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.

Why Fantasy Needs Postmodernism: Morality

This post is meant as an introduction or synopsis of a concept that should be very familiar to long-time readers of fantasy, especially fans of some of the postmodern-influenced contemporary fantasy I'll be covering in this series (and if you're not a fan of Game of Thrones, c'mon). Anyway, don't expect anything groundbreaking here.

Fantasy Violence

Fantasy, high or low, dark or heroic, usually involves a lot of murder. Bloody sword fighting and gruesome monster slaying are so deeply enmeshed in the genre that few works are bold enough to eschew them entirely. There is a bit of dissonance, then, in the fact that fantasy works are often belittled as children's media. Children can't be exposed to raw ultra-violence, so fighting that takes place in these stories has to be put in some kind of context, a space where it is regulated, justified, or comprehended.

The Heroic Frame

There are a few moral frames that are typically used for this purpose. The first, because it's probably the oldest, is the heroic frame. It views violence as an occasion to demonstrate personal virtues: loyalty to the clan, willpower and courage, but most of all strength and skill in the practice of violence itself. This sort of violence is often ritualized in formal duels and accompanied by song, dance, and often a minimum of actual death. It represents warfare in many indigenous cultures, and in Western cultures it has become entirely subsumed by sports.

Some fantasy works, especially products of historical cultures, use this frame for violence (The Iliad, Beowulf, The Worm Ouroboros) but it is not typically sufficient in works that involve larger political strife. Most contemporary works that depict men who fight and kill for personal honor use that trait as a shorthand for evil.

The Postmodern Frame

The newest frame for violence, as far as I'm aware, is postmodern. The postmodern frame paints violence as the inevitable consequence of ecological, economic, and political conflicts. They make no attempt to justify violence, occasionally commenting on the tragic circumstances that spawn it. It generally acknowledges that both parties bear some blame for violence, that both believe themselves to be doing right in some measure. I'll be covering some of these works in this series, but some conspicuous examples are The Wire, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Game of Thrones.

The Moral Frame

The one overwhelmingly common frame for fantasy violence is moral. The moral frame is familiar from works like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. The binary of good and evil in these worlds is common to many religions, but most directly reflects and references Christianity. Western fantasy has deep roots in late medieval chivalric romances (King Arthur and his many continental counterparts) and the expressions of morality in contemporary fantasy can be traced back to those explicitly Christian stories.

Much of early modern fantasy was explicitly allegorical and, especially insofar as it was aimed at children, contained explicit moral lessons. In a long tradition of what Simon Schama calls "grafting," Christian authors used pagan stories, creatures, and settings to enliven what was essentially Bible commentary. C.S. Lewis' Narnia books are the most famous example, though he got the idea from his predecessor George MacDonald.

The Lord of the Rings series, written by Lewis' friend and fellow Christian fantasist JRR Tolkien, was often interpreted as a comparable allegory, especially for political realities at the time he wrote it (World War II) or conceived it (World War I). Tolkien found this unduly limiting; his ambitions were broader. Steven Allen Carr tells us that:

Tolkien in fact encouraged the view of his work as an open-ended allegory, yet denied particularly specific allegorical applications. . . . According to National Public Radio, Tolkien considered Lord of the Rings “an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power,” – in other words, a kind of master allegory.

Thus the story is not meant to represent World War 1 specifically; it can be mapped onto any war. The Ring doesn't represent nuclear weapons; it represents any war machine of unbalanced power. As a "master allegory," the iconography of Middle Earth has had a long and illustrious history as a political narrative, particularly in foreign policy. This history is reviewed in Steven Allen Carr's 2002 piece Confronting Lord of the Rings as Allegory.

Following in Tolkien's tradition (and reflecting the shift to secularism and away from symbolism in art generally), most contemporary fantasy works are not allegorical. The stories they are telling don't come from the Bible or reference its characters in a specific sense - Obi-Wan is not intended as a Christlike figure (though Gandalf may be). But they persist in reaching for Tolkien's "master allegory," which in the abstract refers to the existence of good and evil in the judgments and outcomes of the world itself.

(Image from http://chipweir.weebly.com/the-hobbit-reading-blog/gandalf-a-christ-figure)

In Christianity, Evil literally exists, is personified by Satan, and is propagated by minions under his sway. The Dark Side of the Force, Sauron, and Voldemort, are all to a greater or lesser degree analogues of this system (the extent to which this is literal or simply implicit can vary, but the result is the same). Evil is portrayed as a temptation that acts a test of the protagonists' moral fortitude and commitment to Go(o)d. One's position in this divine conflict is to some extent preordained - entire races are irretrievably corrupted to evil, while some men are born to be righteous kings who fight on God's behalf.

Murder committed against Satan's servants is justified, even necessary. It's a task that needs doing, that can only be completed by virtuous and powerful men, and the completion of which improves the world and reflects well upon them. When Sauron's forces are defeated, Aragorn pardons his human thralls, but hunts down and kills every orc that can be found. It was only recently, in the postmodern era, that it became possible for us to memorialize the nearly three million people Luke Skywalker killed when he destroyed the Death Star.

Of course, Christian fantasists didn't apply their worldview to stories to justify and contextualize violence meant primarily for entertainment. Dragon slaying was a spiritual metaphor. Recapitulating the worldview of medieval fantasies today is not, I think, a harmful instance of cultural appropriation, but it certainly feels inadequate and superficial.

Escaping the Moral Frame

Binary moral narratives should by all rights be dead by now. They simply don't suit the realities of a complex and globalized world, a multicultural world, and a world informed by a wealth of scientific context. The binary worldview has a bunch of corollaries with destructive consequences for real people. Its implicit racial and national essentialism, legacy of classism, and the jingoist dehumanization of putative enemies express themselves in pernicious social issues.

That said, I'm not going to argue that fantasy fiction is actually causing these issues, or that alternatives will make a meaningful dent in changing them (though it can directly achieve smaller goals, like representation of diversity). Fiction is just one part of a massive cultural dialogue, and the dialogue determines the influence of individual works as much as they set the dialogue.

I think it's more interesting to argue that binary morality limits storytelling in a profound way, and that stories that escape it are opening a whole new world of plot and characterization opportunities. Video games offer the most extreme case study. RPGs (Bioware is by far the most prominent example) often mechanize morality explicitly by applying good and evil point values to certain actions.

Players expect that making "good" choices will have the intended results, eliminating a degree of spontaneity and failing to make the player question the limitations of their understanding and intentions. Storylines must be written to fit into this binary framework, pruning away ambiguity and stories that function more on quirk and flavor than moral conflict. In extreme cases, players stop thinking about their choices at all and simply vote by party lines. Games encourage this by rewarding ideological purists with special items and abilities.

Ambiguity is interesting, provocative, and fun. It creates complex characters. Imagine a character like Arya Stark happening in Lord of the Rings, or Ender Wiggin in Star Wars. Remember how clumsy Anakin Skywalker's turn to the Dark Side was in Revenge of the Sith, how artificial and strained it felt. And as much as you might hate it at the time, you know it's a good thing for narrative interest when bad things happen to good characters - when old mentors and assholes aren't the only protagonists with faulty plot armor.

When violence isn't the righteous removal of evil from the world, it needs to be addressed in other ways. It regains some of its rightful brutality, and it can resensitize us to its realities. Characters see the consequences of their choices; they experience grief, guilt, and pain, and grow as a result. Readers are forced to empathize with enemies who once would have been anonymous soldiers trudging into a heroic meat grinder.

The best postmodern stories present several sides of a story. The Wire and Game of Thrones encourage us to identify with some characters over others, but they never let us accept that people like Cersei Lannister are simply evil. Their actions have logic and context, human emotions, and emerged from a particular personal history.

By presenting multiple perspectives, postmodern fantasy can illustrate the limitations of our viewpoints and ideologies, calling attention to if not resolving partisan and international gridlock (condemning people who disagree with you as evil feels great but is ultimately counterproductive). Smart writers can also incorporate material forces that drove historical conflicts in our world.

For the purposes of this piece, I tried to stick to very popular examples I could count on most readers having some familiarity with. The rest of this series will highlight a number of postmodern fantasy works more or less off the beaten path, so if you're here looking for recommendations, hang in there and check back later.

PS While modern authors have done great things with non-binary morality, it's certainly not a new approach. And outside of genre literature, things have been a lot more nuanced for a very long time.

PPS Postmodern works are not inherently superior to binary works. I still love Star Wars. :/ Execution matters as much as anything, and there are of course dozens of hacks writing postmodern fantasy, especially now that Game of Thrones is so popular. I'll be one of them, some day!