Lit The One Sith

Should the One Sith make their return in Star Wars Canon or should the Sith stay dead and buried. Cause no offense but It would take one New Jedi Order member or some rando who has an hard on for Sith Lore to find Korriban/Moraband and start the whole Sith religion again.

 

It would be nice for the nine films to have some kind of permanent impact on the galaxy. There's plenty of room in the Old Republic for Sith stories.

 

The Sith should remain dead and buried after TROS unless they make an Episode IX. Ghosts, holocrons, cults, etc. and even the return of the Sith species if they get canonized would be ok, but the threat of Sith rule of the galaxy should be permanently ended by the events of the Saga.

 

I could see them using the One Sith name but changing the context, bringing it into the Old Republic. Maybe a rival order to Bane's?

 

Evil never rests.

Somehow...it will return.

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That said, it would be nice to have a long break. Maybe a couple generations in-universe.

But that would require creativity and content that is appealing to the fanbase beyond the classic "Jedi v Sith". They are not going to stop making stories in the galaxy far far away, so they have to write about some challenge.

Please note, this is exactly the thought process that spawned the NJO, and then the subsequent return of the Sith in Post-NJO.

So with that in mind...if the canon expands the timeline beyond TROS...sooner or later...the Sith will return.

 

How many people are going to say, “I won’t read it unless the bad guys with lightsabers are called “Sith”?

 

It's not about people who say they won't read.

It's not about people who say they will read.

It's about what a casual fan, or random reader thinks of star wars and reads on a dust jacket or in an amazon description.

In the end...they know the readership they have. It is grabbing the people they don't have.

It's likely an easier sell to say "It's Star Wars" with Blue/Green Lightsabers crossed with Red Lightsabers on the cover, then it is "Star Wars: Doing Things Different".

I do believe they know there is a market for change...that is why NJO exists. Heck, High Republic is at least a little different.

But light vs. dark is core to the popular conception of Star Wars...and "Sith" is nearly as synonymous with dark as "Jedi" is with light.

Perhaps they could skid the idea...avoid "sith" and just have darksiders, or dark jedi, or come up with a new cult. But somewhere down the line, some writer will have the idea "now is the time for the new darksiders to rediscover the ancient evil" and it will just turn up. It has again and again.

Sith sells.

 

I think the One Sith have great designs so they could come back.

But the Sith in general, will return. Their name is in the title of a Star Wars film. People know the Sith, the ST tried to do 'Sith-lite' and just gave up because it was pointless, people called Kylo a Sith from the start and functionally there was no difference.

 

A long break first would be nice… it’s inevitable to happen at some point.

I’d rather they explore those ideas in other time periods first.

And at least now it’s been established that not all darksiders need to be Sith (Kylo Ren, Knights of Ren, Baylan Skoll, Nightsisters, etc.)
*** sidenote: it’s never been established how these are different from the Sith. Especially someone like Kylo Ren.

 

Keep in mind that NJO/LOTF/FOTJ/Legacy-scale conflicts are likely off-limits to the books and comics because Disney wants the movies to be the main events.

Baylan doesn’t want to kill Jedi and one of the reasons he gives is that there’s so few of them left while the Sith want to wipe out the Jedi and he seeks to help Thrawn return to the galaxy and is looking for something while Sith don’t want to be ruled by anyone.

 

We’ve only ever met Palpatine-led Sith. It’s possible to have Sith not bent on destroying the Jedi. And then there’s Kylo Ren, who wasn’t Sith but was bent on destroying Jedi.

(also, the other point wasn’t towards me, but I’d say the High Republic is just as if not more ambitious than the NJO was, and while not mega-scale is still a good idea about how the EU could still tackle big things in clever ways.)

 

I think the moniker of Sith is really all it is. Titles and patterns that become traditions become cultures.

The Sith were the foremost culture of the darkside. But that doesn't guarantee their solitary claim to mastery over it compared to a solitary darksider who delves in the evil alone.

And then you have to deal with the 31 flavors of the Sith represented mostly in legends. Bane was a Sith, but came to despise what the Sith were and changed them. And then you get the fights between rival factions over who is really "Sith". Identity Politics of the darkside.

All of this ambiguity in-universe helps cover for the writers out-of-universe who can play pretty loose with the terminology because it is such a mess.

Was Kylo Ren a sith...no. Did he want to be one...yes. Why? Power. The name has a power, even if it doesn't really imbue the namebearer with anything special. Palpatine talked about the power of the darkside...not the power of the Sith. But if the name can do some of the work for you, why not use it. If nothing else, the name unlocked the amassed stores of Exegol for Kylo. Perhaps there are other Sith caches waiting for students of their history to find.
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Ultimately, I think the argument here is the same argument early legends EU faced. Did the good guys ultimately win in Return of the Jedi/The Rise of Skywalker. That somehow the continuation of the bad guys (the specific bad guys) was a repudiation of what the movies achieved.

Dark Empire was long rejected by many fans who adored other star wars EU because not only did it bring back the Sith, it brought back Palpatine! Turned Luke to the Darkside! WHAT ARE THEY DOING TO MY STAR WARS!

But the expanded universe was exactly that, a stretch to go beyond, both in complexity of story telling, and of scale. If all we ever got were stories about minor challenges to our enshrined heroes, it would all be anti-climactic and melodramatic because it simply would not offer any stakes the good guys had not already overcome.

Can they have different enemies? Sure. They created the Vong for that very purpose. But they made them so uber in the beginning to impress upon the readership this was a serious opponent, they had to walk it back a bit. Then they sacrificed beloved characters and settings to raise the stakes yet higher. They were reshaping the universe, even the concept of the force itself.

And within a couple books after that, it was all undone.

Why?

People want the familiar beats of Star Wars. Lightsaber fights, an evil Empire, plucky heroes fighting against the odds, Tatooine, Coruscant, Jedi Academies, and a darkside nemesis.

And there is no name in Star Wars with a greater air of menace than "Sith".

 

No matter how much they may insist they don't. (See: fan reaction to TFA and TLJ.)

Also, there is nothing wrong with this. Star Wars should have its familiar beats. Not to say every story needs to be a slavish copy of the OT, and not to say stories can't explore the limits of what a Star Wars story is, but the more you "reshape the universe" and "recontextualize the Force" the further away it veers from what we fell in love with as kids - and at the end of the day that's what we're here for, whether we acknowledge it or not.

 

The problem with prequels and stories set in the past is that we already know the ending. I love the Old Republic (KOTOR1-2/SWTOR) as stories and concepts they introduce, but not so much as settings. I see it as reading history, its something that happened in the past, but you know where its going to inevitably lead up. What Legacy did was establish a future of Star Wars that honored the NJO and its sequel series of FOTJ/LOTF and brought back familiar concepts, but in a different way. Yeah, the OT Galactic Empire was back, but it wasn't exactly the same old Empire. There's room for stories where the Fel Empire from a certain point of view is exactly like the OT one, allowing for 'Imperial Period' style stories but unlike actual Imperial Period stories, these are open-ended. But you can also have good guy Imperials, or morally questionable ones. The Empire's just one example. At the same time, we've got a classic Republic and Jedi faction.

And then we have the One Sith, whom I see as potentially a prelude to a return to a Vitiate-ish style Sith Empire, but with its own twist. Darth Krayt is basically something like the Exar Kun of his era, a bit. Point is, Legacy opens up the potential to have stories that are both tied to classic Jedi vs Sith paradigm AND you're not constrained to everything inevitably leading up to Palpatine. At the same time, you can tell entirely NEW stories separate from the Jedi and Sith conflicts. ALSO not constrained to everything leading up to Palpatine.

My critique of the Disney Era is that its unable to find that balance of both sticking to the familiar AND at the same time moving things forward, which most notably late Legends managed to succeed in doing. Abeloth, especially tied to Mortis, is a great concept for a different kind of threat that isn't Galaxy-moving, yet is also big enough to create stories. Just one example.

 

The One Sith should show up from Legends trying to unite the timelines and create the One Canon

 

Something like the One Sith could work if their story was set in the past and they were the first incarnation of the Sith Order.

That’s essentially what the One Sith are in concept anyway, tying back to the origins of the Sith we learned from Lucas after TPM: One Jedi falls to the dark side, starts a new order, becomes the single leader of many Sith. These Sith conquer and work together only as long as that stronger leader is around, then they betray him and resort to infighting.

The One Sith even end up becoming a secretive order at the end of the series, so although the parallels aren’t exact, they follow pretty much the same path and could fit reasonably well as that first generation or generations before the rule of two solidified itself.

Plus, their design would go really well with that idea of a primal Sith culture, which is what Maul’s design alluded to in TPM.

 

“The Jedi-Sith conflict is destined to continue until the heat death of the universe” is so cynical that it suggests that Kreia was right.

Yet Kylo isn’t called a “Sith” in TFA and nobody complained about that.

I’d love for the pre-Bane Sith to chant Duel of the Fates while they march into battle.

 

Eh, it's not different from the real world, as long as there are sentients there will be conflict between selfishness and selflessness, within each person trying to find a balance as well as between people. Conflict is natural, it's neutral - the key is that the conflict doesn't always need to be violent.

 

I wonder why the One Sith are Darths when Krayt learned the Sith ways from XoXaan, who wasn’t a Darth. I also wonder why they made Andeddu a Darth considering that he lived in the Ajunta Pall/Marka Ragnos/Naga Sadow era.

 

I think the idea that the enemies with red lightsabers have to be Sith for the audience, is wrong and, importantly, has nothing backing it up. Until the PT the general audience didn’t even know that Vader and the Emperor were Sith. In TFA and TLJ it was made clear that neither Kylo nor Snoke were Sith, and it wasn’t necessary to make them such in IX. Mando has no Sith. Ahsoka has no Sith. The audience isn’t so shallow as to need there to be Sith any longer - it’d be perfectly fine to introduce a new dark side group. Flesh out Baylan’s motivations and you’ve got a group right there.

Having said that, I don’t put it past an unimaginative creative to bring back the Sith.

 

I was thinking of fan reaction in a more overall sense, but in relation specifically to Kylo, you're correct, many people felt Kylo's lack of identification with the Sith refreshing. But at the same time, how many of his other characteristics - bad guy dressed in black, red lightsaber, scary mask, family connection to the heroes - reflect the distinct "language" of Star Wars storytelling? The "familiar beats," as it were.

 

I didn’t say that they found Kylo not being called a “Sith” refreshing. I just said that they didn’t complain about it.

 

My opinion is if it acts like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, then yeah, may as well be a duck/Sith Lord. I don't think anyone would've batted an eye at Kylo Ren officially declaring himself a Sith Lord. The Knights of Ren were created as being different for the sake of being different, same with 'First Order' and 'Resistance'. Its just the Empire, continued. Either call it that or make an actual attempt at differentiating it. Same with Kylo Ren. If they made an effort to differentiate him from just any other Jedi-turned-Sith, I'd grant that there was a reason for him not being a Sith. But right now? He's not a Sith just for the sake of not being a Sith.

Baylan is completely different from this. For one, he actually still sees himself as more-or-less a follower of the Jedi. He upholds those traditions, and does so while opposing the protagonists. Honestly a regular Jedi in the role of an antagonist would be interesting to see, but I don't care much for not!Sith that are pretty much the same as Sith.

 

Eyes most certainly would have been batted, considering how much talk there has been about the undermining of the Chosen One prophecy in the story we got.