xhonzi said:
American Hominid said:
Because the Sith were excluded from the post-Jedi Bantam EU, you had a lot of random dark siders and Imperial remnants.
Were they excluded intentionally? Or did no one really work them in?
I mean, they were in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, right?
I'm pretty sure they were actually excluded. They were shown in the EU stories taking place before the movies (thousands of years before), and artifacts from this period were seen in post-movie-era sources (like holocrons and the Dark Temple in Mysteries of the Sith) but no actual Sith (except Darth Vader).
This probably had to do with GL's plans to possibly use them in the prequels (the Sith as dark siders go back to the second draft of the first movie, where a Jedi apprentice named Darklighter falls to the dark side, teaches the Sith the dark side - they were pirates before this - and they all become the bodyguards of the Emperor). Zahn wanted the Noghri to be called "Sith" originally because Darth Vader was already known as "The Dark Lord of the Sith." But no one knew what that meant, so he wanted to tie it in to his story... GL/LFL said no. When Veitch and the rest started working on TOTJ they wanted to have an ancient dark side sect and GL said, use the Sith, that's what they're supposed to be anyway.
Towards the end of the Bantam run, people were actually clamoring to see the Sith as villains in the "current" story period. The creators of the New Jedi Order series of books originally wanted to use the Sith but were rebuffed by LFL, so they used extragalactic aliens instead. So I'm fairly sure their use was tightly controlled by LFL.
I've got no problem with the existence of the Sith as a sect, it's just that they seem to have been made into less of a specific Dark Side culture and more of just generically Evil nasties. Palpatine was sort of this in the original films, but Vader struck me as actually having nobler intentions despite his forceful and violent methods. I thought that was the difference between light and dark - means versus ends. Some Force-users would try to use the Force by disrupting the natural flow of things as little as they could. Others would try to accomplish whatever they could, not caring about the consequences - these would be dark siders. Jedi might refer specifically to the first group, and/or more generically to Force-users as a whole (like "Xerox" being both vernacular for "copy" and also a brand name), while Sith would be a specific culture which depended on dark side magic, but certainly not the only one.
Anchorhead said:
Would you like to play a game?
