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"YaeVizsla;c-1589552" wrote:

"JacenRoe;c-1589485" wrote:
I thought both KOTOR protagonists had a definitive profile in cannon... or what was cannon... current legend but previously cannon. Point is you could play them as whatever you wanted, but the "real" Revan was male, and the Jedi Exile was female. Is that not right?

There was a set of novels based on the events of the game. Which gets into questions of canon levels, conflicting canon, the shifting of canon levels after the Legends novels have been ejected on the whole but KotOR has been nodded to repeatedly, and whether that nod goes to the game or the books.

However.

Galaxy of Heroes has not drawn from print media. And it's very clear, it's the KotOR games that hold that special place in the franchise, not the novelizations of them. There may be some people to whom the books are more important than the games. They are a minority, and the books are a consequence of the games; a peripheral product to the games.

The way Bioware RPGs work is, the protagonist is pants. They are not a character. Shepard in Mass Effect is a dull blank slate for the player to project onto. When the player creates their Shepard, goes through the game, makes choices, builds relationships? While the Shepard in the void is boring, my Shepard and your Shepard are interesting, fascinating characters, and a deeply personal experience. And our Shepards may be completely different, but they are both completely valid. And invalidating either of our Shepards is the worst thing a subsequent work can do to Mass Effect.

Also, KotOR holds a special place for a lot of fans because Star Wars at the time was very white and very male. Revan and The Exile were for many groups a precious source of representation, and representation matters. To a lot of folks, Star Wars is just the movies and the video games. And for those people, the only case of a black woman with a name in Star Wars until Solo came out could well have been their Revan and their Exile. (If we don't count the Life Day special. We should never count the Life Day special.)

Declaring what small amount of representation there was invalid is deeply problematic given Star Wars' fraught history with regards to race.

I get the whole, 'the character is your avatar', thing. People played through the game after making the toon look like themselves. That's fine. I played through KOTOR 2 as a dude, and I'm not going to care if she's added to the game as a girl if that's what the official version says she was. She was an interesting character no matter what.

And nobody will know what Revan looks like under his mask. So if anyone cares about that they can imagine him however they want. But if the official version was male, then they don't have to do awkward verbal acrobatics to leave it ambiguous.