First, I wanted to write about my favorite scene from KotOR2 (which, sadly, had a lot more potential as a game). It's a scene from Nar Shadaa, a beggar asks the player character money. We can give him money (light side path, kinda), but the beggar will be mugged (or killed) a few moments later. Or we can send him away (dark side path, kinda), and the beggar will kill another person to get money.
Which reminds me, that the Dark Side concept in KotOR2 is more interesting than in KotOR1. In KotOR1, it's like:
- Please, help me! Those bandits want to kill me!
- (Player Character) DIIIIEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!
- Sir, I'm a poor man, give me some money, please...
- DIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!
- Good day, and I have a business proposition for you
- DIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!
- Hello th---
- DIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I do not have much to say right now, apart from what I said in the thread corellian77 gave link to. That I consider the OT Dark Side stuff rather implausible, the PT concept plausible but flawed because of the OT concept it had to connect to (Anakin becoming the bad-ass evil machine Vader everyone wanted him to become) which led to a very strange scene after Anakin helped to kill Mace.
I mean, in OT, the Dark Side is basically Evil. Now, I want to point out that I'm a person which likes the point of view concept. Which was concieved in RotJ. But still, in the OT the Dark Side was basically being evil with little to no moral values at all, or any other goals other than "THE POWER OF THE DARK SIDE", with the Light Side not being shown as so light, because, PT aside, Obi-Wan and Yoda told lies to Anakin to use him as a tool to kill Vader. Obi-Wan, even after Luke learned that Vader is his father, wanted the boy to kill Vader.But, you know. All for greater good, right? Yeah, the point of view was applied only to the light side, no redeeming quality to the dark.
More than that, you can't really say that Vader is on the Dark Side at all in RotJ. An EVIL person who is conscious that he is EVIL and does BAD things is not EVIL. But yet, he does those things, like protecting Palpatine with his life, even though in ESB he wanted to overthrow him together with Luke. I had a thought that maybe Vader didn't want Luke to give in his anger so he wouldn't kill Palpatine, but that's not very plausible - during the duel the only thing he does is goading Luke to join the Dark Side. And then gets his ass kicked.
In RotS, a different concept of the sides of the Force is born, but isn't fully fleshed out because of how many times the concept of the Force changed. And I've mentioned it somewhere, that light and dark is not good and evil (and power and destructivity) at their base, but selflessness and selfishness at their base (something that Lucas thought while creating two opposite Luke and Han characters in ANH, btw). And I actually dig this concept. I mean, can Palpatine be called evil? Sure, he wants total power over the galaxy (selfishness, basically :) ), but would the Empire be really EVIL? Granted, there are these Death Star thingies, but they appeared in ANH which was more as a straight-forward sci-fi fairy-tale adventure. But I digress. What I want to say, is that Anakin is acting totally selfishly in RotS. He said it himself, "I can't live without her", and that's selfishness. But, of course, he's doing it for a good cause, right? I mean, he, as any normal person becoming evil does not realise that he is becoming evil. From someone's point of view. Which leads to a question "if love is defacto selfish", but, uhm... that's totally another topic.
Now, before I digress even more and venture into the far reaches of my own mind, I'll better wrap this reply up, post it, and actually read it as a whole.