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Or: I'm still thinking about the Jedi Exile, have a 5-part daily series about it

Premise

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is Obsidian's Star Wars tie-in game from 2004. The player character is monstrous because of their trauma, and discovers that each of their companions is traumatized in their own way. The big bad (Kreia, - also known to Tumblr as Sith Mom) is one of the player's companions, delivering Randian lectures to them.

A corrupted planet appears as the literal form of the player character's trauma, and they have an opportunity to blow it up. Typical game mechanics have horrific implications in-universe. As a result, The Sith Lords is a humanistic deconstruction of the heroic tropes and confused karmic metaphysics that continue to form the basis of most Jedi-related Star Wars media.

This series seeks to resolve the master-apprentice relationship between Kreia and the Exile, who are respectively the villain and the protagonist of TSL. Against the foil of Kreia - who is simultaneously a trickster, a villain, and a surrogate mother, - the Exile can be understood as a monster, and as an avatar for queer play.

Background

Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (TSL) was developed by Obsidian and published by LucasArts in 2004. It is a companion-based RPG in the Bioware mould, similar to Obsidian's earlier work on Planescape: Torment (1999) (PS:T). Roughly speaking, TSL has the structure of PS:T, wedded to the themes of The New Jedi Order: Traitor (2002), rushed out to satisfy the oppressive Star Wars holiday release schedule with a sequel to Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic (2003).

Using the Aurora engine, TSL became a third-person game with cinematic dialogue scenes, avoiding the isometric viewpoint of PS:T and other Infinity engine games. The game begins as a linear series of modules, then allows the player to choose which order they complete the next four modules in, before returning to a linear endgame sequence. Over the course of thirty-some hours, the player gathers a party of nine companions out of eleven possible characters, each with their own hidden questlines.

Next Up: Wounds


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