of Vell’s recollections, we learn that he once explained the tattooed markings on his head as a reflection of cultural practices from his species; a signal of admire to a great mentor figure is to ink their name in runic script on your head to signify their part on your bear story. Apt as Vell did it once for his first master—and she in flip did it for him—it’s revealed for the duration of the climax of the story, as Kelnacca comes to seek advice from Vell correct as he passes on into the Force, that the shaved head and tattoos we watch on him in The Acolyte are in fact him honoring that same practice for Vell.
It’s an piquant revelation for two reasons, now now not correct for its understanding of Jedi attachment—that it is now now not this carve and dry factor—but for also how it plays into Kelnacca’s eventual stop. All the way thru the one-shot Kelnacca is presented as anyone who’s aware of when to are available in and be there when necessary: the way he swoops into Vell’s life, the way he eventually knights him and lets him paddle as a Padawan, the way he returns to watch him one last time, even the way he carries on that cycle correct as easily by picking up Vell’s bear Padawan as his next scholar. It’s the reflection of the Jedi’s bear spiritual apex at the time of the High Republic, this idea that they are open-minded about this idea of attachment, nonetheless it’s also one that mirrors the decline we watch in them by the purpose of The Acolyte.
Traumatized by his part in the occasions on Brendok, Kelnacca’s completely alternative by the contemporary timeframe of the advise is to be isolated and abandoned by the Jedi, largely left to himself by alternative and by the Command’s bear reticence to reach out (in part, because they never knew the stout narrate thanks to Indara and Sol’s lies, correct another layer of institutional rot). And so, when Kelnacca is killed by the Stranger on Khofar, he’s left to die alone, unreflected on. There may be rarely any one to carry Kelnacca’s story with them, save for Sol, who takes it to his bear death soon satisfactory. The Command’s recalcitrance means that no one was there to increase him, and completely arrived when it was too late and the situation wished to be grew to turn into into a clean-up. It’s a fascinating minute kick to the gut, and an piquant way to reframe and increase the The Acolyte‘s larger story about the Jedi at some point of.
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