Thread:Sakaros/@comment-29301-20180903145046/@comment-29301-20200102052609

Literally just talked to you, but as I said, I was writing this at the same time.


 * Believe me, HK was just one of several party members who I initially wanted to include or feature more of. Unfortunately, I couldn't think of things to do with them that wouldn't end up as filler, distractions, or both.


 * The Obsidian: Because some guy on Wookieepedia mistakenly believed that was the ship's name. And it's the company that produced KotOR 2. So I decided to just roll with that.


 * Big Epic Symbolism: Yeah, how Meetra attacks the tree was sort of meant to represent how she approaches life and makes her choices. So does everything else in that scene, actually - like how she just goes wandering around slashing things, then decides to chase down and kill a random animal. It's not an accident that that's how she tests out her lightsaber, instead of just swinging it around in the ship's cargo hold.


 * Why Niman for Meetra: Because I feel like everybody overlooks Niman, and I wanted to give it some love. Meetra's not some arrogant, elegant fencer like Dooku, so Makashi's out. Soresu's not aggressive enough. I don't fancy Meetra an acrobat, so Ataru can't be her weapon of choice. She's not some musclebound brute like Malak, and in general she's not necessarily just an overwhelming-offensive-attack-attack-attack type of gal, so Djem So and Juyo don't quite fit her. And nobody cares about Shii-Cho, not even me. Niman is like the balance form, and Meetra was a Jedi Sentinel, which is the balanced class, so there. Besides, Exar Kun used Niman, and he's one of the Cool Kids.


 * Why Juyo for Vrook: Because it's one of the styles he can train the Exile in (depending on character class) in the game.


 * We Can See Force Drain: I'm afraid we're at an impasse here; I was rubbed the wrong way when I read Igniting the Stars and saw Vandak draining people without any spooky special effects.


 * Grammar Goofiness: I'm pretty sure everything you said about those things is correct.


 * A Concrete Why: I saved the longest and most rambling point for last. I think you could maybe peg the confrontation between Meetra and Kavar as the most important single incident, the one which does the most damage to her spirit, but even then - yeah, there kind of isn't a single one. As for your other point: if the reader is able to come up with his/her own plausible interpretation based on the text, that's good enough. But in fact there was a "concrete why" in my head as I wrote the story. If you don't feel like reading the narrative again just to figure it out (assuming I did enough of a good job that that would be possible), then feel free to proceed with the rest of this bullet point, which is slightly shorter than the story itself.


 * Meetra's fall to the dark side is supposed to be just be the ultimate consequence of how she fails to attend to the defects in her own character. Sure, she does things that are heroic and good, but when you get right down to it, everything she does is only out of self-interest, and she basically admits this at several points (such as in her argument with Mical). She doesn't care about the larger consequences of her actions, and she insists that she shouldn't have to care. She has a soft spot for helpless, innocent civilians, but Atton deduces correctly that this is really just a way of salving her own guilty conscience.


 * From the beginning of her quest to the end, Meetra's not interested in saving the Republic, protecting civilization, restoring the Jedi Order, or anything else like that. She has no noble goals, and she explicitly refuses to subscribe to any principles. Principles are what drove her to denounce her own master and the Council and to go join the Mandalorian Wars - and at the end, after she'd lost everything for doing the right thing, she got no thanks from anyone. That's the reason she tells Mical that "Ideas break easily" and why she's so jaded about the Republic, and why she considers all of her actions during the war to be justified even though she also believes they were all for nothing in the end.


 * Her refusal to hold any actual, solid beliefs is also why she tells Atton that Force power has nothing to do with philosophy, and why the narrative (nearly always from her POV) never classifies any Force phenomena (such as the ambient energy in the tomb of Ludo Kressh) as either "dark" or "light". Meetra doesn't care about concepts; all she cares about is herself and the few people who she just so happens to count as friends.


 * Which is all very convenient for her, because having herself and her friends as her own moral center saves her from having to be responsible for anything bad that may result from her actions. It's the reason she never apologizes to anyone, ever, for anything she's ever done, whether recent or in the distant past. It's also the reason she's so wounded by how things go with Kavar. The fact that she's single-handedly decided the outcome of a planetary civil war and shifted the destiny of its whole population means nothing to her. But this one man, Kavar, is supposed to be Meetra's friend, so his approval everything to her. She's so obsessed with his disappointment that she can't really understand why he's disappointed in her in the first place.


 * The last piece of the puzzle is Kreia and her poisonous ramblings about how everyone uses each other, and Meetra needs to adapt herself to this reality. The idea is that even though Meetra externally rejects these ideas out of hand, she can't really defend herself against them because she doesn't have any principles of her own. That, and her experiences on Korriban served to dig up her decade-old, unresolved resentments. To her, Revan was the ideal, perfect Jedi, who she viewed with "a servile and undemanding and completely self-annihilating love"; so if someone who Meetra looks up to that much could betray her, she figures she can't expect better treatment from anyone else.


 * That's a more-or-less complete map of how I had it in my head. Again, I realize it's not necessarily how the reader will figure it, but that's okay.

As always, looking forward to your next story.