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cellarspider · 3 months ago

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Star Wars: The Old Republic and the virtues of hiding under a rock

After all the fun I had writing a deep dive on the delightfully unhinged decision-making process that gave everyone in the Sith Empire equal opportunity to shoot lightning out of their fingertips, I decided hey, why not do another post on Sith-side stuff? Why not focus on another aspect of how The Old Republic's backstory set up for the players to run around being special little guys?

Welcome to the Chiss Ascendancy, which really would rather not be here, thank you.

Spoilers for the Imperial Agent plotline, Act 2 of the Bounty Hunter plotline, Act 1 and 3 of the Jedi Knight plotline, and for the expansions up through the Traitor Among The Chiss flashpoint storyline, set just after the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion. Also, spoilers for a 30 year old novel series, and bits of current canon. Assume all links to Wookieepedia may include unmarked spoilers for anything and everything under the sun.

Also, many, many side rambles in the picture descriptions. As soon as I realized they were a place I could hide secret bits of brain fluff, I could not be contained.

So, for a little out-of-setting backstory first: The Ascendancy is in SWTOR for one reason. If you're a Star Wars fan, you probably know his name by now. You might even be able to pronounce all of it: Grand Admiral Thrawn, known to his own people as Mitth'raw'nuruodo.

Thrawn was a breakout character from the early Star Wars tie-in Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn, which you can see reflected in the increasing amount of cover space he takes up on each re-release. Zahn may not have totally intended for Thrawn to be the character everybody latched onto so hard—I mean, it was originally the Heir to the Empire trilogy, but it's officially the Thrawn Trilogy now. Which makes it confusing, because Zahn has since written two other trilogies that actually star Thrawn as a main character rather than having him as the main antagonist.

Credit really has to go to Zahn for his work on those books, because despite his occasional insistence to the contrary, they revitalized Star Wars as a fandom. It had been seven years since Return of the Jedi came out, and there'd been nothing since then. George Lucas had been pretty burnt out after RoTJ, and the idea of a multimedia franchise wasn't all that common at the time. There'd been Marvel-produced comics, the West End Games RPG sourcebooks, a few tie-in novels, and a boatload of action figures, but all of those save for the West End Games books were produced to market the movies themselves, or directly profit off of their recent release.

All of these were of variable quality and "Star Wars-y" feel. The Marvel comics brought us such incredible things as a carnivorous green rabbit fighting alongside the main cast, and a couple wild comics by Alan Moore where Leia gets her heart turned to diamond by omnipotent Force spirits. The Splinter of the Mind's Eye novel was written while A New Hope was still in production before George Lucas had decided Luke and Leia were siblings, and you can really tell. Zahn, however, helped by the the West End Games books as a worldbuilding reference, did some stellar work integrating his writing into the Star Wars setting, while simultaneously shaping what fans would think of as a good Star Wars outing for years to come. Hell, some of his inventions made their way back into the movies: the name Coruscant is his. But Thrawn is what most people think of as his big contribution.

And it's for good reason! Thrawn is a memorable antagonist. He's smarter than the imperial officers depicted in the movies. He's able to outmaneuver the heroes on multiple occasions. He's got a unique gimmick that dovetails with the Imperial mindset—while the rest of the Empire utterly disdains foreign cultures, Thrawn takes an Orientalist interest in others' art, using it to build theories of a person or culture's psychology to use against them in war. In fact, as we will see repeated in SWTOR, his original role and his people are often used to represent a less obnoxious, more outwardly reasonable sort of imperial behavior.

He's also a cool-looking blue-skinned, red-eyed alien, later revealed to be from a culture of subterranean xenophobes with complex noble house dramas, among whom he's considered to be an outlier. Through all of this, he overshadowed other characters who may have been intended as the center of attention.

What's really funny is that the very next year, D&D would get Drizzt Do'Urden, a character who unexpectedly overshadowed the others in his series who'd been the intended center of attention, who was a cool-looking gray-skinned, red-eyed drow, from a culture of subterranean xenophobes with complex noble house dramas, among whom he's considered an outlier.

I don't know what precisely was in the zeitgeist in the early 90s, but apparently it was just a time for cool guys who grew up in caves.

It's probably similar fandom tendencies that have made both the Chiss and Drow big players in people's imaginations. Anecdotally, I'm one of those fans. You grow up liking elves, but you also became kind of a goth about it, maybe had a bit of an edgelord phase. You wanted cool elves. Possibly cool elves in space.

Apparently there was a critical mass of folks at Bioware who also were on board with cool elves in space, so they made their way into SWTOR, originally only playable for a couple of Sith-aligned classes. If you were to summarize their narrative role in a single sentence: they collectively act much as Thrawn did, providing a calmer, more collected, largely amoral presence that's peripheral to the overall setting narrative, but provides more substance to the villains.

If one were to take it less seriously, the Chiss end up as the serious side of an evil comedy duo. They are the deadpan comedic foil to the lightning-shooting madmen and their minions, the most obnoxiously british military to ever sail the stars.

So, let's dig into the Chiss a little. You kind of have to, given the "underground city" thing. Details around Chiss history and even biology have not remained fixed as canon has undergone its various convolutions, but it's generally theorized that they were the result of a genetically isolated human colony established on Csilla many thousands of years ago, which has since evolved into a near-human species, often with higher physical fitness than human average, but lower chance of spawning somebody with a Force-y destiny for whatever reason. When hyperspace travel became common, their region of space was discovered to be nigh-impenetrable due to a high concentration of wandering gravitational anomalies, which could turn your ship into an interesting collection of relativistic scrap metal.

This means that the "Unknown Regions" in the galactic west remained largely unexplored by the Galactic Republic, and local powers had to develop their own means of navigating the region. This suited the Chiss just fine, because they really, really don't like hanging out with other people.

The Chiss Ascendancy is a major power in the Unknown Regions, and it's highly isolationist, xenophobic, and authoritarian. A Secret Police force helps maintain internal adherence to the Chiss power structure. The average Chiss citizen in the Star Wars setting will never meet a non-Chiss in their entire life. That is, unless, they're stationed in the Chiss Expansionary Defense Force.

That's a hell of a name right there.

The CEDF takes an imperial pattern of national defense and turns it into doctrine: they never attack first. But if someone pokes the Ascendancy, the Defense Fleet will respond, and they'll make sure the poker can never poke again. But the Expansionary Fleet will scout out areas on their frontier, so, y'know, good luck to anybody who happens to be living there.

Within the Ascendancy, a rotating cast of Ruling Families run the government, noble houses that generally specialize in specific industries, space sectors, or resources. Most of the best positions go to those born into one of these houses, but a common Chiss can theoretically become a "merit adoptive", basically a probationary house member that can eventually become "trial-born" into the house proper, possibly achieving a status of "ranking distant". That is, unless you're found to be Force-sensitive, which during the SWTOR time period would either get you exiled, or you'd spend your life on Force-suppressing drugs.

This culture is, it should be noted again, not presented as nice or right by Timothy Zahn or SWTOR, though getting into the heads of Chiss characters can make it seem very sympathetic from their perspective.

Especially when SWTOR's backstory rolls around, and the Ascendancy had the misfortune of being "discovered" by the Sith Empire.

This led to a rather surprising pivot in Ascendancy policy: upon getting a whiff of what the Sith were about, their response was "Fantastic! Let's be friends," and swiftly negotiated a treaty to become a vassal state to the Empire, in exchange for the Empire leaving them the fuck alone.

Zahn's novels in the current Star Wars canon allude to this as a time that the movie-era Chiss are not exactly fans of, but it has an undeniable logic. The Sith are, frankly, out of their collective minds. They're also really focused on beating the snot out of the Jedi and the Republic, and they'll roll over anyone who gets in their way. Or might seem to be in their way. Or might, given the right paranoid squinting, one day maybe get in their way.

And given the Chiss and Sith tendencies toward similar, albeit factually incompatible politics around somebody being the most special thing in the universe, the two factions had enough in common to make the deal work. At least, up until the inevitable day when the Sith would presumably try and take a swat at the Chiss. This was a delaying tactic to defend the Ascendancy against an invasion from "Lesser Space", nothing more.

One might ask, if they're worried about the Sith, why not ally with the Republic? Well, there's two issues. One, the Republic doesn't have a damn clue where the Chiss are, and the Chiss want to keep it that way. The Empire has some clue where the Chiss are. That's more clues than the Chiss want anyone but themselves to have, really.

And furthermore, the Republic isn't really a better option from the Chiss perspective. It's an alien government, largely run by more of those weird Humans that are all over the Empire as well. Its history shows periods of aggressive colonization and expansion, and, the Sith would be very quick to tell anybody, the Republic sometimes decides to just completely obliterate their foes. Do the Chiss also do that? Yes, but they're Chiss, dammit, they're allowed.

So really, the ideal outcome for the Chiss would be that the Empire and the Republic beat each other senseless, with the Empire eventually imploding and the Republic never finding out where the Ascendancy is at all.

As Star Wars will eventually bear out, that's what happened. The Sith Empire falls apart at some point past SWTOR's time period. And in fact, the Republic would eventually go on to implode twice before anyone in the wider galaxy remembered that Chiss existed, when that funny little guy named Thrawn showed up. So, the Chiss might be the only ones who technically achieved their goals with this whole fiasco. How did they pull that off? And how funny is it to watch someone turn imperial chauvinism on the Sith Empire? The answers are: improbably, and extremely.

Throughout the initial war between the Empire and the Republic, the Chiss served as an unseen aid to the Sith. They provided resources and covert services, but they were utterly unknown to the Republic. They were also making moves unbeknownst to the Empire—if they were going to be breaking their usual isolationism, well, why not take up some territory that nobody else wanted while nobody else was looking? And even when they did let the Empire know they were on a planet, they didn't actually tell them where, or how many. Because really, the Empire wasn't too jazzed about somewhere like Hoth. But the Chiss? With a frozen homeworld, their cities dug deep into the glaciers and bedrock? Perfect! Just like home, but with more wampas. They built a sizeable forward base there, and kept that to themselves for decades.

In fact, if confronted about the existence of the base by an Imperial agent, the man in charge of the base will respond "Our presence here is legal, based on all existing treaties. The fact that you never noticed us is immaterial."

Lol. lmao, even.

By the time we get to Hoth in SWTOR, that base is still secret, but there's a sizeable CEDF detachment that are embedded with the Imperial forces on Hoth. And it's a decent little slice of folks, at least within the EDF. You get a whole range of people, from utter jerks like Warden Khel who tries to detain precious Jawa angel Blizz, to well-liked and respected commanders like Captains Yunaali and Yudrass, the later of whom has to patiently deal with the dumbest white man in existence.

Yudrass is also interesting for a further reason: his voice actor Tony Armatrading was from a British Afro-Caribbean background, and his accent comes through in his performance. In the context where the Empire is firmly Evil Space Wizard Britain, the accents of the Chiss stand out. They're a much more heterogenous mix. Yudrass speaks fluent Basic, but some of the others don't. One speaks Huttese, because he was originally assigned to the Outer Rim and hasn't had the chance to pick up a further language since then. A few speak limited Basic, best illustrated by the guy who gives a delightfully unenthusiastic response to finding out a non-Chiss player character has survived an attack by Imperial traitors: "You're still alive. Huh."

Hoth is also a fantastic place for turning around the chauvinism back on the Imperials, if you're playing as a Chiss. You can summarily ignore human officers in favor of engaging with their Chiss subordinates. You can work to have Yudrass promoted, both because of his competence and because you transparently don't like the other guy's face. You can privilege information gathered by the CEDF, because obviously they don't deal in bad intel. If you're playing an Imperial Agent, you can end up siding with the Chiss so comprehensively that you become a merit-adoptive of a Ruling Family. You can even reveal that you were never earnestly working for the Empire at all.

On the other side of the war, It's unclear when the Republic learns about the Chiss. Probably at some point during the quagmire over Hoth, but they're never thought of as a major player. Nobody in the Republic off Hoth really mentions them. They're treated with extreme suspicion, with a couple lines that are pretty eyebrow-raising. A Chiss defector dies while trying to trade information for asylum, and a Republic major responds to the news with "It's just as well. I'm not sure the men really wanted a Chiss hanging around here." Yikes, my dude.

Still, with their presence revealed, the Chiss seem to have slowly started taking more active roles liaising with the Imperial military, working in Imperial space, or even joining Imperial organizations. This begins as projects by the Ruling Families and other prominent Houses, but individual Chiss also started taking swings at making it in Lesser Space. Some of them may have been average Chiss trying to get ahead outside of the traditional Ascendancy power structure, and some of them might never have fit in well back home in the first place.

This is, for the record, why Chiss are a playable option for the Bounty Hunter class. It's not often remarked on though, and Bounty Hunters don't get much Chiss-specific dialog options.

And it's not like bounty hunters or Chiss are exactly welcomed in Imperial space, though. After all, the Empire has their blood purity laws and all that, if you're a non-human or non-Pureblood, you're constantly subjected to microaggressions and, frankly, macroaggressions. Possibly even megaaggressions. They'd never let Chiss near positions of power, or access to their secrets.

People who've played already know where this is going. And any curious souls who read my last post may recall a really odd evil space wizard gimp who decided he did not give one single fuck about those blood purity laws.

Darth Jadus, blessed maniac that he is, opened Imperial Intelligence to alien recruitment with all the political grace he was known for, which was none, with a side order of self-aware cultic rambling: Everyone should have equal opportunity to access the misery that is the Empire, because the Dark Side likes it when you do that.

And in so doing, he created a very interesting proposition for motivated Chiss willing to take the risk, and an even more interesting proposition for the Ascendancy's Secret Police: they could now embed sleeper agents within an enemy security force by submitting job applications.

And this is why new players can chose to be Chiss when they play as Imperial Agents. You get a lot of Chiss-specific dialog as an Agent. The game supports player choices to explicitly say you reject the Ascendancy, or that you're secretly working for it. Or, hell, you could play a Chiss who says they're in it for themselves, and then secretly confides later that they're actually an Ascendancy spy!

I am so, so tempted to describe the Agent plot in its absolutely bonkers entirety, but let's stick to the Ascendancy view… for now, at any rate. I probably have another of these essays in me somewhere.

So! Sleeper agents. If the Empire won't ever fuck off by itself, then the Ascendancy wanted to make sure that they had options to give it a push. That would allow them to go back to their usual isolationism, if they still wanted it—You hear at least one Aristocra intimate that the Ascendancy might go all British Empire on the rest of the galaxy, if they see the opportunity. Some Chiss now rather like the idea of being the tiny little backwater kingdom that suddenly owns literally everything, as great powers around it weaken.

Complicating their ambitions, things did not turn out that way. Well, not the way they expected. The Ascendancy was out there playing spy chess, while the Emperor was gearing up to eat the entire chess tournament.

Honestly, there was no way the Ascendancy could've predicted the crazy shit that was going to go down in the Empire. Like, really, nobody saw that coming, not even in the Empire. Except for Darth Jadus, if you're weird enough to let him take a swing at running the entire government. Hell, if you're an Ascendancy sleeper agent, maybe he's precisely the sort of destabilizing force you want in the Empire.

So, when it turns out you accidentally allied yourself with an eldritch monster that wants to Pac-Man all life in the galaxy, what do you do? Well, fortunately for the Ascendancy, the Jedi took care of that one for them! Unfortunately, the Jedi didn't count on the MMO having expansions. Turns out, the Emperor was not entirely dead, just a little dead. And also he had a spare Empire hiding elsewhere, just in case the first one didn't work out.

No, I'm not joking, this really happened.

Meet the Eternal Empire, the Sith Emperor's side project where he put all its points toward a cultural victory and military automation, so when he lost control of that empire as well, his usurper was able to just kind of fling remote-controlled fleets at the rest of the galaxy.

With the Republic and Empire all war'd out, they were pretty emphatically steamrolled by the Eternal Fleet. And because the Emperor had known where the Ascendancy was, they were also in the line of fire.

And so the Ascendancy said "Wow! We hate it! Kindly take some planets and fuck off."

And it worked! They had to pay some exorbitant taxes to the Eternal Empire, but not as crippling as what the other powers suffered—because invading them hadn't been as expensive and they made early moves to placate this new empire and its alien human madness, they mostly flew under the radar, and weren't targeted for reprisals.

After that, there was a whole song-and-dance that included a suspiciously protagonist-shaped person uniting the rest of the galaxy against the Eternal Empire, overthrowing two or three usurpers who'd taken over (depending on whether you count the evil mastermind droid who was just kind of there to vibe), and killing the Emperor again for almost the last time, the galaxy could finally stop with that whole nonsense and come to a realization: Everyone was flat broke.

The concessions to the Eternal Empire had crippled the major powers. The Republic was reeling once again, and the Empire had lost most of its leadership and was currently in a very funny series of events that canonically end up with an 87 year old who loves shenanigans assuming the title of Emperor. the Hutt Cartel was probably still having its own problems because it was only a few years since their Supreme Mogul decided to become a raid boss and got killed, then the next one was a violent Hutt supremacist who threw a tantrum that ultimately dropped his own palace on him, and we have no clear successor after that.

The Ascendancy responded to Imperial inquiries with something along the lines of "Oh, yeah, sorry, we'd really like to help, but the Eternal Empire, wow! They really did a number on us. We can't spare any resources right now. We totally would if we could, though."

Literally no one believes them, but because no Imperial ships have ever landed on Csilla, nobody could call them on their bullshit.

And that's about where things stand! There was a kerfuffle where one of the Ruling Families put their drama on display to foreigners, which was a big faux pas. The result is a brief series of missions that actually take place on an Ascendancy world.

But otherwise, the Chiss have maintained their isolationism up to the present day of SWTOR's story. Are they right to do so? I mean, the game remains pretty consistent with the rest of Legends on the Ascendancy: they're a bunch of very pretty jerks who only look better in comparison to their competition, who are grand champions of jerkassitude, and because we're not in a position to see the Ascendancy inflict itself on other people. If they were a major power on the level of the Sith Empire, we'd probably see a lot more of their ugly side.

And what about playing the part of being one of these people? It's not good, certainly. Turnabout may feel like fair play, but it's not great at actually improving the situation overall.

…But it can be fun to indulge in a bit, in the fantasy of an MMO. Especially when the Empire is just so, so dunkable. It's like a less dangerous version of when the English cricket team of 1932-1933 decided it was entirely sporting to give Australians skull fractures, right up until the West Indies cricket team said "Now hear us out—what if we attacked you with the ball as well?"

And beyond that, this is the game where you can get the chance to shoot lightning at people while your eight foot tall cannibal thrall-maybe-turned-husband approves on the sidelines. If anything, the Ascendancy might suffer from being less goofy than that. But taken in full context of the MMO, they're often standing in as the reserved or reluctant bunch who got collectively dragged into this whole mess and are just trying to ride out the chaos with all clothes, dignity, and eyebrows intact. When subjected to the galaxy's shenanigans, the Ascendancy would rather take the advice of the skeleton meme: