Chuck's thoughts on KOTOR 2, review, & Kreia?

[Madner Kami]

Kriea is like alot of deconstructive characters the moment you see through all the overly intellectual jargon that makes them "sound" deep, You see them for what they actually are. They go on and on about how life is open to interpretation but its just general BS to justify the amoral crap they do to other people all while acting enlightened and holier then thou. Peel the layers away and what do you have at the core.

You end up with a point, a point about the nature of the force. Now wether that point is correct or not is proverbially and literally besides the point, if you ask me, though it is a great starting point for discussion and conversation. A villain who has a motive that you can understand, is a good villain, regardless on if you agree with the villain's conclusions or not and this is very much the case with Kreia.

[Yukaphile]

I feel as if she's warning you to be careful of your actions. Doing too much good can lead to a bad consequence, yet sadism obviously leads to a bad end. It feels like what Uncle Ben said, "With great power comes great responsibility."

And yet, as I've said, a lot of her teachings make sense in the real world, so if that's the case, maybe the Sith are better suited to rule the world? With never-ending conflict, seriously, it's bred into human nature, do you not need the elite to watch over us and help us reach our full potential? It's Fascist, sure, but a lot of Fascists of the past saw the human nature for war and destruction and knew it would never end.

Ah, I think I see the real problem with why people hate her. It's that a character they massively loathe seems to have "won" in the end. Again, I never saw it that way. It's not really about her winning, it's about her and her interactions with the Exile, and even one of the Exile's dialogue options is to flat-out tell her that he/she has grown and she can no longer teach him/her anymore. That's a student coming into their own, and... no, I don't think she really won. Besides, she did betray her own students, didn't she? Nihilus and Sion. They were brutes who could torture and destroy whole worlds. They had to be stopped. So there is that.

[Wargriffin]

Kriea is like alot of deconstructive characters the moment you see through all the overly intellectual jargon that makes them "sound" deep, You see them for what they actually are. They go on and on about how life is open to interpretation but its just general BS to justify the amoral crap they do to other people all while acting enlightened and holier then thou. Peel the layers away and what do you have at the core.

You end up with a point, a point about the nature of the force. Now wether that point is correct or not is proverbially and literally besides the point, if you ask me, though it is a great starting point for discussion and conversation. A villain who has a motive that you can understand, is a good villain, regardless on if you agree with the villain's conclusions or not and this is very much the case with Kreia.

oh no she is a good villain, but there comes a point when you need to stop listening to their jargon and judge them by their actions. People can blather about their values all they fucking want and at the end of the day, your actions are ultimately the product of your beliefs.

Kriea can sit and spilt hairs over the fact she isn't technically a Sith this is lampshaded at the end when she backstabs you.

"Kriea is a Sith?!"

Atton: " I know right, all that talk about giving into the darkside, manipulating people treating them like pawns, Revenge... I just thought she was just a bitter old koot."

[TrueMetis]

Yeah the whole "I've been betrayed by both so now I'm neither" thing was such horseshit. Jedi consider betrayal a big deal, but it's literally a requirement of the Sith. So no one cares about your whining about your apprentices betraying you. You're not fooling anyone lady, you're a Sith. You never stopped being a Sith. Going around with a fake name a pretending not to be a Sith doesn't make you not a Sith.

[Yukaphile]

That's still overly simplistic. She's a chessmaster, setting the Sith up for betrayal so, as she said, their powers won't overrun the galaxy unchecked. But if that is how it is meant to be, then so be it. It ties back into the same "challenge your beliefs to see how strong they are." It's still a form of adherence to destiny, kinda. If it is written down that all life is to die, then so be it. Because we all die in the end. And it is fundamentally true in Legends that even after 25,000 years, there is no balance brought to the Force, and there is still no interpretation as to what "balance" even means, because one could argue Legends is separate from Lucas, given that he handed the reins off to others, and then sold his franchise to Disney, who terminated Legends. So... I personally think the Sith need reforms, as do the Jedi. Why not go the Kyle Katarn route and learn to wield both sides? The Potentium. Again, like the Protoss from StarCraft.

[Wargriffin]

That's still overly simplistic. She's a chessmaster, setting the Sith up for betrayal so, as she said, their powers won't overrun the galaxy unchecked. But if that is how it is meant to be, then so be it. It ties back into the same "challenge your beliefs to see how strong they are." It's still a form of adherence to destiny, kinda. If it is written down that all life is to die, then so be it. Because we all die in the end. And it is fundamentally true in Legends that even after 25,000 years, there is no balance brought to the Force, and there is still no interpretation as to what "balance" even means, because one could argue Legends is separate from Lucas, given that he handed the reins off to others, and then sold his franchise to Disney, who terminated Legends. So... I personally think the Sith need reforms, as do the Jedi. Why not go the Kyle Katarn route and learn to wield both sides? The Potentium. Again, like the Protoss from StarCraft.

Protoss's psionics do not fundamentally warp a person's personality unless you have more powerful Psionic asserting control. The energies aren't fundamentally different they are simply derived through different sources.

Light side and Dark side are always consistently stated to be incompatible

Case in point Kyle got Corrupted and The Potentium's golden child, Jacen got Corrupted

The whole notion that you can use both sides comes from the games that needed offensives powers and the Dark side tends to be the black mage flavor when it comes to abilities.

Now if you were arguing No power is fundamentally one side or another but its intention that defines
the source of the power 'IE casting lighting from your hatred... actually redirecting lightning that comes forth on your command 'Which is what Kyle's actual philosophy is' but thats not what you've been consistently saying.


The only person who is of note that has MASTERED the Darkside is Darth Sidous aka the guy who is the Equivalent of the Devil 'as in Big Evil not Ultimate rebel without a cause for all you Megaten fan'

[abki]

Yeah the whole "I've been betrayed by both so now I'm neither" thing was such horseshit. Jedi consider betrayal a big deal, but it's literally a requirement of the Sith. So no one cares about your whining about your apprentices betraying you. You're not fooling anyone lady, you're a Sith. You never stopped being a Sith. Going around with a fake name a pretending not to be a Sith doesn't make you not a Sith.

Well, there is one thing that, in my mind at least, separates Kreia from the Sith; although to some extent it boils down to semantics and Kreia's motivations which we don't know. Kreia's end goal is to destroy the Force, but to me the Sith have always been about power and control. Operating on that definition, why would a powerful Sith seek to destroy their largest asset? The only reason I can think of would be if they expected to combat a force user more powerful then themselves, but that does not seem to be the case by the end of KOTOR II (pretty much all the force users are dead).

You could argue that Kreia is trying to destroy the force so as to gain true control/self-determination by stopping the force from messing around with destiny; but self determination seems to be fairly orthogonal to the gain/use power for control vs. benefit of society. Not to mention that destroying the force would likely kill her even if it didn't wipe out all life (she's particularly vulnerable being a powerful force user), and even if she survived she would be left as a possibly blind old lady missing a hand stranded on a battlefield. Heck, her odds of getting off of Malachor alive are pretty much nil in the best case scenario; that doesn't sound like the plan of someone who's goal is to take over the universe. As a result, I don't know if I would call her a Sith (not by the definition I'm using anyways).

[Yukaphile]

I ultimately saw Kreia as being this high-minded teacher about the nature of freedom and self-determination. Fight your own battles, challenge your beliefs, stand on your own two feet, as Atton says.