Whill

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Whills are a vague reference to the relatively omnipresent, yet totally distant Order that George Lucas planned to place the story-teller perspective on in an early draft of the Star Wars saga.

“Originally, I was trying to have the story be told by somebody else (an immortal being known as a Whill); there was somebody watching this whole story and recording it, somebody probably wiser than the mortal players in the actual events. I eventually dropped this idea, and the concepts behind the Whills turned into the Force. But the Whills became part of this massive amount of notes, quotes, background information that I used for the scripts; the stories were actually taken from the Journal of the Whills.” George Lucas^[1]

It was later revealed in the Making of Revenge of the Sith book that the Whills are indeed still part of the saga - the idea being that they are listening to the Star Wars story as related by R2-D2. This nugget of information supports Lucas's earlier claims regarding the droids' centrality in the context of the entire saga, even though Anakin Skywalker is largely considered to be the main character. This would explain the "long time ago" setting preceding each film.

Rumors postulate that the Jedi masters Yoda, Yaddle and Vandar Tokare may be Whills, though they are officially designated to be of a “mysterious species” by an official source of canon, the Star Wars Databank. More recently, there has been passing reference to a Shaman of the Order of the Whills in the novel adaptation of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, confirming their existence – to what capacity, though, is arguable.

In the book Star Wars, the events preceding the book are from the "Journal of the Whills".

Science fiction writer Algis Budris, writing in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1981, jokingly referred to the closing medals ceremony scene in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) as "the Triumph of the Whills" - implying that the scene resembled Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 documentary Triumph of the Will, a propaganda film which depicted the Nuremberg rallies.

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