#skullkraka

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Given the heavy influence of Kurosawa on Star Wars, the New Sith Wars were Jedi basically became feudal lords and daimyo and it basically being the Thirty Years War fused with the Sengoku Jidai in space, the Jedi being basically space Samurai and what a friend said to me about The Republic being essentially a pre industrial pre modern civilization with space flight. I have been thinking about a Star Wars adaptation/Version of Oda Nobunaga, the first of the three unifiers of Japan.

Nobunaga's whole deal was that he was a modernizer who looked towards the future and was insanely ambitious. He introduced flintlock guns to Japan and used modern tactics against the Samurai, modernized the economy, engaged with outside trade with other nations outside Japan and started the process of centralizing Japan. He scoffed at honour and tradition and did not believe in Gods or Buddha's, even calling himself the nickname of Demon King of Sixth Heaven for his opposition to buddhism.

This Star Wars Nobunaga version would be a tactical genius and modernizer who seeks to reclaim technologies lost light and centralize the galaxy into a single empire ruled by them. Legions armed with lightsaber rifles supplied by stripmining worlds for Kyber. An early prototype of the World Devastator used by Palpatine (or a poor imitation of the Star Forge of the Rakata depending on how you look at it.) to stripmine entire worlds and systems to fuel the Galactic economy and their warmachine. Force Sensitive Battlemasters commanding entire legions through the Force and identifying the weak points in the enemy frontline to hammer at. Hyperspace Jammers and interdictors to lock hostile warzones down.

Given Nobunaga's status as the enemy of Tradition and his own real world encounters with militant Buddhist monks and his ambition to unify Japan. I could see him being essentially a thousand years early equivalent to Palpatine if Palpatine wasn't sociopathic space Satan and actually knew how to run an empire. I could see him being a Sith reformer like Kaan or Krayt or Bane who scoffs at tradition and essentially took Kaans brotherhood and perfected it or he could be a neutral atheistic Force Senitive who only cares about the force as a means of modernizing his empire and sees the Jedi as fossils clinging to outdated ideas of Honour and tradition.

Yes, I watched Stray Dog a few weeks ago since I knew the Clone Wars episode Lightsaber Lost was based on it. Sometimes when they homage Kurosawa it pays off and sometimes it's weak tea. Lightsaber Lost is still a good episode, but lacks the emotional and plot complexity of Stary Dog.

That sounds like a really good idea! Having a Star Wars benevolent dictator type who is still in the wrong and needs combatting for the good of all people trampled beneath progress is a great hook. Fits in with the aesthetic of those early Old Republic comics, before the game. And restoration Japan is a great place to mine for inspiration. You could continue it on generations later and explore what it was like in the 1930s even, because it kept getting crazy.

Nobunaga might have been transformative and dynamic, but the aftermath of his actions cast long shadows.

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Me and a friend were talking about how, in her mind, the light side of the force corresponds to the cosmic force and the living force to the dark side "due to how the Living Force is closely intertwined to life and its rhythms, of which intense emotions are an adaptation to survive successfully in, per its fundamental savagery and discord Conversely, the serenity in which is required to commune successfully with the Cosmic Force seems to be that which is prized by the Light" and something I find interesting is how (At least back in Legends. I have no idea what's going on in canon nowadays.) the light side seemed to deal more with matter and how the force interacts with it.

Jedi An'ya Kuro figured out how to walk through walls and teleport. Vergere (before she fell) figured out how to reduce her force presence to the molecular scale to both camouflage herself and tweak around with molecules with the force. A Jedi master on Mustafar figured out how to molecularly transmute things like full metal alchemist. The Jedi had something called a wall of light which fucking incinerated Yavin 4 in a planet-sized firestorm, cut off a Sith lord from the force permanently and was used to permakill a sith ghost.

Oh and Luke had something called a golden flash which I can only imagine as a black flash from Jujutsu Kaisen.

Something you may have noticed is that this involves a lot of precision and delicate work with matter and how the force interacts with it (except the planet-sized firestorm thing). The cosmic force is (As I understand it) the aspect of the force that deals with matter, space and time. It's the part that binds the galaxy together. The Sith only seem more powerful because they care enough to flaunt that power and make the power the point.

Honestly I think they should bring bring this aspect of the Jedi back. The entire reason for the Grey Jedi wank is that Jedi don't get any cool space magic BS in canon and most of the flashy stuff from legends is obscure and esoteric. Lightsaber duels are cool the first couple time but it gets boring without variety. Just let Jedi and Sith be shonen anime characters is what I am saying.

I think you and your friend are onto something here. The Sith would care more about the Living Force because it's more immediate, it's all about survival and is generated and diffused though living things. So, it fits their goals with altering and dominating others, natural lifespan longevity, stuff like that. To catch you up with canon one of the beloved things we lost are Sith Force ghosts, which would definitely tie them more to the Living than the Cosmic. Why care about the Cosmic Force at all if once you shuffle off this mortal coil, that's it. There's a lot of weirdness with Force ghosts in current canon, you wouldn't believe it (mostly having to do with Qui-Gon Jinn and Season 6 of TCW).

In my mind Cosmic and Living is a bit like yin and yang. Living beings radiate with the Living Force and once they die that life energy (soul?) is released into that space between atoms to diffuse throughout the galaxy. It eventually coalesces in stellar nurseries and when new stars, planets, and life evolves boom! It gets converted back into the Living Force.

The Cosmic Force also is associated with fate, visions of the future and the past, sensing things very far away (like mass-casualty events), that sort of thing.

Therefore, there's nothing inherently good or bad with either. It's just how the Force faith engages with them. Both are far older than the Jedi or Sith. Good and Evil are as well.

Come to think of it, wasn't Abeloth a Cosmic Force kind of gal? Seems like the Daughter was more a Living Force kind of gal and the Son and Father more Cosmic? I guess it's debatable. All that Mortis stuff is debatable. From a certain point of view.

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Back in the good old days of KOTOR 1 and 2, there was an implication that the main villain/root cause of the game conflicts, Revan, turned to the dark side because he saw something in the outer rim of the galaxy. An empire of true Sith who would utterly crush the old republic and the Jedi one day and Revan turned to the dark side because he saw that militarizing the galaxy was the only way to survive the coming Sith onslaught. The implication was Kotor 3 was gonna be about finding these True Sith which terrified Revan and putting a stop to them with the True Sith being based off of the Shadows from babylon 5. Eventually, Kotor 3 became the Old Republic MMO and the True Sith turned out to basically be a Galactic Empire rip off with their own OP Gary Stue Palpatine rip off but that was obviously not what the True Sith where originally meant to be. The Lead Kotor writer heavily implied (IIRC) that they were trying to do a Galaxy scale equivalent of Malachor V based on all their talk about being based on the shadows from Babylon 5 and Kreia's talk of killing the force.

The True Sith in the original KOTOR III concept wanted to 'kill' The Force, silence the semi-sentient, pantheistic will forevermore, by turning every last planet in the Galaxy into a blood-drenched battlefield, a realm as traumatized as Malachor V. Bleeding the Force to its marrow by torturing the entire Galaxy to near-death. Since this concept was never acted upon, it's unclear if the end goal was to rule over the ashes, or simply leave the Galaxy in a state of perpetual war and suffering.

I would have made them eldritch abomination. Taking the red-skinned Sith Pureblood species as a baseline, then having them transfigured by the Dark Side over thousands of years into eldritch abominations. Acting as teachers and guides to others who would swear by the creed of "Power, at any cost."

A single True Sith might descend upon a world in the Outer Rim and be mistaken by the locals for a God. Every facet of their culture, religion, government and civil society would be bent and broken in the name of the Dark, a ruthless meritocracy where strength and cunning alone matter. When madness and utter selfishness has consumed a society in flames and internecine conflict, the Sith departs and starts again somewhere else.

Lower end of the spectrum, they'd be exceptionally powerful and mysterious dark side users appearing seemingly from nowhere, resembling a species thought to be extinct for millenia. Higher end of the spectrum they'd be godlike monsters, like Tenebrae or God-Emperor Sheev.

Considering they have thousands of years worth of unbroken knowledge and study with Sith Magic and Sith Alchemy I could see them being less like conventional Force users and more like Warhammer psykers in terms of Force bullshit they can do. Shit like detonating suns, moving moons with your mind and starting storms in hyperspace could all be within the ability of the higher-ups. I could also see the worlds of the true Sith being filled with Fabius Bile-esque abominations of flesh and bone given the special emphasis of the Sith on biological experimentation.

As for their aesthetic. I have been getting obsessed with Elden Ring lately so I think they should have a fromsoftware esque Dark Fantasy aesthetic. Ornate armour concealing… Something beneath their helmets, lightsabers wreathed in Eldritch darkness or even just regular blades and spears covered in dark side fire and lightning. Most of the underlings would still be vaguely humanoid but I see the higher ups being utterly insane in terms of appearance.

One thing to consider is that if these beings have been in the Unknown Regions/Extragalactic Void as far back as the time of Adas, embracing the Dark Side in all its forms and reveling in violence and destruction, there'd likely be … very few of them. A life devoted to the Star Wars equivalent of the Sword Logic is a lifetime of eternal winnowing, and after so many generations of constant competition and applying Sith Alchemy upon one's' own body, they'd be essentially unrecognizable.

And considering the emphasis of the Sith on embracing one's inner desires and transcending all limitations through acquiring power, how each True Sith appears and behaves would depend on the Sith Power in question. One might be a biomechanical horror, obsessed with pushing their physical form past all extremities of pain and euphoria, another might be a desiccated husk, allowing his body to wither away to focus on honing his mind into a weapon of mass destruction. This Empire would function a lot like the Hive, with lesser members tithing upwards to their superiors and so on, and the higher up you are in the chain the more freedom you have to modify the bodies and minds of yourself and your subordinates. There's be a veritable pantheon of a highly select number of Sith Lords that have essentially turned themselves into inhuman monsters over millenia, with Adas hovering somewhere above.

I'm a big proponent of weird Sith stuff. Sith as Cenobites, do it you cowards. Sith initiation as limit experiences. Give them body modifications and mortification. Make them alien and totally philosophically misaligned with the Jedi, not just a breakaway sect. Have them be hiding out in the chaos just doing weird evil Sith shit.

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Random Cosmic Horror idea I just had: one of the most eldritch and horrifying concepts/Implications I have ever seen comes from Halo and specifically the Halo forerunner novels. These novels explain that the space zombies from the mainline Halo games, the flood, used to be omnipotent Godlike aliens called Precursors who saw that the universe itself was alive and nurtured by the experiences, struggles, dreams and suffering of life which they called sweetness. The Precursors are also a species of reincarnators who saw it upon themselves to experience life from top to bottom and to savour every moment of happiness and pain as sweetness that nourishes the living universe.

The Precursors are also dead. Killed by their rebellious children the forerunners but they predate and transcend death so this was but an inconvenience for them. They reincarnated but the process was wrong. They became an immensely dangerous, adaptable and infectious plague that could attain all of their former knowledge and power and could literally infect the fabric of space and time. They became the flood. But the last living Precursor revealed something. Something that drove some who heard it into suicide.

The flood were the original plan. The Precursors show up to a galaxy, plant life and mind and let's them produce sweetness (Experience, pain, joy, dreams, nightmares, despair, hope, suffering) for the living universe then when the time comes they turn into the flood and harvest that sweetness for the living universe to be nourished by. That is fucking horrifying in terms of implications.

Another really fucked cosmic horror implication is from the Game Fate/Grand Order where it is revealed that the amount of energy in the multiverse is limited and energy just be conserved so timelines were utopia or dystopia is achieved are culled by God/the collective consciousness of Humanity for being stagnant. The Games second half is about culling seven rebellious timelines that are attempting to overwrite and invade proper human history and it has a very clear implication that creating something like a world without war or an end of history type world would be just as much grounds to have your world purged as making some hellworld of endless suffering because nothing is happening

A synthesis of these two ideas is that the multiverse is alive, it is pleased and nurtured by your suffering, your joy, your pain, your pleasure, your every nightmare and hope and dream and sensation and experience. It dreams up these worlds and timelines of suffering and pain as well as worlds of endless bliss and joy. It purposefully creates these stories and worlds brimming with suffering and hardship not because it is a sadistic and evil god but it just finds the hardship and triumph of mortals fascinating and is entertained by the whole thing. Whenever a world crescendoes in suffering or joy it devours that world and integrates those experiences and emotions into itself.

God is real and he makes you suffer not because he hates you or wants to test you but because it's entertaining

That is straight up some Lovecraft shit. I think the simulation hypothesis is pointless and a waste of time, but the petri dish hypothesis is very intriguing. To think that everything Earth has gone though is at the whim of some unfathomable being sweeping their hand in our path and wiping us away to start over.

I guess 2001: A Space Odyssey fits into this category as well. But it's more mechanized and less gooey. More's the pity, I like a little cosmic goo.

Kind of Babylon 5 as well, though they made the blunder of having the eldritch gods people you could talk to and eventually reason with. There's no debate with something like that, really.

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You see I love how much you draw from Legends where they were bold enough for this kind of thing because George wasn't watching the shop with the EU. The closest thing canon has gotten to this is Avar Kriss channeling all of the Jedi Order into one during the Great Hyperspace Disaster. Which is why I think they should keep the High Republic project going and make new stuff in different eras like that, to channel some of that Old Republic and New Jedi Order craziness. Some Star Wars fans get too bogged down in power scaling, funnily enough it limits what is possible in storytelling because it puts limits on the possible.

I have been thinking about the Sorcerer's of Tund. Basically exiled Sith priesthood dating back thousands of years who intermix, science and ontology and magic, believe all is one in the force and that the force unites all dualities and multiplicity in its infinity. They also have a special emphasis on shapeshfiting, deceit and illusions. I find them really interesting as basically space Hindu sages or Sufi mystics.

I have been thinking about the sorcerers of tund and their monism, their mastery of Illusion and the idea of the dark side as bound to the living force and what that would look like taken to it's logical limit and an idea struck me.

All of the world is of the force, the force had shaped it and the force will consume it;

The force in shaping the world divided itself and the world into two, the Realm of Spirit, the house of the soul, and the Realm of Flesh, the house of the body.

The living force is the energy of the soul, the power representing the eternal balance between creation and destruction that flows from the soul into the world and also flows from the world to fill the soul. All energy or force that is used to shape the world by the Realm of Flesh is incomplete without the living force to flow into or out of what is created or destroyed.

Therefore the Realm of Spirit while overlooked by many is equally needed to complete the Realm of Flesh. If one desires completion, the realization of the ideal perfect, the retaliation of potential that lies within them and the connection they hold to the force, yet is bound by the desires and bonds to the Realm of Flesh, be they mortal or god, they will never succeed. For in that bond to the Realm of Flesh the Realm of Spirit is forgotten and without the two in harmony one could never be complete. The role of the mind is to acknowledge and perceive the Realm of Flesh, yet also not allow one to be bound wholly to it, thus allowing them to perceive the force and thus understand and realize the part of themselves that lies in the Realm of Spirit. The Tund Sages would be beings who have essentially achieved permanent oneness with the force and have essentially been granted godlike power at the cost of abandoning all personal desire, I could see the Bendu being a good example of what they are like.

This is the key to true oneness with the force in the eyes of the Tund. Those Tund who achieve it become godlike sorcerers and sages capable of moving planets and healing armies. However due to the Tunds emphasis on Illusions this power manifests in a very particular way. Unlike normal illusions which could be considered "a falsehood impersonating the genuine article" these sages possess the power to create "existences identical and indiscernible to the genuine article" as they are existences whose flesh and spirit matches the nature and power of that which they imitate. A sage can do outrageous deeds such as creating illusionary weapons, creating exact copies of other people, creating illusionary landscapes, and even cover himself in an illusion, as to conceal his own presence rendering him unable to be seen or heard, and only faintly felt through the mind.

This is what I consider the very pinnacle of Force Illusions. Essentially you reach the point where the illusion is so utterly lifelike and realistic that the universe no longer registers the existence of difference between the illusion and an actual physical object meaning these illusions can hurt you and even kill you.

How does this sound as an example of the true esoteric nature of the force?

I'm so glad they brought the Sorcerors of Thund out from the EU, they're a true example of the weirdness that can coexist with more grounded stuff like Andor. It sounds like you know a lot more about them! I just encountered them in The Battle of Jedha audiobook where one of them plays a minor role, though they're much more prominent in the Phase II High Republic comics from what I understand.

There's a lot more to be fleshed out with the Force, mainly because we mostly see it through the prism of the Jedi and they have their own orthodoxies on what should and shouldn't be done. And the Sith which flips a lot of those orthodoxies on its head and guard their weird stuff like Sith Alchemy pretty jealously.

I do know a lot about the Mirialans, though, and their unique take on Jedi philosophy. They care much more about the Cosmic Force and hence take things like visions and fate and choices very seriously. I think of them as a little more mystic than mainline Jedi. They believe your choices shape your destiny and take that so seriously they tattoo their faces and bodies to commemorate those choices. The Cosmic Force doesn't get as much attention as the Living Force, and I think that's a shame. It's far more mysterious.

So yes, the Jedi have only been around 25,000 years or so. I'm sure back in the olden times, back before Hyperspace lanes were charted, there were dudes tossing planets around and doing all sorts of miraculous stuff that Jedi wouldn't even date to imagine. And there's a place for that.

I'm writing a fic about Nightsisters at the moment so I'm enjoying thinking outside my usual bubble.

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By the way about James Mangold's First Jedi movie. If you were in the writers room of that and you had full control how would you write it? I say this because the First Jedi is pretty much the only official Star Wars project I even care slightly about other than Andor. How would you do it?

Me personally I'd go all on in on the mythical space Buddhist elements. Like the Prime Jedi could be a Siddhartha/Shakyamuni Buddha figure who saw how the force unites all things. The Sith could be blind materialists who reject his teachings for vapid pleasure.

How dare you tempt me with the ring, Frodo.

For real one fan should have all that power. But I'll give you my answer tomorrow. And this wasn't even the post from earlier in Drafts either @skullkraka can attest to the timing.

Oh Jesus hell, this makes me feel like I'm in a fandom like nothing else.