SW The Old Republic: Sith Inquisitor

[Fixer]

And there's thousands, nay millions of criminals who got away with their crimes, and rotten people today who revel in the crimes of the present, and those who enable them, and decent, innocent people who get hurt. I can't stand the suffering. It's like the whole planet is bleeding.

Move this to your own blog. This is for discussing The Old Republic, not indulging in expressing your own personal sense of nihilism.

[CharlesPhipps]

And there's thousands, nay millions of criminals who got away with their crimes, and rotten people today who revel in the crimes of the present, and those who enable them, and decent, innocent people who get hurt. I can't stand the suffering. It's like the whole planet is bleeding.

Do you believe the bad invalidates the good?

The bad will never equal the good and the irony is they are punished by the simple fact....well, being bad by itself is a suffering.

They just don't realize it.

[Jonathan101]

I'll just post this as evidence for why people underestimate Malak and why he was actually more scary and competent than people give him credit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCYDE_B ... gs=pl%2Cwn

With regards to Traya, the main problem I see with her is that she was a soapbox for the writer to express his criticisms of the Force and the Jedi and everything else that bothered him about Star Wars, especially since many of his criticisms are based on misconceptions. If you put aside that the writer himself seems to believe she is sort of right, she is otherwise a fantastic villain imo.

And they are ALL still better villains than those in TOR.

The writer thinks she is right because...?

The writer took issue with various aspects of Star Wars, for example he thought that there was no real difference between the Light Side and the Dark Side because both tended to achieve the same result (e.g. both Jedi and Sith could use telekinesis), and in general he just had a more cynical outlook on the movies and life than George Lucas did. While this did ultimately give people a very different perspective on the SW universe and the EU / Legends stories actually ran with some of this a bit, at the same time he was fundamentally misunderstanding (or perhaps just disliking) key features of the lore, such as not accepting that the difference between Light and Dark wasn't so much in the effect but in the power source and what it did to you (kind of like health food vs junk food I guess).

[CmdrKing]

I always read it as more a criticism of the EU in general. Traya's philosophy starts from the premise that the Force unto itself is actively seeking to perpetuate pointless conflict in the galaxy, the same battles between Jedi and Sith in untold forms for millennia on end.
The same forces fighting the same battle over and over without end? Yeah that's the cynic's take on nearly every EU book making Luke, Leia and Han fight the remnants of the empire AGAIN, usually with a new sort of dark Jedi AGAIN. Chris Avellone is all about metatextual reference like that (see also how he made experience points a plot point for the Exile, feeding on the bones of her kills and all), so it's the simplest explanation there.

In the end most of Traya's philosophizing is just a means to an end, to get the Exile around to seeing the Force itself as the enemy of sapient life, because the Exile herself was living proof that you could live without directly touching the Force. Most of what she says is designed such that the Exile is always wrong, whatever she thinks, because that lets Traya get her hooks in a little deeper.
It's really kinda a brilliant characterization, because Traya is simultaneously completely full of shit but also making a cutting critique of the entire basis of the franchise.

[hammerofglass]

Part of the problem is that Traya and Kreia profess slightly distinct but incompatible philosophies and different stated goals. It's Kreia who thinks the Force is evil and should be destroyed; Traya just wants to use the Exile to score a philosophical point against the Jedi and destroy her traitorous apprentices before having them kill her in the best Sith tradition and send the exile out to aid her beloved Übermensch Revan, who she trained in her original Arren Kae identity. Given Kreia was a false persona constructed for this quest, where they disagree Kreia can probably be ignored.

The bigger problem is that she's a complete hypocrite who lies constantly, so you never know if she believes a word of what she says.

[CharlesPhipps]

Yes, I think KOTOR2 works primarily the same way that LONESOME ROAD does.

Which is that Avellone's mouthpieces are full of shit and sometimes outright INSANE in their conclusions (Traya, for example, misses that the Force is made up of the choices of mortals--which is as fundamental as "partially, but it also obeys your commands" while Ulysses is, "I don't like the way the world is rebuilding so I'm going to nuke it all back to the stoneage.") but you have the option of disagreeing.

But yes, at the end of the day, Traya keeps trying to insist the Force is separate from life. Which is basically criticizing an element which is not true in-universe.

[Karha of Honor]

I'll just post this as evidence for why people underestimate Malak and why he was actually more scary and competent than people give him credit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCYDE_B ... gs=pl%2Cwn

With regards to Traya, the main problem I see with her is that she was a soapbox for the writer to express his criticisms of the Force and the Jedi and everything else that bothered him about Star Wars, especially since many of his criticisms are based on misconceptions. If you put aside that the writer himself seems to believe she is sort of right, she is otherwise a fantastic villain imo.

And they are ALL still better villains than those in TOR.

The writer thinks she is right because...?

The writer took issue with various aspects of Star Wars, for example he thought that there was no real difference between the Light Side and the Dark Side because both tended to achieve the same result (e.g. both Jedi and Sith could use telekinesis), and in general he just had a more cynical outlook on the movies and life than George Lucas did. While this did ultimately give people a very different perspective on the SW universe and the EU / Legends stories actually ran with some of this a bit, at the same time he was fundamentally misunderstanding (or perhaps just disliking) key features of the lore, such as not accepting that the difference between Light and Dark wasn't so much in the effect but in the power source and what it did to you (kind of like health food vs junk food I guess).

Source? Also my understanding is that you could use the powers of both sides but be less efficient with them if you use the power from the other side of your own alignment.

[hammerofglass]

In the Disney EU (and technically Legends since The Clone Wars introduced it first) the Light Side and Dark Side are semi-independant, and in a higher realm are personified by avatars. This aspect was introduced a few years after the game came out (and millennia later in-universe), though. In fact it may have been meant as a response; the episode that reintroduced it in Rebels (which explored it a bit more since Ezra used both for a while) was full of KOTOR 2 references, including the Force Ghost of a Sith who's Traya in all but name.

I do kind of wonder what would have happened if Kreia found out about the third, neutral side of the force that was introduced at the same time...

[CharlesPhipps]

I do kind of wonder what would have happened if Kreia found out about the third, neutral side of the force that was introduced at the same time...

There was a theory in the Cracked sense that Kreia was the Mother a.k.a Abeloth. Her spirit getting uplifted by Father and warped.

[Jonathan101]

I'll just post this as evidence for why people underestimate Malak and why he was actually more scary and competent than people give him credit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCYDE_B ... gs=pl%2Cwn

With regards to Traya, the main problem I see with her is that she was a soapbox for the writer to express his criticisms of the Force and the Jedi and everything else that bothered him about Star Wars, especially since many of his criticisms are based on misconceptions. If you put aside that the writer himself seems to believe she is sort of right, she is otherwise a fantastic villain imo.

And they are ALL still better villains than those in TOR.

The writer thinks she is right because...?

The writer took issue with various aspects of Star Wars, for example he thought that there was no real difference between the Light Side and the Dark Side because both tended to achieve the same result (e.g. both Jedi and Sith could use telekinesis), and in general he just had a more cynical outlook on the movies and life than George Lucas did. While this did ultimately give people a very different perspective on the SW universe and the EU / Legends stories actually ran with some of this a bit, at the same time he was fundamentally misunderstanding (or perhaps just disliking) key features of the lore, such as not accepting that the difference between Light and Dark wasn't so much in the effect but in the power source and what it did to you (kind of like health food vs junk food I guess).

Source? Also my understanding is that you could use the powers of both sides but be less efficient with them if you use the power from the other side of your own alignment.

I can't find the specific source I'm thinking of, but he mentions here how Kreia is the personification of his frustrations with the Star Wars universe and the Force etc.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120118102 ... php?id=386