With a swing of a wrist gauntlet, and the head-butt of a sinister helmet, The Acolyte’s mysterious dark Stranger carved a path into Star Wars history this week with a single, shocking move: strikes that sent the laser blades of his Jedi foes sputtering out of existence. But while we’ve seen lightsaber-resistant material in Star Wars plenty already, what could cause this strange effect? An infamous material from the Expanded Universe. A very rare and very brittle material, cortosis was first introduced in 1998 novel I, Jedi by Michael Stackpole.
On top of its rarity, cortosis was extremely difficult to mine due to its conductive properties. Like several other materials in the galaxy far, far away, it was capable of resistance to standard energy weapons like blasters—but unlike others, cortosis found a niche with the discovery that it could also conduct the energy of a lightsaber blade, shorting out the weapon for a period of up to several minutes. Although cortosis featured heavily in the Expanded Universe as a premiere anti-Jedi material—although some interpretations of it treated it like any other energy-resistant metals—it did also make its way back into current continuity pretty early on.
After first being canonized in the 2015 Rebels prequel novel A New Dawn, by John Jackson Miller, cortosis has made appearances in several comics, mainly Darth Vader and Aphra, but its most prominent appearance prior to its use in The Acolyte as the material the Stranger’s helm.
