For instance, the Civ games are basically Whig History: The Game, presenting liberal capitalism as the ideal end point for all societies. It even includes uncivilized "barbarian tribes" whose sole purpose is to be exterminated so you can take their land for the glory of capitalism.
Please elaborate.
The character Kreia, an ancient Force-user who acts as your character's mentor over most of the course of the game, is effectively a Rand stand-in. Her whole philosophy revolves around the idea of a heroic individual who triumphs over the universe by rejecting the help of others and anything that could be considered a crutch. One of her establishing moments is her getting her hand chopped off in calssic Star Wars fashion (seriously, what is it with Star Wars and hand chopping) and then refusing a prosthesis. Her ultimate goal is to kill the Force itself because she loathes how jedi and sith alike depend on it for their power.
It's a branching RPG so you can ignore her "wisdom," but the game has a lot of scenes that show her actually being right. Like when a beggar gets mugged after you spare him some credits, because your act of charity made him a target to other poor people and because he didn't feel the proper ownership of those credits that could knly come from earning them himself.
Or when she cows a warlord into basically becoming your servant because really he was weak, because in the prior game he chose to follow another person instead of himself.
Etc, etc.
However (spoilers for a 20 year old video game)
spoiler
Kreia is revealed near the end of the game to actually be a Sith Lord in disguise, Darth Traya, and is the final boss of the game. I wouldn’t say she’s portrayed positively.
This feels like a very relevant point
spoiler
Eh, sympathetically at least, I'd argue
Her goal to kill the force is mentioned ingame to be omnicidal tho. And the fact that she is constantly grabbing boss characters from off screen to throw at you later doesn't do her favours from a player perspective. I mean, she's basically female :unlimited-power:
True, but I think the big difference is that she's a player character herself. We get to see her philosphy from her perspective, as opposed to Palpatine who's basically just your classic one-dimensional evil wizard.
It then becomes an issue of how would you even make a character this manipulative and competent and powerful a protagonist without them just making themselves "right". But nobody actually listens to Kriea, except to gain power which reinforces her in game ideology, which makes Randians right, but the fact that your making a deal with the devil is obvious... Is the problem that they made her too well? Lmao
~~I don't understand the criticism. I never claimed Kreia was poorly written or characterized, only that ~~
the authors portrayed her pretty vile philosphy in a sympathetic light. I'd guess as a way to "both sides" the light/dark dichotomy that defines the whole Star Wars universe.
Edit: sorry, I'm sleep deprived and misread your comment. Yeah, they definitely made her have a lot of depth compared to Palpatine, which I think betrays that at least some of the writers probably lowkey agreed with some of what she says.
Palps is a great character because he is just a one-dimensional evil wizard with no complexity. He's exactly like real-life billionaires; He just wants power and has no morals what so ever.
Kotor 2 had a rushed release, a lot of the stuff proving her wrong and making her problematic throughout the game was cut. The real issue is that the main quest is made purposefully self defeating for somewhat dumb but understandable reasons, mainly to one up kotor 1’s original twist. I prefer the head canon that the game only makes sense if the bad ending from kotor 1 was canon and the remnants of the Jedi are as broken as the infighting sith. Btw I reject the mmo.
All MMOs should be rejected on principle, I think.
I just think mmo came out after I became too old to be a fucking nerd. I don’t like how Star Wars loves both sides-ism partly because white people don’t understand ying and yang but really because it’s an excuse to sell space nazi merchandise to children.
Star Wars' whole spirituality is all over the place. Sometimes it's Christian, sometimes it's Taoist, sometimes it'a Buddhist, sometimes it's fucking Zoroastrian.
Which is frankly ok so how long as you pick and choose wisely and consistently. The middle path in Buddhism isn’t doing left hand path stuff every other Tuesday.
Kreia was also a contrarian for contrarianness' sake. No matter what decisions you made, she always said you were wrong and stupid for making them.
In some ways you may have threatened a sacred cow by going after KOTOR2 though. In my experience, some of its fans can take that very personally.
Oh I love KOTOR 2, it and the OG KOTOR are really the first Star Wars games to really dig into the philosophies behind the jedi and sith. But it still feels a little both-sidey in that way.
Dude, when the big-bad/Revan's dragon at the end of KOTOR is like "If the Jedi had kidnapped me would I have had a chance at redemption?" my teenage ass was shook. It was such a wham line, that this guy you'd been fighting for 30 hours of video game has this moment of self-awareness and self-reflection and is like "Shit I wish things could have gone differently", and that was so Star Wars and also so unexpected from a video game badguy.
Same. KOTOR 2 is probably my favorite SW game, but I hate the bothsidey shit in both games. I never like the "grey jedi" crap in star wars, mostly for that reason.
I despise the grey jedi shit. The whole point of the force is that there actually is a clear moral good and evil, and using power to hurt and oppress people for personal gain is both wrong, and self-annihilating. The whole purpose of Darth Vader is to show that if you use power to hurt people you'll inevitably turn in to a monster, and the only way to save yourself from that is to reject your power. Luke doesn't win by defeating Vader in combat, he wins by refusing to give in to his anger and rage, recognizing that if he did so he'd end up becoming a monster like his father. And when Vader see's him reject that path he has a moment of self reflection and decides to stop being Darth Vader.
But it also doesn't pussy foot around with any liberal shit. George Lucas said it's righteous and just to blow up the American-British-Nazi empire and let little teddy bears eat them.
I'd argue Kreia has a point about not trusting the Force. It really is a giant otherwordly entity that it enforcing its will onto a galaxy.
The rest of her ideas are batshit though.
Idk how it may have expanded, I've only seen a very small amount of old star wars media, but I always thought of the Force as being like the Dao or something. Not really anything alien or much of an "entity" but just a way of conceiving the true nature of the universe. Fate is real, and we lump that into "The Force." Magic powers are real, and we lump them all into "The Force." And so on.
I fucking wish. That's how the original movies made it out to be, but Star Wars has since gone out of the way to make The Light and The Dark into actual metaphysical things rather than, like, altruism and selfishness.
Like, in Kotor2, there were parts where you could find, like, pools of Dark Side energy and use it to become more dark, and that's not at all out of line with other Star Wars media. It's one of my least favorite things about how Star Wars has evolved
Agreed. The Light Side is using your spiritual powers to help people. What do we see Obiwan Kenobi do in Star Wars? He lies to fascists, sneaks around, distracts an evil wizard, and then whispers a few words to Luke at exactly the right time. He's subtle. But his actions are vital to the destruction of the Empire's Death Star and their plans for galactic domination. Star Wars has turned the canny old samurai wizard in to flashy super-hero bullshit. The OT is ultimately about how you can't use your spiritual power for violence without corrupting yourself, and also about the Space NVA blowing up Space America. But now Star Wars is about who is the best flying murder guy. It sucks.
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Lucas' original idea was that the light side is a spiritual goal akin to enlightenment, not a good vs evil thing. Bringing balance to the Force doesn't mean an equal number of good and bad Force users, it means following the correct path with no more baddies.
KOTOR 2 puts a spin on this as the Force actively abhorring the dark side and wanting to put an end to it at any cost, including influencing the free will of sentient beings. These gigantic galaxy spanning wars where trillions of people die are justified as long as the sith lose in the end, and they will keep happening every time a new group of sith pop up.
Kreia hates this, and wants to kill the Force and give everyone true free will - if anyone would even survive the process. She would be killing herself and countless others, but it would at least be the end of the eternal conflict.
the beggar scene is deeply annoying but it's worth mentioning that if you take the dark side path (i.e. threaten his life over nothing) she chews you out for being a complete psycho
"I told you to let him slowly starve to death, not to cut his head off!"
yeah she's still a massive dick and i think the fact that she's literally the end boss points to her ideology not being, y'know, good. she's mainly focused on getting you to amass personal power, probably so you can murder god for her and "free" everyone from the force
Or when you randomly kill someone after breaking into their apartment: "Are psychotic urges all that drive you?"
Kreia is the way she is because the game is a commentary on the way that the previous game (and the Star Wars mythos writ large) portrayed moral dilemmas. Plenty of moments in that game have your selfless light side choice work out the best for everyone involved, proving her wrong even if there's a few moments in it where doing the selfless thing is punished as with the beggar scene.
yeah, originally i was going to say much the same, that her chewing you out either way and "showing you the unintended consequences of your actions" was intended as a deconstruction of the star wars universe and its morality as a whole but you put it rather succinctly
it's also worth mentioning that she's essentially the mouthpiece for the lead writer to air out his grievances with the same who turned out to be a big ol' piece of shit so :shrug-outta-hecks:
Kreia is "no difference between good and bad things" personified and I hate her for it
She is also an open human supremacist
A lot of people misread the beggar scene, I think. The point is that small actions can have unforseen and much larger consequences than you originally intended. The fate of the beggar doesn't really matter, it's just the fact that you shouldn't blindly hit light/dark. You can learn from it and (if you don't mind being evil) commit a couple small cruelties in the refugee camp, which is enough to cause their leader to give up entirely, and Kreia praises you for it.
Of course, this leads up to the destruction of Malachor having the potential to echo out and kill the Force entirely.
I feel really conflicted with Kreia. Like, her philosophy is fucking terrible and it does seem to be supported to some degree by the game's events. And yet, the game also makes it very very clear that she is lying to everyone constantly, and I think that includes lying to herself. Like (if not for the fact that different writers working for TOR cofirmed her to be correct years later, which I hate), I don't know that it's possible to read her "but what if Revan didn't ACTUALLY fall, maybe I just taught him so good that he faked falling" speech and think that she's not deluding herself at least a little bit.
She's given this incredibly-written dialog (and absolutely amazing voice actor, fucking bravo) to express her awful ideology, and I think we tend to read that as the writer agreeing with her ideology. And maybe he did- we all know now that Avellone is an awful person. But I do think it's possible to not read it as being that way 100% of the time, at the very least. But that might just be the part of me that doesn't want to critique Kotor2 talking.
I mean, like a lot of white men I went through an insufferable libertarian, "fuck you the whole world's against me but I'll fucking win" phase when I was younger, and I'd be lying if I said what Kreia said in KOTOR 2 didn't have some influence on that. At least on a concious level. Material conditions, social programming, etc. are a whole other fuck.
Her Sith name is "Darth Traya", aka "Betrayer" and I think that went over a lot of people's heads. I hated her character so much. The whole point of Star Wars is that, at least at a personal, individual level, there is a clear moral good and evil and using your power to hurt other people for selfish reasons is evil.