Will the real Darth Bane please stand up?

Okay, so I did post it, Catherine.

Anyway, this is a thread (partially inspired by the JvS discussion in The_Loyal_Imperial's comics discussion thread) to discuss the three* distinct people that are Darth Bane and which of them, if any, represents the truest, "unfoggiest", picture of the founder of the Order of the Sith Lords in your eyes. Though, obviously, it's going to be the last of the three we get more of.

Darth Bane (Bane of the Sith)
[image=http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/b/b0/Gamer-3-bane.jpg]
Presented as the last survivor of the Brotherhood of Sith, who despaired at Kaan's last ditch attempt to destroy the Jedi. He may or may not have moved a moon with the Force.

Author: Kevin J Anderson

Darth Bane (Jedi versus Sith)
[image=http://i63.photobucket.com/albums/h125/Ulicus/BanejoinswiththeSith.jpg]
Presented as a religious fanatic and veteran Sith/Dark Lord cast down from power before the ascent of the Brotherhood and its multiple Lords. Though he attempted to force the Sith to put aside their petty ambitions and unite as one against the Jedi, he failed in this, and ultimately referred to Kaan's suicidal plan as the madman's "smartest decision".

Author: Darko Macan

Darth Bane (Path of Destruction / Rule of Two)
[image=http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/5/54/DarthBane-frontal.jpg]
Presented as an ambitious young apprentice within the Brotherhood of Darkness and the brains behind Kaan's last ditch attempt to destroy the Jedi, knowing full well it would destroy the Brotherhood, too. He deemed them all unfit as Sith because of the "equality" they preached. Funnily enough, if it hadn't been for him, the Brotherhood would have destroyed the entire Army of Light and probably defeated the Jedi Order not too long after.

Author: Drew Karpyshyn

I've generalised somewhat (because I'm lazy) but which of these three is "Bane" to you? What, if anything, can be done to reconcile them? If they can't be reconciled, should we just ignore two in favour of one? Should we just go with the one we like and pretend the others don't exist? Is this a result of a misinformation campaign spread by the Banite Sith? Can we blame Voren Na'al?

Discuss away... and remember to play nice and avoid author bashing. Remember: this is an adult thread for adults, like me.

Oh, and if anyone wants to talk about the differences between the way the Jedi Knight novellas and other sources portray the battle of Ruusan, feel free.

* I disagree with the assertion that Drew Karpyshyn was the first author to "change" Bane. Bane's characterisation in JvS does not remotely jive with Bane of the Sith, either. You may disagree, in which case you should absolutely say so.

Here's something Trip wrote earlier, to help get the ball rolling. (Thanks go to Catherine for actually knowing where this was):

 

"My Bane" is the one in Jedi vs. Sith. It's the only source that Bane appears in that I've read to completion(as I didn't like the shifts which took place in the novel and Bane of the Sith.) In JvS he has the proper ruthlessness and magesty to be the predecessor of Darths Sidious and Vader, and I think that the other sources lack that perfect combination.

My fanon attempt to reconcile this is given that Bane lived a thousand years pre-TPM and given how often the Star Wars galaxy seems to lose information, the idea that all anyone had of that period was second hand accounts which were mythologized(resulting in the great power of the TotJ Jedi/Sith.) I know it contradicts Bane's holocron from the novelizations and Legacy, but it's still one of my favorite pieces of fanon.

 

One thing I noticed about Drew's Bane is that he's a much more well-rounded character with vulnerabilies and desires. Reemember Bane realising he'd killed his own father? We actually LIKE him and WANT him to win rather than showpony good guys like Farfalla.

The sabacc scene early in Path to Destruction is still one of my faves.

 

Jedi vs. Sith. It was the first time I'd heard of him and that will always stick in my mind. I gotta re-read that comic sometime soon...

 

You may have hit the nail right on the head. Its much easier to have a nasty guy as the central figure of a comic book because its a much briefer read. For a novel, you generally need some degree of empathy to want to read on, which may be why Bane was expanded from a somewhat one dimensional villain to a more well rounded character.

Much as I like PoD, and thoroughly loved RoT, and look forward with much enthusiasm for #3, the Bane in JvS is still the one I love. He was just so totally evil. It may be why I preferred RoT over PoD, because Bane was Bane by the time of RoT. PoD we got to explore Bane before he was a Sith, which, pardon the phrase, inevitably "wussified" him. Not that I think there was any way around that, as this is what happens when the mystique is removed and all the secrets are laid bare. It happened with Darth Vader, no doubt had the Plagueis novel not been cancelled we'd have seen similar things with Palpatine's evolution.

Still... I liked the idea of Bane as the Dark Lord who came back from the dead to take revenge on Kaan. The way he just strolled into that meeting, took Kaan's chair, and yet Kaan dared not lift a finger against him... he positively oozed authority. I loved that. At the same time, there are parts of PoD I prefer. I love that Bane set Kaan up and tricked him into blowing the Brotherhood up. It was good that he conceived of the Rule of Two willingly, and that it wasn't simply something he cobbled together in the aftermath of total defeat. Of course, I also love him as the religious fanatic who didn't care about the Brotherhood and just wanted to use them to fuel the ultimate suicide bomb.

 

Another thought: PoD also lets you entertain the possibility what Bane would have been like as a good guy. Just for a moment, when he's not drawing on the Force after he realises he killed his father.

Stereotypical one-dimensional baddies ARE good, but it's also good to see them as human beings. Vader is a prime example of this.

 

I don't think you can really say one Bane is any more "real" than the others (He is, after all, a fictional character ). I think the more canon one is the SWBOD:ANOTOR Bane, since his is the most recent source and the only one still being expanded.

Personally, I've only read the novel so I can't say much about his characterizations in other sources, but I can say this: all of KJA's work that I've read is rife with moments that punch logic in the gut, kick it while its down, take its wallet, and leave it to die in a snowbank, and Bane as a sort of Dark Side religious fanatic just seems... lamer than Darth Bane as a conniving, self-serving powermonger. The latter is also much easier to relate to. So, yeah; SWBOD:ANOTOR FTW.

 

I read Bane of the Sith on Hyperspace when I had it, but it's a rather...odd characteristation. Am I right in saying it's the first time we see him?

 

BotS is indeed the first time we see Bane. BotS didn't actually read much of KJA's other stories and I was pretty surprised by it. The Bane in that story seemed a little more inexperienced IMO compared to the one if JvS, but I did rather like the orbalisk sequence.

The Bane in JvS was pretty awesome I have to say. He was one of the few truly evil Sith who wasn't actually insane (Palpatine) or prone to redemption (Vader). He was smart, powerful, and just...evil! I think the only shortcoming of JvS Bane was that he was a bit one-dimensional. But when you're restricted to a 6 issue comic series, there isn't much you can do.

PoD Bane certainly had the most extensive characterization but I didn't like how he was wussified in certain parts. I liked seeing Dessel, the Bane before Bane, and the Sabacc sequence is definitely one of my favorite parts of the book. I also liked that Bane planned the destruction of the BoD, it was a nice homage to the cunning that future Sith Lords of his line would adopt. I think the worst part of the book though was when Bane lost touch with the Dark Side at the academy. I understand the need for Bane to face the truth about his father's death, but I thought that part drawn out more than it needed to and it caused me to dislike Bane slightly. RoT Bane was a bit more like the JvS Bane, but the orbalisks seemed to turn him into more of an impulsive brute, and at the end of the book we see Bane's life left in the hands of Zannah.

I mostly like JvS Bane but I also like the some of the depth the books gave him even if they did make him seem like less of a badass.

 

I saw this part a little differently; when we see Jedi training (like in I, Jedi) there always seems to be a part where our hero-in-training faces a personal crisis as they fully commit themselves to their new direction in life. Luke goes through the same thing in TESB when he finds out that Vader is his father. We even see something similar in Starship Troopers (the novel, that is) where Rico talks about getting over "the hump." "The hump" is a common element in hero's journey type stories as one of the Hero's most important challenges; deciding whether he is really on the best course and whether or not he can stick it through. This was, essentially, Bane's "hump," the point where he stepped back to view his course in life and fully accept the Dark Side. IMO, this is an absolutely vital part in his "anti-hero's journey."

 

Like I said, I understood why it was necessary, I just don't think it worked quite as well as it did in TESB or I, Jedi. I just didn't get that same feeling of victory from Bane when he finally opened himself up to the dark side again.

 

On my end, I haven't got the slightest problem with seeing Bane before he was "totally evil". My problem is that certain elements of the character's history, awesome elements that were pretty heavily alluded to, were dropped entirely.

It's clear, in JvS, that Bane as a Sith Lord pre-dates the Brotherhood of Darkness and that Kaan is (and I'm amazed I've never thought of this comparison before) the Starscream to his Megatron/Galvatron.

"Coronation, Starscream? This is bad comedy."

"Lord Kaan? Kaan calls himself a Lord now?"

Yet PoD introduces "young apprentice Bane" and - even more strangely - has Bane and Kaan meet for the very first time on Ruusan. It's a really odd decision to have made, in my opinion. Almost as odd as if Lucas had written the Prequel Trilogy and decided, "no, actually, Obi-Wan doesn't meet Anakin until they duel on the Death Star."

I mean, at the very least, why not have Kaan be the Lord who discovers and recruits Bane, rather than Kopecz? That would have been a change, certainly, but much better than the two of them having never even met.

As one would probably expect, the aspects of PoD Bane I like the most are those that don't contradict his JvS characterisation. I love Dessel, miner of Apatros and Sergeant of the Gloom Walkers (I'd quite readily get behind a Gloom Walkers novel, too)... but "Bane, Sith apprentice in the Brotherhood"? I'm not so fond of him.

If the Academy sections had taken place before the rise of the Brotherhood, if maybe Kaan had been the one to fill Sirek's basic role of rival... well, things would be different.

Heh.

You know what's funny? When I'd only read the novels, I had the exact same opinion. You may stick to your guns where I didn't, but you really should read the "other Banes" before you comment on which one is FTW.

The following is probably my favourite Bane moment. What's interesting is that it does make an appearance in PoD too, only with heavily edited dialogue (for the obvious reason that the comic implies a backstory that is not true in the novel version):
[image=http://i63.photobucket.com/albums/h125/Ulicus/baneisawesome.jpg]
Yet it's partly the dialogue that makes that scene. Why would anyone want to reinvent that guy?

I don't think JvS is perfect, by any stretch, but it's definitely worth purchasing.

 

This doesn't annoy me as much as the fact that Bane is, by the time we get to the (ha ha) Jedi vs Sith part of Path of Destruction, a nobody within the Sith. He's just some hotshot student who is good at, like, everything and stuff, when he gets his exclusive one-on-one training from Ol' Wasisface. I can remember that Karpyshyn tries to explain why he's paid any heed, but I just couldn't buy it, not when he's fresh out of the seminary. As for them meeting for the first time, I think that might have been interesting, but only if they had been fully aware of one another, and had correspondence by proxy...that sort of thing. The feeling from Jedi vs Sith is certainly that they have a history, almost as though Bane is a kind of mysterious Quint-esque go-to guy who, despite getting the job done, is a risky fellow to be dealing with.

"I'll rout them for three, but I'll capture, and execute them, for ten. But you've gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don't want no volunteers, I don't want no mates, there's just too many lords on this planet. Ten thousand dollars for me by myself. For that you get the Hoth, the Horse...the whole damn thing."

For me, at least, the Jedi vs Sith Bane will always be Bane, and not just because I'm sour about the continuity...thing with the Bane novels. It's because that Bane had this sort of aura of seething malevolence and pent-up power that you feel with Sidious in The Phantom Menace or Vader in The Empire Strikes Back. He was the Sith that the old spacer gibbers about in pure fear in the Anakin Skywalker Journal. He was, believably, the granddaddy of Star Wars villainy.

The biggest mistake of the Karpyshyn portrayal is that it makes him sympathetic, which is the same thing that some authors try and do with Vader. I think that ultimately hobbles them as villains, which is what they're supposed to be. You can still root for a villain without having to shed artificial tears over their dead daddies and mummies.

 

It's worth noting that "Bane of the Sith" and Jedi vs. Sith were almost certainly written concurrently. The former was published on January 1st, 2001, while issue #1 of the latter was published in April of the same year.

As to the Bane of JvS-- I never really saw him as pure 'evil' in the cliché one-dimensional sense of the word. I'd almost say he's amoral, but there are hints that he's working under a moral code that's just completely foreign to the average person. He's certainly not one-dimensional, at any rate. When we're first introduced to him, for example, he stoically murders three children and their father, one by one, in what seems at first glance to be a stereotypically sadistic fashion; as the story progresses, however, we learn that he's been poisoned and was near death at that point, and suddenly these seemingly random murders make sense-- he was feeding off them, somehow, to sustain himself.

(As a side note, Mr Karpyshyn admirably picked up on the subtext in this scene-- PoD specifies that he was killing the children one by one in order to feed off their fear and despair. It's weird how he sticks so well to the source material in some areas, whereas in others-- Kaan "meeting" Bane, for example-- he veers way off.)

 

Bane killed his father after receiving another one of his beatings. He unknowingly used the force to cause his father to have a heart attack. Him finding out about this was the whole reason for his losing touch with the Dark Side after killing Fohargh.

 

Honestly, I could read a novel about a stone-cold evil motherkriffer all day long. As much as I'm for rounding out characters in general, I don't think it's what every single character needs, and I think there are ways to do it without making them "sympathetic" protagonistic wusses. I don't think the Bane we got in POD was rounded out so much as he was bowdlerized. Hardass kid-killing pyschopath with a religious devotion to the dark side? There are all kinds of interesting things you could do inside his head to round out that character. Instead, POD just backed off from that and gave us a kid whose mommy and daddy didn't love him, and the Republic was mean to him once, so he up and joined the Sith and decided to pursue power in a generic, not-too-disturbing way. It's like trading in Vader for Hethrir because Vader's just too mean and scary to carry a story.

 

I'd like to offer an alternative view on this. We are only asked to sympathise with Bane in the beginning so we can get on his side and appreciate his point of view. Yet this only extends in PoD until about Bane leaves the academy for the Valley of the Dark Lords and he goes to Ruusan with the others. We are still on Bane's side, but no sympathy any more. Except MAYBE when Githany poisons him, and that's just because Bane is way cooler than her.

I don't think the fact that villains had a "good side" cripples them in a way, it sort of COMPLETES them and makes them a far more complex character. And what Bane does is by his own choices, as evidenced when he recovers from his depression of his father's death.

But yes, fleshing out between Bane and Kaan would have been nice.

 

I think the "damage" is already done once he's left the Valley of the Dark Lords, though. In some ways, I wish we hadn't seen Bane's younger days (they could have been explained in a sourcebook or something), at least, not younger days as...well, generic, as those. And while a "good side" can certainly be beneficial to certain villains in terms of complexity (your Darth Vaders), I don't think that's a hard-and-fast rule. Take the Joker, or Disney's rendition of Claude Frollo, or Shakespeare's Richard III, or even Anton Chigurh. Purest evil, all of them, but you could write reams about them as characters and as "people." They are, in many ways, more complex than those "complete" villains with a good side. I think that Bane had the potential to be that kind of Anton Chigurh/T-1000-brand of unstoppable villain, just with more of a lasting legacy on the canon. Star Wars, to be honest, doesn't have all that many of them. Palpatine's (very) fallible, Malak and Crate were good men once, the Vong have a "you gotta do what you gotta do" mantra, and the Bantam villains were clearly stoppable.

 

What about Voldemort if we are talking about villains who had a past?

 

Well, yes, there's always the option of the Regan MacNeil-class child.

It's not what we got, though.

 

No, Bane's better than Voldie, he doesn't hold grudges or bother with underlings.

 

Just to note: KJA was the one who did BotS; Darko Macan was the guy who did JvS.

Oh, as could I.

However, its one of those things that authors are usually told "doesn't work". If you don't empathise with the character, you have no interest in the character. Of course, empathy can work both ways; nothing stops you empathising with a villain and understanding why they're doing what they're doing. Its just harder to pull off.

I'm reminded of the reasons they supposedly never made a sequel to TIE Fighter, with Lucas apparently not wanting the Empire or the bad guys glorified. It may be they just didn't want to have a full novel with a character who encouraged the killing of toddlers.



Honestly, some Star Wars fans do baffle me at times though. I remember reading comments in the past like: "I couldn't finish [the book]. [Character] made me feel bad". Maybe they just tend to be the younger fans?

 

Maybe Zor, older readers like hope to get a bit more from the books we read.

 

But that comes back to the fact that Bane's just a kid. Voldie works better as a villain because A: He's presented as one, and B: He's got a major record. Karpy's Bane is a greenie.