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While Star Wars has had many controversies in the Disney era, viewers have now mobilized a fleet of TIE bombers to obliterate user scores of The Acolyte wherever possible, namely on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB.
I previously reported that this started up right at release, as The Acolyte quickly became the lowest audience-rated Star Wars project besides the infamous Holiday Special. Now, its former 33% score has dipped below the Special’s 20% score, and is all the way down to 15%.
At a certain point, this is just absurd, and it says a lot more about the viewers than it does the quality of the show itself, which has barely even gotten started, now just three episodes in.
No, I am not going to entertain a debate that this is not review bombing. A 15% score is barely more than a third of the last most controversial Disney Star Wars project, The Last Jedi. Nothing is even close except that Holiday Special. On IMDB, it’s even easier to see. A full 54% of all reviews are 1 star, giving it a 3.6/10.
There’s also how fast this happened. For instance, Ahsoka only has 5,000 reviews in on Rotten Tomatoes after being out for months while The Acolyte has aired three episodes in two weeks and has 10,000 reviews in. The last season of The Mandalorian only has 2,500 reviews in. The beloved Andor, 5,000 reviews total, years later.
Rotten Tomatoes has previously tried to curb review bombing in the wake of what happened with Captain Marvel’s release, “verifying” people had watched the movie before reviewing. But there has been no way to enforce such a system with TV, so here we are.
Why is this happening? There are a bunch of dimensions to this, and none of them good. There is absolutely a racial and gender component to this. A clip from star Amandla Stenberg about “making white people cry” was shared tens of thousands of times online, taken out of context from an interview years earlier about her film The Hate U Give. Showrunner Leslye Headland has starred in many YouTube thumbnails lambasting the “woke” nature of the series, but also it allegedly “breaking canon.”
This is the main reason for the surge since episode 3 aired, where fans (“fans”) believe the show has broken canon or destroyed the lore of Anakin Skywalker by implying that like Anakin, the twins are a “virgin force birth.” Anakin was conceived purely through the force alone, part of his “chosen one” mythology. And now they say that’s happened again, ruining everything.
The problem is…we simply have no idea if that’s true, even if that’s what everyone is assuming after last week. Specifically, while they say the girls “have no father” it is implied that their mother did something unnatural to create them, which would not be a “spontaneous force baby” situation. Dark side meddling? Witch magic? Cloning? We simply don’t know yet, but that has not stopped fans from leaping to conclusions and saying that in three half hour episodes the series has destroyed 50 years of canon.
There is also pushback about the portrayal of the Jedi as…not great, acting as space cops rounding up force-sensitive kids to test and train, not by abducting them per se, but you know, luring them away from their families for “their own good,” which is what happened to Osha, and sparked the events that led to the death of her family and community. Of course, the concept of the Jedi as rulers has dealt with this topic many times over the years, most famously in the prequels where the arrogant, clueless Jedi council’s actions, or lack thereof, directly led to the Imperial takeover of the galaxy.
The 15% score is embarrassing. Not for the show, but for those review bombing it to a frankly laughable degree. I’m not even The Acolyte’s biggest fan, as the first two episodes I didn’t love, though I thought episode 3 was more interesting. But the worst Star Wars project by an order of magnitude in the history of the series? And it just so happens to be one mostly starring black women? This whole situation is a parody of the modern toxic fanbase of the series, and if you want to disguise it as being upset about “canon” than it shows a distinct lack of understand of both the material of the show and the wider universe. You can critique a show, sure, but overwhelmingly, that is just not what’s happening here, and it goes well beyond that. While we have seen many things like this happen with Star Wars fandom over the years, I can’t help but feel like it’s absolutely getting worse.
