A Jedi shall not know anger. Nor hatred. Nor love. But as many people learned this past weekend, that doesn’t mean a Jedi can’t have casual sex every now and then.

Late on Friday evening, a Twitter account called “Star Wars Facts,” which regularly shares Star Wars news and tidbits culled from sources like interviews, art books, and visual guides, tweeted, relatively innocuously, that George Lucas had once clarified the Jedi stance regarding sex:

“Contrary to popular belief,” the tweet reads, “George Lucas says Jedi are allowed to have sex[.] ’Jedi Knights aren’t celibate – the thing that is forbidden is attachments – and possessive relationships’.”

(The information had actually been tweeted earlier in the day by Star Wars: The High Republic writer Cavan Scott, which seems likely to have inspired Star Wars Facts to also share it with an unsuspecting public.)

The combination of two of people’s favorite topics – Star Wars and sex – saw the tweet go viral by Saturday morning. As of this writing the tweet has been shared more than 3,000 times, and has over 11.5 thousand likes.

Here are some personal favorites from within the comics community and beyond (warning: plenty of these are NSFW):

https://twitter.com/GlebMelnikov8/status/1358146263334735875?s=20

https://twitter.com/SadMeganGirls/status/1357945985054478337?s=20

(This is just one of many tweets and comments about Obi-Wan and Satine.)

The information in the tweet isn’t exactly new; it’s actually from a 2002 BBC interview with Lucas, published around the premiere of Attack of the Clones. Amazingly, the headline of that interview was about the “youthful exuberance” that Lucas felt in having returned to the world of Star Wars, and not about the then-newly-revealed fact that Jedi could smash all they wanted as long as they did it outside the confines of a relationship. The answer was presented in context of a quote from Samuel L. Jackson likening Jedi to Shaolin monks.

The question of Jedi sex has been on a lot of people’s minds over the past several years, in particular following the first appearance of Grogu, aka The Child, aka L’il Baby Yoda on Disney+’s The Mandalorian. Considering that the only other characters of his species that viewers have ever seen are Yoda and Yaddle, many have theorized that they may be Grogu’s parents, but would they have been allowed to conceive a child as members of the Jedi Order (and with both of them as sitting members of the Jedi Council)? Apparently the answer to that question has been ‘yes’ for quite some time.

Of course, 2002 was a time with no social media to spread information and opinions far and wide – a more civilized age, if you will. There were message boards, of course, but one had to go looking for those in order to find opinions about things. Who knows what Twitter hot takes and viral threads we missed out on by virtue of neither of those things having existed at the time! (Alas, a search for archived messages from TheForce.net and StarWars.com came up empty.)

The idea that Jedi can have sex but are forbidden from forming attachments has brought back around a long-standing discussion about the ethics of the Jedi ethos – what sort of order forbids love, after all – with some pointing out that a Jedi having sex without attachment means they can basically wash their hands of any consequences that might come of the sexual activity. In the end, though, Kurt Busiek may have summed it up best:

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