Team Rocket Boss.
Yeah, but why would she be working for the guy who tortured her?
Shouldn't she be pissed at him and want to kill him the second she got out of the torture?
I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.
Disasturbator
because she gave up and submitted to him under torture
New theme music also a box
Stockholm syndrome is a well-documented phenomenon, as is submitting to authority in order to escape torture.
And she isn't even really loyal to him, IIRC; doesn't she almost immediately invite you to join her and stab him in the back when you reunite?
Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 7:56:54 AM
Idea Seeker
Bear in mind that she was a Padawan at the time too.
You can't kill art.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Stockholm syndrome is not a well established phenomenon, it was originally coined by police to excuse their own incompetence and from then on has had far more longevity as a popular culture concept/urban legend then an actual empirically supported phenomenon.
You can brutalize, terrorize, and otherwise abuse people into some degree of compliance but that is not the same thing as getting any real sense of loyalty. Bastilla's turn has infinitely more to do with Star Wars genre convention then anything to do with reality. Which is fine, Star Wars doesn't pretend to be realistic. But let's not give it more authority then it deserves, this is not how torture works.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 8:02:56 AM
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
KOTOR 2, for better or worse, provided explanation that the Sith would bring captured Jedi to places strong in the Dark Side, which made the conversion easier. It might be magic, but it works in the setting.
And considering he took her to the Rakatan temple to do the torture, and what the Infinite Empire did thousands of years ago, I'm fully willing to believe that the planet, or at least the temple, is strong in the Dark Side.
Team Rocket Boss.
Yeah but it's still bizarre that Bastila turning to the dark side automatically means she's loyal to Malak.
Sure it's torture but that would make her hate Malak more. He's not even trying to make her loyal with anything, he's just hoping the force lightning will give her a taste of the power of the dark side to make her submit.
That is some pretty stupid logic there.
I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.
If it helps, just imagine that she's as loyal to Malak as Malak was to Revan.
Team Rocket Boss.
Well yeah, there's that. She is quick to try to swear loyalty to Revan and tempt him to the dark side.
Spoiler alert, I have never done a dark side run of KOTOR 1. Shocking, I know. But I had to say no to Bastila in those dark robes.
I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.
Or as loyal as any Sith could possibly be toward anyone or anything that isn't themself. By this point, we may as well call The Dark Side "The Backstabby Side of the Force".
Edited by TrashJack on Apr 3rd 2024 at 12:43:22 PM
I get that. Dark Side in the first game leans way too hard into stupid evil.
I was eventually turned on to what I saw referred to as "the fallen Knight" playthrough. Play light side (not necessarily pure light side, light gray will do) until the reveal of Revan's identity. Then the player snaps at having their entire identity be a lie and decides to destroy the Jedi as revenge. That's my go to playstyle unless doing a character-based run.⁷
Edited by Sid-Starkiller on Apr 3rd 2024 at 12:45:26 PM
Team Rocket Boss.
I personally think it's more entertaining to go good guy Revan, even to the point where he understands why the Jedi did what they did. Not totally happy about it, but accepts it.
I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.
☆♥☆
The thing with the Sith master-apprentice relationship is that it's built on the idea that both sides will eventually try to kill each other. The Sith master offers the apprentice an opportunity to learn and amass power and in return the master gets a personal lackey to order around, but it's expected that the apprentice will eventually try to kill the master to usurp his place once he feels he's gotten enough out of the relationship, but then the master knows this and doesn't want to get killed so they'll likely try to kill their apprentice once they think the time it right.
It's a relationship built on mutual benefit with the understanding that it will end when one side thinks the other has outlived their usefulness, so it doesn't require either side actually like the other at all, just that they would value gaining power from the relationship over any other reason.
So the idea with Bastila becoming Malak's apprentice, with consideration to the idea that places filled with Dark Side power help screw with a Jedi's mind to make the whole thing easier to swallow, is that Malak drove in the point that Bastila wants respect but the Jedi masters have still yet to promote her over Padawan even now, so Malak offered her the opportunity to get the power and authority she wants by joining him. She still hates Malak and wants to kill him, even more so because he tortured her, but she now buys into the Sith idea of how to gain power and decides working with him temporarily is worth it to get what she wants until she's ready to kill him (and remember Sith believe hatred makes you stronger, so it's a good thing if you hate your master cause that just means your even more driven to exploit and kill him). Meanwhile Malak plans to eventually kill Bastila, but for now he has a powerful Battle Meditation user to help him win the upcoming battles with the Republic.
But of course, Bastila isn't really loyal to Malak, so she immediately offers Revan the chance to join her in betraying him as soon as she gets the chance because she likes Revan more, but she's now focused so much on the idea of gaining power through the Dark Side that she rejects working with Revan if they're still devoted to the cause of beating Malak for the sake of the Light Side instead of gaining personal power (which Bastila could share in or take).
The nail on the head is basically that that’s just how the dark side worked in Legends.
It goes all the way back to the ROTJ novelization (or at least, one of them), where Luke when dipping into the dark side against Vader starts inexplicably fantasizing about submitting to Palpatine’s authority, despite the thing that’s making him so hateful being then desire to kill the giy.
It was just a Legends thing. It was big on Team Evil, and using the dark side rewired your brain to make you not just evil, but to want to be a Sith specifically, to join the bad guys, and to follow Sith doctrine and practices, no matter how much sense it made for the character.
Peesumably if written nowadays, it would have included some character moments to set up her making decisions like that, but using the Dark Side as a Hand Wave for characters making certain evil choices was basically just how Legends rolled.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 3rd 2024 at 2:47:30 AM
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.
Team Rocket Boss.
I liked how in Jedi Academy if you DO go dark side, Talon walks up to you, expecting Jaden to be loyal to the Sith cause now that you've fallen to the dark side.
And then Jaden promptly kills her, declaring he's going to seize power for himself and not be loyal to the guys who kept trying to kill him.
Sure, it's kind of abrupt since suddenly killing that one former classmate is enough to to turn Jaden into a power hungry psychopath, but still.
I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.
Bastilla wasn't a victim of Being Tortured Makes You Evil according to Word of God.
In fact, it's her force bond with Revan. The Dark Side is leaking into her brain due to the connection they established when she healed Revan. While your conscious mind is possibly Lawful Good, all of the evil from your time as the Dark Lord is pouring into Batsilla, making her angry, moody, and vulnerable to the Dark Side.
Malak also has actual brainwashing powers due to the Star Forge too.
The novelization actually makes it make perfect sense. Palpatine says that if Luke joins him, he'll let the Rebellion go. Luke starts fantasizing about essentially studying under Palpatine to figure out how to kill him. There's a One Ring effect but it twists the existing ideology verus supplants it.
Similarly, the argument above is why you can't switch sides in TOR. The developers said, "Well if you fall to the Dark Side as a Jedi because of your hatred of the Sith, you're not going to join the Sith. You're going to torture Sith in your basement."
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Apr 3rd 2024 at 8:18:07 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Similarly, the argument above is why you can't switch sides in TOR. The developers said, "Well if you fall to the Dark Side as a Jedi because of your hatred of the Sith, you're not going to join the Sith. You're going to torture Sith in your basement."
I recall that novelization well, and while Palpatine did say that I don’t recall Luke ever taking it seriously. Those fantasies came entirely from a place of being so drunk on the power of the dark side that he started wanting to be the new Vader in order to learn from Palpatine how to master it.
Which… yeah, I would argue is fairly out of character even for an evil Luke, at least in the context of what he was actually in the middle of at the time.
Him being so angry and hateful at Vader that he briefly decides “screw redeeming this I grate” and hacks his arm off, yes, but him then turning around and submitting to Palpatine - even briefly - rather than just trying to do the same thing he did to Vader to him, oof. It felt like the writer really wanting to make Palpatine’s attempts to dominate Luke feel like they made sense, even though in the actual film Luke wasn’t ever really buying.
That book took a number of liberties with the climax, iirc. It’s the same place Battle Meditation was introduced.
As for the developer comments, I’m starting to notice a distinct trend of dissonance between what the KOTOR they actually wrote and what they - afterwards - claim they actually intended to write instead.
There’s a lot of that in KOTOR II as wel: the body of their work doesn’t always match what they swear to the audience they actually intended.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 4th 2024 at 9:03:41 AM
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.
Team Rocket Boss.
Care to cite example of what you are talking about in the last two paragraphs?
I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.
The last two paragraphs were a response to developer feedback the post above mine indicates.
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.
But do you have any examples of these interviews? What do they say they is contradictory to the games themselves?
If you want to know where the Word of God CharlesPhipps cited is from, it’s best to ask him. All I did was respond to what he claimed was in it.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 4th 2024 at 12:02:05 PM
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.
He was talking about The Old Republic, the MMORPG.
Bastila Shan, Darth Malak, and the event of the latter torturing the former, are all KOTOR things, not TOR things.
The post I was replying to was talking about various things, and I was responding to multiple of those subjects as once, hence my changing the subject with “as for the developer comments,” which was referring to the WOG indicated in the post I was responding to.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 4th 2024 at 12:10:40 PM
"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.
I mean torturing her with force lightning hurt a lot so the implication is that Malek broke her mentually and pysically,I don't see what the big deal about this is.
New theme music also a box