Lit A/V Clone Wars Continuity Discussion (Spoilers Allowed)

I am just so irritated with how things have turned out, that I don't know what else to say. I am also pretty sure that if I voiced any concerns to LFL and/or Del Rey, those concerns would just fall on deaf ears.

 

I do agree with many of your complaints, just couldn't resist being facetious. That said, at this point I think it's only rubbing salt in the wound.

 

I don't remember Anakin choosing to be put into the black suit?

 

Well, didn't Revan ultimately end up dark in TOR?

 

He was... somewhere in between. He was still "light side" in the sense that he was very much against the Emperor and for the Jedi, but he became something of an extremist. 300 years of having the Emperor play basketball with his mind obviously took its toll, and he just couldn't seem to accept that anyone but him could save the galaxy. He reached a point where the only solution he saw was to completely eradicate the Sith. Obviously genocide isn't exactly light side 101.

In other words, it's confusing.

 

I'd say he was pretty much back to Darth Revan, since the Jedi Civil War arose out of his opposition to the Sith Emperor as well.

 

That's pretty much 100% dark side. The Force doesn't care about political affiliations.

 

There's a difference between dark side and Sith though. Just because he was dark doesn't mean he was "Darth Revan." He was still just plain old "Revan." He was firmly against the Sith.

 

He was against the political empire of the self-declared Sith... while being a Sith in all but name. Point is, he died on the dark side, and could appear as a dark side spirit.

It's a major theme in Star Wars, becoming what you wanted to destroy, but too blind to see it.

 

There's a difference between Sith and Dark Jedi, though. Revan was definitely a Dark Jedi by the end, but to be a Sith you have to follow the Sith Code. He certainly wasn't a Sith.

 

If we're getting into the business of percentages: keep in mind that the dark side is entirely self serving. Even under the Bannite system, a system that pretends to have an ideology and a goal that requires cooperation, a Sith's perspective never truly extends beyond themselves. Revan, on the other hand, has an astronomical hero complex. Like Anakin Skywalker, he wants to save everyone, and simply isn't capable of leaving that job in the hands of anyone else. He's trying to save the galaxy, but he's trying to do it in a way that compromises who he is and is, in more than one perspective, morally reprehensible. There's no doubt killing all of the Sith would have saved the galaxy numerous pain in the coming years- who knows, perhaps Palpatine would have never even existed- but his method is disturbingly Sith like.

I think the thing that separates him from being "full" dark side (oh how I hate black-and-white morality that's completely non-applicable to real life) is that his intentions are good, and that he's still himself in that Revan was always willing to go lengths no Jedi ever would to accomplish his goals. It's just this time he goes way too far. From the Revan novel and the quests, its clear the creators intentions were to set him up as a "grey Jedi", so that's how I prefer to think of him.

 

But he definitely wasn't in-between, Revan was clearly dark.

 

Yeah, I know that. But there's a difference between "Sith" and "dark." I said Revan was a Dark Jedi. He was not in-between, he was definitely dark, or at least very close to it. A Dark Jedi isn't in-between, a Gray Jedi is. There's a difference.

 

I was referring to this, not to you specifically:

 

Ah, ah-ha. But while he was definitely toeing the dark side, to the point that he was willing to commit genocide. But you can't really blame him. 300 years of mind-frelling by the Emperor would definitely mess up anybody.

 

Here's the problem I have with labels like that: they're always approximate, and crumble when applied to anything situational. People aren't handily sorted into "good" and "evil" bins, and I'd argue that even in all but the most escapist fiction, characters aren't like that either. After all, the entire Star Wars saga hinges on the audience believing that Darth Vader can be redeemed. As helpful as it would be, none of us walk around with a light side/dark side meter.

So whether Revan died light, dark, grey, or whatever color you want to call him is, in my mind, irrelevant, and stunningly simplistic. What I find more important is the characters mindset and rationalization of the act, rather than whatever color lightsaber he happens to be sporting at the time. Int his case, the intent itself is rooted in the light side: the desire to protect. And protect it would have. The way he goes about this, however, is inarguably corrupt.

It's worth noting, however, that I view the single most defining trait of the dark side isn't anger or violence, but narcissism. Darksiders care only about themselves, and will gladly kill anyone who happens to get in their way. That, I believe, is what separates people like Palpatine from Quinlan Vos, Ulic Qel-Droma, Revan and, briefly, Luke Skywalker. In the latter groups case, the desire to help people proves to be their downfall.

Kyp Durron essentially committed what Revan was about to, without a trace of the noble intentions, and five minutes later is forgiven and goes on to become an esteemed member of the Jedi council. Bad writing or not, he obviously wasn't "full dark side" at that time.

Despite all of this, however, I would like to point out that I still feel Revan was handled pretty terribly in TOR.

 

I'm just finishing up season 4, and Maul has returned, looking fully like the precursor to how he did in the Tales (Was it? I forget, can anyone refresh my memory, and direct me to the Omnibus that holds the comic?) comic where eh attacks the Lars homestead, and Obi-Wan finally ends him. For a long time the tale was for obvious reasons none-canon, but I suppose now it actually ends a loose thread, providing Maul survives Season 5. I guess it was either in the concepts for Episode 2/3, or someone in the crew really liked the comic. I know I did.

 

For the Revan thing, is he actually dead in TOR, though? I know at first he definitely was, then they tried to change it, but I have no idea where that's ended up.

The official site episode guide did say that they specifically based his appearance on the Old Wounds comic. As much as I really did (and still do) dislike the resurrection of Maul, if it means that in the end, Old Wounds gets fully canonized, I will be 100% behind it. (And as I recall, Old Wounds was written and illustrated by one of the ROTS artists...actually, wasn't a resurrected Maul one of the ideas tossed around from the AOTC development, or am I completely mixing that up with something else?)

 

But what is Star Wars if not legends from a long time ago about a galaxy far far away...

 

Really, Grievous was never all that great of a character to begin with. Like Dooku, he was botched badly in the movies themselves due to lack of screen time, lack of menace, and lack of any sort of buildup. Going just by RotS, Grievous comes off as a Snidely Whiplash sort of villian who only fights when cornered and when he believes that the odds are in his favor. The EU before and after that has tried to bill him as a legitimate threat (with varying amounts of success), and poor TCW was caught between Lucas' ideas and what the EU said should be. Just like with a lot of the other things they put in the show.

Writing for TCW must have been a nightmare. Between Lucas, the EU, the fans, and Filoni, and with Standards and Practices breathing down their necks, the poor writing staff must never have known if anything from their scripts would even make it to air beyond the basic skeleton. They had to walk a razor-thin line between everyone, trying to please every fan and keep the animation team from strangling them for wanting a new character to appear.

As much as they say that they had the overall plot of the show in mind from the beginning, TCW overall bears much the Lucas prequel-era trademark of being made up as it went along, skipping merrily along the timeline whenever someone had a cool idea or wrote themselves into a corner. It wasn't until when writing for the end of season 3 through seasons 4 and 5 when they settled down, pulled the team into a huddle, and decided to try making a decent run at an overarching plot, which meant multi-parters out the wazoo. And, oddly enough, that seemed to hurt the show in the eyes of people more than help it, because poorly-written episodes were spread out over multiple episodes and the problems were made that much larger.

Sigh. So many of this show's problems would have been fixed if the writing had just been consistent.

And that's why I'm confident in the new show because, if Greg Wiseman's track record is anything to go by, Rebels will have a good plot, established from the very beginning. Action-oriented TV shows are well-served with having a plot, even if it's just undercurrents through seemingly unrelated stories (See: Spectacular Spiderman, Justice League and JLU, Avatar: TLA).

 

I sorry but when I saw this on the Wook, I laughed out loud for over a minute.

 

I still can't believe the series creators had the audacity to say that either.

 

Just because.

 

TAKE IT AWAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY