Thought cortosis was the only thing with roots from Star Wars’ expanded universe that showed up on The Acolyte this week? Turns out, another old concept was hiding in plain sight...
well, from a certain point of view. Watching the Stranger, , carve his way through the Jedi on Khofar in “Night” this week, you might have noticed that his unorthodox fighting style saw him constantly disengage and re-engage with his foes—a flurry of attacks, the deactivation of his lightsaber, only for it to repeat all over again. It’s just one of many duplicitous tools in the Stranger’s arsenal that we see throughout the episode, but not only is it a form of lightsaber combat largely unseen on-screen so far, it has its roots in the Expanded Universe.
The official Star Wars website’s confirmed that the Stranger uses a form of lightsaber combat called tràkata—defined by its leverage of the lightsaber’s unique property as a melee weapon to be turned off and on during combat. First introduced in John Whitman’s audio adaptation of Tom Veitch’s Dark Empire comic series in 1994, but not formally given its name until the final edition of Wizards of the Coasts’ Star Wars Roleplaying Game in 2007, tràkata was not a fully developed form of practiced lightsaber combat, but more of a philosophical technique that relied on using the ability to extinguish and re-ignite a lightsaber’s blade mid-combat to either deceive or execute your opponent. A practitioner of tràkata might bri.