She’s not though lol
KOTOR 2 spoiler
She was both Jedi and Sith in the past, and over time she came to despise the Force and the effect it has on people and pretty much everything else - her goal is to destroy the force and let people have free will (by proxy. She doesn’t care, but that would be the effect, were the death of the force not mean the death of all living beings in the galaxy). Far from a “lol fuck the light side, fuck the dark side, balance is the best” viewpoint.
She’s far from perfect; a peak Machiavellian with contradictory beliefs - and focused entirely on her feud with the force, completely uncaring of the lives of the people of the galaxy. She is, however, a very fascinating character and it’s a shame the money people rushed Obsidian into an early release date.
KotOR 2 is still one of my favorite games of all time.
Amazing character with stellar writing (with some of the restored content it’s even better), who is absolutely wrong. I love that she can have complex layered motivations for her actions, can cause players to question why they make certain moral choices, and still be absolutely wrong in the end. It’s great, and I feel it’s missing from a lot of game media.
Except of course, she’s right. Her goal of destroying the force is one of the noblest in the entire franchise. The force takes away people’s free will on an individual level and hurls the galaxy into conflicts that cost billions of lives in a seemingly infinite loop.
That isn’tto say her ideas are particularly applicable to us. Chosen ones and those individuals worth billions can’t exist in our reality, but do in star wars. We’ve got people who were positioned in critical junctions and could achieve what many others couldn’t, yet Kissinger (rip bozo) wasn’t Nihilus.
Nah I never got on board with the force as a willful entity that sentient beings like us could describe like such, like a puppet master pulling all the strings. Maybe I’m just crazy but the reading of the force as taking away the agency and willpower of beings doesn’t seem to hold up in the (good) text. The fascination with prophecy and destiny is what led many to destruction, not the force itself. The conflict between light and dark isn’t orchestrated by the force itself, at least, not beyond the conflicts that would arise around such a supernatural power. Balance in the force is the light and not the synthesis/conflict between it and dark. I never particularly liked a lot of George’s ideas but that’s one I can get behind.
The clone wars gods of the force Mortis arc and the canon obsession with “darkness rising to meet the light” & vice versa just seem overly simplistic and deterministic in the exact way you describe. I’m probably very dumb for wanting to interpret a space fantasy universe through a materialist perspective but the best works of star wars IMO treat the force in line with Yoda’s description of a link between all things that doesn’t determine how lives play out, but simply describes the link between all lives, and the echoes (to take it back to kotor) one’s actions inevitably cause (which has a fun metaphorical & literal meaning).
The force is a fact of the universe that, by its existence in the cosmology, influences things, but I liked the Qui-Gon school of thought that the “will of the force” wasn’t necessarily a hard deterministic prophecy type thing but the myriad infinitesimal interactions between all things that lead where they will, bringing one to unexpected but (narratively) significant destinations. Or something lol I’m tired
