Killing The Author in KOTOR 2

May The Plot Be With You

In my post on morality in fantasy, I pointed to the Force as one of the best examples of a moral system built into a fictional universe. But the light side—dark side moral axis is only a small part of what the Force does within the story.

Han Solo calls it “one all-powerful force controlling everything,” a “mystical energy field that controls [his] destiny.” That Han doesn't believe it exists doesn't make him any less subject to its whims.

In Skippy the Jedi Droid (a non-canon “what if?” story) Red, the “R2 unit” [sic] with “a bad motivator,” senses what would happen if R2-D2 were to be discovered by the Stormtroopers—Yavin base destroyed, the Rebels crushed, Imperial tyranny forever. To avoid this terrible galactic tragedy, it blows out its own motivator, ensuring the Lars family will buy R2-D2 instead. Red is literally Plot-sensitive. But this explanation is superfluous; of course Red’s actions are determined by the Plot. What alternative is there?

This concept (which seems utterly obvious in hindsight) came to me in Nick Lowe’s essay The Well-Tempered Plot Device. Lowe treats the Force as synonymous with the plot, with insightful results:

 "The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot." "Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot." When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero's head. When a whole planet of good guys gets blown up, Ben senses "a great disturbance in the Plot."

“the Force is one of those arbitrary, general-purpose, all-powerful plot devices that can be invoked whenever convenient to effect whatever happens to be necessary at the time. The only ends it serves within the logic of the story are those of the storyteller.”

I think the Force can be extended even a bit farther than that. It puts the proton torpedoes down the exhaust pipe, gets Luke to Dagobah, brings Leia and Lando to rescue him from the bottom of Cloud City. But it also brings the Emperor to power and turns Anakin Skywalker from a hero to a villain. It creates the whole fabric of the fictional universe: Ben Kenobi tells us that the Force “binds the galaxy together.” The Force represents all of the choices the author makes in the story, including the decision to write it in the first place.

Star Wars is not unique in its inexplicable and capricious magic, much less in its arbitrary and clumsy plot developments. But it may be the only fictional setting that makes these phenomena tangible and literal to the characters. The Force is more concrete than fate or destiny, more prosaic and malleable than God.

A few of the better Star Wars authors have addressed the adolescent moralism inherent in the universe. The results often feel more like contortionism than coherent moral relativism, but it’s better than ignoring the problem entirely. Only two stories, to my knowledge, really let characters grapple with this fate incarnate.

In Into the Void, the antagonist, Dal seeks to escape the Jedi and the Force, pitying his family and friends as “slaves to the Force.” He tells the protagonist,

“You might think it serves you, but you serve it. You never have your own thoughts, because the Force is always on your mind. You never fight your own fights, because the Force fights for you.”

 Substitute "plot" for Force; you get the idea. The dialogue here shows the author is at least conscious of the problem, though the exploration doesn’t go much deeper. 

The only story that really engages the opportunities the Force offers for metafiction is Knights of the Old Republic 2.

The original Knights of the Old Republic plays the Star Wars formula straight. It turns Luke Skywalker's archetypal struggle against the temptation of Dark Side into a game mechanic, a moral barometer/personality test that tells you what kind of person you are and predicts the decisions you will make later, when it matters. In KOTOR 2, developer Obsidian, and especially writer Chris Avellone, set out to critique the inherent absurdity of this model, the way it restricts player-controlled character development and the way it contorts gameplay and storytelling.

Star Wars stories in nearly every era are iterations of essentially the same cosmic war. In the now-defunct Expanded Universe, the conflict between the Jedi and Sith extends back 7000 years before A New Hope and over 100 years after it. Some of the best stories reduce their scope towards the lives of individual characters (the original Han Solo adventures, for instance), but what writers and audiences both love best is to pit enormous armies representing the forces of good and evil against each other. These galactic conflicts cause terrible collateral damage, destroying trillions of lives and stymying political progress.

KOTOR II attacks the Force as the in-universe cause of this suffering, taking KOTOR’s Jedi Civil War as its iteration of this perennial conflict.

The story arises from the Battle of Malachor V, in which Revan and the Exile (the protagonists of the first and second games, respectively) used a superweapon to destroy an enemy fleet, killing many of their own Jedi in the process.

While the destruction of the Death Star was an unambiguous good, the victory at Malachor V feels much more contemporary. Nearly every character in the sequel is a direct exploration of the post-traumatic stress created by that one battle. The Exile becomes a “Force Wound,” cut off from the Force by the pain of the massacre. Her evil counterpart is Darth Nihilus, also a Wound created by the battle. Bao-Dur is driven by guilt for creating the super weapon. The player’s mentor and antagonist, Kreia, finds both the logic and means for her quest in the aftermath of Malachor V.

Kreia's relationship with the Exile is central to the plot. According to writer Chris Avellone,

“Kreia is my mouthpiece for everything I hated about the Force, and then I let her rant.”

“She sees in the player a chance to turn away from predestination and destroy that which binds all things, giving the galaxy back its freedom.”

 Kreia lies and misleads and contradicts herself so much in her dialogue that her goals are left ambiguous, but the Jedi in the game believe that her main goal is to use the Exile to create a Wound in the Force. As Master Vrook puts it, “You are a breach that must be closed. You transmit your pain, your suffering through the Force. Within you we see something worse than the teachings of the Sith. What you carry may mean the death of the Force… and the death of the Jedi.”

The superficial interpretation here is a bit flummoxing—why would Kreia believe this to be possible, let alone desirable? But with Lowe’s concept in hand, we can see that Kreia isn't merely trying to destroy an in-universe energy source. She's literally trying to thwart the force responsible for interfering with the destiny of her galaxy's citizens, forcing them to endure endless conflict and oppression for sadistic entertainment. For a character in a fictional universe to attempt to sever contact with her own creators is wickedly postmodern, and it could only really come off without seeming trite in a setting in which authorial whim has an established in-universe avatar.

If Kreia had succeeded, the legacy of the Sith would have ended: the events of the original trilogy would never have occurred. She would literally have gone back in time and prevented George Lucas from making the films.  That's a neat feat of metafiction. Perhaps this is why aiding Kreia’s scheme is never an option for the player – ending the Force as a font of magic is plausible within the confines of the fiction, but ending the meddling influence of the authors is unfathomable.

(The main point of this post is to showcase KOTOR 2's postmodern premise, and that's done. The rest of the post is a more direct look at the game itself and how it fails to live up to the potential of that idea. It's not probably very interesting unless you've played the game, though. Unless you're the sort of person who reads reviews for entertainment. Like me.)

Review

KOTOR 2 gets a lot of cred for its tone and its ideas. KOTOR wonderfully captures the feel of the original Star Wars trilogy, while the sequel feels intellectual, dark, and provocative in comparison. As much as I respect Avellone’s ambition, and while I appreciate the quite evocative tone KOTOR 2 intermittently achieves, I think it’s rather a failure all around.

Avellone’s anti-Force thematic material is barely detectable in the incomprehensible stew of conflicting plot arcs and interpretations. The game's abrupt release and cut content are only partly responsible for this; the restored content mod and suggestions from developer interviews show that the plot would have only become more complex with further content, and the ending would scarcely make any more sense. It is the apotheosis of what TV Tropes calls the Gambit Pileup.

What really kills KOTOR 2, for me, is the sense that Obsidian was more interested in pointing out KOTOR’s flaw than in improving on them. The game kind of hates itself. Rather than adding mechanics to engage with the game’s new thematic ambitions, Obsidian carried over the systems from the original without substantial modification. Then the game’s dialogue incessantly mocks and deconstructs its own mechanics with self-righteous cynicism. It creates an infectious tone of bitterness that highlights all of the game’s many shortcomings.

Avellone’s thematic ideas suggest a cognizance of the limitations of dichotomous moral storytelling, but the stories it tells reflect a blind adherence to their framework. The obsessive need for every quest to resolve to good and evil outcomes corrupts the value of the prodigious quantity of narrative. Humor, charisma, charm, and depth are subdued in favor of morality plays populated exclusively by pitiful mothers separated from their children, poor starving beggars, gamblers in over their heads, and greedy thugs.

What’s worse, the game asks the player to make these moral choices outside the framework of any apparent character motivations. In KOTOR, the player is presented two former identities, both of which appear in flashbacks and dialogue; moral choices emerge from the recovery of one or the other of these identities. KOTOR 2 provides no such context. Without motivation and characterization, moral choices in this game are laid bare as artifacts of a dumb mechanic. The game mocks you for buying into it, but constructs all of its stories to fit it. It implores you to find a middle path but never presents the option to do so.

Unlike in Return of the Jedi, or the original KOTOR, the protagonist makes no single emotional choice to determine the outcome of the game. Instead, the player decides the fates of three worlds; together, the ramifications of these decisions will determine the fate of the Republic. This Hari Seldon counterpoint to the grandiose battle of KOTOR would be refreshing if the persistent, pernicious moral reductionism didn't result in such unsatisfying stories.

Postmodernism in Fantasy #2: Intro to Postmodernism

I gave a brief discussion of the concepts encompassed by postmodernism in the intro post of this series, but I thought it might be helpful if I provided some further readings. These books and articles are good sources on what postmodernism is (or at least, what I take it to mean) in literature, politics, science, and criticism. 

These are all works I'd consider accessible, and they're generally pretty short reads (with the exception of the Berger). But I'll also link to some videos, because they can help to frame and simplify complex ideas, before or as a substitute for further reading. 

Nonfiction

Derrida For Beginners

Derrida and his concept "deconstruction" have become largely synonymous with postmodernism in the part of the public eye aware of such things at all. Both names are typically tossed out as superlative incarnations of academic inscrutability. I haven't read Derrida's prose, and I suspect that reputation is not entirely unearned. But he was apparently a brilliant thinker who pioneered many of the concepts that defined postmodern thought.

Jim Powell's comic-illustrated Derrida for Beginners does an excellent job of breaking down Derrida's thought, life, and career into plain English. The concepts are often disarmingly intuitive. Deconstruction is illustrated with a visual analogy that makes the philosophical idea, at least in its broad strokes, feel almost obvious.

Deconstruction takes aim at metaphysical dichotomies: true/false, beauty/ugly, mind/body, normal/abnormal, nature/culture, etc. According to Derrida, these dichotomies are generally aligned in a hierarchy: truth is better than falsehood and beauty better than ugliness, for instance. 

The process of deconstruction begins by recognizing each element of the dichotomy as central in turn - to flip from viewing the face to the vase and back again until one can preserve the understanding that both images are present, but more importantly, that both are defined by the presence of the other. If either face were missing, there would be no vase.

It's a rather facile assertion applied to the vase, and indeed even to a dichotomy like good and evil (how many times have we read a fantasy protagonist pontificate that evil exists to glorify the good?). But Derrida takes the idea well beyond the obvious yin/yang cosmic balance, applying it to language and epistemology and questioning some of our core assumptions about reality. 

By decentralizing the dichotomy between true and false, he suggests the whole relativist premise of modern postmodernism. It is the first bold and significant step away from the premise that the world contains a divinely created order governed by apparent rules. Derrida's revolutionary and still-contentious assertion is that we don't actually have access to those rules. Our language does not refer to the world itself, but only to other ideas that already exist within the framework of language. He sums it up neatly: 

"There is nothing outside of the text."

The implications of deconstruction for fantasy tropes are limitless, and only a few of them have been applied. Perhaps the most profound dichotomies in fantasy are us/them (found in works with only one nation's point of view represented) and good/evil, a defining feature of the fantasy monomyth, (and ultimately a microcosm of the Christian worldview), but there are dozens more: civilized/savage; prosaic/magical; male/female; lawful/chaotic; human/monster; noble/commoner, etc.

If you're still confused and don't have time for Powell's book, here's a YouTube video.

The Social Construction of Reality

Peter Berger's The Social Construction of Reality is a foundational text of modern sociology but it is also one of the clearest statements of philosophical postmodernism to be found. Berger takes Derrida's ideas and applies them to our basic interaction with the world (and he does it with fairly clear prose, to boot!). 

The gist is that all of our concepts about the world, from the most physical and intuitive to the most abstract and esoteric, are framed in learned, cultural ideas. Once again, "there is nothing outside of the text" - no imaginable object can enter our experience without being coated in a thick layer of cultural concepts - even if those concepts simply concern how to respond to the unknown, or grasp for inadequate analogies to past experience. These concepts are learned and propagated through everyday interactions and the use of language - the procedural building blocks of culture. 

Here's a short video I find somewhat inadequate and a longer one that suits my predilection for dour academics. 

Identity Protective Cognition

One of the very first articles on Vox.com laid out the postmodern, science-based approach to politics that defines their content. It is essentially a politics-specific extension of the Social Construction of Reality, showing that the facts we take as reality flow more from our identity groups than from any presumed objective consideration of facts. There is more to it - the article doesn't go into material and economic concerns driving thought at all - but this is a concise explanation of the postmodern approach to politics. 

The Young Turks explain the study cited above.

Death of the Author

If you're prepared for some primary source reading, Roland Barthes' Death of the Author is short, readable, and a landmark essay in postmodernism and literary criticism. Death of the Author can be thought of as an application of deconstruction to works of literature. Barthes undermines the idea of a single, privileged interpretation of the text (historically defined as authorial intent). Instead, Barthes sees the work floating in a vast context of culture: history, other art, social mores, biographical details, etc. 

"The text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture." 

Each time a work is read, it is seen in a new context, by new eyes with new ideas and experiences. The reader, the critic, approach the work and ascribe a meaning to it, but this meaning is never The Meaning.

Work that takes this interaction between text and reader as a given and creates structures that explore it is called metafiction. Dark Souls is the epitome of metafiction in fantasy.

Mike Rugnetta explains Death of the Author in this episode of Idea Channel.

Fiction

Barthes' Death of the Author is perhaps best understood through Borges' fictional illustration, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. The choice of Don Quixote is at once incidental - any historical work would do - and precise, since the book was intended as a meta-fictional satire of existing fantasy romance novels.

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is an orientalist fantasy dreamscape that falls squarely in Borges' tradition, though never approaching his genius (nothing ever does!). Nonetheless, it's a great introduction to postmodernism. Many of the stories are like parables, explaining basic concepts in economical prose, dressed up in imaginative and evocative landscapes.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse V is certainly the most famous and widely read postmodern novel. Its simple prose, historical subject matter, and emotional and philosophical resonance make it both accessible and relevant to the public in ways that are not the norm for postmodern works. If you're curious to see what postmodern literature has to offer, this is probably the place to start.

Additional Recommendations

Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Many more will be coming in individual profiles through the rest of this series.