Young Jedi Adventures Is Getting Some Pre-Trauma Star Wars Guest Stars

When Lucasfilm first announced Young Jedi Adventures, an animated series about Jedi Padawans focused at young audiences, Star Wars fans were quick to make gags about Anakin Skywalker slaughtering its cutesy heroes during Order 66—and other Star Wars fans were quick to go “actually this is 200 years before that!” in a bid to bypass all the kids’ show trauma jokes.

Well, good news bad news: now Young Jedi Adventures is getting some canonically appropriate kids’ show trauma joke opportunities!

Today, IGN reported that several episodes in the incoming back half of Young Jedi Adventures’ debut season—set during the High Republic era 200 years before the events of the Star Wars prequel trilogy—will see its young heroes travel to the major Republic outpost Starlight Beacon, and encounter several characters from the High Republic novels and comic books: Padawan Bell Zettifar and his trusty charhound companion, Ember; Bell’s master, the Twi’lek Jedi Loden Greatstorm; and the Starlight Beacon’s Jedi head of operations, Estala Maru. Although Young Jedi Adventures has featured appearances from Yoda—who plays a prominent role in the High Republic era as, well Slightly Younger Yoda—this trio of guest stars marks the first major appearances of High Republic characters from the publishing medium on the series. And on TV in general, as the live-action series The Acolyte is still a ways off yet.

The news also comes with the tacit confirmation that Young Jedi Adventures takes place before the events of The High Republic’s first phase, and therefore… these versions of the novel and comics characters coming on board the show are versions of them that have yet to experience the great deal of very bad things that end up happening over the course of those books and comics. At this point, as we veer back into the “present” of the High Republic’s story when phase three of the publishing initiative kicks off next month, without going into too many details, it’s not really a spoiler to THR fans to say: the vast majority of these Young Jedi Adventures guest stars are either no longer alive or are just about alive and very traumatized by the fact that the everyone else involved is no longer alive.

So yeah. It’s nice to actually see some of these characters and settings before the story arc of The High Republic sent their lives crashing violently off-kilter—literally in the case of poor Starlight Beacon—in the context of Young Jedi Adventures, where everything is filtered through the idealistic lens of its young protagonists. But there is something quite funny about the idea of all those inaccurate youngling trauma jokes getting the tiniest grain of truth to them now.

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