Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is celebrating its 20-year anniversary today, July 15, 2023. Below, we look at how it challenged and subverted some of Star Wars' most common tropes.
Star Wars is obsessed with what machine and memory create, the blurred selves at the intersection of metal and flesh. Darth Vader is the clearest example of this. Anakin's descent to the dark side renders itself real in his deformed body. Obi-Wan says that he is "more machine than man," a fact that is leveraged in the stated impossibility of his redemption. Evil in Star Wars is associated with a disabled body, especially one that was once meat, muscle, and nerve, but is now wired with circuits.
Droids cannot be "force-sensitive" the way people can, and thus they don't bear the moral weight of metal. But they are still seen as lesser. Droids provide slave labor and are owned by heroes and villains alike. A New Hope establishes within the first 20 minutes that droids' memories are routinely wiped. Luke's uncle Owen suggests it with the casualness of asking Luke to take out the trash. In the Star Wars universe, there is an entire class of people whose capacity to remember is entirely dependent upon the people who own them. Both inside and outside of its fiction, the perceived personhood of sentient beings relies on whether or not you are made of metal.
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