From Den of Geek
Quote:
"The character of Mae was rooted in a very early idea I had, even before we had her character, which was: do the Jedi have a monopoly on the Force? Or are there Force users that exist in the galaxy, who are either dealt with and disposed of, or do they have to keep themselves hidden? Are they good guys or bad guys?"
Headland also explained how she came up with the concept behind the series, and where the idea of introducing the Sith 100 years before they reappeared in
The Phantom Menace came from. This is something that has been very questioned on social media, even before seeing the series. But this is how Headland explained it:
Quote:
"There are certain things that happened in the prequels about the Sith and about Darth Maul, and the Jedi's understanding of them, that I found intriguing. Qui-Gon on Tatooine immediately knows that Darth Maul is a Sith from fighting him and then reports that to the [Jedi] Council. Yoda knows about the Rule of Two; he says there's always a master and an apprentice. So, while they're considered extinct, there was a little bit of knowledge about the Sith that I felt would not have come from ancient history. To me, it felt like to know that information that quickly; it would have had to have been in the last 100 years."
The showrunner also explained why she landed on this specific time period to tell her
Star Wars story:
Quote:
"There were two reasons I wanted to set it in that particular time period and that far away from the prequels. One, I didn't want to mess with any canon. The other thing that I loved about this period was the lack of legacy characters. I was too nervous to take them on, but also, I feel like we've seen a lot of that. [The High Republic] felt like a sandbox that I could easily jump into.
In live-action, you haven't seen the Sith as the underdogs, as wildly outnumbered by the number of Jedi that are in the universe. It seemed interesting to me to explore that."