User:MPK/LookingBack



=Preface=

"He was not a great personality, because he thought so much about himself. He was sometimes not even a great artist, because he thought so much about art. Any man with a vital knowledge of the human psychology ought to have the most profound suspicion of anybody who claims to be an artist, and talks a great deal about art. Art is a right and human thing, like walking or saying one's prayers; but the moment it begins to be talked about very solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing has come into a congestion and a kind of difficulty."

- G. K. Chesterton (Heretics, Chapter 17)

Something's got Star Wars stirring in my brain again. That something is probably all the Episode 7-related chatter that's been reaching me. In any case, this old site got back on my mind, along with the five stories that I wrote here and the two dozen or so that I never got around to really starting. So as a primarily pointless mental exercise, as well as for the benefit of the one or two people who might be interested in knowing, I plan on putting up here a series of (as always) informal essays in which I will ramble, mumble, and rant about Star Wars, with a particular (if tenuous) focus on my own fan works, both those completed and uncompleted. The majority of the latter are plot ideas that I've rarely (if ever) talked about, whether here or on IRC. I will feel no particular discomfort about spoiling the hell out of them, for (aside from this site being comparable to a planet in the Unknown Regions relative to the rest of the internet) the chances of my ever getting back to work on them are pretty low. Besides that, maybe my old ideas will inspire somebody who actually would have the time for fan fiction (the poor bastard). Along with the discussion of my works, I will also (when I feel like it) include snippets from my old outlines, character notes, brainstorming, and other scribbles.

That's all I've got right now, folks. No promises, but I'll try. So unless something unexpected comes up, stay tuned. -MPK, Free Man  22:12, December 16, 2015 (UTC)

I - Everything I Like Goes Together; Everything I Don't Like Must Be Fixed: On the Dark Order Saga and Some Things in the Post-Endor EU
Aging is nothing if not a humbling experience, and one of the most obvious ways this is made manifest, for me, is when I review the things I have produced as a writer over the years. As a writer of fan fiction (less so of poetry and original fiction), I've pretty much always thought of myself as a genius compared to the overwhelming supermajority of my peers: those immature clowns whose minds are devoid of true vision, imagination, and artistic integrity, so prone to employing brainless self-insertions as protagonists, so willing to pander to whatever forms of emotional and sexual titillation will garner the most praise from the rest of the drooling, seething, unwashed masses. Nay, I am everything they are not: interested above all in crafting a true story, one with developed, well-rounded characters and plots that are truly interesting and unpredictable. In fact, were an impartial judge to pit my vision of Star Wars against every single last one of theirs combined, it would be no contest: by rights I would be sovereign over them all - the king of this dung heap.

The benefit of years has at least partially done away with this delusion. While I still think most fan fiction compared to my own (or not compared to anything, for that matter) to be garbage, I can now say with confidence that, if nothing else, I have somehow or other grown the ability to reflect on, criticize, and (if necessary) skewer my own work (hopefully) just as effectively as I have other people's in the past. I need not be the king of this dump - to keep the Medieval metaphor, I am content to be just one of many minor lords over my own little tract of territory. Thus, I can be haughty enough to look down from my keep upon the thirteen-year-old hacks and twenty-to-thirty-year-old degenerates as they roll in the mud of the streets; but I can also be humble enough to look up with wariness at the taller and more fortified towers of my neighbors.

It is with that thought that I begin my essays and proceed, in an extremely roundabout manner, to what was for a long time my main writing project here at SWFanon. In fact, the Dark Order Saga goes back to the very beginning of my time here with one lone article which I started without really knowing where it would go. At the time - what the hell, October of 2006 - I was rather obsessed with . I frankly don't want to think about how many days of my life I've sunk into that game.



In any case, despite my inexperience back then, I was able to tell a bad story (or a worse story than what I would've written) when I saw one sometimes, and in the case of Jedi Academy I guessed right. (I know my opinion back then was correct because I still hold it today.) Basically, I was dissatisfied with the fact that the Expanded Universe continuity (prior to the recent reboot, obviously) recognized the game's light side ending as the official and canon one. In it, our protagonist, a cereal box cardboard cutout made to resemble a Jedi named fights his way through an army of fiendish Sith cultists and heroically faces off against the villain,, in a two-tiered boss fight: first against the whorishly-dressed, recycled villainess on her own, and then against , the dead Sith Lord who possesses her dumb ass. Despite being a Jedi for less than a year, Jaden beats them both, killing Tavion, sending Ragnos floating back into his grave, and blowing up the that made Tavion's plan of resurrecting the Dark Lord (supposedly) possible. Only after all this is taken care of do and  show up. The cultist's one Star Destroyer in orbit explodes out of nerves, and Jaden continues his career as a Jedi - presumably going on to succeed Luke as Grand Master in less than a month. In less than a year he'll be taking over the Tonight Show In Space from Jimmy Fallon.

Even as a teenager I found this ending thoroughly lackluster, compared to the alternate ending. Jaden decides to give into his annoyance (I mean, his rage) and murders, a fellow Jedi and repentant defector to the cultists (and, I would be willing to bet, the most justly despised secondary character of the entire Star Wars franchise, second only to himself). Immediately after this, Jaden forgets how to speak with an indoor voice and decides that his new ambition in life is to take over the galaxy or something. He goes to Korriban, kills Tavion, fights and beats Kyle Katarn in a duel, takes the Scepter of Ragnos, and gets outta dodge in a hijacked Star Destroyer.

While I didn't exactly have an eye for drama back in 2006, I was still able to recognize, if in a dim and preconscious sort of way, that the light side ending was nowhere near as compelling as the dark one. The former wrapped up every loose end in an instant, concluding all our business as lightly and cleanly as an episode of The Superfriends. The latter ending, though crude (like everything else in Jedi Academy), is thematically shocking by comparison: Kyle Freaking Katarn just got his ass beaten by his own student. That student, once the hero of the story, is now the new villain and has escaped to unleash who-knows-what kind of havoc on the galaxy. Will Kyle be able to stop him? What will happen next?

So it was from this conclusion that I began - my very first article detailed the Battle of Korriban with this alternate ending in mind, and I'm rather confident that it was just supposed to be a one-off sorta thing. But finishing the story up to Jaden's escape necessitated that I know, or "find out" what happened next, and so that article ended up just being the first domino. Having set Jaden up as the new leader of this Imperial Remnant faction, I sprang into the resultant war. Years of obsessive playing the ' and ' games gave rise to an obsession with battle articles, which I loved to write.



Really, I think characterization and coherence came second to my priority that there must be badass space and army shit going on at all times. That's why Jaden's forces are all over the place in the early battles of this "Dark Order War" with either no in-universe explanation or one that I wouldn't hackney out until years after the original articles were written. First comes a blitzkrieg raid on the Jedi Academy which, incidentally, serves as a good example of my writerly self making the same mistakes that I denounced other writers, fan and official, for making - in this case, the defensibility of the Jedi Academy. Going by the old EU canon, it's apparently been attacked a total of three times by Imperials, who lost every time due to either contrivances, or else moronic decisions on the part of the attackers because the author(s) didn't know or didn't care anything about how military stuff works (or should work) within the setting that they're writing.

By all accounts, the only real defensive advantage for the Jedi Academy is the fact that people don't know where it is. The first time this is breached is in Kevin Anderson's truly painful book Darksaber. On this occasion Admiral Daala (I hate her so much, don't get me started on her) comes to the table with thirty-seven Star Destroyers, not to mention a Super Star Destroyer which is painted black because the regular design simply is not evil or grandiose enough. This force is pitted against, what, a dozen Jedi on foot on the surface with zero initial fleet support and no planetary shield. So obviously instead of slagging the planet from orbit, Admiral Daala farts around with a limp-wristed attempt at a ground invasion and manages to lose the entire fleet.

Not to pick on Jedi Outcast (because its plot holes are offset by the fact that it's actually fun to be Kyle Katarn), but that situation isn't much more sensible in hindsight. The  is a badass ship (I wish we'd seen more of her class elsewhere in the EU), but Galak Fyyar is apparently so cocky that that was the only ship he bothered to bring to the party. I suppose his refraining from smiting the Jedi from the heavens is somewhat forgivable, seeing as Desann wanted to kick the Jedi's asses on their own turf. What's not so easily overlooked, however, is how the Jedi have not learned their lesson from Daala and can do jack shit if somebody wants to show up and start dropping invasion pods on their academy from orbit - they sure are lucky that Rogue Squadron happens to be in the neighborhood.

The Jedi Academy gets attacked again in the old EU canon, but I don't fancy brain rot, so I never bothered to read the  series - sorry but not sorry at all. As for my own mistake, I had Jaden's attack on the Academy consist of yet another ground assault on an inexplicably pantsless Yavin 4, transported by one lone Star Destroyer. My excuse for him not blasting the whole academy into oblivion was that the attack's objective was to capture a bunch of Jedi alive. Naturally, this fails to explain why he didn't do the bombardment thing on his way out, after he's done fishing. Sooner or later the problems with this whole situation did occur to me, sort of; from the "Aftermath" section of the battle article: "After the attack, the Jedi Order decided to outfit the academy with superior defensive systems, including longer-range sensors, anti-air turrets, and a theater shield. They also requested that the New Republic station a fleet in the system to protect the academy." Not terrible, but again, one wonders why the Jedi didn't get around to requesting this military protection after they got attacked for maybe the second time, if not the first.

In any case, I threw in the Yavin attack because there needed to be a battle involving lots of Jedi, a shocking strike against the good guys by Jaden right out of the gate. And then he captures Kuat, which is the biggest and baddest shipyard in the Core Worlds. The New Republic does some raids so that I can write some missions that remind me of X-Wing, then there's a big battle, and HOLY SHIT - DAMMIT JADEN, YOU BLEW IT UP! YOU BLEW UP ALL THE SHIPYARDS, YOU MANIAC!!! At one point or another Jaden also got under his command shadow troopers, dark troopers, and almost every kind of TIE Fighter variant that I found cool sooner or later. And he had a base on because that was in the old  game that I had on my PS2. "Everything I like goes together!"

Still, I had just enough sense to avoid letting the story degenerate completely into a simple war in which Jaden was the bad guy and the finale consisted simply of him getting killed. So I decided to throw in a Bigger Bad force in the form of two Sith Lords pretending to be loyal cultists in Jaden's organization - genius, right? Both of these characters are updated versions of ones from a forum RPG that my brother and I participated in a very long time ago - I won't link to it here. Besides, if the reader is persistent enough, then I'm sure he or she can find it on their own in any case.



That these two Sith characters originate from a time even more primitive than 2006 shows. Darth Persia (his backstory almost entirely untouched from the original one my brother wrote for him) is a small-time Sith Lord working for Revan back in KotOR times who gets killed by Darth Sion sometime after the Star Forge is blown up. After that he's buried for four thousand years, but escapes and comes back to life when his Force Ghost possesses some sap who breaks into his tomb. Persia works for Palpatine as an Inquisitor for a while, then sets out on his own to re-start the Sith Empire after Endor happens. He's somehow a military genius, fabulous public speaker, dual-wielder of Dooku-style curve-hilted lightsabers, and can mix ice cream like nobody's business. Speaking of which, I seem to recall that in his very first incarnation, the time skip that landed him in the Imperial Era was accomplished not by Force Ghost Possession, but by cryogenically freezing himself for the hell of it.

His apprentice, Darth Imperious, was my own creation. He's a Kel'Dor originally named Jorus Kuun whose parents got killed at some point, and who becomes a Jedi, only for Jaden Korr to capture him during his attack on Yavin 4. Jaden spends days torturing him. Eventually Jorus is won over by his captor's inspiring personality and charisma and joins him; not long after, Persia finds him and recruits him as a Sith apprentice. In retrospect, I think the part about his character that I like the most is this line from his article's "Behind the Scenes" section: "The author understands that Imperious' background is rather stock, but doesn't think that a different origin is necessary for the character." As General Grievous once said, "You are a bold one."

Shit goes on. Kyle Katarn eventually stop being useless and catches up with Jaden on Bakura while a big badass battle goes on outside. Imperious shows up and it's a Pirates of the Caribbean-esque three-sided duel. Imperious escapes with the Scepter of Ragnos, so does Kyle after cutting off one of Jaden's hands, and Darth Persia, commanding the fleet in orbit, gets rid of Jaden for good by nuking the entire planet. After that he takes the regime over and forms the Greater Sith Empire, and about a bazillion military campaigns happen after that. I used to have a gigantic text file summarizing dozens (if not literally hundreds) of battle ideas - secret weapons and defections and civil wars and sabotage and intrigues and such - but that file is long gone.

The goofiness of the villains aside, I feel my old self deserves just a little credit - as does my brother, who helped me to take a more sophisticated route in my writing than I otherwise would have. He pointed out to me that at the end of the day Jaden Korr is really nothing more than an asshole who's really good at killing people. But politicians and admirals are impressed by respectability and competence, so none of the Imperial Remnant people are really going to like having to answer to him, whereas Tavion's former cultists are slobbering to do his bidding. I wrote, or tried to write, Jaden as short-sighted and easily duped, in contrast to Persia, who's able to subvert his influence by actually being a good military leader. This seemed to me to be a contrast with a lot of Star Wars writing that I had seen, in which it was rather witlessly assumed that owning a lightsaber meant that one never had to deal with problems in politics, administration, economics, or commanding fleets of starships. This blind spot turned out to be no less prevalent among official Star Wars media than among fan-made.



For instance, the Revenge of the Sith video game and The Force Unleashed both assumed that if Anakin or Starkiller had succeeded in killing Palpatine, then he would be able to swagger into the Imperial Palace and declare himself Emperor, and the whole Empire would trip over itself as it ran to clean his boots with its drool - forgetting, of course, that even among the fraction of Imperial elite who knew anything about the Sith, none of them had any respect for Sith political theory; thus nobody would be impressed by the usurper's martial prowess and would instead ostracize him as the assassin of their rightful ruler. The RotS game had a particularly asinine alternate ending in which Anakin pulls a fast one on Ol' Palps and stabs him to death before spitting to the nearby stormtrooper bodyguards that "The galaxy belongs to me!" And the cutscene ends with this apparently being accepted, whereas in any sane universe the clones would have gunned Anakin down before he could get the first word out.

As I said, there was about a bajillion battles to have happen - due to several cases of overhaul-and-update-what-you've-already-written-itis, though, I never got very far past Jaden's death. Most of what I had planned is too fuzzy in my head to really recall much beyond basic stuff, but I do remember how I intended to wrap up the whole thing. Basically, one of the main dynamics of the story would be the Master-Apprentice relationship between Persia and Imperious, with the former being the arrogant, omni-competent Sith overlord and the latter his ambitious but less refined minion (much more perceptive and effective than Jaden ever was, but still not really up to the task of running an Empire). Not one to let himself be deterred by patience, Imperious would challenge his master and kill him in a spectacular duel in an underground droid factory on the new capital of Eriadu.

Being Sith, the Empire accepts Imperious' rule, but the war goes badly and he realizes he made a mistake. So he takes a bigass fleet to Korriban and uses the Scepter of Ragnos to resurrect Persia - his plan being to force his old master to use his magic military mojo to win the war for him. I had all this planned out in my head, exactly how it would look in a movie. Since it all has to be badass enough, the resurrection happens while in the middle of a Jedi-on-Sith melee on top of one of the tombs in the Valley of the Dark Lords. Imperious would blast a huge wad of dark side energy at Darth Persia's tomb, causing it to explode (because it is imperative that things explode in order to be respectable), and Persia floats through the air to meet them. By this point the only Jedi left is Luke Skywalker, and they gang up on him. Luke kills Imperious by stabbing him through the head, but is beaten by Persia. Persia, who is pissed off for being dead and stuff, then immediately uses the scepter to resurrect Imperious and declare himself the chief asshole once again. (The idea was that if you bring someone back to life using the scepter, you can suck their Force energy right back into the thing and kill them if they piss you off.) Luke is finished off and the two Sith Lords leave. Meanwhile in orbit the fleet battle reaches its climax when two Super Star Destroyers crash into each other, get blown in half, and then crash into Korriban and level the Valley of the Dark Lords. Despite the maximum-villainy wankage in all this, I still applaud myself for that bit. For all the times that the Sith menace gets re-started from a planet that's full of ancient evil ghosts and dark side artifacts, you'd think the Jedi or Republic would take the hint and do something permanent about Korriban - you know, maybe after the first two or three freaking thousand years of Sith problems.

Anyway, since Darth Persia is so awesome that he shits gold bricks and eats Sith lightsaber crystals as breakfast cereal, he takes back command of the Empire and beats the crap out of the Republic. It comes down to a last stand at the last major Republic shipyard in the Core (I can't remember which planet it was. My gut says Fondor, but in any case it probably wasn't Kuat). The Republic fleet's literally just about to be defeated when Imperious goes berserk and starts a fight with Persia right on the bridge. Eventually they both grab the Scepter of Ragnos and drain each other's energy into it - Imperious kicks the bucket straight off, and Persia, reduced to a sickly pasty white mess of a person, dies soon after. Darth Persia's subordinates are incapable of coordinating the battle after that (presumably because of searing pain in their asses from crapping themselves so hard), so the Imperial fleet is routed, and the Republic eventually wins the war. Kyle Katarn becomes Grand Master of the Jedi Order, and finally the galaxy can get some peace and quiet because the never show up because they're still an even stupider idea than anything I could ever come up with.




 * Blue Glass Arrow.svg Supplement: User:MPK/Rebus

Aside from my inexperience as a writer at the time, I'm inclined to think that the main reason Dark Order failed is because I thought of it less as a story about people than a series of articles about shit blowing up. Despite my care to be a bit more astute about galactic politics than most fanfic writers, that ultimately didn't make the whole thing that much better than any other schmuck's post-Endor storyline. I was so obsessed with my own wanked-out villains and their schemings that I couldn't find any real place for the heroes in any of the proceedings. This is perfectly exemplified by Luke's death, which wasn't even a heroic sacrifice, and the fact that nobody in the galaxy was a bad enough dude to kill my two Sith head honchos - they had to kill each other. At the time I thought this would be a clever and novel way to beat the reader over the head with the fact that the Sith way leads inevitably to self-destruction, but in hindsight it just strikes me as excessively grim - not only did the heroes fail to beat the villains, but in a certain sense they weren't even needed to beat them anyway.

In addition to that, one main weakness of Dark Order was the same weakness that all tales, fanfic and otherwise, of huge epic post-Endor wars against the re-emergent Sith. It seems to cheapen everything that happened in Episode 6 - not so much by making Anakin Skywalker's "balancing the Force" shtick kind of a joke, but more prominently making that movie's whole conflict seem unimportant, since after Palpatine's defeat not only do threats just as huge remain to be dealt with, but such huge threats can even come out of nowhere, can be some resurrected Sith stooge from four thousand years ago. And even if you can ignore all that, you can only see the epic post-Endor plot so many times before the differences between the various iterations start to look arbitrary and superficial, and they all become a single, generic blob. (Obviously, I'm currently suspending judgment on how this rule of mine, if it can be called a rule, will apply or fail to apply to the Sequel Trilogy.)



That's basically why I lost interest in the Dark Order story, and also why I wouldn't finish it even if I had the time to and the benefit of revising the plot as radically as I wished. The whole thing started with Jedi Academy, and that game's story wasn't even that good to begin with - it was quite shitty, in fact. That it was an action game running on the primitive Quake 3 engine is no excuse. Jedi Outcast had all the same limitations, yet provided a story and protagonist that most can agree were engaging and fun to experience. Academy, on the other hand, provided close to zero elevation in gameplay quality while simultaneously throwing storyline quality off a cliff. The protagonist is devoid of personality. His supposed friendship with Rosh Penin is never demonstrated, Rosh himself being an annoying fuck with no respectable personality traits and no heroic qualities at all, and whose defection to the cultists as well as his final role as the "Turn to Dark Side Button" could be seen from a mile away. The plot is riddled with inconsistencies and weird gaps of information. For just one example, we are told before the Korriban mission that the Scepter's resurrection shtick works by dumping a bunch of Force energy onto a dead dude, which restores his cells and brings him back to life - but when Tavion actually does it, it just wakes up Ragnos' ghost so he can possess her. Never mind the question of where Tavion got this whole idea to begin with.

This is the other thing that killed the Dark Order series: the fact that Jedi Academy, along with so much of the rest of the Post-Endor EU, was so shitty, and that I felt obligated to fix all of it. For instance, I had to replace  with some other campaign waged by some bare-bones Dark Jedi villain I made up. For the more immediate backstory itself, I actually planned to write some actual prose, a series of short stories called the Jedi Academy Chronicles. Basically, the idea was to have one story per mission in the game, re-telling it all so that it would be decent rather than shitty. Jaden and Rosh would be working together in a lot of the missions, allowing the idea of these two being friends to actually become plausible, thus lending some actual drama to Jaden's turn to the dark side. Just giving Jaden a personality in general would've gone a long way. As it stood, having my story start with his turn to the dark side, leaving the original game's one-dimension-ness untouched, there's no sane way to account for this guy going from a basically well-intentioned Jedi to committing murder, and then becoming a ruthless warlord.

I have only the barest of notes on what any of these particular short stories would have been. I find the bullet point entry for the Taanab mission to be noteworthy, though: I have it written down that rather than Jaden, the point-of-view character would simply be "an ordinary dude" - presumably a blue-collar schmuck who punches in at his shift at the spaceport only to have to deal with a lightsaber melee between Jaden and the cultists, not to mention the giant mutant rampaging rancor. It's a bit amusing to imagine.

So the final reason I will never complete or re-write the Dark Order series is that the whole thing is simply too damn big. If I'm going to fix it, I might as well fix Jedi Academy. And if I'm going to fix Jedi Academy, I might as well fix the entire post-Endor EU, and I would not wish to force such a task on even my most loathsome enemy. Suffice it to say that if I were to start over again where I did nine long years ago at the Battle of Korriban (presuming a decent backstory rather than a shitty one in Jedi Academy's prior events), I would most likely forgo entirely the tedious rerun where Jaden becomes an Imperial warlord. Instead I would end the whole saga right at its start, with Jaden being defeated by Kyle in Ragnos' tomb, and then finally struck down while grasping at the scepter. To my mind, that would be the only respectable way for my original idea to end, combining the essential resolution of the light side ending with the tragedy that was implied in the dark side one, and completely avoiding the much-trodden ground of a humongous New Republic-on-Sith war.

Needless to say, though, Kemp's Jaden in Crosscurrent and Riptide is about a zillion times better than mine ever was or could be. -MPK, Free Man  17:03, December 17, 2015 (UTC)

II - On the Writing of Romance, Being the First of Many Chapters to Deal with Knights of the Old Republic


When I consider what depths of scum and villainy there are to the internet and to humanity in general, I suppose that I'm not much of an explorer. But one experience of mine which I remember with exquisite disdain and self-directed indignation is the web site once known as kotorfanmedia.com, of which I was a member for some years. Today I note with some satisfaction that the site and its forums appear to have been offline for some time, but even that does little to make me feel better about the entire affair - better to have always stayed clean. As I seem to recall it, the membership there - on the forums, anyway - seemed to be only a few dozen strong, consisting of girls whose chosen pastime was apparently symbolically masturbating to visions of the tortured, fractured, misunderstood, lonely, angry, angsty souls of their female, their female , , , and (of course) the king shithead himself,. There were only a few exceptions to this, and the fact that I was myself one of those exceptions serves only to underscore my foolishness in dwelling there to begin with.

It was during my time at KFM that I composed my first and (to date) last story that deliberately had any attempt to include romance in it. It was a oneshot (more like oneshit, amiright?) consisting of the fight against on board the  in KotOR 2, the main focus ostensibly being the relationship between the Exile - male, light-sided, and bearing the recycled named of Jorus Kuun - and Visas Marr. Long story short, Jorus takes one of the game's roads-less-traveled-by and has Visas stab herself in order to defeat Darth Nihilus. It works, Nihilus dies, Visas dies, and Jorus sits on the Ravager's bridge angsting and being miserable because he just made the woman he loved kill herself without ever telling her he loved her - or something like that.

Even with my blindness about my own writing talent (see the previous chapter), it didn't take too long for me to be disgusted with the story that I had written, and I eventually had it deleted. For whatever reason, I've never since felt inclined to write a story that involved romance, whether as part of the main plot or a secondary one. And, frankly, I don't think it fits within the mood of KotOR 2's story to have romance like you theoretically do in KotOR 1, or would in another story - mostly because all of the characters whom these fanfic writers focus on (since they're from the game, y'know) are so fucked in the head. You, as the Exile, are a traumatized former war criminal. Atton's day job used to be torturing people. Handmaiden seems to have been not brought up by her parents, and besides that she's apparently spent her whole life being shat on by her sisters for being a bastard (and despite her in-game light-sidedness, the stuff going on between her and Visas among other things (both in the cut content and the actual game) indicate that this alignment is somewhat tenuous). Visas has spent who-knows-how-many years as the sole speaking companion of a world-devouring monstrosity. Mandalore's an honorable Klingon warrior who would have no interest in silly, squabblish romantics (not with any outsiders, at any rate). Compared to all of them, Mical and Mira are the straight-man and straight-woman, respectively. And I dismiss Mical as ineligible on the grounds that he's hardly any more interesting than Carth; and Mira shoots Male-Exile down as soon as he makes the first move on her because he's "too old" (which is reasonable, given that she's talking about spiritual or psychological "age").



Should the reader find any of these subjects odd to focus on, I kindly refer him or her to the title of these writings. The point remains that the overwhelming majority of the party in TSL is consumed with bizarre, traumatic emotional baggage which, one would think, is interesting enough and important enough (for the writer themself as well as the characters) to crowd out any and all cutesy bullshit where Female-Exile takes Atton out on a date to some bar on Nar Shaddaa, or Male-Exile goes skipping through the fields of Telos' bio-dome while holding hands with Visas. The romantic affections among all of these characters, whatever precise shape they took, were always more interesting when they were suppressed, hidden, or left unfulfilled. Mira being dirty in the shower or chronically punching the wall while thinking of Female-Exile (which at least one cretin has written) is not romantic or interesting. But Atton confessing his love to her as he dies from being tortured by Darth Sion (as in the cut content) is meaningful because it is tragic. Similarly, Atton accompanying her as they fly off into the sunset at the end of the game, saying nothing of love and simply asking "Need any company?" (again, left out of the actual game) is satisfying because it is at the end of the game, and thus we don't need to see what continues to go on between them.

Male-Exile sharing a bed with Visas ("charging her loading ramp," as he'd put it) while in the middle of the quest to find the Jedi Masters is obscene and boring because the relationship has nowhere to go from that point forward. But Visas confessing her love to Male-Exile while they're on their way to fight Nihilus works because they have no time to act on it. Likewise, Brianna murdering Visas on Malachor out of jealousy (this, too, was cut) or, for that matter, Visas sacrificing herself in order to defeat Nihilus, works because a love-obsession cut short by death is always effective, provided the viewer cares about the character who dies.

One more point about Visas for emphasis since her situation is likely the most extreme compared to the other party members: you know how people who are victims of rape (to put it mildly) sort of have trouble forming and maintaining intimate relationships with people in the future? It seems plain to me that Visas' backstory is analogous, or equivalent in terms of sheer trauma, at least as far as the narrative is concerned. It's been ages since I read Unseen, Unheard (the short comic about her backstory), so I'm not positive, but at any rate I'm confident she was rather young when her entire planet got Force-Drained to death around her. And, again, she spends her life after that being Force-bonded to a sentient dark-side abomination and doing whatever it tells her to. It should go without saying that the rape victim analogy remains only an analogy (for me, anyway - for the creepy motherfuckers out there on fanfiction.net, I can make no promises), but this is why I bring it up: does it not occur to these writers that, after everything she's experienced, Visas might have a little difficulty relating healthily and normally to people - let alone going on dates? I'm impressed that this person is capable of recognizing basic social cues, and you expect me to believe that she's maintaining and screwing a boyfriend less than a year after being turned loose from Nihilus' influence?

The overall point: taking these characters, each one of whom carries a veritable Hell within him and herself, and throwing them into conventional romantic relationships with each other is clumsy, artificial, and buffoonish. The writer who does this demonstrates that she has only the most superficial grasp of the characters' personality traits and backstories. And so she frolics about in her own imaginary projections, drooling, jabbering, and swearing to the moon that she can see a living soul somewhere behind Mical's sterile, pixelated eyes.

Though some may expect otherwise, I hold much the same opinion toward KotOR 1: that giving Revan a romance plot to deal with - be it with the British Jedi loon, or with the king of shit himself - is likewise detrimental to the story and to any and all hypothetical spin-offs and continuations. But I will leave that subject, and others, to treat in the next chapter. -MPK, Free Man  23:29, December 23, 2015 (UTC)

Post-Script: The other big reason you can't write the Exile screwing anyone is his/her Force-bond with Kreia. It's the same principle as when Kreia's hand gets cut off: if one of them gets in on some action, the other gets in on it too, whether they want it or not. -MPK, Free Man  01:14, December 25, 2015 (UTC)

III - In Explaining a Thing by Way of Pontificating on the Central Arc of Revan's Character


In this essay I will explain, in my usual meandering way, why I think that direct romance is best left out of the story of KotOR's Revan as well as that of the Exile. First, a few concessions. Yes, the plot, characterization, and overall feel of KotOR is far less dark and disturbing than that of TSL, and so it does much more fittingly lend itself to a conventional romance subplot. (And as much as I like to take the piss out of him, it's not really Carth Onasi that I hate so much as the idiotic fangirls' perceptions of him, and their delusional conviction that he is far more interesting and engaging than he actually is.) But I myself am unable to look at KotOR in isolation after having experienced TSL; since Revan's entire journey as a person before, during, and after the former is considerably deepened and altered by what we're told in the latter. It goes from a carbon copy of the basic Star Wars story (intrepid adventurers, a quest across the galaxy, some romance on the side, and a space battle with stuff blowing up at the end), with the addition of the whole amnesia plot twist thing, to the mere prologue to TSL with all its dark subject matter and moral ambiguity.

That being said, I've never subscribed to the conventional interpretation of Revan's character. That is to say, I am not an apologist for his manipulations of the Republic and Jedi; nor his turn to the dark side and embracing of the Sith teachings; nor his use of a superweapon to destroy Malachor V and massacre his own subjects whose loyalties did not suit him; nor his treason against the Galactic Republic; nor his unhindered employment of other twisted fiends such as Darth Malak and the various Sith assassins and torturers (of whom Atton was one) in the pursuit of his goals; nor his use of the Star Forge. In other words, it is plain as day to me that - whatever we might say or not say about the corruption in the Jedi hierarchy and the Republic - it is indisputable that Revan was a villain prior to the events of KotOR, and that even if he himself believed in the rationalizations that Kreia suggests in TSL, then they are merely that: rationalizations which are no better than those of Darth Sidious or Plagueis ("These pitiful little life forms are better off being ruled by us enlightened ones."), for whom Revan is the equivalent galactic menace of his time period. Contrary to the conventional interpretation (which I always took heat on the internet for contradicting) the real dramatic power of Revan's story is not that he was some transcendent genius who "mastered both sides of the Force" and "walked the middle ground" for some fictitious "greater good" because nobody else was strong enough to - at its bottom, that interpretation is nothing more than the application of hand-waving justifications that would justly repulse any decent man if ever applied to a real-life dictator or warlord. It would be apt, then, to remember from our common wisdom that it is a road paved with "good intentions" that leads to Hell - or, in this case.

The slobbering Revan fanatics in real life always had the exact same blind spot that Revan himself does in-universe: it is the same stink of self-righteous, hollowly-justified hypocrisy which they rail against the Jedi for having. "Screw those damn Jedi!" they say one minute. "Those elitist, isolated, unfeeling bastards who abuse, kill, and manipulate as many people as they want just because they're powerful and they think they know what's best for the whole galaxy!" Then Revan shows up and they fall on their faces in rapture because he has all of the Jedi vices to the point of superabundance. But Revan gets a pass on it because he's special, you see - he's not like the other Jedi and Sith. He's enlightened, so he gets to decide. Revan gets to say that the Republic and the Jedi Order aren't worth reforming peacefully. Revan gets to say that treason is justified. Revan gets to say that his rule over the galaxy would be so much more peaceful and prosperous than the Republic's or Emperor Vitiate's. Revan gets to decide who lives and who dies, based on who's useful to him or not. Because he's the player character.

But anyway, as I have been trying to say, what makes Revan's story actually memorable and interesting is that, as a consequence of his capture and amnesia, his life is actually two lives. The first is the rise and fall of a great hero, echoing the stories of and Anakin Skywalker (and, not to mention, many of the archetypal stories of human literary history). The second is of that same fallen hero, who returns from death as another person, so to speak, only to discover the person he once was; in his second life, Revan must face the burden and consequences of the first life and come to terms with both. The central drama is the question of how he will do this. The game's alternatives, of course, are of repeating the tragedy of the first life by becoming a villain again, or defying it by being redeemed as a true hero. The all-important layer which TSL adds to this arc is, of course, the whole True Sith thing - this terrible, unseen threat out there which is not only ultimately responsible for Revan's fall, but also is still at large. The triumph over Malak is revealed to only have been the beginning of a far more desperate struggle; the tension between the two lives is not resolved; Revan is still haunted by the first one. Thus, the central arc of his character is extended, and the dramatic question from KotOR is extended, potentially into the distant future. Without ever showing it, TSL turns the struggle of Revan's life into something like itself: long, dark, and bleak. Is he strong enough? Will he pass this test a second time - or fail it a second time?

As I see it, that is a tremendously compelling character arc, one that needs no addition or obfuscation by a romantic subplot - not one that lasts, at any rate. There's nothing wrong with Bastila or with Carth (only, as I said above, with the fans), but having them be too closely attached to Revan detracts from his character. He's spiritually joined the ranks of the cast of TSL. He is now a a seething, larger-than-life galactic mass of torment. Don't give me any crap where he and Bastila get married and move into a space-apartment and throw a party and play pazaak and go shopping together. Revan's heart is only interesting when it is a broken thing, and the few people on this planet who have written him well understood this.

Good for them, I guess..? -MPK, Free Man  20:14, December 31, 2015 (UTC)

A short addendum, in case I misrepresented myself above. I did not mean - or should not have meant - to say that KotOR or Revan's character is marred by any romance whatsoever. If he wants to smooch Bastila, that's fine; if he's a she and she wants to smooch Carth, well, if you insist. And if it's contained to the events of KotOR itself, perhaps a short period after, and even up to Revan's disappearance, that's ideal. If, however, the romantic subplot remains in the foreground (or, worse, if it strangles and takes the place of the main plot), then that does detract from the story; unless it is cut short or by other means rendered unfulfilled, it can only do harm.

I suppose that this entire position of mine may be nothing more than a rationalizing extension of my inability and unwillingness to write romance in my own fiction. That may in fact be the case, but it's what I've got and I'm sticking to it. Till next time. -MPK, Free Man  20:14, January 2, 2016 (UTC)

IV - On TSL's Plot Holes and Contradictions, with a Focus on its Ending

 * For some years, it seemed that one of the ways in which the fans of TSL were most pleased to fawn over the supposed brilliance of its plot was by parroting Kreia's statement toward the game's end that "there is no great revelation, no great secret," no sudden twist that changes everything like we had in KotOR. Having looked back on this matter and failed to find or recall any adequate explanation of what they meant by this statement, I have found it to be solemn, snobbish sophistry. Of course there's a great big fat revelation in the story. Two, in fact, and both revealed in the final act on Dantooine: first, you've been duped by Kreia, who is the final antagonist of the game; second, you're a living Force wound that feeds off of others and poses a potential threat to all life. These are big, important things that were not clear before they were revealed, and that meant a lot when they were revealed. They are twists - and it's okay, guys. Nothing's wrong with twists.



This silly opinion and others like it are basically the manifestations of what seems to be (or to have been) an idolatrous exaggeration of TSL's story quality, which I'll touch on later. But for all the fun we had experiencing that story, it is fairly riddled with plot holes, inconsistencies, and self-contradictions. To this day I don't think that anyone has really been able to straighten it all out - and, I am convinced, no one ever could without altering the material we're given in the game, amputating this here and connecting those two things there, re-doing this and that. In this exploration here, I'll be elucidating the contradictions having to do with Kreia, the Exile, and the end of the game. There are others in different parts of the plot, but these are the most glaring and have to do with the central thematic essence of the story, and thus are the most important to discuss.

I think Kreia's great. She's well-written and her voice acting is superb. But at the end of the day, her goals and motivations are never adequately explained, and even a skim of them can show that they are contradictory - and perhaps the most bewildering part of it all is that we are reminded or informed concerning all of them within a short timespan. For instance, sometimes she is pure Sith Lord, bent on destroying the Jedi and the Sith who betrayed her, taking over Malachor again, and putting the Exile through the archetypal Sith final test: pitting one apprentice against another (the other being Sion) and then the surviving apprentice against the master, to the death, and may the strongest win and take supremacy. But other times her long-term goals seem entirely un-Sith, such as when she talks of sending the completely-trained Exile off to find Revan and defeat the True Sith. I suppose you could mash these two together, but then both seem to be rendered superfluous when Kreia talks about her desire to somehow use the Force wounds in Malachor V and/or the Exile to kill the Force - and, of course, the exact way in which she hopes to accomplish this is never hammered out. If I recall correctly, though, there is a loading screen blurb on Malachor which says something along the lines, "If the echoes from Malachor are not stopped, then all who can feel the Force will be either deafened or killed." It astounds me that this is apparently the only part of the game, cut or uncut, where that is plainly stated. And if there's nothing more to it than that, it seems to imply that her only goal would be to keep Malachor intact until it finishes the job for her.

One could argue against my charges of inconsistency by claiming that Kreia is just insane, and so it isn't a problem for her to have contradictory goals, but I don't think that was at all what the writers were trying to imply - at any rate, most fans of the game never seemed to pick up on this supposed insanity of hers. Nor did I ever get the impression that she changed her goals to suit new circumstances, since the different goals are spoken of in such close proximity and sometimes within the same conversation.

Then again, there may be a way out of this wamprat-trap. Maybe Kreia wasn't planning on destroying the Force anytime soon (not within the timeframe of TSL, anyway) because she couldn't, didn't know how. Maybe the plan was to take over Malachor again, get the Exile on her side, and devote her time to studying Force wounds and figuring out how they can be used to kill the Force, or even pass on this task to the Exile since Kreia's old and wrinkly and perhaps liable to kick the bucket within a decade or so. If that were the case, I suppose it wouldn't be an inconsistency for her to be working on this Evil Plan and sending the Exile (or someone) to slow down the True Sith, since they could easily show up on her doorstep and muck up said Plan. But again, this is not what the game gives us - I just put it together in my head, years after playing the game, elaborating on and slightly altering the source material. I mean, just for starters, in order for this to work we'd have to alter the final confrontation in which, as it stands, Kreia insists that she and the Exile have to fight to the death.



And this brings us to the other big plot snarl: any plan of Kreia's, or the Exile's, that involves the former getting killed by her apprentice in order to make said apprentice stronger (or whatever) falls apart when considered in light of the Force bond thing. You know, the plot thread established back on Peragus, where they're so closely Force-bonded that the Exile feels it when Kreia's hand is cut off, and they're pretty sure that if one dies, the other will too? Remember that plot point? Well, the game doesn't - you kill Kreia and you're completely fine, without explanation. It never gets broken, so far as we're told - after all, if you execute Atris on Telos, then Kreia will phone you all the way from Malachor and reminds you about the bond thing in order to blackmail you into coming to her. And I think that's the last mention of it anywhere in the whole game, even including salvageable cut content. Afterwards it's simply dropped.

This shouldn't be surprising. All this happened too long ago. The game was rushed like hell and never finished, and even the salvageable cut content isn't enough to reconstruct or even sketch out whatever the writers' originally-intended, cohesive, polished, refined story - both the overall plot as well as the finale - was supposed to look like (and take it from me, I played the game with the full content restoration mods - if those mods really represent the ending how it was supposed to be, then Chris Avellone isn't anywhere near the hot shit we all thought he was). I mean, who knows how insane the development process looked? Just consider all the things we do know that happened. A whole planet got cut. Mical was added in on the fly to replace a completely different party member who would've showed up on Korriban (which itself was gutted, I'm willing to bet). At one point they were going to have Atris join the party, for reasons that have not survived, and at another point she was going to be Darth Traya at the end, not Kreia - and who the hell knows what that was all about?

Speaking of which, this is one of the reasons why I think, in retrospect, that the quest of the TSL restoration modders was sort of doomed from the start (which made my obsession with them back in the day all the more idiotic): even they couldn't provide the complete, consistent, proper ending that we all pined after for such a long time. At best, they were left with only a few traces of that ending (on another note, KotOR's ending doesn't impress me either, but I can explain that some other time).

Anyway, it shouldn't surprise us that neither the (known) cut nor uncut content adequately explains how the Exile is able to survive dying with Kreia as a consequence of their Force bond. Master Vash's explanation (in the cut content, where you actually got to talk to her) is no help, either. If I remember it right, she basically says that a bond can be weakened and broken if one of the participants falls to the dark side or something. But this cannot apply to the Exile and Kreia because Kreia never falls to the dark side, she always was on the dark side in the first place (and don't give me crap about her being "neutral" or on the "gray side"). And this doesn't account for the different alignment changes that the Exile might go through during the course of the game. And besides, given the Exile's mutant Force bond-making-ness, whereby the bonds form super-fast and super-strong, it doesn't make sense that the normal means of safely breaking ordinary Force bonds would work for her. On a thematic note, this is because it simply isn't fair that the Exile is able to get out of this dilemma so easily. Everywhere in the game, except for Vash's cut and less-than-adequate talk, implies that you're thoroughly screwed. And as I'll explain later, I think this ought to have worked to the ending's advantage.

These issues, and others, are why I'm unable to stand with the party (possibly extinct now, for all I know) which worships at the tennis shoes of Chris Avellone. Obviously I will cut him (and whoever else wrote the story with him) some slack, given how rushed the game was, and given also that he prepared himself for writing by supposedly seeing every Star Wars movie and reading every book and comic from the EU - which shows ridiculous dedication, even if he is exaggerating. But the slack we cut him can only go so far before it transforms from good will toward a man into a dogma of Avellonian Infallibility. I've already complained in previous writings that he failed to "get" Star Wars, and that, knowing some of his opinions on it, it seems that he wrote Kreia (and Revan by extension) as mouthpiece characters so that he could bitch about everything in the movies and Jedi philosophy that he didn't like or didn't understand. At any rate, the fangirls who venerate him with asinine flattery ("He made the Star Wars I love, not George Lucas!") have done that with the characters, even if he didn't.



Still, we can find some solace in the fact that Avellone somehow managed to write a great story in spite of his apparent contempt for the universe in which he was writing - unlike the amateurs who took the same path. For a cardinal example of this, one need look no further (Force knows why one would, though) than the fanfic Prophet, Thing of Evil (one of the famous events here was the time I ranted about it on IRC). It's especially notable in this case for apparently preceding TSL's release (or else the authoress simply didn't play it) and yet attempting to do the same thing: challenge the conventional Force-philosophy and morality of Star Wars. The authoress accomplished this by reducing Revan from a fallen hero, seduced by the love of power and ruthless pragmatism, into a petulant, completely sociopathic woman-child whose ultimate goal, rather than uniting the galaxy under a powerful Empire (much less defending it against an invader from unknown space), is to get some peace and quiet so she can play house with her fuckbuddy Bastila - she doesn't hold even the slightest pretense that she's doing anything for the good of others. She starts the whole Jedi Civil War just because she's pissed that the Jedi stole her girlfriend from her, and at the story's climax and finale, she justifies all of her atrocities and vices with a revolting, nihilistic diatribe about how we're all going to die and all of our actions will eventually become meaningless, so as long as we're alive there's no point in restraining ourselves with philosophies, rules, or notions of morality; we should all just "be true to ourselves" and do whatever we think we ought. Great! That's a wonderfully uplifting message, Revan! I'm sure Nietzsche would be proud. When you wake up in Hell and meet the specters of all the millions of soldiers and civilians and Jedi who died because of you, I'm sure everyone'll feel a lot better after you finish explaining how they fucking needed to drown under the tidal waves of a galactic war so that you could be true to yourself. Don't worry, they'll reserve a special encasement in the ice just for you.

Ope, that was a tangent. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa maxima.

Let's reel it back in. So in the end, we're given the snarl of Kreia's mutually exclusive goals on one hand, and her Force bond-enforced mandatory suicide pact with the Exile on the other. The former snarl can be untangled with only a small amount of tampering, but it's all for nothing unless it's also straightened out with the latter one. I think I have a solution that most people have overlooked.



As it stands, there's no way to get out of the final duel to the death unless the Exile joins Kreia in her quest to destroy the Force. But frankly, sometimes the Dungeon Master just needs to look you straight in the eye and tell you, "No, your character wouldn't do that." If you join Kreia, it's game over; she's absorbed your personality; you've sold your soul to the devil. As I'll explain elsewhere, we can afford to sympathize with the villain here - but we must not agree with her.

Okay, so if we discount the impossible option, it looks like there's no way for the protagonist to get out of the story alive. Kreia has to be stopped, and to be stopped she has to be killed, but if she dies, so does the Exile - and I think we should roll with that paradox instead of trying to solve it. Given the somber, bitter-sweet, Empire Strikes Back-esque tone of TSL, I'm inclined to think that it would make more sense, technically and thematically, to actually have the Exile die on Malachor with Kreia (or else aboard the Ebon Hawk immediately after - dying at a delayed effect so that she can give some last words to her companions, I suppose). That would save us from copping out on the suspense and dread that begins after Kreia reveals her true nature on Dantooine. Nor, as some naysayers might argue, would it negate the whole KotOR 3 sequel hook. Simply have it be the Exile's surviving party that leaves for the Unknown Regions. The KotOR 3, then, would follow up with a new protagonist who somehow or another follows in their footsteps.

I realize that the idea of a third act featuring Revan but not the Exile as major protagonists would surely be anathema to many or most old-school fans of the series - it would have been to myself as well, not very long ago. But as I look back on everything, it seems to me like a big mistake for the third act of KotOR to just drop the issue of the Exile's "living cosmic Force parasite" nature when such a big, screaming huge deal was made out of it in TSL itself right until its [non-]ending. And every KotOR 3 which I've read or heard of, including my own idea back in the day and the path that the official EU took, always downplayed this part of his character to the point of irrelevance. Visas or Mical is full of shit when one of them tells you after Dantooine that the threat which the Jedi Masters said you pose is merely "the danger of their beliefs." You're potentially another Nihilus and you can potentially be used to kill the Force. That's arguably a bigger deal than the True Sith. Surviving Malachor, even as a light-sider, doesn't solve this problem, and the fact that neither of TSL's endings give a satisfying solution - or even a satisfying failed solution - is one of the most troubling flaws in it.



Heck, you could even have this issue be the difference between the light and dark side endings of the game. In the former, the Exile would take the real Jedi way and let herself die with Kreia and Malachor so that neither the planet's wound nor her own can be used to threaten the galaxy any longer. In the latter, she'd refuse to make this necessary self-sacrifice and either escape the planet alive or else save it and take over Trayus Academy - thus becoming the quintessential Sith in the sense that, for all her strength, she is ultimately driven by a single fear that she (like Palpatine and Darth Plagueis) can never truly conquer: the fear of losing her power - and this final, narcissistic terror makes the Jedi path of self-denial unthinkable for her, no matter how dire the consequences of this refusal. Those consequences would necessarily include her return as one of the major villains of KotOR 3.

Of course, like the story we were given, the latter scenario fails to explain how the Exile could survive Kreia's death given the whole Force bond thing. Maybe she'd somehow imprison her or put her in stasis and thus keep them both alive? Alternatively, what if Dark-Exile - instead of going stabby-stab - Force-Drains Kreia to death in the same way as the Jedi Masters - could that perhaps successfully kill her and remove the bond without it being fatal? Maybe, I don't know. But if we were going to take the time to give TSL another coat of paint, we could figure this out.

And hey, here's a KotOR 3 fic idea from out of left field: go with the dark side endings of both games - KotOR and the one I just proposed for TSL. Keep the common fan premise where whoever's left goes into the Unknown Regions and teams up with Revan, but here's the twist: somehow or other they take out the Sith Emperor - like, early on. They throw the Empire into chaos. But then, because they're dark-sided, they turn out to be the real villains of the story: Revan, the Exile, evil Bastila, and everyone else who's still alive and dark-sided from both games' main cast. For your heroes, start with one or two party members who deserted or were left behind or something on account of still being light-sided - such as Handmaiden, Disciple, Mira, perhaps Atton, or even T3 - and throw in a couple original characters, and maybe a third "hero of KotOR 3" to lead them.



So anyway, those are the options for a completed ending of TSL, as I see it: you either die a hero or live long enough to become another Nihilus. Does it sound bleak? Please suffer me another sort-of-tangent at this point. I am not saying that you can't ever have a happy ending. I am not saying that you can't ever have a story where the heroes survive and are triumphant, without the victory being a pyrrhic or bittersweet one. But you can't have that story be this one - TSL - with these characters, unless you want to discard the very things about the plot and characters that made them compelling in the first place. The story reaches its maximum dramatic tension after Kreia shows her true colors: you have to stop her, and if you run away you'll die, but if you face her you're pretty much sure to die then, too. The Force bond thing, remember? Of course you do. That's the linchpin that gives the game's finale all of its weight - it's the same sort of weight that we have in Return of the Jedi when Luke goes to the Death Star, fully expecting that he'll die there - all because he has to try to redeem his father. The same weight can be seen in the Iliad with the story of Achilles: the gods have decreed that the Greeks will not win the Trojan War without him, but they've also decreed that he will die if he does help them. In the end he rejoins the battle to avenge Patroclus and all the other friends he's lost, even though he knows he won't live to enjoy the spoils of victory. This weight is the same weight present in any story where the hero must choose to come to terms with a destiny that is larger than himself and that he cannot change, but that he nevertheless is called to. It is when a hero is challenged to pay a terrible price, and not in exchange for great riches or fame or anything of that sort, but rather for the sake of some deeper, higher reality or truth which is judged to be effectively more concrete, more important, more real than safety, prosperity, and life itself. It is the challenge, one could say, for the hero to make the exact choice which would brand him a fool in the eyes of the pragmatist, the cynic, the materialist: the choice to (in symbols or in fact) give up all the goods of the world for the sake of one's soul.



This archetypal plot is immortal, and it's one of the most compelling things in our human tradition. Which is why I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it when a writer sets up a great, tremendous, terrible crucible for the hero to pass through, only to throw in some stupid, hackneyed, contrived loophole at the last minute that allows them to get the payoff of the crucible while completely shielding and exempting them from its actual consequences - that kind of get-off-scott-free bullshit doesn't happen in real life or real fiction. To my mind, this is epic and dramatic storytelling's Unpardonable Sin, the most vile and despicable species of cop-out. J. K. Rowling performed what I think is the perfect, archetypal modern example of this: she sets up Harry Potter so that (somehow or another) he's actually got the last Horcrux subsisting in his soul or something. For the uninformed, the Horcruxes are the Magic Plot Coupons that all need to be destroyed in order to stop Darth Voldemort from coming back to life again and again. So after a lot of other stuff happens, the crucible is reached: Harry bites the bullet and lets Voldemort kill him. We see it happen. We see the villain of the story carry the dead body of the hero to the gates of Hogwarts, where he gloats at all of Harry's friends. And right there, when the audience feels the most for this heroic sacrifice, Harry comes the fuck back to life. He's one hundred percent alive again and ready to fight. No side-effects, not even a hangover, for fuck's sake. He comes back, but the Magic Plot Coupon is gone. The sacrifice is undone; its price is refunded, but the reward is still given. It all comes down to the simple, stark fact that, to what should be her everlasting shame and disgrace, Rowling simply didn't have the guts to actually kill off her hero and let him stay dead (I sure wish I was able to write and publish a bunch of pandering young adult fantasy novels and get rich and be hailed as the next Tolkien). So in the end Harry's great and terrible decision becomes a spiritual fraud. To draw an analogy, Orthodoxy is overcome by Docetism; but in reality the Son of Man has to actually be a man and die on the Cross, or else Christianity is a joke.

The point is that if a story is going to include the heroic crucible, then there has to be a cost, for success as well as failure. There has to be. Jedi's is that Luke redeems his father, but his father dies in order to destroy the Emperor. But there's no cost in the end for Harry Potter, and neither is there one for the Exile. The difference between the latter two is that I can avoid being disgusted with Chris Avellone on a personal level because it's probably not his fault. What probably happened is that the rushed development and whatever else was going on scrambled up his brains, and one way or another the ending was prevented from taking the shape that it was supposed to.

Anyway - that's why I think the way I do about the ending of TSL. -MPK, Free Man  23:45, January 5, 2016 (UTC)

V: Why Kreia Is Wrong and That's the Whole Freaking Point
First of all, guys, yes I'm still alive. Second, I'm going to do my damnedest to make this following monstrosity my very last big essay that has to do with KotOR (though in the future there may be a few that are about my own fanfic ideas that are set in the same era). So yeah, may the Force be with me.

You know how I've said that Carth Onasi isn't a problem, but what he's turned into by the fangirls is? Kreia's the same way. The following statement may or may not sound odd - I really have no statistical or demographic understanding of the KotOR fandom except my own personal experience with and in it - but I often got the impression that quite a lot of fans hated Kreia. That's how she so often got treated in the fanfic that I happened to peruse, anyway. When she appeared at all, it was most often so that Fem-Exile (because she was always a female, most of the time) could ignore her advice, prove her wrong, and tell her to shut up (they did this a lot with Master Vrook, too). But there seemed to also be a sizable sub-segment of people who liked Kreia so much that they agreed with her views on the Force and such. And as I've written before here, that's the worst possible thing you can do with the villain of a story. Sympathize, understand, all that's good - but not agreement.

The reader ought to be familiar with all Kreia's shit, so I'm not going to waste time summarizing it all. Suffice it so say that if we were to turn Kreia into a person in real life, she'd be a super-die-hard Calvinist. She would believe that God pre-destines all people from eternity to be saved or damned, and that they are predestined without any regard for their choices and without their having any say in the matter; all of their choices and their fates made for them, to the extent that they are arguably more clockwork toys than actual moral agents. And Kreia would be that, but she would also want to believe that people have free will and choose their eternal destinies (as in Christian orthodoxy), but for whatever reason she would just be unable to convince herself of it. From her perspective, she'd be trapped in the wrong universe with the wrong god, because that's what she is in TSL.



Her whole worldview, and by extension the morality of her master plan, hinges on her belief "that the Force has a will, it has a destiny for us all"; that it uses people and directs their destinies to "balance" itself and regulate itself, et cetera. If Kreia is wrong about the Force having a will, or even about what that will is, then her worldview is wrong and her plan is stone-cold crazy and evil. But I'll say it again. I think Kreia's a great and interesting character, and it's not supposed to be because she's right, but because you could understand why she comes to believe in what she does.

Still, I'd like to note that I can and do chuckle at the legitimate wisdom and insight in JM76's summary of TSL as "just [the player] listening to a geriatric villainess lecture you on her twisted view of the Force for ten hours".

This actually puts me in mind of one of the KotOR fanfics of mine that never saw the light of day. I came up with it approximately immediately right after I finished reading James Luceno's Darth Plagueis novel. Possessed of a delusion that I was the first person to do so, I came up with the idea of writing a story that would give Revan the same sort of treatment that Luceno did to Plagueis and Sidious: a comprehensive explanation of the evolution of Revan from her early Jedi career through the Mandalorian Wars and to the completion of her turn to the dark side. I will say more on this story later or elsewhere, but the relevant bit here is that, in my feverish fit of making notes on what this story of mine would contain, I wanted to go into detail on Revan's different masters, what their different views on the Force were, and what sort of view she ended up adopting. In particular, I wanted to portray a contrast between what Revan learned from Kreia and what she learned from Arren Kae (incidentally, no, they are not the same person, that's baloney). The former would have been a believer in the Force as a living, thinking thing that has a personal destiny for everyone. Kae, in contrast, would have encouraged Revan to forget about such esoteric long-term thinking and focus on the present moment, allowing "destiny" to take care of itself (my character notes also said of Kae: "Despite her Jedi virtues, she is passionate, hot-blooded, and never takes more than ten seconds to make up her mind about anything").

I mention this old story idea of mine mostly because I'm slapping together this essay on the fly and I just happened to think of it. But to reel it back in: one of the kinds of creative potential that Star Wars has, and which I am most enthusiastic for, is that the Force and the Jedi provide an ideal opportunity, to put it ineloquently, to discuss or comment on philosophy and spirituality by way of allegory. Even in just the movies we can see that they're sort of a blend of eastern and western traditions: they follow codes and disciplines in the spirit of Christian monasticism, yet the emphasis on meditation, enlightenment, oneness with the universe, et cetera come from the spirit of the Orient. But as we know, Star Wars was very, very seldom used for the purposes of talking about spirituality and philosophy - TSL being one of the only exceptions.

And as I said above, whether Kreia deserves for any real-life person to agree with her depends on whether her particular view of the living, thinking, self-regulating, cosmic solitaire-playing Force is true or not. But contrary to Kreia's naysaying apologists, her point of view is not clearly or indisputably the right one. They commonly would say that the repeated wars of Jedi and Sith constitute direct evidence that the Force is using these terrible conflicts to sustain itself at the expense of all the rest of life. But that is no evidence one way or the other; it is only data, and incomplete data at that. Kreia doesn't really know anything that nobody else does, except for some of the stuff about the Force wounds. She hasn't looked behind the curtain and found any Wizard of Tython. At the end she's taking a shot in the dark, same as anyone else.

Cancerous Tangent: A Look at a Kreia Apologist, with Mumbling About Parallels Between Art and Real Life


Warning, time for another semi-tangent - or at least a drag to make this all take longer. There was once a guy (or maybe a gal, I don't know) known as "Allronix" who I think sufficies as the archetypal Kreia apologist, having seemingly had Star Wars ruined for him by TSL. Rather than speaking for him, I'll quote him:

That's a pretty good summary of his viewpoint, I think. He's definitely exaggerating like hell in some of his other posts where he says that Jedi literally are forbidden from feeling emotions and having friends and all that jazz. Overall, it's about the most depressing and cynical interpretation that one could possibly make of Star Wars. I'd go nearly so far as to call it laughably cynical, since I am forced to conclude that, in the interest of being consistent, Allronix found himself unable to feel good about Luke Skywalker redeeming his father, since it was all just part of a historical galactic "gang war". The result was that Allronix (I use past tense because the Good Lord only knows where he is now) made himself look like a man who hates himself. I mean, I suppose that if you insist, yes, you can make this interpretation and stick with it - I can't exactly stop you. But at that point you've stopped being a fan of Star Wars, or an enthusiast, or whatever the term might be. You've become something else entirely: someone who is intensely interested in a particular saga and setting and yet fundamentally despises its moral and metaphysical foundations.



But I'd like to wax philosophy again, and I will start by zeroing in on the bit that I put in bold on the third quotation: "Inevitably, because sentient beings are what they are, they start mangling it to fit ideology." This makes him sound like all of the dreary, self-wise unitarians and skeptics and "spiritual-but-not-religious" types of the modern west. More than once I've heard or read such people say that the ultimate crime of the historic Christian Church (and, by extension, of all large institutional religions) was not some particular crusade or inquisition, but the very first moment at which these religions became solid - when, they argue, the human vision of God was "imprisoned" by the dogmatism of men. A more precise and direct way of putting it would be to say that the great sin of the ages was when religious people first worked up the gall to make up their minds about something, to decide that they would believe very strongly in some particular thing - unlike these moderns, who either believe very strongly in absolutely nothing, or else believe very strongly in nothing in particular.

They labor under a rather superstitious conviction that the human race would not be able to come up with any reasons to exploit, imperialize, be racist, make war, invent the TV shows of the ninenteen nineties, or commit any other large-scale atrocities if it weren't for religion. Of course, now it's me who's taking a wild shot in the dark, but I'd bet a few bucks that Allronix is, or was, a secular humanist of some stripe or another. Art rhymes with real life, so a certain reaction to "religion" in Star Wars rhymes with a certain reaction to religion in real life. One observes that there have been thousands and thousands of years of war and unrest that must be explained; and approaching the problem from this particular angle makes it impossible to acknowledge that evil is both universal and intrinsic to all men, and therefore man cannot fully excise it from himself. Or, as an actual writer once put it:

So while we don't have Original Sin in Star Wars, we have the exact same sort of evil in all of its species that we have among us in real life. So for Kreia, or anyone, to blame it on the Force or the Jedi religion is about as absurd as blaming it on art, or shoes, or any other perfectly sane, normal, and thing that humans have. The truth turns out to be the exact opposite of the maxim: it is not the spiritualist and the mystic but the materialist, the fascist, and the humanist whose motivations and ideals are abstract, ethereal, and out of touch with reality, because they suppose that the problem of humanity is small enough for humanity to solve.

Aside from my hunch that Allronix got to this conclusion because of a secularist mentality (which, I admit, is still only a hunch), the rest of Allronix's problem is plainly that he decided that Chris Avellone is more important to Star Wars than George Lucas. Put another, broader way, he made the fatal mistake of accepting every single piece of Star Wars media and every detail as worthy of acceptance when it comes to evaluating the whole as an artistic narrative. Accepting everything is a straight path to insanity. Sure, it doesn't help that the writers of the EU kept perpetuating a status quo of galactic history which gave the impression of a Jedi Order whose teachings never changed size, shape, consistency, or application in ten thousand years. And yes, Chris Avellone may have criticized and railed against that status quo, but he deliberately chose to stay in line and help perpetuate it, to help make sure that almost every single galactic crisis is a Jedi-Sith conflict, and to help make sure that the Jedi Order is always the same exaggerated caricature of the one we see in the Prequel films.

ENOUGH; OR, TOO MUCH




Now that I've written all that shit above - badly organized and hacked together though it be - I'll never have to write or think about it ever, ever again.

So to get back on track: we have Kreia assuming that the Force is some cosmic parasite that is responsible for all these wars and terrible things in the galaxy, and the only way to free everybody is to kill it. Sounds good, right? There's just one catch: as Atris and others point out (in cut content and out of it), this plan just might sorta, kinda, maybe kill everything everywhere. So our unsung heroine Ubermensch has decided that a genocide of unprecedented scale is a necessary price to pay for the end of all the Jedi and Sith. But hey, I'll give her credit for one thing; one way she's actually not a huge, flaming hypocrite is that she's apparently fine with herself being killed by the completion of her own plan and joining her quintillions of victims in the void, since the Force presumably can't sustain an afterlife if it's dead.

"But MPK, oh MPK," you might say, "Even if it was as bad as all that, you're forgetting about the Yuuzahn Vong, who are completely outside the Force. And that droid species that nobody remembers, and that other one from that one Marvel comic book. They'd probably be fine. Kreia can kill the Force, and everyone without the Force could survive and be free!" To that I say, go ahead and dig into the deepest dregs of the EU to support yourself. And suppose you're right. Suppose the Vong would survive, along with a couple other odd species. For that matter, give yourself the best-case scenario: say that regular plants and animals survive, and the only people who die would be Force-users and actual Force-sensitives - even then, we're talking a decent percentage of the universe's population, not to mention a number of entire intelligent species which are Force-sensitive, such as the Miraluka. What about everyone else? And if you don't get the best-case scenario, what about all the normal animal and plant life, which is also connected to the Force? And here's something that these oh-woe-is-us-the-whole-galaxy-is-swallowed-up-by-the-Jedi-and-Sith-wars crowd forgets: there's all manner of civilizations that never came into contact with the Jedi, Sith, or Republic, let alone been victims of their wars. We hardly ever see much of them directly, but they do exist - in Wild Space, the Unknown Regions, and so on. Shouldn't they get any say in this?

And since we're on that path, why don't you tell me, thou hypothetical Kreia apologist: you believe in self-determination of the individual and individual choice and freedom and all that good shit, right? That's why you don't like the Jedi and Sith gallavanting across the galaxy fucking up everyone else without their all-holy consent, right? Then tell me, just who the hell is Kreia to decide all this, without anyone else's consent? What gives her the right to appoint herself as the ultimate representative of all sapient beings, and to decide for them all that life without the Force and death are both better than life with it? Just because she's butthurt that she got rejected by the Sith and the Jedi, and her favorite apprentice went down in history as a treasonous galactic dictator? Just because she thinks she's pretty damn sure that the Force is using fate and destiny to control the lives of everyone, and things would obviously be so much better without it? She's so sick of the Jedi thinking that they know better than everyone, when it's really she who knows better than everyone? What a bloody convenient coincidence for her.

At the end of the day, Kreia is willing to potentially destroy an unfathomable percentage of all the life in the universe - not the galaxy but the universe - in order to get revenge on a god who, for all she knows, may not even exist. She is, then, what she claims to despise the most about the Jedi, the Sith, and the intelligent Force that she believes in: a distant, isolated, inhuman persona that is willing to unleash destruction and misery upon all of creation for the sake of some esoteric, mysterious "greater good" that the overwhelming majority of her victims couldn't care less about (particularly when stacked against the value of life itself). Kreia talks like she wants to bring freedom to the common people of the galaxy, but those common people would shake their fists at her elitism and arrogance just as angrily as they would at even the most ivory-towered shut-ins of the Jedi Order.

Because she's, like, the villain, guys. -MPK, <font color="#990000">Free Man  22:03, July 4, 2016 (UTC)