Black Talon

Well, the work week is over (it was short—I had post-Easter Monday off too) and I've just spent a few hours with my wife. At my age, it's getting a little bit on the later side on Friday night. My wife is going to watch some true crime shows while she does the budget for the week, and I'm down here going to do an hour or so of SWTOR before hitting the hay for the night. I think. I've been thrown off all week on sleep; maybe I'll just do this blog post and then go read and listen to some music until I get sleepy. 

Anyway, as I said last post, I finished the main rewards track of galactic season 2, but there's still some stuff to do because I'd like to get the season 2 achievements. That means getting to legendary rank on the reputation track, and getting to 100 weekly season objectives. I've got 70 done now, so it'll take me just over four weeks worth. You can do seven per week before it stops counting for the week. So I'll still do a bit of grinding, but I'll be a bit more relaxed about it, because the dailies don't help me anymore, for instance. Most weeks there's a flashpoint objective. Usually there's a choice of selected flashpoints that you get extra credit for doing. The objective will say something like "do eight flashpoints" but if you do one of the selected ones, you get four extra points. If you also beat the bonus boss, you get another three bonus points. So if you do the selected flashpoint and beat the bonus boss, you actually get eight points and therefore the entire objective just by doing it once. 

I didn't really want to  play any of the flashpoints on the list (first time for that) and I had a character who needed to do the Black Talon anyway, because he was traveling from Hutta to Dromund Kaas. I even recorded it. I had thought that I'd get the bonus boss, as well as another objective about using exploding objects to kill enemies and I'd only have to do it twice. Turns out that the bonus for the bonus sub-boss only counts if you're doing one of the selected flashpoints. Now, I could—and probably should—have come up with a better plan than just running this same flashpoint eight times in a row, but that's what I ended up doing. I did a dark side choice for my first (recorded) one, but then did the light side choice all of the other seven times, so my net effect there is a lot of lightside points gained. I also really got loads of XP; I think I went up a level at least once every time I played it. This character has only done one planet and he's already well into his 30s on level (remember that at launch, you'd play the entire story—ten planets—and top off at level 50. Even now after several expansions have raised the level cap, it's only 80. I'm almost halfway there already. It's a little crazy.) 

Anyway, doing Black Talon all those times, I obviously skipped through the cut scenes and dialogue after the first or second time to make it faster, but I was really impressed with the hypocrisy and sophistry of the Jedi and the Republic. Which, curiously, I don't believe that the writers notice, because... SJWs, most likely. Not that the Empire are really the good guys, or anything—in fact, they're often so cartoonishly, silly in their villainy that it just makes me kind of laugh. They're like the Boris Badenov and and Natasha Fatale of villains. But the Republic and the Jedi aren't the good guys either. One of the first sub-boss fights you have to do is against four Republic boarders in the hanger of your ship. While you're fighting them, they shout dialogue like "you shouldn't have attacked us." This is quite curious, because we didn't attack them. We just showed up with our ship to demand that the stolen secrets and the spy that ran off with them be returned to us, and literally within about a second or two of re-emerging from hyperspace, they somehow were already firing on us and sending boarding parties after us. They attacked us, yet had the gall to try and take the moral high ground and say that we attacked them?

After this, you get a long-distance call from Satele Shan herself. She makes a bunch of entitled and thoroughly unreasonable demands, like we need to let the spy and his stolen secrets go, because it makes people feel bad if we fight to protect ourselves from their aggression. Quite literally. She says that we're lying when I say that I know that they have a defector with stolen top secret plans on him on the ship, but of course, I'm not. They do indeed have such a defector with stolen plans, which is the whole freakin' point of the mission, to recover him. And then she threatens me, and tries to appeal to some kind of humanitarian spirit; "these skirmishes only happen because we let them. Oh, by the way I'm on my way to destroy your ship after I get done destroying these three Imperial dreadnaughts that I'm destroying, and then I'll kill you."

Sometimes the writing is a little bit clever when it broaches things that resemble modern politics and the corruption of the Republic. But most of the time, it's kind of clueless. Just like George Lucas himself seemed to be clueless most of the time (but occasionally seemed to imply otherwise) about how the Jedi and the Republic were the villains in the Prequel trilogy and that Kenobi and Yoda were both dead wrong about all of the advice that they gave Luke during the original trilogy—yet somehow they were still the heroes and the good guys, even though everything that they did made them into villains. Just because the Empire and the Sith were bad doesn't mean that the Jedi and the Republic were good. This kind of gaslighting is still with us all of the time, though. In fact, it's become one of the most prominent features of our age; the most evil people who ever lived telling us that they're good to oppress us, take away our freedoms, steal our wealth, our culture and our country from us and give it to entitled and ungrateful covetous Third World hordes, groom our children into victims of sexual predation, etc. Because that's those are all the right things to do! Good heavens, I hate Democrats sometimes. And I hate most of the Republicans who are either too stupid or too cowardly to tell them to knock it off and actually be serious about it, preening in self-righteousness even as they demonstrate grotesque evil. Er... anyway. Yeah. this is becoming one of my biggest dissatisfactions with Star Wars; that it's written as an excuse and justification for evil. It's OK to be even MORE evil than the so-called evil that you're opposing as long as you can justify it by warping morality so that you can pretend that those you're opposing are actually the evil ones and not you. And this crap goes all the way back to the original trilogy although its gotten considerably worse over the years as the creative types of Hollywood have degenerated into the most evil society that's ever been on Earth since the time of Noah.

Anyway, once you apprehend the traitor, he tries to guilt-trip you by talking about both sides planning some vaguely spacey sounding riff on the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction, but I don't see how this is supposed to work, as he can give no indication of how what he was doing makes anything better for anyone at all. He's just an evil, selfish traitor who's managed to convince himself that he's justified in doing whatever he wants to do because that's what he wants to do. Just like liberals have been doing for decades. The story is more laughably yet also infuriatingly bad the more I had to repeat it. Laughable for how ridiculous the premise of it is; infuriating because of its obvious resemblance to real life.

I finally finished my last playthrough of it earlier this afternoon, so I'm ready to actually bring this character to Dromund Kaas for good. Or, more likely, I'm ready to switch to another character actually and move him (or maybe her; I think I'd like to finish Revecca's sojourn on Korriban next) on to the next planet now.

UPDATE: Oh, and I forgot to mention; the "tough Admiral Ackbar" who says "You're talking to a Republic Special Forces Commander, meat. Show some respect!" Meat? Do you know who you're talking to? It's like the writers at BioWare went out of their way to make sure that the Republic are not only not really the good guys, but they're also not even likable guys in any way whatsoever. They're obnoxious and annoying at best; full of a toxic stew of arrogance and self-loathing at worst. Like they're liberals, or something, as written by liberals. Which, no doubt, they are.