Darth Nihilus and the Ancient Sith - A big misinterpretation
[1/2]
Hello everyone,
Before I begin, I would like to give credit to @S_W_LeGenD and @Freedon Nadd for helping me out with this thread.
In this thread, I am going into the topic relating to Nihilus and the comparison made between him and the ancient Sith. As many of you know, Nihilus has been said to ‘maybe rival’ the ancient Sith as stated by Kreia, who knew a great deal about those ancient Sith. However, most people believe that Kreia was rivaling/comparing Nihilus to the ancient Sith in terms of power. In this thread, I will be discussing and showing this is not actually the case and that her statement has been heavily misinterpreted for years.
Firstly, let us state Kreia’s statement.
“I fear he may even rival some of the ancient Sith. He is already more of a force than a living thing, a hole in the Force that threatens to draw everything into it.”
-Kreia, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 - The Sith Lords
Chris Avellone has expanded upon the previous quote and clarified what Kreia was alluding to.
“Kreia is setting the stage for what we imagined KOTOR 3 to be, and as we had a sense for the power we wanted those Sith Lords to reveal, her predictions are accurate….”
-Chris Avellone , Lead writer of KOTOR 2
I am aware that possibly some events in KOTOR 3 did happen in the Revan novel in some way or form. But it was not Chris who made the novel and so we don’t really know what Chris would have done with his ‘ancient Sith’ or who those ‘ancient Sith’ would have been. The novel was written to continue what Chris made in KOTOR 2 but we don’t know if Chris would have taken another direction with it. Either way, I think I have some pretty interesting points to mention.
Kreia’s predictions, whom are stated to be accurate by Chris, at the end of KOTOR 2 were alluding to Tenebrae’s Sith Empire in the Unknown Regions but the main question is who are those ‘ancient Sith’ that Kreia and Chris were referring to? It could not have been current Tenebrae as she does not know he is alive and she is in fact talking about ‘ancient Sith’ i.e in the past. She knows that the True Sith Empire still exists in the Outer Region but that’s not what she alludes to when she says ‘ancient Sith’ as it she distinguishes between the ‘ancient Sith’ from the True Sith empire she is talking about. She does not know that the current Sith Empire is basically the ancient Sith Empire taken upon by Tenebrae.
Let’s state some important points first:
1-Kreia is knowledgeable about the ancient Sith
2-Kreia knows that a Sith Empire exists in the Outer Regions but does not know that it’s in fact the ancient Sith empire taken upon by Tenebrae
3-Chris says that the power of those Sith Lords (I.e the ancient Sith Kreia talks about) was to be revealed in KOTOR 3 meaning that the ‘ancient Sith’ Lords are not dead and would be revealed. This means that Tenebrae himself is who Kreia is referring to when she says ‘ancient Sith’ but Kreia thinks he is dead after all those thousands of years and hence says ‘ancient’ Sith.
Based on the above points, the ‘ancient Sith’ Kreia talks about is Tenebrae himself (not current Tenebrae) and not the other ancients like Exar Kun, Naga Sadow etc… as they are dead by this time and so their powers were not going to be shown and revealed in KOTOR 3 meaning that Chris was not alluding to them in his ‘ancient Sith’. He was alluding to Tenebrae only as he is the only ancient Sith alive by this time and so would be able to reveal his powers in KOTOR 3, as stated by Chris. Put simply, the ‘ancient Sith’ Chris and Kreia allude to is Tenebrae himself and not any of the other ancients that we know from our perspective.
This also explains as to why Kreia says that Nihilus may rival the ancient Sith (i.e Tenebrae) despite saying that Nihilus is the greatest of the Sith Lords up until his time:
”What do you wish to hear? That I once believed in the code of the Jedi? That I felt the call of the Sith, that perhaps, once, I held the galaxy by its throat? That for every good work that I did, I brought equal harm upon the galaxy? That perhaps what the greatest of the Sith Lords knew of evil, they learned from me? What would it matter now? There is only so much comfort in knowing such things, and it is not who I am now.”
-Kreia, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 - The Sith Lords
The comparison/rivaling here by Kreia is that both, Nihilus and Tenebrae, have drained planets completely out of life with Nihilus draining Katarr and Tenebrae draining Nathema. This big analogy between Nihilus and Tenebrae (the ancient Sith) would have driven Kreia to compare/rival Nihilus to the ancient Sith in terms of this planet draining. Not only that, but this would have driven Kreia to indeed allude to Nihilus rivaling Tenebrae in terms of being an entity/non human as a result of their planet draining. Tenebrae consuming Nathema has made him an immortal and no longer a natural or a human being and even had a side-effect of hunger on him, similar to Nihilus’s hunger. His consumption of Nathema has made him more of an entity and an immortal being. This is an exact analogy to Nihilus becoming more and more of an entity as he consumes and drains planets and thus why Kreia rivals Nihilus to Tenebrae (the ancient Sith) in terms of no longer being human and more of entities. As a matter of fact, this is exactly mentioned in Kreia’s quote itself:
“I fear he may even rival some of the ancient Sith. He is already more of a force than a living thing, a hole in the Force that threatens to draw everything into it.”
Notice how Kreia mentions the ‘rival’ part and right after says that Nihilus is ‘already’ (relating to what has been previously said; i.e the rivaling) more of an entity than a living thing and thus leading to the rivaling/comparison to Tenebrae also being more than a living thing. Note that Kreia is not rivaling Nihilus to Tenebrae’s immortality but to the fact that both of them are entities and not natural living beings anymore due to the fact that both have drained entire planets of the Force. Basically, when Kreia says Nihilus ‘may rival’ the ancient Sith, she is saying that he is becoming more and more of an entity just like Tenebrae, the ancient Sith. She is not comparing Nihilus’s power to the ancient Sith. She is comparing Nihilus’s increasing entity state/form to Tenebrae as he consumes and hungers more and more. Nihilus and Tenebrae have both been explicitly stated to being unnatural beings. This comparison/rivaling by Kreia is even more supported by the following:
[Nihilus]
"... Darth Nihilus, a being of pure hunger and dark side power, was approaching the colony."
―The Conclave at Katarr Codex Entry (Star Wars: The Old Republic
"And it devours him as he devours others - his mere presence kills all around him, slowly, feeding him. He is already dead, it is simply a question of how many he kills before he falls."
―Darth Traya (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords
"Nothing matters except his hunger. Before it devours him totally, Nihilus uses its power to displace his persona into his robes and armor. As his useless body disintegrates, he becomes living primitive intention; at last, the whole of the galaxy becomes food—for Nihilus has become the hunger."
―Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide
"He… if he can truly be called a man any longer… is one of the Dark Lords that pursues you. I do not think he knows what you are, not yet."
- Kreia, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 - The Sith Lords
"Nihilus wore a mask of possible Hendanyn origin and spoke an unsettling, literally extirpating, tongue. Jedi seers sampling it from a Sith holocron proclaimed its intelligibility required mere patience, for Nihilus’ was the language spoken billions of years hence, at the end of all time. Jedi mystics offered a slightly less fantastical hypothesis: impossibly, Nihilus spoke the raw dialect of the Force itself, untranslated by midichlorians - one needed only die to comprehend it."
―Abel Peña (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide Author)