Just finished KotOR for the first time...

[6079SmithW]

Only the Star Wars films are true canon. Everything else is only canon as long as Lucas says it is and he can de-canonize it at any time, as he did with the original clone wars cartoon. The canon Revan is a lightside male and the canon Exile is a lightside female but Lucas could de-canonize both games if he wanted. Star Wars canon is more loose and not as clearly defined as Trek canon.

 

[Reverend]

^Since that would mean about 99% of *all* Star Wars related media is non-canon (by dint of not being the films) a game not being "true" canon can hardly be said to really matter, no?

 

[Skywalker]

In Star Wars, it's all canon unless said otherwise. In Star Trek, it's never canon unless it's on-screen. Star Wars canon is very clearly defined; they have different tiers of it, for goodness' sake.

 

[CorporalClegg]

Only the Star Wars films are true canon. Everything else is only canon as long as Lucas says it is and he can de-canonize it at any time, as he did with the original clone wars cartoon. The canon Revan is a lightside male and the canon Exile is a lightside female but Lucas could de-canonize both games if he wanted. Star Wars canon is more loose and not as clearly defined as Trek canon.

So KOTOR is canon.

Do you need a Venn diagram?

 

[6079SmithW]

In Star Wars, it's all canon unless said otherwise. In Star Trek, it's never canon unless it's on-screen. Star Wars canon is very clearly defined; they have different tiers of it, for goodness' sake.

Really? I've always been told that anything outside the six movies is not canon unless Lucas says otherwise and what is canon in the EU is always subject to change

Do you need a Venn diagram?

Maybe. The point is the canonicity is not stable with the EU. Heck, even scenes from the movies change in canonicity with Lucas always editing and re-doing them

 

[Delsaber]

KOTOR is the only Star Wars property aside from the original trilogy that I can take seriously. Brilliant stuff.

How long do we have to wait for an HD rerelease, I wonder...

 

[Skywalker]

In Star Wars, it's all canon unless said otherwise. In Star Trek, it's never canon unless it's on-screen. Star Wars canon is very clearly defined; they have different tiers of it, for goodness' sake.

Really? I've always been told that anything outside the six movies is not canon unless Lucas says otherwise and what is canon in the EU is always subject to change

Other way around. Everything is counted as canon in Star Wars (aside from stuff that's distinctly labeled as non-canon, such as Infinities), and it only becomes non-canon if Lucas says so.

 

[6079SmithW]

That's good to know. Next time someone says I can't consider the EU canon I shall correct them. Is Tales of the Jedi canon? Those are my favorite EU stories. Probably also why I love KOTOR because it references them.

 

[PsychoPere]

Tales of the Jedi, like the majority of the modern EU continuity, is in the "Continuity Canon" tier - below George Lucas (the films, personal statements, etc.) and Television (which only includes The Clone Wars).

 

[6079SmithW]

^ Sweet. I always like stories set in ancient times and am more interested in Tales than the post-ROTJ works. The older the better. The Bane trilogy was ok but a bit too "recent" for my tastes.

Anyway, back to KOTOR. The second one was the first RPG I had ever played. These games got me hooked on the genera.

 

[PsychoPere]

This is only tangentially connected to KOTOR because it's more connected to TOR, but here I go anyway...

The older the better, eh? You should check out Ostrander and Duursema's current Dawn of the Jedi series. It's set in a time before the Jedi Order even exists (though naturally it does focus on an order of Force practitioners that would lead to the Jedi). It's currently the absolute earliest entry in the SW universe, since it is most set in 25,793 BBY. In addition to its strong writing and great art, it even has Rakata!

(And there is a definite KOTOR connection to keep this post at least somewhat tied to the thread topic.)

 

[Scout101]

There's something just horribly WRONG with the Star Wars universe, when you start taking into account all this stuff. 25,000 years, and the universe (or at least the part we've seen) is completely stagnant. From the farthest past to the future, what's different? Other than the names of the people, not much. If we were talking about a couple hundred years here or there, sure, maybe it was just a slow patch, but to go that long with NO technological change? Yikes!

Blasters, hyperspace, lightsabers, speeders. Realistically, only thing that ever gets worked on that's new is that every now and then, someone gets it into their head to build a doomsday device. Even then, the oldest one and newest one would be about evenly matched...

 

[Reverend]

This is sort of why I was initially rather disappointed with the art direction on KotOR. I think the old 'Tales of the Jedi' comics did a pretty good job of showing a much more primitive looking galaxy than the one we saw in the movies, from the weapons and clothing all the way up to the ships and locations....then in KotOR everything looks very much like the movies. This bothers me since while I can believe that technological development can slow to a crawl, I have a hard time believing that aesthetic tastes, conventions and fashions could become so similarly stagnant.

I agree though, something is badly wrong with the Star Wars galaxy, and that something is that they can't seem to go more than a few centuries at a time without some devastating galaxy-wide conflict. In that sort of environment it's easy to see why advancement is slow and indeed, often subject to backsliding as knowledge is hoarded, lost or even outlawed.

 

[Hound of UIster]

The explanation for the visual differences between ToTJ and Kotor I think were tax breaks from the Senate.

 

[Scout101]

But those sorts of constant conflict should drive MORE innovation, not less.

If you had a sword and a horse in the Civil War, you were in great shape. If you showed up with them in WWI, 50 years later, you were in trouble. 20 years after that, you were slaughtered without a 2nd glance. A WWII fighter plane would never even see the plane/ship/missle that killed it using Gulf War tech.

25,000 years, and nothing appears to have changed a bit. If anything, the Old Republic stuff looks newer, and it's been 25,000 years of stagnation and backslide. Looks like same tech, just dirty, broken down, and poorly understood.

 

[Delsaber]

There's something just horribly WRONG with the Star Wars universe, when you start taking into account all this stuff. 25,000 years, and the universe (or at least the part we've seen) is completely stagnant. From the farthest past to the future, what's different? Other than the names of the people, not much. If we were talking about a couple hundred years here or there, sure, maybe it was just a slow patch, but to go that long with NO technological change? Yikes!

Blasters, hyperspace, lightsabers, speeders. Realistically, only thing that ever gets worked on that's new is that every now and then, someone gets it into their head to build a doomsday device. Even then, the oldest one and newest one would be about evenly matched...

Hmm, I never really thought about it like that before, but you're totally right. Compare and contrast with Star Trek, where humans go from post-apocalytic scavengers totally unaware of any other life in the universe, to guardians of space and time, all within a single millennia.

I think this stems from that one crucial narrative difference between Wars and Trek: one is fantasy, which just happens to include spaceships; the other is science fiction, though no less fantastical in its approach.

Fantasy universes have a way of existing inside a bubble, perhaps by design. After all, if all those fantasy societies started advancing past swords 'n' sorcery and towards industrialization or whathaveyou, a lot of those classic genre tropes become largely meaningless.

Star Wars is actually kind of remarkable in that sense; it's one major fictional universe that actually (mostly) succeeds in blurring the lines. With that in mind, thinking too much about those 25,000 years of arrested development breaks the illusion somewhat.

I'd be interested to know if there was ever an explanation for that in the fiction.

 

[Skywalker]

If Obi-Wan hadn't said "for over a thousand generations" in ANH and had instead just said "for over a thousand years" (which would have fit with the PT, which implied that the Republic had only existed for a millennium), we probably wouldn't be having these discussions about technological stagnation. I agree that it's a little weird. Sure, having a massive 25,000-year long timeline makes it possible to do all kinds of different stories with different characters, but it's still kind of awkward.

I really need to catch up on Dawn of the Jedi. I remember being really excited about that when it was first announced, but I haven't had the time or the spare cash to keep up with it.

 

[CorporalClegg]

There's something just horribly WRONG with the Star Wars universe, when you start taking into account all this stuff. 25,000 years, and the universe (or at least the part we've seen) is completely stagnant. From the farthest past to the future, what's different? Other than the names of the people, not much. If we were talking about a couple hundred years here or there, sure, maybe it was just a slow patch, but to go that long with NO technological change? Yikes!

Blasters, hyperspace, lightsabers, speeders. Realistically, only thing that ever gets worked on that's new is that every now and then, someone gets it into their head to build a doomsday device. Even then, the oldest one and newest one would be about evenly matched...

Hmm, I never really thought about it like that before, but you're totally right. Compare and contrast with Star Trek, where humans go from post-apocalytic scavengers totally unaware of any other life in the universe, to guardians of space and time, all within a single millennia.

I think this stems from that one crucial narrative difference between Wars and Trek: one is fantasy, which just happens to include spaceships; the other is science fiction, though no less fantastical in its approach.

Fantasy universes have a way of existing inside a bubble, perhaps by design. After all, if all those fantasy societies started advancing past swords 'n' sorcery and towards industrialization or whathaveyou, a lot of those classic genre tropes become largely meaningless.

Star Wars is actually kind of remarkable in that sense; it's one major fictional universe that actually (mostly) succeeds in blurring the lines. With that in mind, thinking too much about those 25,000 years of arrested development breaks the illusion somewhat.

I'd be interested to know if there was ever an explanation for that in the fiction.

This is a pretty good summation.

One reason I think it's so believable in swords and sorcery stories is because those are based in a dark age type setting, and our own dark age was totally stagnant for almost a millennium. The association is just easier to accept.

SW has "science" connected with it which promotes an idea of progress. But if we think of all the social and cultural reasons humans didn't evolved (and even regressed in some areas) over the coarse of the mid hundreds and then expand that to a galactic scale, then perhaps 25,000 isn't all that extraordinary.

 

[Drago-Kazov]

Anybody could tell me why am i having trouble with starting Kotor 2 on the same computer which runs Kotor 1 just fine?

 

[Reverend]

^You might need to be a bit more specific than that.