Falkus said:
[sblock]What exactly are you talking about?
And actually, her attitude was more along the lines that helping people was to weaken them. People have to face their problems on their own if they wish to gain strength and grow, and that holding their hands just prevents them from achieving their full potential. A point of view that is worthy of some consideration. The Sith are about gaining power for the sake of power, a view Kreia didn't follow.
And you do realize that her ultimate goal was to destroy the force?[/sblock]
[sblock]I was making a stupid drug-based analogy to try to explain what Kreia's Grey Jedi powers derive from and how she herself "reads" in terms of Light Side/Dark Side balance. Frankly I think she was always more Dark than Light -- more Darth Traya -- all along, but she was able to keep that cloaked using her mastery of mental manipulation.
And yeah, she wants to destroy the Force, or allow the Exile to break free of the Force's control and from there let the Force be destroyed, or... or... *something*. It's not entirely clear. KotOR 2 is a game with much of its ending text removed. She wants to destroy the Force entirely because she's had such bad experiences with *all* manifestations of Force power. The Light Side and the Dark Side -- she's burned out on them both. She wants negation, freedom. A la a drug addict who's gone past being able to feel euphoria from any sort of drug use and has begun to become self-destructive and despair-filled because they've destroyed their ability to experience any pleasurable sensation at all.
As for the "people face things on their own, bla bla bla", that's clearly more a Sith than a Jedi philosophy. Geez, Atton Rand comes out and says it at the end of the game, and as a former Sith Assassin he really ought to know. She's not a "true" Sith -- she doesn't work for the typical Sith goal of purely increasing one's power -- but that doesn't make her not Dark. She describes herself as Darth Traya, the Betrayer, and names Betrayal as her own greatest attribute.
After all, the point of the KotOR 2 era is that the regular Sith, under Revan and Malak, are gone, and we've got *new* Sith who follow strange, self-destructive philosophies. Darth Nihilus wants nothing but to suck up all life into himself and leave the whole universe dead. Darth Sion wants nothing but to torture and cause suffering for the sake of causing pain -- himself so filled with pain and torment that the only pleasure he can feel is from spite. And Darth Traya wants to destroy the Force itself -- and her own power and, ultimately, herself with it -- out of a sheer emotional desire to destroy the purpose and meaning and interconnectedness the Force provides in order to establish her brand of "freedom". (Does she know for sure severing the Force through echoes on the large scale won't kill everyone, or plunge everyone into a deep depression, or create a future of endless war and suffering? No. But she's willing to take the risk just because she hates the Force so much.)[/sblock]
Actually, you're one hundred percent wrong about this. A game bearing the Star Wars label is considered to be just as canon as any of the EU novels.
Yes and no. Canon is fuzzy in a game if for no other reason than that it's interactive, and each player's play experience creates a different order of events, not all of which can be the canonical one. At the very basic level, Revan's sex and whether Revan turned to the Dark or the Light are quite fundamental facts in the history of the Star Wars universe (since they determine whether Revan was Bastila's or Carth's lover, etc.), and yet after playing both games all you can say about either of those is that they're "indeterminate".
And the whole idea of dark side powers strikes me as idiocy. Why is it okay to cut off a guy's limbs with your lightsaber, but if you zap him with force lightning, you're on the path to the dark side?
Then the whole idea of the Force, and many of the basic assumptions of Star Wars, strike you as idiocy.
The point of the Force is that it *is* mystical and tied directly to one's emotions and one's psychological state. It isn't just another kind of "science", a simple physical force you can control. There are some manifestations of the Force directly linked to positive mental states -- empathy, calm, compassion -- and some that are directly linked to negative ones -- anger, hatred, schadenfreude, spite. The manifestation of Force Lightning is clearly the latter. (Keep in mind that it *is* so strongly linked to the Dark Side that, according to the novelizations, the Jedi of the prequel era, and Luke in the OT, were *shocked* and *terrified* to see the Force Lightning -- they didn't even know it was possible, because it involved using mental states they weren't aware of. Long-lived Yoda, who'd seen earlier eras when the Dark Side was stronger, was the exception.)