The following essays contains spoilers for all Star Wars films and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
For the first six months of dating, my partner believed I hated Star Wars. Any time the franchise was brought up I would express visible disgust. Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker was still too fresh on my mind, and that film had buried my love for lightsabers deep down. But the lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The truth is I love Star Wars. I always have and always will. But the franchise is hard to love because it has a fundamental flaw. And that weakness is not a recent development arising out of the sequel trilogy. That problem started a long time ago in theaters not so far away.
Episode IV: A New Hope is a classic hero’s journey. The film is the most prototypical example of the monomyth, and Joseph Campbell’s influence upon George Lucas is well documented. Luke Skywalker answers the call to adventure, crosses the threshold, transforms himself, and in doing so saves the galaxy.
The morality of that first film is obvious and binary. The Rebels are the good guys. The Empire are the bad guys. Luke is robed in white, and Darth Vader is dressed in black from head to toe. From the moment Luke discovers the charred corpses of his aunt and uncle, the audience never doubts his mission to stop the Empire. And the guiding lights for Luke on this adventure are Obi-Wan Kenobi and the very idea of the Jedi.
Yet the next film, Empire Strikes Back, is not so simplistic and adds a bit of gray to this once black-and-white worldview. After the Battle of Hoth, Luke goes to Dagobah to train under Yoda. Luke is taken aback to discover that this decrepit, senile, green creature is actually a Jedi Master. The lesson is clear: A great Jedi does not have to be a strong warrior1. The Jedi are not what he expected, but this is highlighted further in a more subtle way: Yoda is wrong.
While training under Yoda, Luke has a vision of Han and Leia in danger at Cloud City. Yoda implores Luke to stay and complete his training, but the young Jedi leaves to save his friends.
Luke’s rescue mission does not go well. Han is frozen in kryptonite. Luke learns the horrible truth about his father and loses his arm. Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine still rule the galaxy. Nonetheless, the movie ends on a hopeful note as our core characters look out on the stars. Han, though captured, is still alive. The Rebels live to fight another day. And Luke has saved Leia. The heavy losses do not matter much against saving a loved one. Despite all his years living in the swamps of Dagobah, this is a lesson Yoda still has not learned.
The prequel trilogy fully explores this idea. These three films are fundamentally about the failures of a flawed stoic order. The tragedy of The Phantom Menace is that the rebellious Qui-Gon Jinn is the only person who could have successfully trained Anakin Skywalker. Obi-Wan sticks too close to the teachings of the Jedi Order, an organization which warns that “fear is the path to the Dark Side”. They want an empathic, former slave to ignore his trauma and his love for his mother. Qui-Gon’s death at the hands of Darth Maul seals Anakin’s fate.
The audience starts to see the consequences of the Jedi Order’s failures in Attack of the Clones. Their policy of nonintervention allows a galactic war to break out. Slavery still exists on planets such as Tatooine. The Jedi have kept Anakin away from his mother. Their lack of contact makes her torturous death from the Sand People hit that broken boy so much harder.
This climaxes in Revenge of the Sith. When Anakin goes to Yoda after his vision of Padme’s death, the Jedi Master gives the Jedi Knight the worst advice possible: “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.” Naturally, Anakin refuses to let his wife die. The Jedi of the prequel trilogy only see love and attachment as negative emotions. Ignoring these emotions gives Emperor Palpatine the opportunity he needs to twist Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader.
These feelings though are what allow Luke to triumph in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. In the Emperor’s throne room, Darth Vader toys with Luke. Only when Vader threatens Leia does the tide of the battle change. Luke uses this anger to defeat Vader, but instead of striking the killing blow, Luke’s heart stays his hand and allows his father’s redemption to occur. Passion does not fall exclusively into the domain of the Dark Side despite what a broken order of stoic warriors says.
This is a subtle theme about the complexity of morality. Star Wars often tries to be a nuanced tragedy, but this is undercut by the side of the series that is a basic adventure story. Debating the nature of good and evil seems unnecessary when the main antagonist is a cackling maniac who enjoys torturing others by shooting lighting bolts from his hands. The movies feature bad guys with names such as Darth Sidious, Darth Tyranus, and Darth Maul. Maybe this is judgmental, but I am going to assume that the ancient Sith Lord Darth White Supremacy does not have particularly refined political takes.
Star Wars tries to have both black-and-white and gray-all-over viewpoints. Depending on which you prefer will probably determine whether you believe A New Hope or Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars film2. Trying to balance both these worldviews is near impossible and is part of the reason why the series stumbles so often.
In fact, the piece of Star Wars media that best balances these two takes on morality is not any of the films. Instead, the most successful work at doing so is a video game from Bioware.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is an RPG released in 2003. Though some earlier games had morality systems, KOTOR popularized the idea before games such as Fable and Mass Effect made such gameplay commonplace.
KOTOR’s morality system works especially well because of the binary classification of the Force. Perform noble, honorable actions, and your character increases their alignment with the light side. Make cruel, selfish choices, and you fall deeper into the dark side.
This system is about more than mere ethics and storytelling though; your choices affect the gameplay. Light side users of the Force have stronger healing and buff spells. Offensive powers like Force Lightning and Choke are empowered by the dark side. Certain equipment can only be worn by characters of a particular side, and your appearance changes if you fall to the darkness.
Naturally then, these possibilities make KOTOR near endlessly replayable. Since its release, I have played this game too many times to count. Despite the choices available to me, however, I almost always stick to the light side.
A good role-playing game allows you to embody a character. The choices you make may not reflect your own personal past and preferences, but the goal is to make a nuanced and believable character.
A full dark side playthrough of KOTOR does not achieve this. You rescue NPCs from thieves, so that you can mug them yourself instead. You force one of your party members to kill his best friend. You wipe out an entire tribe of Sand People on Tatooine and support the enslavement of Wookies on Kashyyyk. Your character has to be a mixture of teenage edgelord and absolute psychopath. Fully committing to the dark side requires you to be comically evil to the point of disbelief. This is the same basic morality of good versus evil that exists in A New Hope.
Some situations, however, are beyond the elementary. On Manaan, the native Selkath take a stance of neutrality towards both the Republic and Sith. Several times on this planet, the player is forced to choose between preserving this neutrality or giving one side an edge. One of the best side quests in the game involves the trial of an old Republic soldier, Sunry, who is accused of killing a Sith officer. At first, you may believe in Sunry’s innocence. Along the way though, you discover that Sunry was having an affair with this woman (who was actually a Dark Jedi) and did kill her. At this point, you can reveal this crime to the Selkath judges, but your hand may be stayed out of fear that the truth of Sunry’s actions will lead to crippling sanctions on the Republic. For once, the ethical path is not easy to find in KOTOR. Nonetheless, this complexity is not going to push good characters away from the light nor evil characters away from the darkness.
On the other hand, two moments in the game are more relevant to your character’s story. The first comes when your ship, the Ebon Hawk, is captured by the antagonist Darth Malak. During your escape from the Leviathan, you come face to face with Darth Malak for the first time in the game. Here he reveals the game’s big twist: You are his former master, Darth Revan. Your character’s backstory has been a lie fabricated by the Jedi who captured you and attempted to turn you back to the light side.
This revelation is shocking, but you escape because Bastila, your Jedi companion and likely love interest, throws herself against Malak and buys you the time to escape. Her fate is left unknown. Once you escape from Malak’s clutches, you tell the rest of your comrades about your true origin story.
At this point, the narrative has given you a compelling reason to switch sides. A follower of the light side may turn against the Jedi Order that tricked you and wiped away your identity. A Dark Jedi may realize that they have followed this path before and turn back from chaos and destruction.
Roleplaying games (at least western ones) are about the story you create. And the story of a purely evil Jedi is not an interesting one. If I want to play a bad guy, falling to the Dark Side after being a part of the light is a far more compelling story. But that moment after learning you are Darth Revan is not the moment I pick to flip the script.
The second and even more engaging moment comes on the game’s final planet. Your team needs to disable the shields to gain access to the Star Forge in the skies above, the McGuffin you have been chasing for most of this game. One person stands in your way: Bastila who has fallen to the Dark Side and become Malak’s apprentice. You win the duel (because this game is not that hard), but Bastila does not turn away from the dark side. So long as you accept the mantle of Darth Revan, she offers to join your side. Together you will crush Darth Malak and rule the galaxy.
This is a far greater temptation. If you are playing a male character, Bastila is the only romance option, and it is a familiar story in the Star Wars universe. The two of you grow close, but Bastila tries to ignore her infatuation as it is are against the Jedi code. You make a move, and she gives in to her feelings for a moment. Afterwards though, Bastila tries to move past it, and the romance is tabled until she is captured on the Leviathan. Finally after your duel, you can be together if you also join her in the dark side. The choice is difficult and is often one I choose on any given playthrough.
Of course, the story can still have a happy ending if the player rejects her here. Bastila runs away and you duel her again onboard the Star Forge. After yet another defeat, she begs you to kill her, ashamed of what she has become. You can redeem Bastila, but it requires you to break the Jedi code: You tell Bastila that you love her. She reciprocates and you get the happy ending after defeating Darth Malak.
Both sides of the Bastila storyline are engaging. Love can lead you to ruin or salvation. By themselves, either one of those themes is overdone to the point of being trite. Where Star Wars is special though is that it balances those two sides perfectly from the stories it tells to the physical laws of its universe. Yet despite how incredible a good Star Wars film can be, balancing those themes is impossible to perfect in a flat narrative.
More than any other movie franchise, Star Wars has had an incredible collection of video game titles: X-Wing, Rogue Squadron, Racer, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, The Force Unleashed, Jedi: Fallen Order, and more. In some ways, Star Wars is a better video game series than a set of films. But the truly quintessential Star Wars experience on film or in bytes could only ever be captured by a role-playing game. Whether it be for a romantic partner or a father, this a series about love and what it makes you do. The choice is yours on whether you decide to be Anakin or Luke.
