Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic Both Blurs And Upholds The Franchise’s Age-Old Binaries

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is celebrating its 20-year anniversary as we speak, July 15, 2023. Below, we have a look at the way it challenged and subverted a few of Star Wars’ most typical tropes.

Star Wars is obsessive about what machine and reminiscence create, the blurred selves on the intersection of metallic and flesh. Darth Vader is the clearest instance of this. Anakin’s descent to the darkish aspect renders itself actual in his deformed physique. Obi-Wan says that he’s “more machine than man,” a truth that’s leveraged within the said impossibility of his redemption. Evil in Star Wars is related to a disabled physique, particularly one which was as soon as meat, muscle, and nerve, however is now wired with circuits.

Droids can’t be “force-sensitive” the best way individuals can, and thus they do not bear the ethical weight of metallic. But they’re nonetheless seen as lesser. Droids present slave labor and are owned by heroes and villains alike. A New Hope establishes inside the first 20 minutes that droids’ reminiscences are routinely wiped. Luke’s uncle Owen suggests it with the casualness of asking Luke to take out the trash. In the Star Wars universe, there may be a complete class of individuals whose capability to recollect is fully dependent upon the individuals who personal them. Both inside and out of doors of its fiction, the perceived personhood of sentient beings depends on whether or not or not you’re product of metallic.

Although a lot of Knights of the Old Republic’s narrative engine facilities itself round easy binaries of excellent and evil, machine and man, it additionally prods at them. That may appear odd, as looking back, KOTOR appears like an try to get again to the great outdated days of Star Wars. In that method, it’s distinctly un-subversive. It presents lots of the similar thrills and plot factors as the unique movies. An evil empire rises that threatens an on-the-run group of resistance fighters. Your hero picks up two plucky robots: an astromech and a protocol droid. The climax entails destroying a strong house station. Most famously, after all, the plot hinges on a twist about identification.

Still, KOTOR does play with the established formulation. The recreation’s tackle Han Solo is a teenage woman, its C-3P0 shouldn’t be a queer-coded butler however an murderer robotic obsessive about killing: the fan-favorite HK-47. Its twist of identification shouldn’t be about heritage, however about self. The participant’s personal identification is revealed to be the memory-wiped Sith Lord Revan. Previously presumed useless, Revan was really brainwashed by the Jedi, hoping that they could possibly be the important thing to defeating the Sith Empire.

This twist has a decidedly queer character. Revan was a selected title, separate from each Jedi and Sith till they turned to the darkish aspect. Consider Revan’s masks, a tool to make KOTOR’s twist potential, but additionally one thing that renders them formless, unable to be cleanly perceived, till the Jedi take away it. The recreation is unable to reckon with that “queer horror,” to borrow a phrase and framework. A light-weight-side Revan would not have room for feeling betrayed, nor a dark-side Revan motivation for something however petty revenge. Revan’s selections are between re-assimilation into the system that rejected them or changing into the pinnacle of the house empire’s viper.

It’s hardly a compelling selection, because the distinction between gentle and darkish verges on the parodic. Physically threaten the shopkeeper for a lower cost or do not, barter a peace treaty with the Tusken Raiders or slaughter all of them, pledge fealty to the Empire on Korriban, or keep loyal to the fractured Republic. However, buried within the recreation’s subtext, the distinction between darkish and lightweight can really feel slight. In one in every of many seeds for the sport’s twist, one celebration member describes “Dark Jedi interrogation techniques” that “can wipe away your memories and destroy your very identity.” But it is solely the common Jedi that really use these strategies in KOTOR’s story. Later, when companion Bastila is tortured into becoming a member of the darkish aspect, her reminiscence and sense of self stay intact. Still, each side cruelly leverage energy to reshape others, unafraid of bolstering their ranks with coercion.

The equivalence between darkish and lightweight is one thing it shares with the prequels. Both the stormtroopers (in A New Hope) and the Jedi (in The Phantom Menace) seem on Tatooine for their very own arcane functions after which disappear. Neither of them have any intention of liberating slaves. Mace Windu asserts that Jedi should not warriors; he leads battalions an hour and a half of film runtime later. Binaries between flesh and metallic are equally questioned. Both clones and droids serve the identical goal: They are each manufactured, they usually each die for his or her makers. Attack of the Clones presents one of many franchise’s most placing moments of visible poetry: The fleshy clones are made in a completely chilly and unnatural atmosphere whereas battle droids are constructed within the coronary heart of a mountain, encased within the earth.

Even although Star Wars props up an ablest logic of personhood, it additionally relentlessly equivocates machine and man. In Return of the Jedi, Luke acknowledges his father’s humanity in his severed, sparking hand, a robotic limb like his. In KOTOR, Revan restores HK-47’s reminiscence simply as they later reconstitute their very own, although they by no means absolutely regain their reminiscences. Revan’s thoughts is simply as malleable as a droid’s. In the same tack, each endings of KOTOR are principally the identical, with Revan earlier than a crowd, celebrating their victory. The major distinction is the colours of the flags flown and the music being performed.

Lately, Star Wars has tended fully in direction of probably the most conservative and restorative parts of its fantasy. The Mandolorian and The Book of Boba Fett lead on the identical empty mythologizing and motion determine posture. Even The Last Jedi, which prompted large, misplaced ire and obtained considerably outsized reward for its subversion, is in the end affirming of the franchise’s mythic, however nonetheless consumerist, energy. The film ends with kids enjoying out one of many movie’s scenes with a hand-crafted Luke Skywalker toy.

It’s simple to consider Star Wars as an ideal, glittering entice. The massiveness of its cultural import, the frequent sterility of its world, and its compromised however dogged insistence on simple binaries could make it really feel enclosed. Imagining well-liked science fiction, whether or not it bears the Star Wars title or not, that actively questions and dismantles its assumptions feels inconceivable. Revan makes me lengthy for it. I would like a greater world for them, for all of Star Wars’ machine males, the place reminiscence and selfhood should not conditional and can’t be stolen. But for Revan, like everybody else, there is just one destiny: to play the half others offer you and do what have to be executed.