#The Jedi Exile

[blanq]

recently played both knights of the old republic games

[commander-sarahs-art]

Sometimes I get possessed and draw an OC that i hadn’t thought about in a minute, today that was Kailan😂💕

[anakliro]

posting these separately because I like them too much

[whyamiheredude3]

Tried out a new brush and had some fun

[criterioncollected]

a not admitting of the wound - emily dickinson / knights of the old republic ii: the sith lords

[crowhoonter]

One of the best parts of KoTOR 2 to me is how it subverts the typical Star Wars trend of having the main character be the center of the universe. In most things Star Wars, especially the movies, everything revolves around the main character, and granted, that is partly because they will be our main protagonist, but also it specially focuses around them. Anakin Skywalker is the single most important person during the prequels, almost everyone plans involve him in some way, and his actions define almost everything else that happens. This trend continues in the other trilogies, with the Skywalkers being the main focus.

KoTOR 2 is similar in some aspects to this, the Exile is undoubtedly the center of the story, and their actions influence everyone else to the extreme. The subversion of this is that the majority of the exile's influence doesn't take place during the game arguably. It happens far before it.

The Exile is responsible for almost every one of their companions major neuroses. Your actions have defined everyone, if not always directly, and played major parts of shaping them into who they are by the time of the game. The way it plays out, it's like a sort of "afterword" of one of the movies. You experience the fallout of the actions and decisions you made, the result of being the center of the universe, and it is very rarely pretty. KoTOR 2's companions were broken by your actions, and now you have to mend that break.

Basically, I really love that KoTOR 2 shows the how being the most important person ever would really play out, and its incredibly destructive consequences. Its a really cool subversion of the typical Star Wars formula.

[nukbody]

Canon bioware lemme live

[oodlesofd00dles]

I miss them sometimes

[jediexilemeetra]

“Because I hate the Force. I hate that it seems to have a will, that it would control us to achieve some measure of balance when countless lives are lost.”

Darth Traya, Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords

[exiledjedi1]

"I never needed to beat you, I only had to let you think you were invincible."

Here's Satele Shan for you all. I love her character so much and she reminds me of a more mature version of Bastila.

[thepunchingbag]

I think Atton's jealousy and resentment of Mical goes a lot deeper than "he stole my girl."

Firstly, Mical is roughly 10 years younger than Atton/the Exile. Which means, Mical - while his life path was certainly altered due to the Wars - never had to fight in either the Mando or Jedi Civil Wars. For the most part, he's lived in a post-war society and doesn't have a jaded worldview. Sure, Mical criticizes the Order but there's no hatred; he's simply disappointed in their shortcomings. He very much still has faith in the Republic, because he never really saw how much of a clusterfuck the administration was during wartime. So Atton, right off the bat, sees Mical as this irritating kid who doesn't know what he's talking about. And the fact the kid's a Republic spy (and a diplomatic spy at that, so missions are mostly fact-finding involving politics rather than getting a blaster pointed between the eyes), is just extra salt in the wound. Sure, he's "serving" in the Republic military, just with all the glory and none of the PTSD, lingering medical issues due to combat injuries, and none of the lifelong problems with substance abuse.

Also, I headcanon young Jaq (before getting severely mentally fucked up during the War) as a bit of a wide-eyed "Gee Whiz!" idealist. And now Atton sees this mirrored in this pretty boy wannabe field physician-turned-spy. Except Mical never gets the idealism smacked out of him, assuming the Exile's LS. In fact, this kid seems to be rewarded for his idealism at every turn.

Hell, I bet the fact that Mical's a Republic spy and that's another lightside mirror to Atton being a Sith assassin, just rubs Atton all kinds of wrong.

Second, Mical is perhaps a bit naive (okay, more than a bit) but he's very intelligent. He's openly a bookworm and, say what you will, Mical was the only one to discover Kreia's plan on his own. Even Kreia says he's a "wasted" pawn of the Republic, that he could have been so much more. She, grudgingly, respects him (as much as Kreia respects anyone outside of Revan and the Exile). So, once again, compare this with "the fool", Atton, who is clearly also quite intelligent in his own way. However, nobody really sees that because Atton acts like a dumbass in order for people to underestimate him. This probably futhers Atton's resentment - this snot-nosed nerd gets to flaunt his brainpower, but Atton's always flying under the radar.

Even worse would be if young Jaq had dreams of maybe going to a good university after serving, maybe hoping to use whatever the Republic's version of the GI Bill program was - only for Jaq to be too messed up after the War and not to mention he deserted, so he's probably thrown all chances at getting military benefits out the window.

Now to throw the match into the kerosene-soaked mess of Atton's hatred - is when the Exile potentially starts to grow close to Mical. It's like, of course, Atton feels like garbage not worthy breathing the same air as the Exile. But he'd hoped that perhaps she'd at least never grow close to anyone else. That they would stay in a state of relationship limbo forever.

So... on top of everything else, the kid gets her too?

Atton would be seething, even if he's LS. I think the only reason LS Atton restrains himself from cornering Mical on Malachor and shoving his lightsaber through his eyesocket, is because that would upset the Exile. If Atton's DS, all he feels is his rage, bitterness, and resentment - plus the overwhelming desire to see a Jedi's life bleed out on the floor.

Meanwhile, I think Mical regards Atton with bemused pity. Also he shows him compassion, since Mical is emotionally mature enough to see Atton is a very broken man.

Which of course just pisses off Atton more.

[blanq]

i don't have a caption for this

[ospreyeamon]

the falls of the revanchist jedi

The narrative doesn’t directly examine why the Jedi who followed Revan and Malak fell. It is spoken of as a given – they followed Revan into war, so they followed Revan into darkness. That’s not how people work though. That’s not even how people under the influence of the Dark Side of the Force work. Spending twenty years as Palpatine’s thrall didn’t prevent Vader from throwing his Master into the reactor shaft to save his son. Revan can murder every NPC available to be murdered until reaching Rakata Prime only to pull a 180, redeem Bastila, and be feted as a hero of the Republic, Sith-eyes and all.

All but one of the surviving Revanchist Jedi who followed Revan and Malak into the Mandalorian Wars followed them again into the Jedi Civil War. Even the Exile, that lone dissenting actor, can say that they would have fought with their fellows against the Republic had their connection to the Force not been severed; that they were unable, not unwilling. Yet, the Exile can also say that they would not have followed Revan and Malak in attacking the Republic, that they went to war to defend the innocent. Many of the other Jedi who joined the war effort alongside them must have felt the same way, in the beginning.

Many of the soldiers of the Republic like Carth Onasi returned home after the Mandalorian Wars were over, even those like Saul Karath who would bow to Revan again. What then are the factors that led every surviving Revanchist Jedi, save the Exile, to follow Revan from the Mandalorian Wars into the Jedi Civil War?

1) The Mandalorian Wars changed the Jedi who fought in them. The Exile’s dialogue provides the different reasons why they might have left to fight in the war – to protect the innocent, to test their power, to defend the Republic, to win glory – reflecting varying motivations of Knights and Padawans recruited by Revan and Malak. However, despite the differences in the initial reasons for defying the Jedi Council to answer the Republic’s call, they all would have gone through similar uniting experiences during the war. Terrible experiences. Shared hardship often serves to reinforce group identity.

Older Jedi like Kavar and Arren Kae had fought wars before, but the initial expedition led by Revan and Malak was almost entirely composed of young Knights and older Padawans. Military morality, ethics in warfare, tends to be rather twisted from the perspective of modern western civilian morality. Your ability to prosecute the war and the safety of your soldiers takes priority over the lives of enemy, and sometimes even allied, civilians. Ruthless is more than a virtue, it’s a necessity. Collateral damage is an inevitability. For young relatively inexperienced Jedi, raised on ideals of valuing all life and always seeking non-violent resolutions, the transition to military command positions where they were not only required to kill, not only required to led troops to their death, but required to give orders which they knew would directly result in the deaths of civilians would have been distressing.

We know that the Exile once led troops directly into a minefield during the Battle of Dxun, but I think that barely scratched the surface. We aren’t given the full laundry list of the Mandalorians’ war crimes, but at the very least it includes the crime of aggression, murder of civilians, use of child soldiers, and conscription of captured civilians into the Neo-Crusaders and for forced labour. Given this disregard for the lives of civilians, I consider it likely that the Mandalorians also used hostages and headquartered themselves inside buildings like schools and hospitals. I suspect both sides used poison weapons, nuclear weapons, torture, and executed prisoners of war.

2) The Battle of Malachor V was a purge and a crucible of conversion. Kreia, HK-47, and the recording of Bastila Shan all say it; “a series of massacres that masked another war, a war of conversion”, “the intention was to destroy the Jedi, break their will, and make them loyal to Revan … Revan was "cleaning house" at Malachor V”, “to convert the last of the Jedi who fought beside [Revan] – and murder those who would not”. The Jedi in the radius of the Mass Shadow Generator would have included the Jedi Revan did not believe would agree with the plan to invade the Republic.

I think many of the Revanchist Jedi had already been falling by inches before Malachor. The Mandalorian Wars were brutal and one of the major symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is emotional dysregulation. Irritability, anxiety, depression, guilt, anger – the ongoing effects of trauma make a person more susceptible to inadvertently drawing on the Dark-Side of the Force. Using the Dark-Side of the Force was forbidden by the Code enforced by the Jedi Council, but the Revanchists had been pressured to compromise their ethics in other ways to effectively prosecute the war.

For any Jedi who had not already fallen, the detonation of the Mass Shadow Generator was a final blow they could not withstand. They all fell – into the Dark-Side, into death, away from the Force.

This was the conversion that Revan desired. The moral conversation – the acceptance of actions that violated their previous moral code, the previous moral code that would not have permitted making war on the Republic. The conversion in the Force – pushing Jedi to the Dark-Side ensured that they would not be accepted back into the Order by the Jedi Council even if they desired to return.

3) The Jedi Council’s decision to exile the Jedi who returned to face them was a gift to Revan and Malak. The Council’s judgement might have been rooted in their discomfort with what the Exile had become but the reason they publicly gave is that the Exile disobeyed the Council to follow Revan to war. That reason applied equally to every single other Revanchist. By exiling the one Revanchist to return the Jedi Council exiled them all, whether or not they intended to. They may not have, but by deciding to keep secret the true reasons behind their sentence of exile they ensured the other Revanchists could interpret their judgement no other way.

Telling the Revanchist Jedi they would never be welcome to return to the Jedi Order ensured that they would never go back. Onwards was the only path left to them.

4) Revan was extremely charismatic and competent. The Revanchist Jedi had already decided that Revan and Malak judgement was better than the Jedi Council’s when they chose to defy the Council’s orders to follow them to war. Revan, Malak and the Revanchists then won the war for the Republic. In fact, Revan even discovered the shadowy threat the which had been the Council’s justification for sitting out the war through engaging in it, while the Jedi Council remained ignorant.

The Republic government probably bungled the early stages of the Mandalorian Wars by not intervening sooner. The Mandalorians were committing more than enough war crimes for them to justify it, but they allowed Mandalorians to expand their territory, build their forces and industry, and entrench their advantage. When the Republic did enter the war, it wasn’t because the Republic leadership had made a strategic decision, or even a moral one; it was because some corrupt politicians organised bribes to fast-track Taris into the Republic because it was under threat and they wanted to protect their business holdings there. The Jedi Council was also tangled up in the culture of corruption; Lucien Draay was given a seat on the Council even though he’d been accused of planning and assisting the murder of four Padawans because of his powerful family connections.

The Old Republic was more an aristocratic republic than a democratic one. Alderaan, Onderon, the Empress Teta system – they were all monarchies during this period, not democracies. If aristocrats could hold power through right of blood and plutocrats through wealth, then why shouldn’t Revan lead the Galactic Republic by right of merit and conquest?

Revan was secretive, but at least some of the other Revanchist Sith knew about the shadowy threat – the True Sith Empire. If the Republic was going to need to fight another war against an even greater enemy, surely it would need better leadership. Leadership like Revan.

[anakliro]

lately everything I do is just another seedy trick to get closer to you

[azems-familiar]

the tumblr user formerly known as revanchxst posting kotor fic for the first time in two years?? wild. anyway,

Qatya and Kavar have a conversation during the reception following Revan's promotion.

[sapphicstarwars]

Sapphic Rarepair Tournament Round 5-99