Inside the Mind of Leslye Headland: An Indie Author's Take on The Acolyte

[@crownedshyness9656]

“Maliciously incompetent” is a good phrase here.

[@PauloJrchannel]

This idea that "The Acolyte was cancelled because of fan-harassment!" is such an obvious cope. The amount of money involved in producing and releasing a major series is just to much for them to just cancel it over harassment, and that's assuming there even was any harassment. The Acolyte was cancelled because nobody was watching it, and Disney has nobody to blame but themselves.

[@bashamd96]

The only way I'd accept that is if it went as far as sending an actor to the hospital with the harassment. Which given that didn't happen, I can safely put that in the "never happened" file

[@MikeTheD]

Yeah the degree of this failure means the entire mainstream rejected it. Most of them have never seen a single clip or article in this space of the internet. What those mainstream viewers DID do was watch the other Disney Star Wars offerings previously, and said wow that was very boring. They’ve stopped humoring it. Wokesters totally mistook humoring for acceptance, and the average viewer finally started observing the extremely easy red flags that warn against such entertainment products.

[@Cardinal_claw]

@@PauloJrchannel That's what boggles my mind. This is about profit. If some jerks on the Internet was all it took to get a show cancelled, we'd probably have about a quarter of the current visual media library. And that's if they were genuinely being jerks, not simply people expressing their opinion. Harsh or gentle, an opinion is an opinion.

[@grandarkfang_1482]

Leslie Headland is my inspiration for going indie once I get my ideas off the ground.

[@maxheadroom4659]

Indie is the way to go. Hollywood is broken & toxic.

[@grayearly3116]

This show was a self insert Reylo fanfiction written by Harvey Weinstein's former personal assistant. Thats all i needed to know to understand it

[@silverscorpio24]

I guarantee that Leslye's "nerd room" was custom designed for that interview. Probably by a paid decorator.

[@vernonhampton5863]

Well, that would explain the $180 million dollar budget

[@epiczk0n141]

She probably couldn’t name a single Star Wars object in that room

[@seacliff217]

Agree regarding inspiration. Lucas had dozens of stated inspirations for Star Wars, but managed to mold it into something unique. It's more a stylistic critic of artistic choices than an objective one, but it doesn't help that a lot of modern writing seems to solely pull from other fictional media and personal experiences for inspiration. Prequels were at least in part inspired by Rome's transition from a Republic to Dictatorship, and that inspiration for its politics feels absent in the Acolyte where its Senate/Jedi relationships are merely incested from the prequels instead of pulling from the same or other similar historical examples to flesh out what was seen in the prequels.

[@hoos3014]

@@seacliff217 The Acolyte was heavily inspired by the French folk tale Bluebeard. There are also several allusions to the ancient Greek myth and play "The House of Atreus" if you care to look.

[@seacliff217]

@@hoos3014 I don't think it's controversial to say Folktales and Myths are fictional.

[@hoos3014]

@@seacliff217 Wait, are you saying that all stories should be based on historical events? That would be extremely limiting.

[@seacliff217]

@@hoos3014 No. That is not what I am saying. I agree that would be extremely limiting.

[@Sarcastic_Sophist]

Just want to say I have a lot of respect for the way in which you do give credit for where it is due. As an aspiring author myself I also like to hearing your takes on the process of writing and the dedication and work that goes into it. Regarding your take on avoiding that blu between you and the character. 100% agree and watched this play out a lot in ttrpg spaces. I had a friend who was very political and self righteous and she kept putting that into her characters. Now out of game we would just kind of be quiet and let it slide. In character where she had ideals in antithesis to the party it caused inter party conflicts. She got upset feeling like no one like her character and felt like we were attacking her. Just bought my first house and moved in. Hoping to check out your books once I rebuild my savings a bit.

[@somerandomdude343]

This is "Write what you know" taken to its logical extreme

[@johno1544]

Kathleen Kennedy said the Acolyte pitch had her in tears.

[@kymelatejasi]

One of my inspirations for some characters that help a main character free herself from a contract an ancestor made that affects her is wishing to see more of the relationship between Julius Novachrono and his aide Marx in Black Clover. My two characters have evolved so much past those two characters and while still have the same magic types, they have evolved to have some different spells and a much closer friendship than the one I got inspiration from. I don't understand how people lift so many things straight from others and think it's okay. One thing here and there, but as much as we've seen today is insane.

[@MajorSmurf]

Isn't it amazing how own suffering never ends in this timeline... from the Acolyte to ROP... let our eternal torment continue. You know if parallel timelines exist... we live in the worse one.

[@CptBarbarosa]

Book Alastor could be like any other real life person's appearance used in literature. Though a little harder to argue for, so long as the similarities stop at looks, I wouldn't categorize it as an insert.

[@boomer.beasley]

Yo bro good to see youre playing with the video format

[@Xemnes135869]

It's actually my favourite interview with her. It's the only one I know where she is not mentioning that she is a lesbian.

[@hezekiahsimon3341]

I need to pay this man to be my editor

[@whatthefilmwtf7171]

If mauler is long man are you middling man same quality but shorter and maybe not as tall because he's apparently 6 foot plus can you believe that

[@TheFatalcrest]

😂 ofcourse, Mauler is longest in human form

[@jimslater8685]

He's an eldritch being, he can manifest as many feet as he wants.

[@BoSmith7045]

"Like that one time with your camp councilor....". Wait... what? 😧

[@pluviamachina3583]

Hedland is like an AI art generator; she's smart enough to look at past material to put things together into something recognizable, but she's far too non-sapient to comprehend her own actions and simply "does" without understanding what makes something believable nor why said past material makes sense.

[@jperes889]

I really hated the Kung fu style fights. It has little to do with star wars, looks completely imported. I really feel a lot of the scenes we see are more to make it look cool rather than make for a coherent narrative and respect the lore of the universe.

[@Tietzy81]

I enjoyed the insight on this.

[@Sue20022010]

Alastor rocks

[@crimsonpotemkin]

I remember this interview. I couldn't believe my ears. She absolutely wallows and thrives on failure and disappointing people. After the comment about the Wookie off screen death she says something bizarre like "it's nice to have people like you" or "I enjoy it when there are people like you". I think she has some kind of self loathing complex, but unfortunately for all of us she insists on spilling it onto the screen instead of going to therapy. And she definitely has dirt on the higher ups.

[@bensinex7725]

I swear, these Hollywood people fit the meme of Principal Skinner. “Am I out of touch? No, it’s the toxic fans who are wrong.

[@AstroZombi36]

Chow Yun Fat is a legend- this trash is an insult

[@keegobricks9734]

Not that she's a good writer or anything, but I think Disney needs to be blamed too. I'm sure for all her faults, Leslye's show may have been more coherent without the scrap-booking and meddling that Disney loves doing. There's the chance it could have been made even worse without that, but in this one thing I'm giving Headland a little bit of slack. I mean any story I wrote would probably suck if Disney got their disgusting scummy mitts all over it.

[@insensitive919]

"You must delete a jedi without a weapon" OHSA: HAHA FORCE CHOKE FOR YOU DAD Leslie though this setup and payoff was amazing, she has no idea how shallow and forced it feels, even if one was being charitable. A teenager could write a better story than this gsrbage.

[@insensitive919]

No offense to teenage authors, I'm still working my way up to teenage fanfiction level 😥

[@hezekiahsimon3341]

And why did she leave the plot holes there? Was she to lazy to fix the plot errors?

[@zeogold]

Safe bet that Lesley Headland never watched those shows and movies that she got "inspiration" from.

[@SilvrSavior]

Umm.... then if fun is subjective then can a comedy never be well written? Like Airplane or Army of Darkness? If the writing for a comedy can be great, then what new metrics do you need to use for them?

[@blurhavokofficial]

Yes. Fun is subjective. A comedy can be well written and have none of the jokes land for someone. The opposite is true as well, as Deadpool and Wolverine was hilarious to me, but it is a horrendously written film. As I said in the video, everyone finds different things fun.

[@dylancross1039]

Comedy isn't subjective. Humor is. A joke is a joke. Whether you find it funny or not is up to you.

[@maxheadroom4659]

Where did they find someone to interview her that cannot tell the difference between good & s**t writing? Did they hold interviews for the interviewer? ha

[@fd502]

6:34 Wait what? I thought for sure you’d say Blur Havok 2 but you’re telling me that you have a different reveal than the one I’m thinking of but it’s in Blur Havok 3. …man I need to read fasten than what I do… 9:52 eh the what now? Crimson Peak monster? I genuinely like that film but I genuinely don’t know what monster? Because the way I use “Horror Movie Monster” I usually mean that to be Godzilla, The Thing, The Fly, The Host, The Monster of Frankenstein, so I don’t class other spooks with them it has to be a monster so genuinely what is she talking about?

[@hoos3014]

Good lord, man 03:05. No, she does NOT "admit that the sisters are 'self-inserts'". She said that some siblings who raised close together can grow to irritate one another, which rings true to a lot of people.

[@blurhavokofficial]

Maybe I should have included this because I read it, but didn't include it in the video, but this is not the only time Leslye has stated that the Acolyte Twins were based on her own relationship with her sister. There is a New York Times article titled "Leslye Headland Hopes the Force Is With ‘The Acolyte’" that explicitly states this as fact.

[@hoos3014]

@@blurhavokofficial I read the article you mentioned. Here's the relevant bit: "“I (Headland) have a very strained relationship with my youngest sister, and I feel like one of the reasons it is strained is that we both see each other as the bad guy,” Headland said. “And if I was going to tell a story about bad guys, it seemed to me that the place to start should be a familial relationship where one person is adamantly convinced of her correctness and the other person is also adamantly convinced of her correctness.” I'm at a loss to understand why using her personal experience to inform her writing (which she had already referenced in a published play) is supposed to be a bad thing. Great writers do that all the time (See: Tolkien and his experience in WWI). Puzzling.