Loftwings and Demons

Now that I've played KOTOR I and II I actually have some background on the Old Republic era. Well, besides just what I got from the Darth Bane novel, which takes place much later in the timeline. There's a lot of references to the characters in these stories but I also feel like people don't talk about them much. It's weird.

Right now I'm on Nar Shaddaa.  I'm having a lot of fun.  I cleaned out a whole club of pazaak players. 

So, um, because I love those random 'who would win' vs scenarios, I came up with this: Bastila vs. Darth Maul!

I personally think Darth Maul would win, but I'm sure someone could make a competing argument. I just think of it like this--Bastila took down Revan, sure, but she was also defeated by the Sith's former apprentice, so defeating a Master Sith doesn't mean she can't be taken down by an Apprentice. Also that was before the Rule of Two where Sith could shore up their own skills by attacking in groups. Battle techniques may have improved since then, and those considered master duelists of an earlier age may not be as skilled in a later era. Maul is also a specialist in one-on-one fighting and dueling, whereas Bastila, Revan, and Malak, while undoubtedly skilled in such battles, would not have focused on that specifically. Bastila has Battle Meditation, but it seems she can only use this when she herself is not fighting, and the purpose of Battle Meditation is primarily to bolster the skills of others anyway. And Darth Maul was only barely defeated by a two-on-one attack in The Phantom Menace, rather than an attack by a single Jedi.

Though actually I'm not as interested as who would win as how this battle would look.

Because it would look awesome.

I can just imagine both of them attacking with their double-bladed lightsabers, one of them yellow-gold, the other red. I also imagine that the battle would go on a while. Also, for some fun scenery, it could take place outdoors on Naboo, or perhaps on Mustafar (and without randomly spinning lightsabers at each other haha).

KOTOR I is a great game and I'm having lots of fun with KOTOR II, but they're also both very noticeably misogynistic to me.  Like if you listen to how the men in these games talk about women, and see how women are presented vs men in these games, it's clear there's a lot of misogyny, especially if you control for the greater respect the player character can be expected to receive in a game regardless of gender (you can choose to play as either a man or woman in these games).  This isn't really surprising, and it's an issue with all Star Wars stuff, but especially in the Lucas-controlled era.  People always try to protest this by saying that Lucas era had a lot of great women characters, and it did, but it also treated them in quite misogynistic ways.  Does Disney era Star Wars have misogyny?  Well, yeah, but it tends to be of a different and more subtle sort, and I suspect that's due to a woman (Kathleen Kennedy) being the head of Lucasfilm currently.  But I think that when control of Star Wars transfers over to another man, it'll pick up a lot of the more explicit misogyny that the old Star Wars had.  It's not like Disney hasn't had plenty of misogyny in its own media, after all.

I do like a lot of the women in these games.  I'm very fond of Bastila and Mission in KOTOR, and for minor characters Marlena Venn is one of my faves (hope she's livin' it up somewhere nice since she ditched Tatooine with all those credits lol).  And in KOTOR II Kreia is already an extremely intriguing character. 

I chose a woman character in both games, and right away this affected the way other characters treated me.  I'm not very far along in KOTOR II yet though and I'm already tired of Atton Rand's attitude.  Carth was similarly tiresome to me early in the original KOTOR game, though he got less so with time, which again I view as just a factor of the player character gaining the respect of the other characters, not because the game isn't filled with misogyny.  Marlena's husband is awful, and one of the few instances where the game actually seems to treat misogyny as bad. 

Of course, it's not just about the way these characters act.  It's about the way women are fit into very particular roles unless they're 'special' (like the player character, who is still not immune to the misogyny of other characters).  Woman NPCs almost always exist in relation to someone else and are defined in the story by that role:  someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's daughter, etc.  And of course nothing about having these roles in and of themselves is inherently misogynist, but it's about the presentation and focus, which always seems to end up centering men in some way.  For example, Shasa is a Selkath who joins the Sith and her father asks you to find her.  Shasa is presented as the one being manipulated and her father is of course doing this for her own good and the greater good of Manaan.  It's seeing these sorts of things repeated and adding up over time.  It's about things like the prevalence of Twi'lek dancing women in the cantinas, and how women are presented as visually delicate regardless of their depicted strength.  It's how both so many of these smaller and larger things go largely unremarked upon and unnoticed.    

Just got the last star map off Kashyyyk.  This game has some dramatic cutscenes!  The confrontation with Malak before this was extra dramatic, even if I was already spoiled on the big surprise of this game, haha.  Then again I still didn't know exactly how things were going to play out.

The Republic ciphers in KOTOR are stumped by the Sith 'encryption' on the passcodes, which are just simple mathematical sequences.

Sith recruiting strategy must be 'Join the Dark Side! We have math!'