Well, okay...I don't stan them.
But I have mixed feelings about them.
As a kid I was really into Star Wars and looked up to the Jedi, so I think it's a hold over from that.
The Jedi are flawed, foolish, short-sighted and kind of cowardly (among other things) and The Republic is a stagnant beasts with an inefficient anachronistic and byzantine system where the worst kind of poverty has existed for millennia.
...But I still kind of like them, despite their tragic faults.
Well...Idk if I like The Republic as depicted in Star Wars, in some ways I hate it.
But the idea of a galactic society where hundreds if not thousands of peoples and cultures are brought together to coexist is one I really like, and I can understand in the early days why the Jedi would of supported the creation of such an organization.
Of course it is just that, an idea , and the lore is filled with the many ways The Republic as a bourgeoise order failed these ideals.
Ultimately I think the Jedi erred in so closely associating themselves with and mooring themselves to a state.
Their understanding of the force and themselves is also incomplete or lacking, I think.
But at the end of the day I still like the little space wizard monks.
I respect their aim in controlling their emotions (even if it often materializes in suppression instead) and in being diplomats and peacekeepers for the galaxy (even if it often materializes in propping up an unjust status quo).
But now I am starting to ramble about children's media, which is an unforgivable crime, so I'll stop.
I don't necessarily hate the Jedi, but the biggest shortcoming in KOTOR when I replayed it was that there was never a "good" option that didn't also support the establishment and all of its failures in some way. It made me realize that if you became some kind of populist revolutionary in the Star Wars universe and lead a proletarian uprising, you would almost certainly be smeared by the Jedi Council as a "Sith Lord" regardless of whether you had actually turned to the Dark Side, and god damn there's a piece of Star Wars media I would love to see.
Yuthura is basically "what if sith were revolutionaries instead of fash"
The "good" option in her storyline is to send her back to the Jedi and be all "keep working within the system and they'll ban slavery eventually" though. Which of course they don't because there are still slaves 4000 years later when the movies happen.
I mean, a lot can happen in 4000 years, and the Galaxy is a big place. Whether slavery was abolished and later reinstituted, or condemned to the fringes for some amount of time and then crept back in, isn't entirely clear.
But telling someone to climb back into the echo chamber and stop caring so much signals that it probably was not.
True which is why I chose the dark side options for the most part with her.
I think I chose a couple light side when she sounded like she was going to go full sith to try and steer her right.
Later on in KOTOR you get Dark Side points for doing a John Brown to some Wookie slavers, and the narrative ties itself in knots to "both sides" the whole thing. That game is truly one of the greats, but the "good" options always break towards the status quo, it's kind of annoying.
The cool thing about KOTOR II is that Obsidian goes to great lengths to explain why Bioware's method of gamifying morality into "good points" and "evil points" is bad and dumb, but a decade later Bioware would continue to wonder why nobody ever plays the "evil" options in their games.
I'm assuming the only time people picked "evil" options was like blowin up the tank under that krogan that kept on ranting?
And punching the annoying reporter / killing Kaidan (which... why is that an evil option? it's self defense and the "good" option also results in you killing him!)
It took me a second to remember who you were talking about but that was such a badass moment. When you just shatter that blade in half
Yeah didn’t that happen to Revan? But also he’s evil or something idk
I haven't played the MMO or read any tie-in books, but my headcanon is that Revan started the war to overthrow the Republic with good intentions, but Malak brought in all of the fashy Sith elements shortly after betraying his master.
That's pretty much canon I think, I think he kind of lost himself in it though, but Malak was alot worse.
I remember in KOTOR II Kreia reveals that a big part of why Revan wanted to take over was to prepare the Republic for an invasion of something else that was coming from either the edge of the galaxy or outside it, which was kind of a cool idea that they never got to follow up on.
it was, the purpose was to prepare for the real sith empire, what they later represented in the tor mmo as being a bit of a disappointment compared to the mystique of that narrative setup
aww that's weak. I was expecting a unique villain like the Yuuzhan Vong, not "more red lightsabers".
I thought he was preparing them for when the emperor showed up, but that could have been a swtor post hoc explanation