If Revan Returns Should He Stand Trial For Treason?

That is debatable. Given the fact that everyone calls Revan by the name 'Revan' following the Leviathan sequence in the game, it seems that Revan embraced his true identity and all of the baggage that came with it.

I think that Revan should have been made to stand trial for his crimes as DLotS, but for a number of reasons, I don't that he would have been convicted.

 

i'm going to have to disagree charles. revan was just like anakin/vader he was a good natured man before he fell. and after his return to the light he was very nice he helped many people on his road to redemption. malak was the evilest he was the one who ordered the bombing of telos not revan.

 

Revan was a good man, like Anakin Skywalker but unlike Anakin Skywalker, Revan obliterated that last trace of goodness within him. Despite Kreia's claims, Darth Bane: Path of Destruction more or less illustrates just how much of a monster that he really became. Let's face it, the Revan of the games is so evil that he's a direct father of the Banite line.

 

juhani believed. darth revan had good in him. darth revan was evil yes the new redeemed revan no there is a rumor that when malak fired on his ship as revan lay dying he muttered "forgive me" that shows there was a tiny spark of good in him.

 

Yes, but my argument is essentially Revan is dead by the time of KOTOR.

 

He's a mass murder. Of ocurse he should.

Like our world, there's a law for celebrities, a law for mundanes.

 

I think that's irrelevant when it comes to whether or not they are the same person. Darth Revan was irredeemable, I agree, but he had the dark side stripped from him along with his memories. Even if he regains his memories, he doesn't necessarily regain the darkness that originally went along with them.

Edit; Wait, I see you basically siad something similiar earlier. Sorry, tired. Uh, yeah, I basically agree but I don't think Revan has a "new soul", I think he just has the old one cleared of darkness. Darth Revan and Revan are, at their core, the same "luminous being".

 

As the canonical LS ending demonstrates!

 

I think that it dosen't matter. He didn't stop the unknown threat and we now have an MMo coming out. So in the end, what difference does it make

 

here's what think happened.

the jedi exile finds revan imprisioned releases him then she gives her life to allow revan to escape. revan returns to the jedi order and rebuils it. after revan's death a grief stricken bastila erases revan from the records and puts down he never returned.

 

Here's what I think (probably didn't, but it's my guess for now) happened. Revan travelled to the Hidden Sith Empire, never intending to wage an overt war upon it because, hey, he's one guy after all. He either integrates himself into, or reintergrates himself into (see the stuff Zor and I rambled on over in the KotOR 42 thread) Hidden Sith politics. He may be the Sith Emperor all along or he may slay him and usurp his place (perhaps in secret, with the Hidden Sith thinking he's the same guy). Or maybe he's the power behind the throne? Doesn't really matter.

HE REMAINS TRUE TO THE LIGHT (mostly) DURING THIS TIME.

He is, essentially, trying to reign in the excesses of the Hidden Sith Empire because he knows he cannot destroy them alone. All the "mysterious and weird" stuff the Sith Emperor is doing is because he's not actually wanting to lead the Sith to total conquest at all, the only reason he invaded in the first place was because his Dark Council were starting to grow impatient with how long he'd already stalled them, yada yada.

So, basically, the Sith Emperor is a light sider In fact, he may use the title "Sith Emperor" not in addition to but instead of "Dark Lord of the Sith.".

(Yet, despite all this, he will end up contributing greatly to Darth Bane's Order. Pity)

Yeah, I am a Revan fanboy. Can't help it.

And, hey, if you want wacky - maybe Revan was the very same Sith Emperor as the one who fled after the Great Hyperspace war. Maybe he extends his life by hopping into clones, ala Palpatine... except he does it with baby/child bodies and allows himself to mature more naturally.

Maybe he allowed himself to grow up in the known galaxy one time.

Haha, now I sound like I'm on drugs.

 

If I had to choose a "final fate" for Revan and the Exile?

Revan and the Exile head to the Sith Empire and starts spreading a doctrine of the Light Side of the Force amongst its adherents. This results in many of the Sith Magicians becoming potential Light Siders and making the conflict between the Empires more ambiguous.

 

revan is not the sith emperor revan is too good a person to rejoin the sith. you know what i really think i think the sith emperor is naga sadow or kressh the younger.

 

I would prefer him to be never identified as anything but "The Sith Emperor."

Also, Revan would never rejoin the Sith.

 

I don't know.

"The darkness and the light wage a constant war within you. The balance is tipped one way now, but it can easily be tipped back."

Anything could happen.

 

I think if you got a holocron from Darth Vader as of The Force Unleashed or perhaps even Empire Strikes Back before Vader sees Luke take his suicidal plunge into the depths of Cloud City just to reject the dark side of the Force you'd think Vader/Anakin was totally lost to the dark side as well.

Just because Revan makes a holocron before his amnesia and then subsequent redemption upon learning his true identity and still rejecting his mantle of Dark Lord of the Sith, despite whatever feelings he may have had to learn that the Jedi Council and Bastila(the woman he already had significant feelings for at that point) tweaked his brain to put him on the path he'd followed up to that point, I don't think that makes him an irredeemable monster with not a shred of good in him. His core motivation was to help people, even him going Sith and attacking the Republic was apparently with good intention. In his case the path to hell was paved with good intentions. Thing is, the guy's core of goodness won out. He wasn't so much given a new soul or miraculously had the darkness removed from his soul by the Jedi Council or the Force... but he was given a new opportunity to see the world he'd created as Darth Revan with new eyes... the eyes of an everyday person, on the run from the Sith, and trying to help those being crushed under their boots. Once all his memories are recovered after his identity as Darth Revan having been revealed the guy chooses to not follow that path again... even if he is hacked off in the extreme at what was done to him by the Jedi Council, that's not enough to make him embrace the brutality he'd unleashed on the galaxy.

Could he stand trial? Sure, he's the same man. He's responsible for what he did. But he also acted to turn around what he'd done even after finding out it was him that started the galaxy on that path. He confronts Malak, defeats him, and helps take out the Star Forge thus crippling the Sith war machine. Then he proceeds to go to Korriban to eliminate the threat of the Sith Academy there. And then he remembers his entire motivation in the first place, the True Sith. At every turn he's trying to rectify what he did as Darth Revan, somehow I think he might've done something to make amends with the Mandos if they were the sort to hold a grudge against him for being the stronger warrior.

 

Counterpoint, I'm willing to acknowledge within the context of the games that Darth Revan was not quite the same level of monster that Darth Malak was. Darth Vader was not quite the same monster that Emperor Palpatine was. Emperor Palpatine would probably eat fried baby Ewoks if he felt he'd get a force buzz off it.

OTOH, I think that "Good Intentions" are a really poor way to defend Darth Revan from being responsible for the death of billions. While Malak was the one to annihilate Telos IV, Revan was the guy who stuck him in charge and didn't kill him afterwards. Likewise, Revan also never bothered to inform anyone about the True Sith Empire or other threats. Instead, he solely took it upon himself to become savior of the world.

The closest literary analogue for Darth Revan and Grand Admiral Thrawn is probably Ozymandias from Watchmen. They're responsible for truly monstrous acts in their quest to save their worlds from evil. The only difference is that, ironically enough, Ozymandias suceeded. Sadly, for Revan and Thrawn, their entire Dark Enterprises mostly failed. Grand Admiral Thrawn's campaign only ended up getting him killed when the galaxy would have been a far better place had he just warned anyone.

I'm not sure that "the same man" works either. If you mind-rubbed Darth Vader to the time when he was a nine year old boy (and he wasn't in an iron lung), you're not going to have remotely the same man or someone you can hold responsible for Darth Vader's crimes.

 

The story, for me, is less interesting if Revan could have been redeemed the 'traditional' way. The story becomes much more powerful and tragic if the man who had sunk so far into darkness as to be irredeemable got a second chance over the man who quite possibly deserved a second chance: Malak.

KotOR is like if the Rebellion captured and mind-wiped Darth Sidious and set him on Darth Vader.

I think you're arguing from a different POV than Dawud. Revan is the very same man as he always was because he is numerically identical (and, in Star Wars, this goes beyond 'same body' to 'same soul'), just as Anakin Skywalker the nine year old boy is numerically identical to Darth Vader.

Derek Parfit sums it up well in Reasons and Persons:

So, yes, Revan's character has changed from that of Darth Revan... but they're still the same guy. This would be less cut-and-dry in the case of a real world example but, unless the Jedi Council actually destroyed Revan's "luminous being" and replaced it with a new one, they are still the same person.

 

Are you suggesting Revan was 1000 years old in KOTOR1 but wiped his own memory before he came to the Republic to serve as his own sleeper agent?

 

No, it was Cavil.

Then a Bob Dylan song led him to Malachor.

 

I'm not absolving Revan for his crimes at all. I'm saying, the guy had a core of good and did a great deal of evil to fulfill his good intentions. Then he got amnesia, then revived and hypnotized in such a way as to draw out select memories to an end... and when all was revealed the hyponosis broke his amnesia was remedied in large part... and he still chose to fight the good fight because he saw where his deeds to work towards his good intentions had led the galaxy. Jedi Knight Revan with the Star Forge robes was the same man as Darth Revan who chose to do the right thing after seeing first hand all the evil he'd wrought in his ill-conceived quest to do right.

Sure, he got a second chance. But it's far easier to say that Revan was more akin to Vader than Sidious in his sentiment. The roles just happened to be reversed. I don't think Malak deserved redemption, he was a monster. He escalated things when he'd taken Revan out of the picture. I believe it was Malak that razed Telos... and we know it was Malak that razed Taris.

No doubt, Revan was a bad man. I still think he had a kernel of good, a mustard seed even, in his heart. And it is that which allowed him to come back from his amnesia and still do the right thing. Not some supposed rewiring of his brain.

 

I think it's much more to do with the fact that the Jedi Council lifted the shroud of the dark side from him, specifically. The fact that he chose not to go back after his vision had been cleared doesn't give us any indication that he'd have ever been able to cast off the dark side himself.

Revan didn't turn back from the dark side. He was turned back by outside forces and, in that new mindset, was able to choose not to go back.

Under Malak, thinks got more overtly brutal and less intelligent - not more evil. If anything, given what Kreia says about Revan and his whole "create and exploit wounds in the Force to bend people to my will", Revan was the more vile of the pair. The fact that Revan wants to "save the galaxy" is irrelevant. Per the RotS Visual Dictionary, so does Sidious.

Revan has elements of Anakin/Vader to his story, obviously, but as for his relationship with Malak, it overt to me that he is the dark Obi-Wan with a splash of Sidious to Alek's, less talented, Anakin.

 

I believe in souls in real life.

I also believe that souls are effected by our memories and choices. So when Revan had his brain rubbed, he became a different person.

And those experiences affect his "luminous being."

 

I'm going to grab onto these two quotes, because I agree with the first, but for me it leads to a different outcome, but the fundamental argument here is over the second quote.

I like the tragedy and complexity of Revan's mind-wipe, but I actually much prefer the idea that it wasn't really Revan in there. That Revan was basically brain-dead on the bridge, his mind completely gone. And the Jedi Council then went and programmed him with a new identity, a new personality, a changed character. It might be the same spirit, the same Force presence, but everything that made that spirit express itself in the way it did, that made it be itself in every fundamental way -- experiences, natural predilections, personality traits, moral convictions -- was gone, and instead the Council overwrote it with a personality, a history, a set of experiences and predilections and personality traits and moral convictions of their own construction designed to make him the best possible Jedi and as thoroughly uninterested in the dark side as possible.

That, to me, is vastly more interesting and tragic than just having Revan redeemed by force, and it raises so many more questions about identity and determinism -- it raises KOTOR into a mindkriff on the scale of KOTOR II. Did Revan do what he did freely, or because the Jedi Council programmed him? If he was controlled by his personality, then isn't everyone else? So he was no less free than anyone else, but still . . . he did what he did because the Jedi Council programmed him to be a saint. You can get a Revan who's a pure light-side saint, who always makes the right choices in the game, who reflexively rejects the dark side and pulls Bastila back . . . not because the Dark Lord of the Sith was redeemed in an uplifting second chance, but because the Jedi programmed him to be perfect, and he couldn't do anything else if he wanted to, because he can't want to.

This, of course, makes it about a billion times wilder and more interesting when Revan's old memories and experiences start to reemerge, and then everything goes straight up in the air.

 

On the Temple of the Ancients, Bastila says right out that parts of the dark side linger in the new Revan. The Council couldn't eradicate it all. Indeed she blames part of her fall on this, because the bond gave her access to his dark side and she was tempted and corrupted by it.