Being neck deep in the Old Republic era of Star Wars really puts things into odd perspective when the occasional OG meta crosses my dash. Here I am thinking about the nature of the Jedi Order and its tendency to hegemony and severely mistrusting anything and everything that they can't fit into their neat little world view, alongside the desperate and sometimes unethical strides the Order made during the twenty eight year long galactic war against the Sith Empire, where both factions where hundreds of thousands if not millions of force users strong, where sometimes the sheer need of bodies leads to a disconnect between teachings and actual practice... Not to mention the era is haunted by the actions of the events three hundred years prior of the actions of Darth Revan and the Jedi Exile, by the wars that shaped them, and thus gave rise to this unstable and constantly breaking galactic conflict!
And then I read a very thoughtful meta about how the Jedi are a small and marginalized religious group that are both lauded and exploited by the very Senate that they serve. And like. It's not wrong. The Prequels are very much about that!! But god it just reads so at odds to me because that's not the situation I'm familiar with and know.
It's just that the Clone Wars as a concept are just so small in comparison to the scale of this civilization on civilization war of the Old Republic. Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if the developers of SWTOR had that very concept in mind when they were creating the game: Take the Clone Wars and just make it bigger. Instead of a few million clone troopers versus droids you now have tens of millions of soldiers and conscripts on both sides, instead of a couple thousand Jedi versus a dozen of dark-siders and Sith, you now have hundreds of thousands of Jedi and Sith. Not only that, but the Republic itself is smaller, only really encompassing the Core Worlds and a good chunk of the mid rim, plagued by the Sith Empire seizing worlds from them and other worlds seceding in protest. It isn't just the Separatist Conflict, it's that on top of the war against an entirely separate sovereign entity that desires all of the Republics resources and planets.
It's also like. The Sith. No longer is it just Palpatine with his myriad groomed and broken boys and the occasional Fallen Jedi or dark sider, it's now a full blown concept and institution. Power schemes and backstabbing but also a full multilayered society of Sith, military, civilian, slaves all working in concert to be the aggressors of a very big and very costly galactic war. Sure they're kinda uh. Evil. Sometimes. Especially with Emperor Vitiate's stated goal of devouring planets but like. You get to see how sympathetic and morally nuanced people just living in this society can be, from the top all the way down to the bottom. It's not just spooky evil boogeymen cackling away in the dark, it's just mostly that.
It's a fascinating era to dig into and play around in, because you have things like Alderaan's civil war and succession crisis, the discovery of the Voss as a society of Force users who refuse to fall into a binary of dark/light and the Republic and Empire's desperate bids for favor, the politics of the Hutt Cartel and how they brush up against these giant nations, how places like even the outer rim are affected by this galaxy spanning conflict.
Don't get me wrong, I like the original movies and the prequels/rebels era of the timeline! It's just so small compared to what I'm dealing with, with the room for many stories about so many different conflicts just in the Jedi Order alone. The Old Republic era just hits different, and has a lot of flexibility in most every concept it brings forth for every institution to be both a hero and a villain depending on where you look. (Star Cabal you're on thin fucking ice)
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