Lit Beyond the big two: lesser Force traditions in the GFFA

Anyone else interested in the Blackguard?

 

I am but we don't get a discussion if we all agree so lets ask some questions:

How would you describe the Blackgurad?
What made you interested in them?
How can you see them being used?
In what way would you like to see them being used?

 

Since Ordo N-11 seems to have other thigs to do I guess that I will have to answer my own questions


How would you describe the Blackgurad?
A smaller Force tradition that originate from the Brotherhood of Darkness and had their main base on Mustafar. They did not believed that there was a light or dark side, and that the only light or dark side would dwell within the user. They sought to bring balance the light and dark sides within themselves, similar to the ancient Je'daii Order.
The Blackguards traditions seems mostly to be martial based but they had an interesting philosophy that you gained a higher knowledge of the Force by understanding the philosophies and abilities of other Force traditions around the galaxy

What made you interested in them?
Their looks mostly, since I don't have any of the material were they appear. I want to know why they count as a Dark side tradition if they tried to balance the light and dark sides within themselves. Also, since they live on Mustafar I want to know if they have any special survivals suits under their seemingly fireproof robes and how their helmets work

How can you see them being used?
Since one of their traditions is to go out in the galaxy and learn they can easily be a stories many character, companion or enemy.

In what way would you like to see them being used?
In a way that makes them stand out from the Jedi and Sith. To me they seems to have been created just for the excuse to have the players fight a large group of lightsabre wilding Force users without using the Jedi or the Sith so want to see them given more personality

 

What about Grey Paladin, or Sälãi Käsi?

 

What about them? You tell me

 

Someone let me know that a question had been asked in my direction here, so I figured I'd better answer it (I've not paid much attention to the rest of the thread, though, so apologies if I'm interjecting tangenially across the discussion)....

The first thing I want to emphasise is that this is a VERY old comment, from a long, long time ago. It was written before I was the co-author on WARFARE, so I was just writing as an ordinary fan (rather than a more-or-less inactive fan with faintly spurious credentials ).

Even more importantly, it was written before there was any Dathomiri stuff in TCW, so I wasn't talking about that at all.

So DigitalMessiah was right - I was talking in broad terms about the way that the focus of attention had shifted towards the "Nightsisters" in preference to other Dathomiri.

But I feel it's important to clarify what I meant in my own words...

So, let's look at what that focus shifted from...

***

The majority of canon (Courtship, YJK, Geonosis and the Outer Rim, and even Infinity's End) has depicted the Nightsisters as a tiny, margnalized group, outnumbered something like 100 to 1 by ordinary Dathomiri.

As the story was originally told in Courtship, they were actually a NEW movement that only began in the Imperial era. Now that particular point is something that's been retconned since Infinity's End, and you won't find me saying a bad word about a comic written by Pat Mills, but it's a useful point in emphasising the Nightsisters' outcast position on the very edge of Dathomiri society....

And I suppose what I was was speaking up for was the rest of Dathomir.

The "traditional" Dathomiri were conceived by Wolverton as a society like most real-world societies, in which the norms of behaviour were basically good ("never concede to evil" was the founding social idea), and bad behaviour was either concealed by duplicity, or else made to appear normal, even to its perpetrators, by cultural and political rhetoric...

There are no Nightsisters.

Speaking personally, I think that's a good place to tell a genre-fiction story. It generates drama from betrayal and self-deception, and it places a stronger emphasis on shared humanity and interconnectedness, and on the opportunity to reach out like Luke did to Vader (and Vader, damaged though he was, also reached out to his son). It tells stories of dark and light in terms of selfishness and openness, shame and hope.

(... at this point, you should imagine an Ewok stepping down off whatever the Bright Tree Village equivalent of a soapbox is! )

I'd be a little... uneasy, I suppose, if the association of "exotic locale where people do things differently from the way they do it in civilized, liberal places" was too closely boltplated to an idea of "crazy weird dark side bad guys"...

Thankfully, Dathomir is a BIG planet.

Backlash turned out to be a nice return to all the places we saw in CoPL, and I thought TCW did the bad guys proud, while telling a very new story without actually causing any continuity snafus (the Zabrak stuff is a nice homage to both Galaxies and Infinity's End, and within the very wide and complex framework of the cartoon, I can completely understand that they chose to focus on a more limited palette of Dathomiri characters)....

As far as the broad arc of canon is concerned, though, the "Nightsister" name still seems to be restricted to a few small, short-lived groups sharing little more than a cool name and a bad attitude (the Infinity's End ones, the Maul-TCW ones, the Galaxies-CoPL ones and the YJK ones). And we've still only seen two or three very localized areas of the planet, too!

So, it seems, my grumbling in March 2010 was rather premature.

(When it comes to WARFARE, it's worth mentioning that my authorial intention was that both Lanu Pasiq and the anonymous female protagonist of "Nightfall on Ruusan" are "non-Nightsister Dathomiri" who just happen to be low-level Sith Order assets. Of course, that's just my POV, and I'm VERY well aware that anything you sketch in the sandpit is then left for other people to play with....)

***

Also, a quick "thanks!" to Iron_lord - I hadn't realised there were Dathomiri in The Last Jedi. It's a gap in my reading, and one I should probably check out.

And a random mention too to Zeta1127 and @MiaMesharad and Contessa since they were commenting on this point as well, and I've sort of nodded tangentially to them in what I said above!

-- The Imperial Ewok

 

I think the big loss with Nightsisters is how it is basically now a term that is interchangeable with "Dathomiri Dark Jedi". From COPL, it was always understood that Gethzerion's group were "marked" by using dark powers. Blood vessels broke in their faces, their skin wrinkled and hardened, and it wasn't something you could actively hide from. Everyone could see if you were a Nightsister just by looking at you.

That sort of fell by the wayside almost immediately, since the image of the beautiful and seductive witch a la the Queen in Snow White quickly creeped into all illustrations. Even Tamith Kai and her ilk are described as tall and beautiful. I always liked the idea that using the dark side makes you ugly and old beyond your years. It reinforces the idea that the dark side is seductive solely because of the power it grants, not because its glamorous or looks fun. The lure of power is enough to sway you even though you can see the horrific effects that tapping into it can cause.

 

It is pointed out in the book that Tamith Kai and her ilk is different from the Nightsisters of old by not being directly market by their use of the Dark side. It is possibly something they learned from Brakiss

 

I think there's simply more to the Force than any one group realizes, including the Jedi. The Fallanassi use the White Current and Luke's test of Akanah seemed to indicate that she wasn't Force sensitive in the way that a Jedi is, but she is able to create powerful illusions, and Luke ultimately concludes that the White Current is another aspect of the Force. Talzin says she is using magic and not the Force, but I think we're supposed to conclude that she's full of it.

The success of the Jedi order has led the Force to be largely correlated with their understanding and use of it, so other groups might conclude that since their use of the Force and understanding of this power is different than the Jedi, that it must be different than the Force.

 

From the Bardotta arc of TCW I got the impression that the magic is really about her using "stolen" Force and thus not channeling it in the way that Jedi or Sith do.

 

Exactly. In fact, what was pretty clear to me in that arc was that she was composed of stolen Force entirely. There is a very interesting connection with the opening of the Infinity Gate there, and I'm hoping it is utilized at some point.

By the way, the Dagoyan Masters not actively using the Force but merely immersing themselves in it was great.

 

In that case, what was she before the first time she stole Force?

 

What is the connection? I haven't read Infinity's End in a while.

 

If it were up to me, I'd make her some kind of Sekot-like intelligence that arose from the planet. In any case, the way she was fading away in the episode and was so desperate to steal other people's Force made it quite clear, to me at least, that she owes her existence to stolen Force. When muscleman Opress faded away, the real Opress was still inside. When Talzin faded away, there was nothing there.

No connection right now. But the Infinity Gate opening could be used to explain the whole business with Talzin and the green mist. Chronologically, the previous Nightsister group opening the Gate is the point of departure for the new green mist Nightsisters of the cartoon. I'd like to see some connection between the green mist and the Kwa. Dawn of the Jedi was a good outlet for that with the Kwa and Dathomiri characters, but it went out with a whimper....

 

Did Opress fade back into his (relatively) scrawnier version? Or did he just vent the excess Living Force with which he was imbued?

What the heck, I have netflix, I'll check.

 

How would a sekot-like intelligence steal Force?

 

I don't really like the comparison to Sekot insofar as that it and Yuuzhan'tar were sort of emergent intellects out of the collective Living Force of their planets' symbiotic ecosystems.

I'm uncertain about the interpretation that she's merely stolen Living Force, because that seems to be her means of teleportation or conveyance. She does it before Grievous and his droids can kill her in Massacre and then she shows up later the same way in Revenge, and it's not something that she does due to harm to her or anything. She's going to appear in Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir, and she may get killed in that, so we'll see if that happens.

 

I don't want to start writing fan fiction here, but the way Talzin has been presented suggests to me that she is something other than just a Nightsister. The way I see it is they have piled ridiculous power on top of ridiculous power for Talzin, then another source needlessly connected her to the Mortis people, and finally the entire thing collapsed under the weight of its own ridiculousness and they turned her into a Force-sucking vampire made of green smoke and worshiped as a goddess by the space Thugees. I hope Son of Dathomir addresses the whole business instead of pretending that nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

 

When was she connected to Mortis?

 

Book of Sith.

 

Wasn't the only connection between Talzin and her group of Nightsisters to Mortis that they worshiped the Son and the Daughter as Gods?

 

Yeah, that's why I was confused. And it's more like as personifications of the sides of the Force.

Anyway, the Force group which I've always been curious about, and is probably the third oldest in the EU after the Jedi and the Sith, is the Guardians of the Breath and that whole business with the Kashi Mer.

 

The Order of the Terrible Glare were referenced way back in Devilworlds.