Playing SWTOR again and I forgot how like weirdly lib colonialist the gameâs politics are.
Like thereâs the early missions on Tython with the illegal religious settlers provoking the âsavageâ indigenous habitants who may or may not have the capacity for sentience but the game didnât feel like exploring that more than an off-the-track side quest and one in-game mail.
But Iâm playing the KOTFE expansion and the Anarchy in Paradise chapter is so illustrative of this libbed up colonialism. Itâs explained to us that Zakuul is the homeworld of an empire that has colonized the rest of the galaxy. Because of the resources extracted from the playersâ worlds, the people of Zakuul live in blissful luxury. Weâre directly shown that theyâll only support resistance in so far as theyâre not materially negatively impacted so that they can cosplay rebellion and have fun. Theyâll immediately condemn any resistance that actually threatens the luxuries theyâve been extracting. These all directly reflect IRL conditions of imperial core-periphery relations and conditions of petite bourgeois resistance within the core. So when it comes time to blow up the infrastructure that allows them to live in this luxury, the game tells you itâs a Dark Side of the Force option to go through with that.
Koth, in particular, is so illustrative of this. Like itâs so clear the writers believe his issue is that he misplaces his trust, he trusts the emperor but doesnât trust Senya. But the actual issue is that Koth is blind to the fact heâs a colonialist. If you explode that infrastructure in Zakuul, Koth scolds you for that and acts like parks being destroyed is anything equivalent to planets being colonized. In another conversation he admires the emperor outloud and when you remind him of the body count of the emperor in the colonized world he just goes: âwell he was nice to Zakuulâ.
Like itâs so âboth sides are the sameâ