Knights of the Old Republic (video game)/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Fridge Brilliance

  • Carth, your first "real" party member, frequently states that he doesn't trust you, finds your placement on the Endar Spire suspicious, finds what the Jedi are doing suspicious, and frequently gets angry about what he perceives as getting the runaround. He comes off as a total Jerkass and whiner...until The Reveal comes out. Turns out he was dead right about ALL of his suspicions, just not in the way he expected! The comics and the second game add a few more layers. He encountered a Jedi coverup before, as he helped Zanye Carrick escape from the Covenant. In the second game, Disciple is reporting directly to Carth. Given Carth's trust issues, Mical's reservations (even Exile, his childhood hero, has to be careful when prying info out of him), and how important the Ebon Hawk is, there's likely some strong history between Mical and Carth, meaning Carth may also know more about the Jedi than he let on.
    • Ditto Bastila. She comes across as a total bitch, quoting dogma at every turn, and regarding your PC with a cross of fascination and horror. Then The Reveal. She's a Padawan, set up on a babysitting task that even a Master would get overwhelmed with. She was given a token order to try and capture you alive, because "Jedi don't kill their prisoners" ...except when they do but no one seems to have expected her to actually do it. Worse, she's got the Force Bond to you, like it or not, meaning that (if you play Dark), you're pulling her down with you (see second game for more details on Force Bonds). Alternately, if you play Light, she becomes envious that you're doing her job better than she is; that the Light Side comes so easily to you, the former Dark Lord of the Sith, of all people, whereas she has to struggle to keep it up. Between the stress of all this, the fact that the Masters are no help at all and are, as usual, more concerned with covering their ass and reputation than actually helping...plus the fact that she has issues and doubts of her own? Malak didn't so much pull her to the Dark Side as give her a giant shove over a cliff she was dancing on already.
    • More a case of clever story telling, but this only just occurred to me so I'm putting it here. At the very beginning of the first game your soldier is apparently unfamiliar with the details of a war they have supposedly been fighting, and is unable to perform basic tasks which should be second nature. Just the game teaching you how to work it right? Wrong. Your memories have been tampered with, and so any inability on your part to perform simple tasks or remember very important details, it's all because your memory has been blanked. This also neatly sidesteps Story and Gameplay Segregation.
    • In a brilliant case of foreshadowing: For the original Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel, there are four discs required for installation. The original's fourth disc has on it a quite obviously evil Darth Malak, who is also featured on the cover. The sequel's however has an elderly woman in Jedi robes. Then comes The Reveal, and you realize that they highlighted the Big Bad before you even finished installing.
  • If you go to Korriban before she gets captured, everybody decides that Bastila should stay on the Ebon Hawk since all the Sith are looking for her and she'd be easily recognized. Makes sense. But wait. Back on Taris, wasn't she running around in public all over a planet crawling with Sith troopers? Why did she not stay in hiding then, or create some sort of disguise? If anything, you'd think that the Sith troopers on Taris would be more likely to recognize her than the teachers and students at the Sith Academy. The ones on Taris had fought her before her ship crashed and had been given her description and orders to track her down and bring her in. The people at the Academy, on the other hand, were pretty far away from the front lines and would probably be less familiar with her.
    • One could assume that maybe she had been using the force as a perception filter. Meanwhile, the people on Korriban are Force-sensitive, so they'd probably be immune to such things.
    • Another possibility would be that her pod crashed in the middle levels of megalopolis, and it was even mentioned by her as far as this troper can remember, and we know that middle and lower levels weren't under control of Sith forces, but controlled by gangs instead (at least in middle levels case). By said gang members she was captured eventually.
  • Why did Kreia spend all of Knights of the Old Republic II trying to "kill" the Force anyways? It's obvious once you put the pieces together. It's not just some personal vendetta against the Jedi and the Sith, but rather an act of intended benevolence. Exhibit A: the point early on when Atton suggests that the Jedi's reliance on the Force makes them weaker in the long run compared to those who have to survive without it. Exhibit B: The Yuuzhan Vong have been "cut off" from the Force. Exhibit C: As mentioned above, Kreia evidently knew enough of the Yuuzhan Vong to know that they were coming, and quite possibly knew a number of details about them. It's therefore probable that Kreia was trying to even the playing field more or less, especially if her visions told her that the actual Yuuzhan Vong invasion wouldn't occur for millennia, plenty of time for the galaxy to adapt to more Mandalorian means of fighting off the extra-galactic invaders. Which would mean that in a very twisted sense, the "Big Bad" is really an extremely misunderstood(which is all her fault), and possibly also misguided, anti-villain.
      • Although, if you think about it, Kreia was trying to create a new, stronger order of Jedi. This was WHY she was training the Exile in the first place. Parading the Exile in front of the remaining Jedi Masters was meant to be her moral victory over them; she's just as mad at you if you killed them all as she is if they try to depower you. And those Force-Dead assassins she was training would probably have been just as effective against the True Sith Empire as they were against the Jedi (other than the Exile, anyway). Plus, good luck taking out the Sith Emperor in a fair fight.
    • Jossed. She was talking about the "True Sith" who show up in the upcoming MMO
  • You know that scene on Nar Shaddaa with the homeless guy, how nothing you do to him matters because the Force will screw him over anyway? How anything you try to do will be twisted by a Force that cannot be trusted and yet insists on robbing you of free will? Maybe you understand Kreia's point of view a little better now.
    • This is Kreia's Lesson- it's the entire thematic point of the game!
  • Why can Kreia teach both the Jedi and Sith prestige classes to the player? It's not Gameplay and Story Segregation, it's because she was once a Jedi and a Sith.
  • Early in the game, Bastila asks you a series of basic questions about your past. You can point out that the answers to her questions are surely in your Republic service file, and she says she wanted to see how you answered. But what she's really checking for is whether your basic memories are still those of your programmed personality, even though some of Revan's memories, and his Force sensitivity, have begun to reemerge. Likewise, when Dorak is helping you choose a Jedi class, the reason he's unsurprised by your answers is because you're answering just like your programmed personality should – or possibly like Revan would have.
  • On Taris, you get to meet a crazy old kook out on the streets preaching about his hatred for aliens. After repeated playthroughs, This Troper thought that this was just a waste for pixels and all, but what he says actually makes sense out of context! Two things he says particularly stands out:

Crazy Old Kook: Listen to me, people! There is a terrible scourge sweeping the planet! Heed my warning, before it's too late!

Crazy Old Kook: The evil walks among us! The enemy is here!

      • He's actually talking about you, Revan.
      • He's probably talking about the Sith on both counts.
    • Possibly jossed. If you walk up to him as a Sith trooper, he greets you happily. Very happily. And then invites you to share in the alien-bashing.
  • In KOTOR 1, you can be invited to a Sith party (talking to Sarna as a male or Yun as female) - only for them to get super drunk enough to pass out, leaving their Sith armor for the taking. Now, this is just a side quest, but BioWare still placed a foreshadowing even for this! Just talk to some of the citizens in the Upper City cantina and one of them will say something about Tarisian ale being an extremely alcoholic drink...
  • In the Light Side path for dealing with Bastila's mother, Bastila gives up 500 credits so her mother can get to Coruscant and pay for medical treatments. It's literally everything Bastila has to her name. It's very sweet... until Fridge Logic sets in and you remember that your character, or at the very least your party, can at this point have tens of thousands of credits. Granted, the money Bastila gives is hers and hers alone (it isn't deducted from your total), but you'd think a Light Side Jedi would at least have the option to cover the expense.
    • Well, your party isn't exactly playing by Jedi Order rules of property ownership, in about the same way that a rhinoceros isn't exactly a cuddly lap animal.
      • Even so, later in the game you can give up 500 credits to a swoop racer for parts, not to mention the numerous other giveaways. Giving within your own party would be a bit weird, but something easily handwaved.
  • Fridge Horror: Remember how the group of people at the lowest level of Taris went off to find the Promised Land in KOTOR? Well, assuming that they survived the destruction of Taris, a very disconcerting thing was found in the unused voice clips of KOTOR II. Read on if you dare. The HK-50's are talking about the Droid Factory, and how there is more than one factory. One of them comments on how there was one located on Taris. If the Promised Land was, in actuality, a Droid Factory that contained very hostile droids, then that means the group of people are.... That is Fridge Horror.
    • Not quite. HK-50s may not have been in production at the time, and the factory could have been built after the destruction of Taris. After all, no ones going to find (or expect to find) a droid factory in the giant smoking pile of rubble that remained of Taris.
    • You want Fridge Horror? How about this. You just convinced a bunch of people in an underground bunker of a city, surely the safest place on the planet, to pack up and leave for what one expects would be a green outdoorsy type place. I don't think anyone would call more tunnels and sewers "paradise". A couple days later, the entire surface of the planet was bombarded with turbolasers. If paradise WAS there, it isn't anymore. If they were in paradise when this happened, THEY aren't there anymore either. Congratulations, Light-Side Jedi, you just sent an entire settlement to their deaths!
    • The fate of the Promised Land is covered by The Old Republic in a quest on Taris. :It didn't end well.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Multiple NPCs comment on the Exile's talent with creating Force Bonds, connecting with people through the Force. This implies empathic abilities. Place an empath next to a traumatic event, say the destruction of Malachor V, and they will be damaged. - Romantic Pessimist
    • Applies to all Jedi in general, really. It's implied that this is why so many Jedi turned to the Dark Side with Revan and Malek. The Exile, being the most experienced with Force Bonds / empathy, was the only one that naturally reacted to the horror of galactic war by cutting all bonds to deafen herself.
  • Atton actually gives you a subtle bit of Foreshadowing early on in Peragus. When you run up with Kreia, he somehow manages to identify Kreia as a Jedi. Yeah, understandable how he assumes the exile is the jedi...anyone with a brain could have figured out the Jedi Exile was indeed the jedi people were talking about in the base, especially after the conversation he had. However, when the Exile and Kreia walks up, he immediately Misidentifies her as a Jedi, too. How would he know that? Cause he used to hunt Jedi and was force sensitive, of course - makes sense he'd be able to recognize them.
  • One of my favorite part of KOTOR was the the use of Charisma skill that can be uber helpful especially if you want to persuade other characters and NPCs on your ideas or stances on certain morales. Now, my favorite class is the Soldier (yes, very generic I know) and at first I was kind of confused why the Scoundrel class gets plus points on the charisma ability, but then I realized: of course they would! After all, Scoundrels are Genre Savvy and cunning individuals who are quick-witted and perceptively street smart. Being charismatic is practically their second nature!
    • Definitely ties in with how Han Solo- also a Scoundrel- is just so damn lovable.
      • And also Mission Vao. I mean come on!
  • There could be a whole 'nother page just for Kreia. While watching a Let's Play, the LPer casually pointed out that in the first proper conversation you have with her on the Ebon Hawk, she lies to you twice. This Troper never noticed, and in fact, couldn't find them until the LPer elaborated.
    • A link to that LP would be great. I'd love to see that moment.
      • I didn't post the original comment, but it's probably this.
    • What are the two lies? I haven't played the game since 2005 and hell if I can find them.
      • Definite lies: 1) That the jedi council cut you off from the force, 2) Revan escaped from the Jedi, 3) that she doesn't know where Revan went. Also that the force bond can kill you is likely a lie, we only hear it from her, the jedi masters don't think such a thing is possible and she has good reason to lie since it gives her a way to influence the exile.
  • How did Calo Nord, a badass but still a rather short man, survive the crashing of a good few hundred pounds of steel onto his back? Well, when you loot his armor, you find it's second only to Cassus Fett's battle armor!
  • In the second game, there's a docking-bay owner who you have to either pay off or persuade to let you leave the Ebon Hawk there for free. You can try to use Force Persuasion on him, but it will almost always fail. Why? Said docking-bay owner is a toydarian (the same species as Watto from Episode 1), which are known to be immune to mind tricks.
    • Probably not really immune, but rather resistant. Dominate Mind level of this Force feat affects him quite well.
  • This may belong more in irony, but I am playing through the game again knowing exactly what's going to happen, mainly in terms of the big reveal. I was talking to Juhani, and when she is yelling at you for indirectly causing her home world, Taris, to be destroyed, she tells you that "...It's so hard to lose your entire past. You wouldn't understand." You are given the option to agree with her and say that no, you would not understand. Which seems perfectly reasonable, until later in the game you discover that you HAVE lost your entire past, when the Jedi mind wiped you.
  • Early in the second game, when Atton and the Exile talk about Revan, Atton assumes that Revan was female and the player has the option of having the Exile correct him. Atton served under Revan and should know perfectly well whether Revan was male or female - but he also has every reason to obfuscate that fact by either intentionally getting the details wrong (if Revan was male) or just making flippant comments about Revan's sex (if Revan actually was female).
  • Not sure if this is a shout out or even a callback, but in Shadows of the Empire it's revealed that Vader was trying to sustain his body outside of his suit by focusing his anger and hatred with the Dark Side of the Force. Sion succeeds in doing exactly that.

Fridge Horror

  • In Knights of the Old Republic, If the Jedi plan had actually worked, the Endar Spire not been attacked, and the Star Forge still found and destroyed, what would they have done with the mind-wiped former Sith Lord who thinks (temporarily at least) that he/she is an ordinary Republic grunt? Someone like that would be far too dangerous to just leave alone. Would they find some way to draft him/her into the Service Corps and take the risk of him influencing other Force-sensitive Jedi washouts? Would they mind-wipe him/her again? Would they turn him/her over to the Republic? Would they arrange an accident?
    • Oh, that's not even the beginning of it. Remember the horror you felt at the berserk Selkath on Hrakert Station, or the Peragus Mining Facility, or the Harbinger? Now remind yourself that you are the kickass protagonist, a real face. Imagine what it must have been like to be one of the nameless victims.
    • Here's another: just what exactly did Revan do to the Jedi that he was kidnapping to places like Dxun, Korriban, and Lehon? You know, the ones he wanted to "break"?
    • How the hell did Sion end up the way he was? And Nihilus?
    • How many people would have died if Kreia succeeded at destroying the Force? And would that really make the galaxy a better place?
      • Either way you look at it, it's nightmarish. If her hypothesis was correct, then you just allowed all the horrors of the Empire and the Jedi-Sith wars past this point to exist. Thousands of years of war and billions of lives could've been spared if you didn't stop her. If her hypothesis is incorrect, the worst case scenario is this: considering the Force is connected/generated to life, she may have ended up murdering EVERY living thing in the entire UNIVERSE. This is the kind of death toll NEKRON attempted.
    • Carth and Canderous have an argument in the first game about "warriors versus soldiers" where Canderous is playing his Proud Warrior Race Guy card to full effect and Carth (a die-hard supporter of the Republic) is having none of it. Of course, they're arguing about the recent (for that era) Mandalorian War. Flash forward three milennia and change later, and we have the Clone Wars, where the "Grand Army of the Republic" is composed of (essentially) Mandalorian slaves. Somehow, I think Misters Ordo and Onasi would be grateful they're long dead by that point.
      • Mandalorians are not a race. They are a culture. A bunch of clones with no understanding of that culture could not possibly consider themselves or be considered Mandalorians.
      • Yes and No. While the fact that they are clones of a Mandalorian isn't enough, the EU suggests that Fett incorporated Mandalorian traditions into their training.
        • Something that should be considered: Jango Fett sold his genetic code to the Kaminoans and helped develop the training curriculum for the Clone army, so if the Republic is to be bashed for using Mandalorian slaves, then they were enabled by a Mandalorian traitor.
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