So, here’s what happened. Star Wars started out as a fun throwback to Buck Rogers that a nerd and his buddies conned a studio into making. Through a series of misadventures and creative Hail Mary passes, it stumbled across the cultural finish line, becoming, against all odds, one of the largest, most ubiquitous, and most unceasingly lucrative franchises in history. The demand for Star Wars stuff birthed a merchandising Old God with endless tendrils snaking out into infinity. Across the decades, this behemoth became too unwieldy, collapsing under its own mass, and its new wardens at Walt Disney Studios decided to prune things substantially. Calling takes-backs on years of wild growth universe building, they started over from where things had left off back in the ‘80s.
Then, over the next 10 years or so, Disney started dolloping out spurts of pureed extended universe nostalgia. A little at a time, Disney tossed beloved, formerly-retconned characters and events into their own way-too-much-content take on the Star Wars universe. Fictional folks that diehard fans had long-since finished mourning were returned to continuity. “Remember that thing we took away?” Disney seemed to say. “How much would you love us if we gave it back?”
And that brings us to Abeloth, the Mortis God first introduced in the expanded universe novel Fate of the Jedi: Outcast. She’s not a household name like Darth Vader or Wioslea the Used Speeder Dealer, but to folks who got deep into the canon of what’s now considered legend, she’s almost definitely the big bad being ominously foreshadowed at the end of the first season of Ahsoka.
For anyone not caught up on books from 14 years ago about movies from 40 years ago, Abeloth is a wildly powerful being. The story goes that an even longer time ago in the same galaxy as usual, she was a servant to a trio of immortals called The Ones – a Father and his two kids, the Son and the Daughter, who embodied the Light and Dark sides of the Force. The lady, who would later be called Abeloth, wanted to kick it with these guys real bad, aspiring to become the Mother, which feels presumptuous for someone marrying into a family with adult children already present, but hey, we’re not here to judge. The bad news was that she had a bad case of mortality that kept her from being part of the immortal crew.
In a desperate bid to fit in and, more importantly, to not die, the ambitious lady started sipping what she shouldn’t sip, and relaxing in baths in which man was not meant to bathe. She took a nice dip in the Pool of Knowledge, a Force nexus that granted her omniscience, and drank from the Font of Power, which is presumably a bold Courier.
The side effects were hard to hide. The Mother became Abeloth, a twisted and immortal being capable of all manner of weirdness. She could possess the bodies of others, corrupt minds, draw in victims to feast upon, and, for whatever reason, control plants. Her stepkids spent the next several millennia trapping her in a special prison every time she escaped, until their deaths during the Clone Wars.
The short version: Abeloth is an eons-old immortal space vampire with every super power, driving people crazy and getting up to no good. She’s got elements of the bad guys from most religions, she can take any form, she speaks in a thousand voices, and she just loves killing. She’s a Lovecraftian abomination, done Star Wars expanded universe style, with lightning hands and the whole nine. More than all of that, she’s a pretty solid tease for Ahsoka’s next season.