Lit Ancient Races: Celestials, Rakata, and Co

This is sick. I love it.

 

In KOTOR 2, there’s an item called a “Rakatan Band” with a description that says, “The origin behind the item's name is unknown, but rumor has it that these bands were constructed as a defense against an ancient species of alien deceivers, who made absurd claims of dominance concerning their role in the galaxy. It is said this species of lying primitives went so far as to take credit for almost every major event in galactic history since the discovery of the hyperdrive.”

 

Wow, someone didn’t like the Infinite Empire I guess. Feels like an Avellone thing.

 

It seems like it. And @darklordoftech had also shown me a scene from KOTOR 2 where Kreia recounts the history of Revan’s fall and the Mandalorian Wars, but she doesn’t mention the Star Forge at all, only making an indirect reference to Revan’s seemingly limitless resources.

Perhaps Avellone wanted to shift the focus away from the Rakatan elements of the story, re-focusing it on Malachor V and the True Sith instead. Would Obsidian’s KOTOR 3 have gone so far as to retcon the Rakatan Empire as actually belonging to the True Sith, with the Rakata themselves only being a slave species?

 

Here it is:

I don’t think so considering that in the same interview in which Avellone compared the True Sith to the Shadows from Babylon 5, he said, “They were survivors of Naga Sadow’s empire.”

 

@darklordoftech

Indeed, but I’m wondering if KOTOR 3 would have retconned the Rakatan Empire as being only a part of the Sith Empire rather than its precursor. That would mean they’d also retcon the Sith Empire as being much older than it had been until then.

If the Rakata and the Star Forge were minimized in KOTOR 2, it suggests the writers didn’t favor this faction of ancient dark siders as part of their story. So if they were setting up the bigger threat of the True Sith, then I can imagine they might suggest in KOTOR 3 that what we thought was the Infinite Empire was in fact a small part of a much older and stronger Sith Empire.

Or perhaps it’s even simpler than that, and the game would have instead suggested the Star Forge was actually a Sith construct, with the Rakata later taking claim over it and over deeds they may have been responsible for but only as a servant species of the True Sith. This reminds me a bit of how the Killiks claimed they built Centerpoint Station, which they did, but only under the direction of the Celestials.

Hopefully the KOTOR subreddit is unlocked today. There’s a few threads that seem to deal with references to the Star Forge in KOTOR 2, and even one that suggests the addition of the Rakata in KOTOR 1 felt like a last-minute and out-of-place decision. Maybe Avellone had a similar impression and wanted to reframe some of the backstory by connecting it back to the Sith instead.

 

That doesn't really fit. Tha Rakata preceded Naga Sadow's Sith, and KOTOR 2 didn't really hint at anything that would mingle the two or suggest that they were part of a Sith Empire.

I don't see anything in KOTOR 2 that tried to downplay the Rakata or the Star Forge either. They just weren't particularly relevant to the story as it played out. You don't need to repeat every bit of information about past events in dialogue, not when they are irrelevant to what is going on. Even more so when you consider the fact that you don't want a character to appear all-knowing. Kreia had her opinion on stuff, but she didn't know about all events that transpired, nor was she a reliable narrator, she had a slanted view on great many things.

It should also be noticed that the information given by the game for items is not reliable information either. It often includes assumptions or states that something is unknown.

 

When KOTOR 2 came out in 2004, the Sith history we are familiar with from the EU had not yet been nailed down. There were books referencing the Sith Empire being old enough to have been founded around the year 25,000 BBY. And its connection, if any, to the Rakatan Infinite Empire had also yet to be explored in any detail. So if Obsidian had decided to make the Sith Empire the actual source of the Rakatan constructs, they wouldn’t have contradicted the canon of that time.

That’s not to say this is definitely what they would’ve done. I agree that the absence of references is not proof of anything. But it is not farfetched to see the omission of references as a possible bias on the part of KOTOR 2’s writers. And we know they were building up the surviving ancient Sith as the big enemy of the trilogy, so it’s also not too wild to imagine they could have retconned the lore introduced in KOTOR 1 to help magnify the threat the characters would be dealing with in KOTOR 3.

 

Would be fun if the True Sith predating the Rakata actually are the Celestials then ultimately. Ancient galaxy ruling Sith that managed to reach immortality and godhood actually via ascension. Something the lesser modern Sith crave and fail to replicate. And in contrast, I wonder what if the true Sith are not the same as the evil Sith Lords, but Sith free of Dark Jedi Lordship over them and thus different, not as evil,but still a threat to the KOTOR 3 heroes ideologically.

 

Wow...that reads as "the darkside CAN win". I don't know if Star Wars is ready to go there.

 

According to Avellone, the True Sith, the ancient Sith Lords who survived outside the known galaxy, were not too far in terms of power from what we saw of the Celestials in later books. The plan was to have their civilization be capable of shaping entire solar systems according to their design, which is on par with Centerpoint Station.

Hell, the KOTOR games predate the Dark Nest trilogy, the first story to name the Celestials and expand on the lore that ties them to the mysterious Builders. I think the implication in KOTOR 1 may have been that the Rakata may have been these beings who constructed Centerpoint, and then the Obsidian sequels could’ve revealed it was actually the ancient Sith.

I don’t know about ascension, though. That wasn’t part of the lore until FOTJ. I’m not convinced even Troy Denning originally wanted to suggest that’s what had happened to the Celestials, though it’s possible. But certainly Avellone wanted to keep his True Sith on the physical plane, since the player character would need to confront them in the game. Though, to be fair, they need not be fully in the physical plane. And the notion of Force ghosts is almost foundational to Star Wars, so perhaps that was a direction they could’ve explored.

 

Where was it first said that ancient aliens gave hyperdrive technology to humans?

 

I don't think it's ever been said.

It's always been that Humans and Duros invented it.

Later it was added that they reverse-engineered and changed it from the Rakata to not be driven by the Force (which came in KOTOR).

 

I think the Kwa were the first in travel the Galaxy then the Rakata

 

Did we ever get a good answer for what exactly this thing was?



It first appeared in the Darth Vader comic that focused on Lord Momin’s past. I believe it had a second appearance in a recent comic featuring Qi’ra, and I seem to recall Wookieepedia calling it a dark side shrine of some sort. But I hope there’s more to it, because it has always intrigued me, especially because in the context of the original panel it’s almost like that thing is a representation of the dark side of the Force itself.

It also reminds me of the kaiju-like living statues that were drawn-up by Dave Filoni for one of the unfinished TCW arcs. These creatures would've featured in the arc where our heroes found an ancient Sith temple in the depths of Coruscant, underneath the Jedi Temple. The buried Sith temple idea would later be recycled for Rebels, but these creatures have yet to see the light of day in any canon works so far:



On their own, they have a passing resemblance to the dark-side thing from the Vader comic. But both also remind me of the God Warriors from Hayao Miyazaki’s movie and manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind:






In Miyazaki's story, these warriors are ancient bio-mechanoids created by the human race and responsible for its near annihilation in a long-past apocalypse. We know Filoni is a big Miyazaki fan, so I don't think the resemblance is accidental. And while we have yet to see Filoni's kaiju-statues (as he called them) make an appearance in any canon stories, I do wonder if something like that may have been what Charles Soule was hinting at in the Vader comic?

If so, could we see some kind of long-dormant bio-mechanoid like these ones make an appearance in future canon stories? Canon has already introduced the Zeffo, who as an ancient and extinct precursor race that left behind Force artifacts are the perfect candidates to be responsible for creatures like these. And there are a few hints that whatever Baylan Skoll is searching for in the extra-galactic world of Peridea in the Ahoka show may have ties to the Zeffo too. Just some food for thought, and all possibly unrelated. But it would be a very fun thing to introduce, and a more satisfying explanation for that dark side thing from the Vader comics.

(In my fevered thoughts, I can even imagine these creatures being used to introduce Lucas's concept of the Whills. Lucas described living beings in the SW universe as being vehicles for the Whills. So what if the Zeffo took this one step further and created these things as bodies that could be more directly controlled by the Whills, only for certain dark-side aligned creatures to take control over them and sow chaos? All right I'll stop, that definitely goes too far into speculative territory, but I liked the idea.)

 

Living statues? Someone played Mysteries of the Sith I bet... Filoni the Gamer?

 

Wasn’t there another arc that featured “Dark Side kaiju” as well? One of the Knights of Ren got squished by one, I think.

 

Yeah.

I think there is a quick line implying they are droids just dressed up to look scary but I can't remember for sure.

 

I want to know more about the Aing-Tii monks and know if they are related to the Whills

 

Ah, that level could be a severe pain in the scarns...

 

A nice exploratory video by YJKen on youtube here, looking at the history and downfall of the Zeffo, and some significant thematic links to the decline of the late era Republic Jedi.

 

A few days ago I was wondering how the EU could’ve been different if the book series that followed the NJO hadn’t shied away from the Vong as much as they did. It could’ve been cool to tie their gods to the ancient races of the GFFA, perhaps even the Celestials.

In that case the Vong could’ve literally been descended from the gods, as they believed themselves to be. But only as a very twisted and diminished form of the beings who once created technological marvels in the galaxy. In a way, that might be too similar to the primitive Rakata, who lost all connection to the Force and thus to their technology. But I kind of like the implication that yes, the Vong weren’t actually wrong about their ancestry, just not in the way that they had imagined.

That sort of connection could have also given the Vong an end goal for their rehabilitation with Zonama Sekot, to become once again creators of galactic marvels, only without all the pain and destruction they had embraced for millennia. Having the Jedi help a group of Vong investigate their past in the Unknown Regions could’ve also been a good catalyst for the galaxy’s re-encounter with the Killiks, and perhaps would’ve been a more natural flow from one series to the next. But I totally understand if people were tired of the Vong, and it makes sense for the new threat to be totally unrelated. But I do think it’s a potential connection that would’ve been cool and organic.

 

TBH, as much as I dislike the post-NJO, I've also never really liked any of the fan ideas I've heard about having the Vong gods actually objectively exist.

 

Supernatural encounters making the vong gods just other names for the actual gods like the mortis gods , immortal gods of the sith, architects and Old ones stay winning