it occured to me while trying to avoid waking up this morning that if i did write the eirn-as-scourge au, i could use the excuse to use the darth braga au (or at least, parts of it). tol braga as a scheming sith sent to undermine the jedi from the inside appeals to my inner contrarian, even if it also undermines (a possible reading of) his characterisation as a whole. i think we’ll leave ‘darth marr is actually a kel’dor’ on the cutting room floor, though.
three jedi accompany the jk on their foolish mission: tol braga, warren sedoru, and leeha narezz. of the three of them, only tol braga - an arrogant narcissist, not that the narrative ever calls him on this - has no evidence of Dark or Unorthodox thinking before they head out. warren has his moments of ‘this fucking resistance is so inconvenient, why couldn’t they have continued to be peacefully oppressed for a little longer’, leeha has her belief that the meedees are intelligent beings in their own right, and that a droid may even one day be force sensitive. one of these things is not quite like the other, but it gets even better.
in their fallen states, warren and leeha are under the emperor’s influence, while tol took one look at the fact he was having to face the consequences of his own failure for once in his life an went ‘welp, guess i’ll become a sith then’. what exactly ‘under the influence’ means is never really expanded on; they are not puppets, are not possessed, but - once the hold breaks - have no memory of what they did, or how, or why. an easy absolution; easier, at least, in as much as they do not have to remember and account to themselves what they did.
tol and warren, though, are soldiers - focused on the empire’s battles, attacking the republic, seizing its assets and sharing its intelligence, systematically undermining the war effort at their master’s bidding. leeha, though - her only crime is that of the heart. the revelation is that she loves - not just her meedees, but another jedi, who loved her in return, and who stumbled into a trap she laid because of it. neither of them are particularly tactically important - this is a personal matter, a poc-coded alien woman using her evil wiles to seduce away a single jedi. it is this love that makes her evil, this love that makes her weak and exploitable.
one of these jedi is very much not like the others.
related: reason n it frustrates me no end that the jedi of swtor have more in common with the jedi of the pt than the jedi of literally all the other swtor-era media.
leeha’s love affair - on tython, to boot - calls back to an early exploration quest, where the player character is called upon to spy upon two padawans suspected of being in love. how awful, and how surprising, that two young people in a remote and highly cloistered environment might indulge their hormones and a need for companionship.
the jedi, as an order, are set up by the writers to fail and fall, and it’s not hard to see why people primed to contrariness by the movies eat it up eagerly. for me- well, it’s hard not to be contrary myself and start stanning them to spite the authors that hate them. itsbadwriting.gif is the go-to battlecry of many a cherry-picking fan, though i feel justified in using it here. there are married jedi in swtor, jedi with children in swtor, and i’m not just talking about satele. but, hey. who needs consistent writing when you can just have them act in whatever way the author needs them to in order to be knocked down and shown up, amirite?
