I still don’t get what The Acolyte is trying to say is bad about the Jedi. I haven’t watched the series but from what I can tell it’s that they tried to take the cult’s children away.
Their goal was to make them look inflexible, presumptive, and impulsive. They also were trying to make them look like they steal and convert children and indoctrinate them with garbage. However the problem was on every level they fucked up, since they made the witches look like the bad guys each and every time.
The witches believe the force is a thread that binds everyone into one big glorious tapestry, or like a web? Sure fine. Them being a women only order? Sure, go ahead. But they clearly crave power, they indulge in unrestrained emotions, and they have one of their LEADERS tell a child to use their rage on their sister, which makes them look fucking horrible. This is after they mind rape a young man casually, which apparently damaged him badly enough he withdrew from life before ending it. That's fucking evil.
It also helps that they don't understand that you can heckle cops and get clapped by your peers IRL. If you do this crap to peaceful space monks it makes you look like an asshole. Oh, and then you have them draw bowstrings, which means intent to kill, since hollyweird doesn't understand how hard it is to nock and hold like that. Oh and threaten to attack them too. Oh and even when the one witch mother said she would've given Osha? She insulted and harrassed the Jedi, which tells you the viewer she was doing some DARVO bullshit with her death to spite them.
And then they did the "Dissolve into an evil smoke monster". I don't give a shit if you're trying to subvert the expectations, you see that and a child looking scared and dissolving apart you start stabbin.
If the show was trying to say that the Jedi assumed the cult wasn’t Dark Side aligned, they should have made it clear that the cult interpreted the Force in a different manner than the Jedi viewed it. Have the Sith dismiss any notions that the Thread was a Dark Side interpretation of the Force. There were other Force religions in Disney canon and EU. Show that the Jedi, in their zealous pursuit of ending the Sith, viewed any interpretation of the Force other than their own as a vector for the resurgence of the Sith.
Did Headland think that the audience was to ignore the negative connotations associated with terms like witches and cult?
If they wanted to really do this right, have the mental connection thing be how the cult likes to commune among the "weave" and intermingle, rather than calling it the many. They do it on Torben, and he snaps since he never experienced something like that before, and since they do dabble in the dark side due to allowing emotions to flow, he goes nutty for a while. He then goes out and attacks them for being mind raping child sacrificers, since Soul mentioned the deep hole they venerate and a ritual they were gonna do.
Torben's actions lead to death since he stabs the witch mother, hence why he wants to kill himself. Soul's secret is he knew this was a shameful attack since he tried all he could to stop his friend's apprentice, hence his guilt and desire to hide with it. And then you have Kelnacca and Venestra literally not know what happened. Have them actually be blameless, whose only crime is defending two friends they DID NOT KNOW START THIS.
I literally spent five minutes whipping this up. That's how trivial it was to make the shit make sense.
