Revan's Motivations & TSL's Relation To Them

[Emperor Devon]

Previous thread, starting around post #63.

 

I sense that you would agree that it is characters that drive a good story, rather than the setting or tools that the characters use.

 

Doubtlessly.

 

Revan’s fall, to me, was his passionate and overly emotional sense of justice. {why Revan fell} That, to me, was Revan.

 

I couldn't agree with that portrayal of his character more. However, I do find that it is entirely in keeping with the idea of the true Sith that Obsidian presented to us. There has been no (reliable) confirmed date for when Revan discovered the Trayus Academy on Malachor, and I prefer to think he discovered it very late in the Mandalorian Wars by which time he had already become the person you previously described him as and developed . As I see it, finding out about the true Sith was simply the straw that broke the camel's back and further served to reinforce his notions that the Republic needed someone strong such as him to guide it.

 

Again, the development of his character you have described is still entirely possible with the true Sith. The only difference is that he reached the point he felt the Republic needed to be replaced with something of his own vision shortly before the battle at Malachor rather than after it. Either way the timing there makes little difference and he undergoes just as much character development with or without the true Sith. They simply provide another reason for why he thinks he should rule the Republic, and with the Mandalorians gone are the next (greater) personification of an enemy the Republic cannot defend itself against.

 

I did not like the notion that he was faced with a threat of fighting a greater military threat that was behind the Mandalorians, whereby he succumbed on the spot and turned against everything he ever knew and launched a war against those he just defended – all in order to unite them against this threat, knowing millions would die in his takeover. It is unrealistic.

 

Again, what I mention earlier. He had developed ideas of how incapable the Republic was of standing on its own two feet and had already become so arrogant that it truly was a small stretch for him to decide to conquer the Republic to save it. The true Sith were merely something physical that for him served to confirm all his ideas about someone strong running the galaxy.

 

The threat of being gridlocked, and the inevitable destabilizing of the galaxy would weaken resistance to such an 'unseen threat'.

 

I am sure his attempt to rationalize this was that if the Republic fought the true Sith they would lose for certain, as they very well nearly did during the Mandalorian Wars and even then it was a struggle for him to defeat the Mandalorians. If he were to conquer the Republic with the Star Forge he would have a larger fleet than he ever did as a Jedi, but with the added benefits of having total, undisputed control over how to defend galaxy without the bureaucracy of the Republic to boot.

 

Then add in all of the references to the ‘power’ of Malachor, and that its surface corrupted those whom walked on it. It takes away from the psychological rationale for Revan’s fall that I hold onto so strongly.

 

There is no official source to contradict our idea of Revan's fall other than the chronicles, which are full of so many holes apart from that they are no even worth considering official.

 

One such example is that these ‘true sith’ somehow ‘fed’ on force users, or whatever that means

 

Nihilus' Sith, not the true Sith.

 

the ‘mass shadow generator’

 

A technological device entirely unconnected to the Force that served as a means to kill of disloyal Republic forces by "accident."

 

the ‘living wound in the force’

 

Exile, not Revan.

 

Darth Nihilus and his ‘hunger’ and ‘consuming the galaxy’ – so on, it sounds too ridiculous to me.

 

If I may point you to a theory of Jediphile's regarding Nihilus.

 

To me, the second game is too much heavy science fiction, and too little character driven storyline.

 

A great deal of TSL's story hinges upon science fiction, which IMO serves to obscure the actually greater amount of character development present in it. To that I would point towards Kreia or Atris.

 

Instead, he disappeared into the wilderness, and let his empire disintegrate in an almost inevitable civil war for power. Why did he not resume his original plan and conquer the Republic, upon ‘remembering the true sith’, and turn this new empire upon the ‘unseen enemy’?

 

The only reason I can think of is the time frame, since takeover of the Republic was delayed by several years during which something could have happened. However, neither of us can say, as we cannot hold informed opinions on the subject without knowing why he even chose to leave.

 

All that information aside, Sith never surrender power, which is what Revan would essentially do by vanishing.

 

I never believed Revan considered himself a Sith, before or after his wind-wipe. My theory anyway is that while the Jedi Council wiped away all his memories, they proved unable to destroy the things that made him what he was. (As Bastila says, his power and strength of will.) I think that he adopted a similar ends-justify-the-means philosophy throughout his journey for the Star Maps, and by the time he reached the Rakatan temple summit he'd had enough time to stew in his own juices over how ineffective the Republic, even with the aid of the Jedi was against the Sith. (ie he repeated the same mistakes of his past self.)

 

If the first game ended with a light side ending, it seems illogical that Revan would not warn the Republic of the nature of the far greater threat.

 

Since his only source for his claims was apparently from the Trayus Academy, it is unlikely anyone would have believed it. (Or wanted to believe it.)

 

Instead, he vanished into the very regions that ‘corrupted’ him and ‘so many others’,

 

A misconception held by most of the Jedi. Revan was ultimately responsible for corrupting himself, and doing the same to the other Jedi.

 

He simply let the ‘feeding sith’ utterly render the Jedi Order extinct,

 

Kreia did not visit Malachor V and re-found the Sith until after he'd left.