Lit Could or Should Revan return to Disney Canon?

In-universe I blame Vrook Lamar for Vima being forgotten. That petty vindictive man hates (He'll say against because hate is a dark side term, but I call it for what it is) Ulic Qel-Droma and anyone associated with him and even was against Duron just for being Ulic's cousin. I'm sure he sidelined Vima, made sure she stayed off the Council, because she trained under Ulic etc.

Why can't the Exile come back? All they have to do is say she is a general who nearly wiped out the Mandalorians. If anything, Malachor (if it is Malachor 5) being intact in Rebels along with a female Sith voice goading Ezra on the planet indicates a possible very different course for the Exile in canon than she had in Legends...

Also, I'm still not seeing how either Revan or Exile are wish fulfillment. The things that happened to them even Palpatine might not wish on his worst enemies... (In fact, he probably didn't, seeing as how he often just gave them a quick end instead of torturing them for centuries or cutting them off from the Force.).

 

Because some people think popular = wish fulfillment. Just like how Rey doesn't meet the criteria for a Mary Sue, that doesn't stop many detractors for labeling her such.

If Revan was a wish fulfillment character he would get the girl/guy (He/she didn't, not even in KOTOR 2)
Have a lasting legacy (Revan was barely able to reverse he caused, and helped nearly destroy the thing he set out to save)
Take an active part in galactic events for years to come (Revan disappeared to deal with an unknown threat of the True Sith in the original games, the Emperor in TOR, in the later case, he failed incredibly hard)

Revan was a powerful and charismatic figure, who nonetheless brought great harm to the galaxy while trying to do good. He turned away from loved ones to not place them in jeopardy, and disappeared from the galaxy at large trying to right those wrongs.

 

Revan is intended to be a "blank slate" character where (s)he could be anyone you want her(him) to be. (S)he literally couldn't be ruined.

I liked Revan's character in SWTOR (mostly because he was voiced by Jeff Bennett, not because of his storyline)...but I'd be okay with either he being a she in canon or, as mentioned earlier in this thread, him actually being Tarre Vizsla or something equally crazy and off-the-wall. And they can do that because Revan was originally intended to be a blank slate. Which is okay.

 

Revan's a blank slate in KotOR beyond "OMG HE WAS SO AWESOME AND CHARISMATIC AND TACTICAL" but less so in TSL.

The one thing I will always give BioWare Austin credit for is for TOR's Revan actually being the guy Kreia described. A self important, delusional freak with a messiah complex.

 

The delusion part would happen to anyone after 300 years of torture, but otherwise agreed.

 

He was always like that. Before I was a big SW fan I was a big KotOR subfranchise fan and amongst that fandom there was a . . . tendency, let's say, to view Revan as borderline perfect. Vrook was an ass for daring to be the only Jedi Council member who called him out. When TSL came around, these people heard "Perhaps Revan never fell" and immediately latched on to the idea that Revan, somehow, was a good guy even as a Dark Lord of the Sith, or that he walked the line.

Which, of course, couldn't have been further from the truth.

TSL, in fact, severely condemned Revan -- frequently -- as an extremely bad guy and negatively interpreted many of the traits BioWare attributed to him.

Mandalorian Wars? He was already an scheming **** when he issued his call to arms.

HK-47: "I believe the Mandalorian Wars were to defeat the Mandalorians and also to build the foundation for Revan's army."

(And more)

His charisma? More or less stated to have been the result of his studies into Force bonding. (Often missed because Mical/Disciple goes the most in depth on the subject, and most people played a dude)

The Exile was doing, naturally, what Revan taught himself to do. And, in that light, his and Bastila's force bond looks less accidental.

When Kreia praises Revan because he chose to embrace evil for "the greater good" rather than being tricked into it, we're not meant to view that as laudable, any more than Anakin was laudable for embracing evil to save Padme.

The "galaxy", as an abstract, was Revan's Padme. And that's a large part of what makes him a self important, delusional freak.

 

But. Hey. He redeems himself after he gets his memory back.

You're right though, there's no denying that pre-mindwipe Revan was a massively deluded, arrogant piece of crap who wanted to do the right thing, sure...but like you said, so did Anakin. Or Thrawn. Or Darth Caedus. Or...

Basically, people praise him for being (in TSL) a three-dimensional villain but they see it as heroic, rather than villainous.

 

Yeah, I mean, TSL is the story that established that Revan repeatedly stabbed God in the face (created Force wounds) to break people to his will.

Like.

No, that's not good.

It's funny, regarding the mind wipe. I actually used to suspect that --maybe -- he'd seen that coming. Like, why else reprogram the Kashyyyk computer to scan his brainwaves and make sure he was the same person? Back in my "REVAN WAS A TRUE SITH INFILTRATOR" days, I wondered his pre-mindwipe persona hadn't, itself, been a constructed persona. But that ship has long since sailed.

I really liked the idea of him as a Jekyll/Hyde figure, and the "Palpatine" behind the Mandalorian Wars without him having even realised it. (He'd have been "the Sith" who went to the Mandalorians with an offer, in this interpretation)

 

I think Revan is a good example of, "He who plays with the devils toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword."

Did the Mandolrians need to be stopped? Yes. Were the Jedi essentially useless mediators? Playing with their holocrons while the galaxy burned? Guilty as charged. But in the process of fighting them, the brutality of the war convinced Revan that Jedi meditation and naivety were not good counters against titanic threats. And so, like many villains, he sought to use brutal, terrible measures to fight, brutal, terrible organisations, eventually turning on the Republic he set out to protect. Or at least destroy it's present form as TSL elaborated on.

 

Well, TSL also introduced the True Sith, so when KotOR says "the Jedi Council were hesitant to get involved because they sensed a greater thread behind the conflict", well . . . yeah. They weren't playing with anything, they were right. Even on a charitable interpretation, Revan, again, is the dip who thought he knew better.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the guy . . . but I love him because he's such an immensely talented screw up.

 

Yes, but confronting the greater threat is rather worthless when the one right in front of you has burned down half the galaxy. I reeeealy don't think Vrook, Lamar, Atris and Vandar et al would have done much better.

 

Actually this is the same person.

I assume you meant "Kavar" in the second one.

 

Yeah, the two lightsaber guy.

 

Well, without Revan's support the Republic would have collapsed. When Revan interviened, Mandalorians were already attacking Core Worlds. We must also remember, that they have barely managed to defeat Mandalorians, even with the help of Revan and his followers.

 

And since the True Sith/Emperor were behind the Mandalorian invasion to begin with. The Republic and Jedi would have simply folded to the first major scheme, instead of the Jedi Civil war/Sith Cold war depending on which continuity you're following.

 

It's mainly a question of where the line is drawn. The Jedi Council always insisted that they would have joined the fight at the "right" moment, eventually, and that Revan jumped the gun.

Perhaps that would have led to disaster, also. Perhaps not. Maybe there was a shatterpoint to come.

The difficulty with pointing to the narrowness of the Republic's victory is that it's uncertain how much of that was manufactured to Revan's benefit. We know that he wasn't shy about sacrificing "whole planets and systems" for the greater strategic goal, and we know that he prioritised keeping his loyalists alive over those whose allegiance lay more generally with the Republic.

And, by the end, we know he was actively purging the military (at least the third under his direct command) of anyone whose loyalties lay elsewhere.

 

I think Disney might be hesitant to bring Revan back simply because general audiences might confuse him (visually) with Kylo Ren.

Hell, not too long ago my brother's workplace had a star wars costume club visit and he took pictures of what he thought was Kylo Ren only for me to point out it was actually a guy dressed a Revan

 

That makes me feel so angry...

 

That's only an issue if they bring the character back for a film series.

But that's another reason Revan will be a she if the character returns.

 

With the return of fan favorites such as Thrawn, I'm all for seeing Revan canon again, but keep the character's gender ambiguous. When SWTOR made Revan a man, most fans didn't seem to be that happy because the original Knights of the Old Republic was meant to give the player a feel that their created character was them immersed in the Star Wars universe. A canon era set in the Old Republic has a lot of potential and it'd be nice new stories mixed in with elements of the old Expanded Universe.

 

I wonder if something similar could have been done with Anakin and the Clone Wars. I feel like the dialogue of the OT could be interpreted to suggest that Yoda warned Obi-Wan and Anakin to stay out of the Clone Wars, but they ignored Yoda's warning and went on a "damn fool idealistic crusade." Ultimately, Anakin concluded that only an Empire could maintain peace.

I also wonder if Vitiate's goal with the Mandalorian Wars was to lure Revan to him.

You're making me nostalgic for the days when we speculated about "Dark Lords of the Rakata", Freedon Nadd and Exar Kun being connected to the True Sith, etc.

 

If we do get a canon Revan, If he follows the path of the darkside, she shouldn't come back from it. None of this fake identity given to him. By keeping her a Sith Lord even when death comes, it further distinguishes him from that Annie dude.

 

I don't think it's really in keeping with Star Wars that ONLY Anakin could have come back from the Darkside. Anyone is capable of redemption IF they are open to it, and are willing to pay the price.

 

I think it's extremely important that Anakin/Vader is the first to return from the dark side. Extremely.

If it were up to me, that would be the most important part of his bringing balance to the Force. Shattering the spell of the dark side's power, forever, so that never again could someone say "It's too late for me".

That being said . . . Revan (in KotOR) wasn't too bad because he didn't make the choice for himself. He was forced back on to the straight and narrow and then rejected the dark side from there. He never had to actually make the journey back under his own power.

 

The new canon already mucked with this with new Quinlan Vos going on a rampage in the novel Dark Disciple (killing his own Jedi friends even), and then being welcomed back into the Jedi Order, Master status reinstated and commanding troops per ROTS.

In fact, he completely undermines Anakin's story in ROTS because the Jedi Council Anakin deals with seems to be completely different between Dark Disciple and ROTS. They won't make Anakin a Jedi Master because he's too young and has snarky tantrums? Anakin: "Um, Master Windu, Quinlan Vos has done far worse things and he is a Master."

Anakin feels he has no choice but to join the Sith after he chopped off Mace Windu's hand? Anakin: "Master Yoda, yes I did chop off Master Windu's hand, but only to prevent him from making a serious violation of the Jedi Code in killing a defeated opponent. I'm not the one who tossed him off a roof. You'll let me stay with the Jedi because you let Quinlan stay even after he actually killed Jedi Desh and who knows how many others on his trip to the dark side. Can we go team up to defeat Palpatine now?"

"Oh yeah, Palpatine told me he could save people from death, tell me he's lying. Actually, since you guys are so forgiving to Quinlan, I might as well just tell you I'm married to Padme and there might be childbirth complications, help me out. Considering Palpatine just killed all the other Jedi in the galaxy now, you can't really afford to expel me."