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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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She's not though lol
KOTOR 2 spoiler
She was both Jedi and Sith in the past, and over time she came to despise the Force and the effect it has on people and pretty much everything else - her goal is to destroy the force and let people have free will (by proxy. She doesn't care, but that would be the effect, were the death of the force not mean the death of all living beings in the galaxy). Far from a "lol fuck the light side, fuck the dark side, balance is the best" viewpoint.She's far from perfect; a peak Machiavellian with contradictory beliefs - and focused entirely on her feud with the force, completely uncaring of the lives of the people of the galaxy. She is, however, a very fascinating character and it's a shame the money people rushed Obsidian into an early release date.
KotOR 2 is still one of my favorite games of all time.
Amazing character with stellar writing (with some of the restored content it’s even better), who is absolutely wrong. I love that she can have complex layered motivations for her actions, can cause players to question why they make certain moral choices, and still be absolutely wrong in the end. It’s great, and I feel it’s missing from a lot of game media.
Except of course, she's right. Her goal of destroying the force is one of the noblest in the entire franchise. The force takes away people's free will on an individual level and hurls the galaxy into conflicts that cost billions of lives in a seemingly infinite loop.
That isn'tto say her ideas are particularly applicable to us. Chosen ones and those individuals worth billions can't exist in our reality, but do in star wars. We've got people who were positioned in critical junctions and could achieve what many others couldn't, yet Kissinger (rip bozo) wasn't Nihilus.
Nah I never got on board with the force as a willful entity that sentient beings like us could describe like such, like a puppet master pulling all the strings. Maybe I’m just crazy but the reading of the force as taking away the agency and willpower of beings doesn’t seem to hold up in the (good) text. The fascination with prophecy and destiny is what led many to destruction, not the force itself. The conflict between light and dark isn’t orchestrated by the force itself, at least, not beyond the conflicts that would arise around such a supernatural power. Balance in the force is the light and not the synthesis/conflict between it and dark. I never particularly liked a lot of George’s ideas but that’s one I can get behind.
The clone wars gods of the force Mortis arc and the canon obsession with “darkness rising to meet the light” & vice versa just seem overly simplistic and deterministic in the exact way you describe. I’m probably very dumb for wanting to interpret a space fantasy universe through a materialist perspective but the best works of star wars IMO treat the force in line with Yoda’s description of a link between all things that doesn’t determine how lives play out, but simply describes the link between all lives, and the echoes (to take it back to kotor) one’s actions inevitably cause (which has a fun metaphorical & literal meaning).
The force is a fact of the universe that, by its existence in the cosmology, influences things, but I liked the Qui-Gon school of thought that the “will of the force” wasn’t necessarily a hard deterministic prophecy type thing but the myriad infinitesimal interactions between all things that lead where they will, bringing one to unexpected but (narratively) significant destinations. Or something lol I’m tired
KOTOR isn't in the new canon anyway, so I feel it makes sense to pick and choose what from the current canon applies to KOTOR and vice versa. I don't think anyone outright suggested the force being sentient per se. I personally think of its influence more like gravity, both in the sense that it's a fact of existence and that the work in applies (in the physics sense, not labour) isn't absolute. This is reflected in the game mechanics, the force rewards the PC for "picking a side”, at neutral the player can't get prestige classes and max light/dark side points gives bonus attributes.
Even if we don't get into the light vs dark notion, the force is definitely pushing people in anti-human directions. In the prequels, every time Anakin asks for advice, he receives some pseudo-buddhist inhuman horseshit, and I don't think the point was that the jedi leadership were all imbeciles. Hell, even in the OT, it's clearly said that Luke cannot kill Vader, since he'd fall to the dark side if he indulged his anger in that way. The force is literally telling us killing space hitler bad. The balance (as described by Lucas, not that he was perfectly consistent) is supposed to be all light and no dark, but if human tendencies give rise to the dark side so easily, this balance isn't a real equilibrium. You can see this in almost all the post-ROTJ stories, the dark side rises back somehow.
I like Kreia's animosity towards the force for a very meta reason. All of the idealist idiocy in any of the SW stories, all the individuals that changed the fate of the galaxy had the power to move worlds, can be explained by the Force forcing an idealist reality on the SW galaxy, and that destroying the Force would restore materialism as a fact to the universe, and as a bonus will break the cycle of galaxy-wide conflict.
I think that’s a fair interpretation - don’t necessarily agree with it but I get it! I did subscribe to the fan explanation for the Jedi order being absolutely no help to Anakin, basically saying the Order as a construct became ossified and unable to contend with the realities of life and human (or alien) emotions. There’s plenty of good SW media going into how the light doesn’t require to ignore emotions, love, or even killing when necessary, and the restrictions were the result of a millennia old stagnant order.
The Light would be the ideal state: beings living in harmony, valuing each other’s lives etc., but I like to think the Dark is “unnatural” in the way of conditions leading to humans making malicious or greedy choices. It’s all a bit metaphorical but the dark is almost always used to represent selfishness and disregard for empathy, patience, etc., but the Dark can be a descriptive term. It can represent the “darkness” and evil choices that humans (or aliens in fiction) are capable of, and the evil they perpetrate in their selfish pursuits creates the Dark. Basically the Dark is the use of the force for “evil”, selfish, or non-empathetic actions, and it acts as a force multiplier (haha), causing a literal cascading descent into evil and madness where it would be more metaphorical IRL. The corruption necessary to accrue billions, and the ease of abandoning human empathy when it is in one’s interest is pretty analogous IMO. I see the idealist nonsense of the dogmatic Jedi philosophy as just as problematic as Kreia does, but I’d be more willing to point to human (or alien) power structures causing it more than the mystical field itself.
As with all interpretations of vague and inconsistent media I think there’s no real answer, or at least one that’ll get us to agree 100%, ¯_(ツ)_/¯. All I know is that I used to spend far too much time thinking about fiction like this and this thread’s been a throwback so thanks, good discussion lol