★ Top Fifteen Tournament #8 - Darth Plagueis

LOTL wrote:I am not sure as to how the debating should have evolved on the course of 3 months but I see essentially the same arguments being shaped and reshaped in the same theme as glass gets melted, formed, then melted and then reformed again to different shapes but still, looking at it overall, it is just glass only. Maybe the surface intricacies have changed but not the base quality of the material

As it is, going by a cursory glance, the opinion hasn't changed. Revan is capable enough to contend in the force, especially considering his versatility, and his ability to map that in combat on the go but I am not yet convinced he has the dueling skill or the combat acumen of Plagueis to achieve a victory by a majority

Keep in mind the metric is how large of an amp Malgus would need to win, so a fight between Revan and Plagueis is immaterial in this context, to a degree.

LOTL wrote:I am not sure as to how the debating should have evolved on the course of 3 months but I see essentially the same arguments being shaped and reshaped in the same theme as glass gets melted, formed, then melted and then reformed again to different shapes but still, looking at it overall, it is just glass only. Maybe the surface intricacies have changed but not the base quality of the material

As it is, going by a cursory glance, the opinion hasn't changed. Revan is capable enough to contend in the force, especially considering his versatility, and his ability to map that in combat on the go but I am not yet convinced he has the dueling skill or the combat acumen of Plagueis to achieve a victory by a majority

Obviously I'll peruse the arguments in proper detail but those are the impressions I have. Also apologies if I come across as condescending, that is not the intention at all. Merely that I have seen many of these concepts previously

Revan is at best a peer of Vitiate, and thus below Plagueis.

Revan is far beneath Vitiate - read my debunk post of him on the previous page.

Revan is 100% not ~ Vitiate. 

I'm abstaining for now unless a tie occurs.

Which is why I said "at best".

Ant, I have comments on this aspect:


D. FORCE IN BALANCE

Darth Gravid was "driven increasingly mad" by "his attempts to straddle the two realms" of the Force and "introduce Jedi selflessness and compassion" into Sith teachings. Plagueis later reflected that what Gravid sought to achieve was impossible and that no Dark Lord could intermingle with the light side after the dark had "staked a claim." 

Star Wars Darth Plagueis wrote:A human Sith Lord whose short reign had elapsed some five centuries earlier, Gravid had been persuaded to believe that total commitment to the dark side would sentence the Sith Order to eventual defeat, and so had sought to introduce Jedi selflessness and compassion into his teachings and practice, forgetting that there can be no return to the light for an adept who has entered the dark wood; that the dark side will not surrender one to whom, by mutual agreement, it has staked a claim. Driven increasingly mad by his attempts to straddle the two realms, Gravid became convinced that the only way to safeguard the future of the Sith was to hide or destroy the lore that had been amassed through the generations-the texts, holocrons, and treatises - so that the Sith could fashion a new beginning for themselves that would guarantee success.

Revan proved Plagueis wrong.

(1) When Revan recovered his mask, "in an instant, all his lost memories came flooding back to him." These experiences came from when he "wielded tremendous dark side power" with megalomaniac and sociopathic beliefs. However, Revan was able to reconcile and merge his wholly distinct Sith and Jedi ideologies and identities together. Revan then "wielded the dual philosophies of Sith passion and Jedi tranquility" to the point he could "release the Force in its purest form."




So, two things here:


1. Darth Gravid essentially is a Sith trying to be a Jedi in the novel. In the colloquial sense, it means that a person born and brought to the dark side, someone who has known nothing but darkness, selfishness, and negative actions, thoughts and behavior throughout his life, without any exposure to goodness, kindness, compassion or any of the redeeming qualities of the light is trying to be good



Going by a philosophical point, do you get how idiotic that very notion is actually? It is a common theme in Star Wars and even in life that human beings are seduced by the dark side, or by our base emotions and that we have to exert a great deal of control over them to maintain sanity and order and ensure that you be tethered to the light. Case in point, it is impossible to expect a person that has stayed in the jungle throughout his life to suddenly become civilized and conform to the order of society without expert help, by mere observation.



It is axiomatically contradictory, though the terms that we use here are not rigorously correlated but they do basically have a correlation. Such a concept is axiomatically impossible.



2. In contrast, Revan has spent his entire life as a Jedi, been indoctrinated to its principles and been exposed to it for more than 30 years in the Jedi Order by the Council. Meaning, he has a much deeper connection to the light side than Gravid would ever have, even if he studied the light side for 100 more years properly. He has basically been born to it. He turned to the dark side because it is a small part of his nature, because of the exposure to the planet, and because of the Sith( Vitiate), most of which are surface level factors that not only take into account nature but also the circumstances of the time and the place. But biggest of them all, he has the redeeming factor in Bastilla in love, that has thematically been shown to be the biggest reason why people from the dark go to the light. Meaning he not only had the tether to his Jedi self through his past experience as a Jedi but also love.



So the conclusion? He can allow himself to master the aspects of the force that Jedi would consider corrupted because of his exposure to the dark side, but because of love and his experience as a Jedi, he can also master light side techniques


This is not because of some amazing super mastery or perspective to the force that no one has seen, but rather, a change in his base philosophies( Reborn Revan obviously exhibits both light and dark side tendencies and leanings) that have manifested as a result of the highly personalized experiences he has seen. Note, that even love wasn't enough to save Vestara simply because the entire culmination of her character development happened by Sith and on meeting Ben, she was too set to change.



Note that this is not a rigorous argument, but merely a set of observations but it is entirely possible to rationalize Revan's mastery of both the light and the dark as a result of his unique experiences and perspective. The kind of perspective that Plagueis and the likes never could have

I. MACHINE CORE CHANNEL

Summary: During the events of Shadow of Revan, a coalition is formed between the Sith Empire and Galactic Republic/Jedi Order against the Order of Revan, led by the resurrected Revan. Revan attempts to use an ancient superweapon called the Machine Core, housed in the Temple of Sacrifice, to destroy all life on Yavin IV in order to resurrect Vitiate. A large strike team of Republic champions, led by the Hero of Tython, attacks Revan before the ritual begins. During the fight, Revan "creates a Force resonance with the Machine Core” and attempts to “channel its power into an immense attack." The channel "deals periodic [tele]kinetic damage to enemies within 1km" and, after two minutes, would “deal massive damage to enemies within 1km." However, the strike team interrupts Revan’s channel and stops it before competition. 

A. PURPOSE OF THE CHANNEL

Contention: Azronger and The Ellimist argue/insinuate that, because Revan’s attack drew on the Machine Core’s power and took two minutes, his powers are curbed at just one 1km.

Rebuttal:

Revan didn’t channel the Machine Core’s power for two minutes just to stretch the attack a kilometer. The pulsations of Revan’s channel already *instantly* dealt “periodic [tele]kinetic damage to enemies within 1km,” meaning Revan was *instantly* able to spread the attack a kilometer. The reason for the channeling was to steadily increase the potency of the pulsations within the kilometer, culminating with a mega attack that would have dealt “massive damage.” 

For context, the Republic’s command fleet, led by Satele Shan, had “many thousands” of soldiers and Jedi. The Sith Empire’s command fleet, led by Darth Marr, also had “many thousands” of soldiers and Sith. Lana Beniko emphasized, “These aren't just small patrol groups--both navies have gathered their most powerful warships.” These armies established their base “nearby” the Temple of Sacrifice (TOS). The coalition armies pushed forward toward the TOS, establishing a forward position right up to its entrance and also surrounding it from the other sides. It is reasonable to conclude that most of the coalition armies would have been positioned close to the TOS to fend off Revanite attacks rather than twiddle their thumbs at camp. After all, the Revanite War was described as, “War on a scale we’ve never seen,” and Marr said the Revanites “may be the fiercest adversaries we've ever faced.” Ergo, there were easily hundreds or thousands of Jedi and Sith positioned somewhere between the TOS and the “nearby” coalition base, and most were likely concentrated closer to the TOS. 

Now, while you would only need a relatively small amount of power to cripple a Republic soldier, you would need far more to cripple a Jedi or Sith. The intrinsic properties of Force barriers make Force users wildly disportionately capable against telekinetic attacks. According to The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, “The ability of a Force-sensitive individual to create a nearly impenetrable wall of Force energy to protect them from Force attacks. Originally developed and practiced by Umbaran Shadow Assassins, a Force barrier was not perfect; the combined efforts of several powerful Force users eventually could break through.” So, on the aggregate, for Revan to break a single Force barrier, he needs powers that match “the combined efforts of several powerful Force users.” However, Revan’s kilometer attacks opposed hundreds or thousands of Force barrier-active Jedi and Sith. The power needed to break through their defenses and deal “massive damage” would be truly off-the-scales. 

Overall, it’s not that Revan used significant amps and time to stretch an attack across a kilometer, which he actually did *instantly*, but that he used significant amps and times to try to challenge hundreds or thousands of Jedi and Sith. 

---

I think there’s some confusion over what I mean by Revan scaling to the cataclysm of Ziost by being, at the very least, comparable to the weakened Vitiate who achieved the feat. However, the evidence does support that, with very limited resources and time, Revan has the capacity to lay waste to a planet. Proximity to Vitiate aside (which I cover extensively in my Super Fight III debate with Azronger), Revan’s plan in Shadow of Revan necessitated that he be able to drain Yavin IV without any superweapons or followers and with the coalition armies surrounding his vulnerable position. The fact that Revan was “arrogant and obsessive,” as Azronger put it, doesn’t mean he was absolutely insane to the point he thought he could drain a planet but really not even come closer. Revan still had his intellect--just not his wisdom. Everyone else seems to believe Revan could do it, too. Satele Shan says, “The Emperor was not as strong as he might have been had Revan succeeded,” and the Hero of Tython says, “You’re only going to make the Emperor stronger,” rather than dismiss the possibility of Revan succeeding. Theron Shan says, “We stopped Revan. How is that possible?” indicating had the strike team failed then Revan would have successfully resurrected Vitiate via draining Yavin IV. The Emperor’s Wrath even explicitly states, “What you were up to would've resulted in a sure thing,” rather than, “You couldn't even resurrect Vitiate anyway.” Revan’s “If I have to snuff out every life on this world by hand to draw the Emperor out, then so be it!” line, in-context, was not just a general expression, as Revan made clear he would have drained Yavin IV *soon*: “I will waste no more time. This must end--now.” And, again, given Revan was surrounded by the “many,” “many thousands” of Republic and Imperial forces, there was no where else to go and limited time to do anything.

There’s something intuitively profound to be said about the mastery and raw power needed to do something of that scale, as only a handful of characters also directly scale to that level. I know many members resonate with that sentiment but, if you don’t care and want something more real, I provided many other combat-oriented feats in my opener as well. I never even insinuated that Plagueis necessarily couldn’t do the feat also, by the way. However, there’s definite hypocrisy from the Plagueis Brigade for using far more unquantifiable and meta feats like unbalancing the Force or “exploring the depths of the Living Force” yet still refusing to even consider something like draining a planet like Vitiate did to Ziost as usable. 

---

Let’s dive deeper into Abeloth and planet-razing, though.

“Abeloth was surrounded by five powerful Force-users: Luke Skywalker, High Lord Taalon, Saber Gavar Khai, and two others Ben didn't know. It was almost like a dance, with the combatants leaping, somersaulting in midair, tumbling aside. The cries of curses in the musical Keshiri tongue, the unique sound of the sizzle of lightsabers batting back Force lightning, the smell of sulfur all combined to unsettle Ben… Again, the three Sith and Luke encircled Abeloth, and this time they seemed to be wearing her down.” (Fate of the Jedi - Allies)

Abeloth *should* have been able to unleash a telekinetic/lightning/drain wave that atomized the Jedi/Sith strike team besides Luke. Just 0.0000001% of her power *should* have killed Gavar Khai, who was weaker than early teens Ben Skywalker. She couldn’t kill any of them. I would pose that the power/presence of Luke prevented Abeloth from just laying waste to the area in a flash. For the sake of argument, let’s assume Revan could drain a planet in fifteen minutes. Similar to the Abeloth point, that doesn’t mean he could drain a planet also populated by hundreds or thousands of Force users that could resist/push back against any macro-attack he makes. Overcoming their collective defenses would make any planetary attack far more difficult.

I’m well aware that countless Force users were on Ziost when Vitiate consumed the planet, but the context was different than with Revan’s attempt. Darth Bane - Dynasty of Evil comments that, while a Force drain death field is taxing, the energies drained helps further sustain the attack: “The effort of creating an aura of pure dark side energy would have quickly exhausted even Bane. However, as his enemies fell he was able to draw their essence into himself, feeding on their energies to revitalize his fading strength and reinforcing the field in preparation for the next wave of victims.” Vitiate likely continually recycled the energies absorbed by the death wave to push it further out, allowing the attack to gain vast momentum. In contrast, every Force user on Yavin IV was concentrated in Revan’s vicinity. Revan would have had to first overpowered everyone collectively before he could push his drain forwards. The fact Revan couldn’t one-shot galactic armies doesn’t mean he’s weaker than Plagueis, though, lol.

B. CONDITIONS OF THE CHANNEL



Contention: The description of Revan’s channel states the pulsations and mega attack dealt/would deal damage “to enemies” specifically. Azronger and the Ellimist dispute that this precludes the attack also damaging Revan’s allies--the Revanites.

Rebuttal:

(1) If you dropped a bomb that causes “massive damage” to a region that has all your allies and enemies, you wouldn’t just say it “dealt massive damage to enemies.” Revan’s attack also crippling all his Revanites would be insanely character/lore important to exempt. All the developers had to do was write “all” or “everyone” instead of “enemies.” 

(2) Azronger pointed out that Revan’s planetary ritual via the Machine Core would have indiscriminately destroyed all life outside of the TOS. That’s true, but the ritual and the kilometer channel were unrelated attacks. Not to mention Revan wouldn’t want to preemptively cripple/kill the thousands of Revanites defending the TOS before the ritual started--that would have made him vulnerable to the coalition armies. Moreover, the mechanisms of the Machine Core ensured that no one within the TOS would die from it: ”It's a weapon designed to eradicate all living things on the moon, save for those safely inside the temple.” Revan had “countless Revanites” “garrisoned inside” for the ritual, showing he wanted to spare his allies. However, Revan’s kilometer channel was not done through the Machine Core but his body/will, meaning he would have had to of manually targeted his enemies and exempted at least the Revanites within the TOS during the telekinetic pulsations/mega attack.

So, between both a grammatical and lore perspective, it’s clear that Revan’s kilometer channel only damaged his enemies, which adds a whole extra layer of complexity and difficulty, further explaining Revan’s usage of a nexus and channeling time. 

C. EXERTION TOWARD THE CHANNEL

Contention: Azronger and The Ellimist argue/insinuate that, because Revan’s attack drew on the Machine Core’s power and took two minutes, his powers are curbed at just one 1km. More specifically, Azronger argues/insinuates that the nexuses allowed Revan to not care about reserving his power for his upcoming fight with Vitiate, and that Revan was pressed for time during the channel so he would have tried to do it as quickly as possible. 

Rebuttal:

On the point of nexuses, I disagree that the Yavin IV and TOS nexuses meant Revan did not have to worry about Force fatigue. Replenishing Force reserves have almost always been shown as a long process necessitating rest and meditation (Dooku in the ROTS adult novel as perhaps the only exception, though I contend he was washing away his physical fatigue, which has precedent in the lore, not his Force fatigue). That’s not to say that the nexuses didn’t allow Revan to summon more power more quickly, nor speeden the recovery of his reserves, but there’s no precedent for a nexus replenishing slow-to-recover Force reserves faster than they are depleted. On the contrary, Darth Baras still completely exhausted his powers on the Korriban nexus to the point he couldn’t even conjure Sith lightning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2ppG40K-64&t=4m18s). Likewise, when Darth Bane fought an army of techno beasts on a planet that was “a bastion of dark side power” and in a chamber that “overwhelmed his Force awarenesses by a great concentration of dark side power,” his reserves were still almost depleted and needed significant time to recover: “Breathing deeply, he called upon what remained of his Force abilities to replenish his strength. After several minutes the spasms began to fade, and he was able to stand gingerly once more. His body and will were exhausted; the smart thing would be to rest before attempting to use the Holocron. // He had proceeded carefully, still drained from his battle with the technobeasts. The slow pace allowed him to recuperate his energies and rebuild his strength as he probed the crystal archives.” 

Revan normally likely wouldn’t care about his Force reserves in a giant battle with the Republic’s greatest heroes, but he planned to resurrect Vitiate shortly after the fight: “Everyone outside the temple will die shortly, it has to be this.” Further, if the strike team loses to Revan in-gameplay, he goes, “There’s no one left to stop me. I’m coming for you, Vitiate!” which isn’t something you would say if you were about to take a notable break. Note Revan was likely in such a rush to conduct the ritual so that he could do so before the coalition armies/fleets thwarted his plans--he didn’t have all day, and his Revanites were depleting. 

I’ll again point out that Revan effectively told the Hero of Tython that he didn’t bring his full power to bear against the strike team--"Of course, it's so obvious now. You have no idea what I am, what I've become. You don't even begin to comprehend what I've become.” Again, Azronger’s point that Revan was “arrogant and obsessive” doesn’t mean Revan wouldn’t have known the guy he was talking to was the same guy who he just fought and thus would know his full powers, and it’s not consistent with Revan’s character to just lie blatantly. 

Moreover, Revan continued to fight the strike team long after this kilometer channel, and even withstood the planet-destroying Machine Core going unstable and trying to destroy everyone in the vicinity (more on that later), indicating he didn’t pour much of his raw power into the channel or else he should have quickly burnt out afterwards. This only doesn’t follow if his reserves were replenishing faster than he was attacking, but that theory has no precedent in the lore and many counterexamples.

On the point of time, note that the TOS is a multi-level complex with limited means to climb to one level to the next. Revan teleported to a higher level of the TOS to do the kilometer channel, stranding the strike team at the level beneath him. Azronger’s rebuttal to this--”If he really believed the team was struck below, he would never have bothered engaging and proceeded with his plan in peace. And if they really were stuck there, that means they as a collective can’t lift the same set of stars Revan’s spirit did.”--fairly points out that Revan would have just tried the channel from the start and ignored the team if they had no capacity to reach him whatsoever, but I don’t think that means the strike team posed an immediate threat irregardless of level either. Spirit Revan had to either teleport them to Revan’s new location or maneuvered a complex series of rocks for the protagonists to climb to reach Revan (note to Azronger: spirit Revan lifted the staircase for a lower level, not this one). If not for outwardly intervention, Revan would have had a distinctively greater amount of time to attempt the channel uninterpreted. Thus, it’s not that Revan had to instantly rip out this kilometer attack but couldn’t. Rather, Revan could have believed that he had more time to do the kilometer channel than how much he ended up having. Ergo, Revan would not have tried to waste much of his Force reserves if he had the time luxury of using a less taxing power source. 

Consider that you are Revan and plan to launch an kilometer-spanning attack against hundreds or thousands of Force users. Which option would you choose?:

(1) Heavily draw on the Machine Core’s power so you do not have to dig at and waste away your Force reserves unnecessarily, with consideration you are about to face an uber powerful Force user. 

(2) Ignore the Machine Core’s power and invoke some/much of your Force reserves to do the attack solo.

You would obviously choose (1). However, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have instead done (2) also. There’s no way to cap Revan by this.

D. MACHINE CORE CHANNEL RECAP

(*) Revan’s Machine Core channel instantly spread across a kilometer, and he could have likely pushed the attack further in radius. Instead, Revan chose to increase the attack potency within the radius given there were hundreds or thousands of Force users in the region. 

(*) Revan had to specifically target enemies and avoid allies with the kilometer channel, making it far more difficult.

(*) It’s unsupported that Revan devoted much of his Force reserves to the kilometer channel, as he likely wanted to conserve energy against Vitiate, stated that he didn’t use his full power, continued fighting long after the channel happened without any notable fatigue, and was not in an absolute hurry to complete the attack.

Put another way, Revan’s kilometer channel was way more difficult and impressive than it being let on, and all available evidence indicates that it’s still not even a cap for Revan anyway.

--- 

I don't think I have the time luxury to proof-read (sorry for typos) or hold off posting everything in bulk, so I'll be releasing posts as they're finished.

II. MACHINE CORE BACKLASH

Summary: Continuing from (I) the Machine Core Channel, the strike team ambushes Revan during his kilometer channel. They attack him point-blank, causing him to lose control of the energies, which then "overloaded" and "backlashed" within him. Revan is "stunned and unable to act" for three seconds, then gets back up and continues to fight, all the while saying, "No! I won't be denied! I will never give in!" 

A. QUANTIFIABILITY

I’m afraid I don’t recall what you’re referring to regarding some cave being more potent than Palpatine or Abeloth - citation would be nice.

Abeloth concentrated the dark side nexus of a planet into a single building: “Abeloth had somehow managed to harness all, or close to all, the dark-side energy that permeated this world, and compress it into this one pitiable being. What had once been Tola Annax now contained unfathomable dark-side energy waiting to be released. It had been both a trick and a test. Had they attacked her, leaping into the pit and slicing her to ribbons with lightsabers, they would have been at the center of the explosion. No one would have survived-and they might yet not survive.” Luke described it as more powerful than Abeloth or Palpatine, and it could have one-shot him: “Luke could sense the dark side here more strongly than anywhere else he could recall.” // “Toward a city more full of concentrated dark-side energy, of hate, and anger, and fear, and violence, than anything Luke Skywalker had known before.” Obviously Revan didn’t tank anything remotely this powerful, but it’s still a testament to the impressiveness of Revan tanking kilometer-spanning dark side energies all concentrated and ripping him apart internally.  

Anyway, we don’t know how much period damage was delivered with each pulsation, and therefore we don’t know how potent the concentrated backlash was - that was my point. If you argue that the blast - and thus the periodic pulsations as their radii were the same - would have encompassed the coalition base, then it can’t have been very much at all as we see multiple non-Force-users being fine in the aftermath. And if the blast wouldn’t have encompassed the coalition camp, we still don’t know how much damage was delivered.

The idea that Revan would have been far into the channel is unsupported. Teleportation or no teleportation, it realistically couldn’t have taken more than 30 seconds for the strike team to have reached the top floor with Force jumps, especially if they used the floating rocks.

Err, the fact some non-Force sensitives survived doesn’t mean the damage was powerful. Those you linked were specifically next to Marr and Satele when the attack happened, and the attack’s potency would be relatively mostly diminished at the edges of the kilometer. 

As for its general quantifiability, there’s no way to know the exact potency of almost any Star Wars attack/explosion. Though, tanking any explosion coming from your innards is almost unheard of, and tanking a concentrated explosion that was causing damage across a kilometer is *insane* and clear proof of Revan’s ability to tank immense attacks by holding his body together through sheer willpower. If that’s still too vague for you, though, I show below that Revan has explicitly shown to be able to tank lightsaber blades anyway.

B. LIMITATIONS?

Even a nuke with a ten-ton yield would still cause damage where “most residential buildings collapse, injuries are universal, fatalities are widespread” in a one-hundred-meter radius per Nukemap . And the door in The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance would ”easily” have withstood such an explosion but not a Jedi’s lightsaber blade - Sith lightsabers like the one Malgus wields are even more potent.

There’s a difference between a lightsaber blade slowly slicing through a specific point versus blowing down the door via the widespread damage of ten tons of TNT. Focus ten tons of TNT into the space of a lightsaber and I wouldn’t be surprised if it could cut through the bunker as well. Again, the kilometer channel is that overloaded within Revan’s body, ergo it was uber concentrated. I’m also not sure why you are assuming environmental damage across a hundred meter radius is more impressive than damaging hundreds or thousands of Jedi and Sith anyway.

Even if he could tank it with sheer willpower, he would be immediately incapacitated. To reiterate my argument from my previous post as a reminder: “Per your own scan, Revan was ‘Stunned and unable to act’ upon being struck by the detonation. As a reminder, your premise was that ‘Revan surviving suggests his body is highly tethered to his will, not biological functions.’ So, obviously, if his body is incapable of moving or doing anything, it indicates his body briefly wasn’t responding to the dictates of his own will. You yourself noted that ‘even Revan’s will has limits,’ so we can logically conclude that Revan’s willpower was pushed to its utmost by the backlash - not totally spent but clearly briefly discombobulated in the aftermath.” And, as established, the total damage taken is probably not greatly in excess of a lightsaber blade’s energy, so if Revan were ever struck with a lightsaber and he decided to try to keep his body together through sheer will, he would be similarly ”Stunned and unable to act” as his will would be disoriented from exerting itself so monumentally, leaving him completely defenseless and vulnerable. In melee lightsaber combat, a three-second lull in defense is lethal - if Revan gets hit once, he’s going to get hit a second time and die. Therefore, Revan’s spurious ability to endure a direct lightsaber strike through sheer will, even if true, is practically useless in an actual lightsaber duel.

*** IMPORTANT ***

No. The opposite. Revan was “stunned and unable to act” as it pertained to the *fight*, not everything. First, Revan talked throughout the whole process (“No, I won’t be denied! I will never give in!"). Second, and more importantly, consider that the strike team was *right* next to Revan when the kilometer explosion erupted within him yet *still* couldn’t kill him when he was "stunned and unable to act" for three seconds. That means Revan was simultaneously holding his body together to resist the kilometer explosion AND the direct attacks of the strike team, meaning he was *actively* tanking lightsaber strikes. Ergo, even if you think the kilometer explosion feat is ambiguous, tanking lightsaber strikes is not.

This is a red herring. Using Force energy to deflect the energy of a lightsaber blade is entirely different from telekinetically holding your body together as the lightsaber blade’s energy tries to rip it apart on a molecular/atomic level. Not only is bringing Satele up irrelevant in that sense, but I’m also not convinced Revan scales above her feat. She seems to be a disproportionate savant in tutaminis like Corran Horn, as indicated by the fact that her subsequent, lightsaber-energy-supercharged telekinetic blast only pulverized a relatively small portion of a cliffside - impressive, but not beyond the likes of AotC Obi-Wan Kenobi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ToztqqDcaY&t=4m

Vs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmJqgdaTArM&t=7m20s

Satele’s telekinetic defenses don’t scale from her energy defenses, so even if Revan could circumvent or outright overpower the former as you allege, it doesn’t mean he can overpower or scales from the latter.

It’s not a red herring. Your argument is that Revan’s standing is “limited” by the kilometer channel, but your also arguing padawan Satele Shan could summon far greater power than that feat. Revan, who would shitstomp padawan Satele, therefore scales wildly above your take on the kilometer channel. There’s no evidence whatsoever that Satele was a tutaminis savant, lol. First, being a savant is commonly genetic and runs in the family (e.g. like Corran Horn, who you compared Satele too). Neither Revan nor Bastila Shan are indicated to be tutaminis savants. Second, Satele never used the ability again, which is weird if she’s an uber savant with it. Third, Obi-Wan blowing up Durge’s squishy insides wasn’t more impressive than Satele pulverizing a cliffside. Fourth, Satele’s attack was concentrated against Malgus specifically. Most of the energies would have been against him and his Force barrier.

C. REVAN’S NEW FEAT

What? ”everything in the vicinity” would include the strike team members, including the non-Force-sensitives. As Revan’s channel had been broken at that point, his life force would have been drained the same amount as everyone else’s - an amount not enough to kill even non-Force-sensitives, it seems. He clearly didn’t endure a planetary drain.

None of them died. They all team up again to fight some of the Six Gods.

And resurrecting them like that is simply a matter of pulling their spirits back from the Netherworld in the brief period when their consciousness is still intact. It has been replicated ad nauseam by massively pre-prime Plagueis.

There’s no evidence that the same team that fought Revan also fought the Six Gods. The odds of that are actually very slim given the team that fought Revan was handpicked from Satele’s command fleet whereas the team that fought the Six Gods featured nearby surviving Jedi after the War of the Eternal Throne. The only character that definitely fought in both was the Hero of Tython. 

I think you misunderstood my Machine Core argument, so I’ll explain again. At the end of the TOS fight--many minutes after the kilometer channel attempt--the strike team rendered the Machine Core “unstable” and it tried to “indiscriminately strip the life force from everything in the vicinity,” including Revan. Recall your argument that a normal kilometer attack would compromise just “0.1%” of the energies needed to planet-raze, and note that the Machine Core was “primed” to wipe out all life on Yavin IV and then became "a violent maelstrom of twisted force essence, indiscriminately stripping the life force from everything in the vicinity,” with Revan being right there. It’s practically certain that its targeted and violent attacks against Revan and co. would have far exceeded just 0.1% of its overall potency. I don’t see why its overall attacks against the vicinity wouldn’t be approaching its full power, as nothing is restraining its rippling energies.

I brought up spirit Revan lost post because he was actively resurrecting strike team members across the fight. Ergo, there’s no way to claim anyone survived this uber drain attack because, besides the fact all but one of them could have died lore-wise anyway, spirit Revan could have just brought them back from the dead afterwards. Even the Hero of Tython could have died by this attack only to be resurrected by spirit Revan. So, I don’t see any way to lowball the feat. Indeed, if Plagueis was within immediate proximity of a planetary super weapon trying to strip away his life essence, I have grave doubts you would try to hand wave it away.

D. MACHINE CORE BACKLASH RECAP

(*) Revan tanked internal kilometer-spanning energies through sheer willpower.

(*) Revan tanked multiple lightsaber attacks point-blank through sheer willpower. 

(*) Revan tanked a planetary superweapon trying to strip away the life force from everything in the vicinity.

Altogether, Revan being a corpse powered through sheer willpower enables him to tank attacks that would kill conventional beings.

@DarthAnt66: Outstanding post

I miss you LOTL

The problems with arguments against Plagueis's lightning feat

The argument against Darth Plagueis’s insane lightning feat (which would be as if in the novel Revan just lay down and let an even more powerful version of Vitiate attack him with all of his might), is that Palpatine wasn’t trying to kill him, but instead drew “more deeply on the dark side than he ever had” to increase the amount of pain. Of course, one would acknowledge that this isn’t in a vacuum the most straightforward interpretation of such a line - the most obvious interpretation of the line is that Sidious is using all of his lethality. So you would need an active reason to support the less obvious one. The one given is:

”Sidious gloats/monologues/etc. afterwards!”


Several problems with that argument:

1. It's a red herring. Whether Sidious was gloating after Plagueis has not only been electrocuted, but had his breathing apparatus broken and was in a ridiculously disadvantageous position against Sidious is unrelated to whether the second lightning strike where Sidious drew more deeply on the dark side than ever before in that attack. Does the fact that Sidious was gloating and monologuing against Yoda mean that he wasn't using all of his power against him?

2. It ignores the fact that Sidious was using Force choke afterwards.

3. If Sidious's goal was to maximize pain instead of lethality, and the way to do that was to use this allegedly special kind of pain-lightning, why did he stop? Why didn't he keep on using it? Force choke presumably wouldn't have been as painful. If he wanted to monologue, he could do so in the middle of such bursts of lightning.

The clear answer (to the already more straightforward interpretation) is that Sidious stopped because the lightning wasn't effective. What worked was the Force choke + broken breathing apparatus; and as has been explained earlier, the mechanics of needing oxygen are very different from regenerating from damage or even Force attacks. Sidious gloats to Plagueis that his midichlorian manipulation is failing because he's being choked, but the super-super-super lightning isn't mentioned again as a factor at all.

4. If Sidious was nonetheless using more of his power than he ever had to inflict this pain, why couldn't he completely incapacitate Plagueis? His lightning wasn't enough to prevent Plagueis from stumbling up and launching telekinetic storms.

5. If Sidious was so gung-ho about just toying around with his master, why did he:

• Try to kill Darth Plagueis with a >>>100 megaton nuclear warhead
  
• State that his master's escape of said nuclear warhead made him seem "nearly omnipotent"
  
• Speculate over whether his master was several steps ahead of him in power
  
• Refuse to act against him until he when he was drunk and asleep - and even then backed off from doing so until the dark side whispered to him (and it wasn't to learn more from him - he had already tried to get Plagueis killed)
  
• Speculate over whether the feeling of a power greater than himself reaching out to him was his master
  
• Feel caution over even approachiing Plagueis's corpse out of fear that he was still alive
  

Now the other complain brought up is:

”Other people have survived Force lightning!”


What examples are there of anyone tanking, without a barrier or lightsaber, the full power of a TPM-Sidious tier being's lightning?

The only example that has been brought up is RotJ Luke. However, in this case the "all of his power could mean power to torture" makes more sense because Sidious was very clearly trying to torture Luke to death, and Luke at that stage was NO threat to Sidious. 

• RotJ Sidious didn't try to have Luke nuked
  
• RotJ Sidious didn't wonder if Luke was omnipotent
  
• RotJ Sidious didn't wonder if Luke was way more powerful than him
  
• RotJ Sidious didn't hesitate to attack Luke until he was drunk, asleep and the dark side told him to
  
• RotJ Sidious didn't fear that Luke had a way to cheat death (and Sidious feared even after Plagueis's death that he had)
  

So this is not a remotely comparable example.

Of course, do you really think that Sidious's full power lightning can't kill someone? Of course it can. 

Finally:

”Plagueis's clothes weren't scratched!”


This one's easy - the potency of a Force attack isn't capped by its environmental damage. Valkorion's lightning that killed Darth Marr didn't actually cause any environmental damage, for example. What matters is that the potency would relate to the killing/disabling of the target, and here the limits of Palpatine's power failed.

Plagueis ~ TPM Sidious

No serious objections to this parity have been raised. The lightning feat itself is not even necessary; you can just look at Palpatine's handling of Plagueis, where he's scared to face him head on and was scared even when he was drunk and asleep to make a move until the dark side told him to, even though he had already tried to have his master nuked. There's also an encyclopedia quote that says Sidious took out Plagueis as soon as he had the ability to.

In fact, the case for Plagueis ~ TPM Sidious is FAR stronger than the case for Revan ~ Vitiate. Revan was completely incapacitated by Vitiate's lightning.

TPM Sidious >> Revan

Or rather; how many supremacy quotes are you willing to just dismiss? 1? 2? 5? In the absence of any concrete scaling of Revan over Sidious besides "well maybe his teleportation is cool", shouldn't the default assumption be that repeated Legends-canon statements are accurate unless strongly contradicted? Where's the contradiction?

Even from a holistics standpoint, it bears noting that the Sidious supremacy quotes are not just "well here are some Sith, Sidious seems stronger than them, let's give him this accolade". The holistics are that Sidious's position as the most powerful sith lord ever is central to his place in the story and to the reason why the movie saga is labeled the most important period of the Star Wars galaxy, why the Chosen One was needed, etc. Palpatine is supposed to be the culmination of the Sith even as early as TPM.

Unbalancing the Force

This is one of the most impressive feats in all of Star Wars. I've gone into this earlier, but one thing to note here is that (apprentice) Sidious and Plagueis are depicted as unprecedented threats to the galaxy. 

If midichlorian manipulation isn't that important, why did the Force itself conjure the Chosen One against it?

Because that was the most immediate trigger for it.




-----------

How can you quantify Revan's nexus feats?

Ant has tried to refute this by saying that it's balanced out by Revan being injured, Satele's BM, etc. But the burden of quantifying this is in Revan's camp. You can't just wave your hands and say "it's a wash!"

Note that this isn't some sort of small nexus that can be dismissed as a nitpick - the Yavin IV's nexus (to say nothing of the dark temple super-super-super nexus) is described as an overwhelmingly powerful concentration of the dark side that characters like Satele Shan struggle to even withstand, and that scales above over nexuses that can instantly drive Jedi insane. The potency of the nexus is referenced multiple times in the game and other source material. 

If a disembodied narrator that can zoom in on specific events that had no witnesses is too unreliable to use (aka Sidious supremacy quotes), why are we using an explicitly insane Revan's word?

^ the claim that SoR Revan > Revan Reborn is based on him claiming that his powers "intensified".

The claim that Revan can absorb Yavin IV is based on Revan's own word (which could've been hyperbolic even from his perspective).

Everyone else in the story is absolutely certain that Revan stands no chance against Vitiate. This includes the light-side Revan spirit.

-----------

Anyway, I may give more specific replies to Bran, Ant, etc. later.

@DarthAnt66 @lorenzo.r.2nd @Bart @Seturna @NotAA3 @EmperorCaedus @Jake @Syndiciate @IG @Isv @MasterCilghal @BoD @The lord of hunger @Sas @Ash @Blade_of_Dorin @Cheth @AlexSerp @KingofBlades @darthbane77 @DarthSkywalker0 @Praxis
@AlexSerp
@The lord of hunger
@LOTL

TPM Sidious >> Revan

Or rather; how many supremacy quotes are you willing to just dismiss? 1? 2? 5? In the absence of any concrete scaling of Revan over Sidious besides "well maybe his teleportation is cool", shouldn't the default assumption be that repeated Legends-canon statements are accurate unless strongly contradicted? Where's the contradiction?

TPM Palpatine only has three alleged supremacy quotes over Revan. Allow me to repost my thoughts on them:

(1) "Meet Darth Sidious – the most powerful Sith Master who ever lived." (DK Readers)

-> In-universe limited source that is unaware of or excludes EU content, and ironically holds Plagueis died decades beforehand anyway.

(2) "Sidious is the most powerful Sith ever." (DK Readers)

-> In-universe limited source that is unaware of or excludes EU content, and ironically holds Plagueis died decades beforehand anyway.

(3) "Darth Plagueis was the most powerful Sith to ever live." (DP blurb)

-> Specifically addressed by Leland Chee to be interpreted as a subjective statement.

(Note to whom it may concern: In-universe limited means the claims within the source is not necessarily true.)

tl;dr: PLAGUEIS HAS NO BINDING "MOST POWERFUL" QUOTES OVER REVAN.

@DarthAnt66 The novel itself states it in-story. Plagueis is aware of Vitiate and still deems him to be his inferior:

Darth Plagueis wrote:But Plagueis now understood that Tenebrous had been wrong about sorcery, as he had been wrong about so many things. Yes, the gift was strongest in those who, with scant effort, could allow themselves to be subsumed by the currents of the Force and become conduits for the powers of the dark side. But there was an alternative path to those abilities, and it led from a place where the circle closed on itself and sheer will substituted for selflessness. Plagueis understood, too, that there were no powers beyond his reach; none he couldn’t master through an effort of will. If a Sith of equal power had preceded him, then that one had taken his or her secrets to the grave, or had locked them away in holocrons that had been destroyed or had yet to surface.

I'd emphasize the lightning feat again (as summarized above) - the counters to it have been, IMHO, quite conclusively debunked.




I'll address the anti-supremacy quote arguments more in detail later, but I'd like to zoom in on:

DarthAnt66 wrote:

(3) "Darth Plagueis was the most powerful Sith to ever live." (DP blurb)

-> Specifically addressed by Leland Chee to be interpreted as a subjective statement.

This is one of the reasons why the "ask loaded questions to authors/Chee on twitter" tactic is so mocked.

The chances that Leland Chee based his answer on either reading the Plagueis novel for power levels or some personal opinion on whether Plagueis > Vitiate/Revan are lower than the chances that George Lucas will be elected president of the United States in 2020. You could've sent him any blurb quote, and he would've given the same response. But the fact that a particular quote was selectively chosen is used as some grand point rather than an attempt to selectively ask questions. Indeed, Chee responded by referring to BLURBS IN GENERAL, while he could've just answered specifically to that one.

If instead someone had asked Chee about some other quote about power levels, he would've given the same answer. Chee has never backed definitive power levels (not just quotes - but levels at all) (except for one time where he said that The Father was the most powerful - but that's hardly contentious). But apparently, which questions just happen to be asked on twitter are supposed to change the lore now?

It's one thing to do analysis not in the spirit of the intent in-universe, but out of universe, intent needs to matter.

Now; regarding "license to be subjective", that means that blurbs can be subjective (just like everything can be - even the movies can be subjective, given, say, false flashbacks in TLJ). If you look at the blurb though, there is a clear delineation between the "most powerful" part - which is a statement - and the second sentence, which is a subjective question.

tl;dr: PLAGUEIS HAS NO BINDING "MOST POWERFUL" QUOTES OVER REVAN.

Interesting that you use the word "binding". Even if the word of disembodied narrators that can apparently read the specific thoughts of people isn't "binding", how are any of Revan's arguments binding?

You say that other factors could have balanced the nexus-amp for Revan, or that he could have grown in exact lockstep with Vitiate based on very fuzzy and imprecise scaling from a TP battle, or that he could have drained Yavin IV because he claimed off-the-cuff as much, or that Sidious could have been using a special kind of lightning on Plagueis. How is this sufficient to dismiss supremacy quotes?

A Shorter Lightning-feat tl;dr

I'd like to give an even shorter summary of the lightning feat in case if any readers don't want to read the summary given above. Of course, the point is that a drunk, half-asleep Plagueis tanked Sidious's full-power lightning with no barrier, which shows that 1) he has parity with TPM Sidious (the most powerful Sith ever) and 2) he can use midichlorian manipulation to heal in real-time from Sidious's full-powered lightning (or, if you prefer, he can just tank it with raw power).

The key line: that Sidious drew more deeply on the dark side than he ever had.

At this point you might be familiar with the common attempted rebuttals. The main argument against it is that Sidious was using a pain-lightning form that still required lots of his power but wasn't designed to kill (convoluted, yeah). Here are some smoking guns for the lightning feat / debunks for the counters:

• Sidious was very scared of Plagueis's power, and definitely did not want to play around. His first plan was to nuke him, which would've hardly allowed him to monologue. He then thought Plagueis might be omnipotent, wondered if he was far ahead of him, was scared of his corpse afterwards, etc.
  
• To expand on that: even AFTER a drunk Plagueis had fallen asleep, Sidious didn't want to make a move! He only did after the dark side whispered to him. And by this point he had already tried to nuke his master, so he definitely wanted to. It was fear.
  
• If Sidious was going for pain instead of efficiency, why did he stop using the lightning? Of course, he did so because the lightning failed.
  
• If Sidious could've killed Plagueis easily with his lightning and was using an alternative pain-lightning mode, why couldn't he completely incapacitate his master?
  
• Sidious pausing and monologuing AFTER the lightning and a disabled breathing apparatus doesn't mean he was going easy with the lightning itself. You could use that same logic to say that his attacks vs. Yoda were low intensity too.
  
• The environmental damage of the lightning to Plagueis's clothing doesn't mean anything; Valkorion's lightning on Marr didn't damage anything environmentally. Force attacks don't need to do that to be super-potent.
  
• The RotJ Luke example doesn't work because Sidious didn't think RotJ Luke might be nearly omnipotent, didn't try to have him nuked, etc.
  

After thinking it over, the main reason I held Plagueis above Vitiate and, as a result, Revan were the most powerful quotes and the unbalancing of the Force that he and a less powerful Sidious carried out together. I realized it's likely irresponsible of me to vote for a character based on the first stance as I have not given proper time to think about whether or not I truly believe most powerful Sith quotes apply to characters who are dubbed "Sith" but do not hold to Sith philosophy.

This leaves it so that the main comparison between Plagueis and Revan I'm left with is the idea that Plagueis and a less powerful Sidious are able to significantly alter the balance of the Force after months of meditation meaning the two would've been matching a significant portion of the galactic population's passive energy output whereas Revan seems to possess a degree of parity with Vitiate up to SOR as a result of their mental war. I lack knowledge of the true scope of Vitiate's abilities if I'm being honest and don't feel comfortable voting for any of the main contenders at this time. 

My original act of switching from Caedus to Plagueis was somewhat politically motivated but after thinking it over I don't think it's fair to all the people who've put so much time and effort into arguing for stances that they truly believe in for me to vote for something I don't truly believe in.

backing plagueis

Even though I'm still on the Plagueis side, Ant did a good job. Arguments about the combat style and the use of hax were especially interesting.

III. BATTLE PRECOGNITION

Put simply, battle precognition is a non-Force-user martial art/way of predicting the future. It’s therefore not inherently supernatural and cannot be some uber hax ability. Chris Avellone, whom you’ve quoted, clarifies this by stating that battle precognition is about ”calculating feints, attacks and dodges with a speed few can surpass.” It’s simply about honing your mind to an extremely high level, which even non-Force-sensitives can achieve.

"The greatest among the Echani are said to be able to read their opponent's moves so well they can predict the path of a battle several seconds, sometimes even minutes in advance, by gauging their opponent's fighting style, heart rate, and their movements in combat. In many ways, the Echani see combat as a rapid dejarik game, calculating feints, attacks, and dodges with a speed few can surpass." - Chris Avellone

Although I don’t personally like using author quotes as they are not canon, but I’m merely posting the full context you’ve omitted (ironic, since you dismiss the Battle for Naboo quote on the basis that it may an alternate continuity, but then liberally cite author quotes for pro-Revan arguments, which are not part of any continuity). But if you want to go with Avellone in spite of this, all battle precognition is is heightened mental clarity which allows you to do calculations in your head about your opponent’s moves very quickly. Given this, I think Darth Tenebrous would be a far greater practitioner of the art than Revan could ever hope to be.

Honestly, I don’t know what you’re on about. My post acknowledges that battle precognition is a non-Force sensitive fighting style that “anticipates attacks via ‘gauging an opponent's fighting style, heart rate, and there movements in combat.’” However, it is a *specific* fighting style and mental state generally unique to the Echani. It’s not just being really good at anticipating attacks. Ergo, Darth Tenebrous wouldn’t be a specific practitioner of battle precognition, but I have told Meatpants and others that his computing power would be a *major* advantage in combat and what I would highlight foremost if I was debating for him.

Battle precognition is “supernatural” in that it allows non-Force sensitives to anticipate attacks “seconds, even minutes” before they happen. Earth humans cannot do that. Force users generally cannot even do that. Ergo, Revan being able to both uniquely calculate attacks before they happen AND sense them before they happen provides a logical advantage over a Force user who could just do the former.

Moreover, battle precognition can simply be overcome via superior Force augmentation. The Echani-trained Burr Danid had ”Perfect technique” with ”flawless” attacks and defense, ”yet Vader toyed with him as if he were a child.”

Burr Danid was still just a student, not a fully fledged Imperial Guard. He had “flawless” abilities and “perfect technique” only according to a fledgling Kir Kanos (the comic is written from Kanos’ POV, which the audio drama makes clear). Note Kanos and Jax were indicated to be loosely comparable with Burr even early into their training--“Burr Danid is the best among us, though Carnor Jax and Kir Kanos are also quite adept.”--and still grew significantly thereafter. Completed Imperial Guards were stated to be “almost a match for the formidable Darth Vader himself,” which shows how effective non-Force sensitive fighting techniques can be.

Darth Bane went toe-to-toe with an Echani who was also a Jedi Master who had ”spent her life honing her martial skills so that she could one day equal, and even surpass,” “the legendary Echani warrior Raskta Fenni,” “the greatest duelist of her time,”; and ”achieved the rare and prestigious rank of Jedi Weapons Master”; and ”transformed herself into a living weapon” by ”Eschewing all other fields of study and forsaking the development of her other Force talents to focus exclusively on the lightsaber and combat”; and very likely a practitioner of battle precognition as she was an Echani with ”Her reactions were so fast, her combat instincts so pure, that she was able to sense and anticipate what he was going to do even as it happened, then use his attacks to her own advantage.”; and had allegedly killed as many Sith Lords in the New Sith Wars as the thought bomb, meaning almost 2,000; while her combat abilities were ”enhanced” by battle meditation from a Jedi Master comparable to Bane himself in power; and without that battle meditation, she would still have been steamrolled by Bane along with her allies.

Raskta Lsu was insane. She struck Bane a bajillion times: “Raska's blue blades flickered too quickly for the eye to see, neutralizing her enemy's initial, wild attack then landing half a dozen lethal blows to his chest and abdomen.” Bane survived only thanks to needing to guard very small locations as his orbalisk armor absorbed the rest. Perhaps your point is that Bane could still still overpower her with the Force anyway, but my emphasis toward battle precognition is that it offers a major distinguishing advantage, not that it allows one to defeat a radically more powerful foe. Ergo, if you consider Revan close to Plagueis in power, this ability diminishes/neutralizes any possible differences in their lightsaber abilities and increases the probability that Revan successfully fends off amped Malgus’ attacks relative to Plagueis.

NOTE TO EVERYONE: Given that the voting will close in under a day, @DarthAnt66 and I have agreed to stop attacking each other's characters. Instead of trying to debunk the other, we will simply focus on building a finishing case for our own characters, Plagueis and Revan, respectively. To those still on the fence, more stuff for both will still be posted, so by the end of it, make sure to evaluate arguments for both characters carefully and come to your own decision about who deserves your vote - do not be influenced by peer pressure or politicking.

Azronger wrote:NOTE TO EVERYONE: Given that the voting will close in under a day, @DarthAnt66 and I have agreed to stop attacking each other's characters. Instead of trying to debunk the other, we will simply focus on building a finishing case for our own characters, Plagueis and Revan, respectively. To those still on the fence, more stuff for both will still be posted, so by the end of it, make sure to evaluate arguments for both characters carefully and come to your own decision about who deserves your vote - do not be influenced by peer pressure or politicking.

yes. i like this. good idea. gather up feats, scaling, statements, and see who wins it out in the end. thats how i like it.

Rapid Fire Plagueis Arguments

You've probably heard these before, but anyway:

• Even when Plagueis was drunk and asleep, Sidious (who had tried to kill Plagueis with a nuke) was too scared to attack him. He only did so after the dark side whispered to him to (this and some of the points below being relevant to both Plagueis's parity with Sidious and the incorrect claim that Sidious wasn't using full lethality on Plagueis with his lightning).
  
• Sidious, far from wanting to toy around with Plagueis as has been claimed, tried to have his master nuked. That failed, which led Sidious to wonder if his master was "nearly omnipotent".
  
• Sidious speculated not long before Plagueis's death whether his master was multiple steps ahead of him in power.
  
• Sidious, once again far from being willing to toy around with Plagueis, was scared to go near his corpse because he was worried that he had cheated death. Would be weird if you buy the claim that he was just toying with Plagueis (and somehow drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had?).
  
• When Sidious felt a power greater than himself after Plagueis's death, his first guess was whether it was his master reaching out to him from beyond the grave (which it may have been).
  
• When Plagueis arrived on Naboo far, far, far before his prime, the entire planet was plunged into an unprecedented winter. That's right - winter, on Naboo.
  
• Plagueis's death directly caused a seismic shift in the balance of the Force, to the point where Sidious claimed (in detail too explicit to be entirely metaphorical) that the orbits of the stars had shifted due to changes in the galaxy's dark matter.
  
• Even TPM Maul, who is fodder to Sidious (who feared Plagueis), is so powerful that his presence is described by two OOU sources to be proof that the Sith are "deadlier" and "more powerful" than ever, respectively.
  
• Plagueis's real-time regeneration from the full-power lightning of the most powerful Sith in history, without a barrier and while drunk and half-asleep, is the harder part of midichlorian manipulation; he describes killing with it as easier.
  
• Plagueis's attempt to TP every living being in the galaxy failed...but the Force decided to actively intervene against it, which may have been why it didn't succeed.
  
• Plagueis's midichlorian manipulation was described in the book as the most direct cause of the creation of Anakin Skywalker by the Force in retaliation.
  
• A pre-prime Plagueis "all but atomized" six armored maladian assassins with uncharged TK. This was despite having two dead hearts, and then with a third one failing when he tried to use Force lightning (so he was too weak at this point to even use Force lightning). This might sound like a small feat, but the number of times that TK has vaporized living beings, especially without any charging, is very small.
  
• Plagueis scales stupendously beyond Darth Bane, who could kill lightsaber-proof orbalisks with his lightning and channel a planetary firestorm ritual through his body as a trainee, and even more utterly absurdly beyond Kaan, who can hold the entire Brotherhood in a TP-trance (and yet his TP did absolutely nothing to Bane).
  
• Plagueis is the only Sith ever recorded to generate sorcery through sheer willpower.
  
• The unbalancing of the entire Force to the dark side to an unprecedented degree, overwhelming the light-side bubble generated by the entire Jedi Order (and a hole of which was popped by Tenebrous's master), was done by a massively pre-prime Plagueis (before his amped his own midichlorians) and an apprentice Palpatine that still considered Plagueis "nearly omnipotent" decades later.
  

On the TPM Sidious Supremacy Quotes

The attempted counterargument is that the TPM Sidious supremacy quotes don't count because they're in-universe. The evidence for them being in-universe is that they say "a long time ago...". Aside from the fact that this is just a common phrase used in Star Wars, it doesn't mean anything about it being in-universe:

• Some may say that the narrator is acting as if the Star Wars universe is real, but even truly OOU sources (aka breaking the 4th wall outright) do that out of convenience; in an interview George Lucas may say "Vader became X" without caveating that Vader isn't a real person.
  
• Some may say that the narrator is acting as if they're in a particular point in time in the Star Wars universe, but this isn't uncommon for an OOU source either. For example, an interview may include a line like: "Yoda believes that he must do this to win, because ten years ago he did something else and it failed".
  

(nor can you say that these responses are pedantic when the original "a long time ago means there's an in-universe narrator" case is no less "pedantic")

You might not like random supremacy quotes, but Sidious's are special. He has so many of them, and across so many sources, that they cannot be dismissed out of hand. Furthermore, Sidious has a place in the mythos that extends beyond just a specific comparison between him and certain past Sith; he's thematically the culmination of the Sith Order and the ultimate conventional threat in Star Wars. The TPM Sidious quotes aren't somehow distinct from the AotC or RotS ones in falling under that distinction. (if you don't care for thematics or holistics, then the case is simple: there are multiple sources, and they are Legends-canon.)

On the Plagueis supremacy quote

As has been demonstrated, the claim that novel blurbs are invalid has been debunked. They have the same "license" to be subjective as any other source, but the supremacy statement is phrased very objectively. 

Even if in a vacuum you took this quote as insufficient to sway you, it works so strongly in conjunction with:

• Sidious wondering whether the Force had been so strong in anyone
  
• TPM Sidious's own supremacy quotes
  
• Plagueis's development from wondering whether the Ancient Sith (including Vitiate) were more powerful to concluding that he was stronger than any on record
  
• The cosmic reaction to Plagueis's death that saw the constellations realigned
  
• The unbalancing of the Force and breaking through with midichlorian manipulation signaling an unprecedented level of power
  

BANITE SCALING

After @Meatpants created created a great post highlighting Bane’s formidability (and not to forget the orbalisk feat which should directly put Bane in Revan’s ballpark at the very least), I decided to make a post about Banite scaling in more detail. Firstly, in order to get people’s memory jogging, let’s again reiterate what has been said so far.

in 1,000 BBY, Darth Bane destroyed the established system that allowed for multiple Dark Lords to coexist, viewing it as parasitic and impractical to the Sith’s ultimate goal. He supplanted the Brotherhood of Darkness with his new dictum, the Rule of Two, that only allowed for two Sith Lords to exist at any one time: a Master and an apprentice, one to embody the power, the other to crave it. The Master would impart all they knew of the dark side to the apprentice, and when the apprentice had surpassed their teacher, a duel to the death would commence. If the Master killed the apprentice, then the latter would be unworthy to carry the mantle of Dark Lord and continue the line, but if the apprentice proved victorious, they would ascend to Sith Mastery and select an apprentice of their own, and the cycle would continue. As a product of this system, each consecutive Banite Sith Lord became more powerful than the last, and gained all their knowledge.

Of all the Sith Masters, only Bane had understood the inescapable futility of this cycle. And only he had been strong enough to break it. Under his leadership the Sith had been reborn. Now they numbered only two - one Master and one apprentice; one to embody the power of the dark side, the other to crave it.​
​
Thus would the Sith line always flow from the strongest, the one most worthy. Bane's Rule of Two ensured that the power of both Master and apprentice would grow from generation to generation until the Sith were finally able to exterminate the Jedi and usher in a new galactic age.​
​
That was why Bane had chosen Zannah as his apprentice: she had the potential to one day surpass even his own abilities. On that day she would usurp him as the Dark Lord of the Sith and choose an apprentice of her own. Bane would die, but the Sith would live on.


"The Jedi believe the Sith are extinct," she began. "But you can plainly see by my presence that the Jedi are wrong. The Sith still exist, but now we number only two: one Master, and one apprentice. One to embody the power of the dark side, the other to crave it."​
​
"So you want to increase your numbers," Set reasoned. "You're seeking recruits to join your cause and rebuild the Sith armies."​
​
"That is the path to failure," Zannah replied. "The history of the Sith has proven that in greater numbers the Sith will always turn their hatred against one another. It is inevitable; it is the way of the dark side.​
​
"The only way we can survive is by following the Rule of Two. Our numbers can never grow beyond this. The Master will train his apprentice in the ways of the Sith, until one day she must challenge him. If she proves unworthy, the Master will destroy her and choose a new apprentice. If she proves the stronger, the Master will fall and she will become the new Dark Lord of the Sith, and choose an apprentice of her own."​
​
Set felt like things were becoming clearer now. "You are the apprentice. You think it's time to challenge your Master. And you want me to help you defeat him."​
​
"No!" she snapped, causing Set to flinch in his bed. "That is the old way. Lesser followers would unite their inferior skills to bring down a strong leader, weakening the Order. This goes against everything the Rule of Two stands for.​
​
"If I am to become the Dark Lord of the Sith, I must prove myself by facing my Master alone. If I am unworthy, then I will fall - but the Order will remain strong under his leadership.​
​
"Do you understand?"​
​
Set understood all too well. "The Rule of Two guarantees that each Master will be more powerful than the one who came before. It culls the weak." Good for the Sith as a whole, but not so great if you're the one getting culled.


"With patience and cunning, we are laying the seeds of our ultimate victory. Generation after generation our power and influence will grow until one day we will destroy the Jedi, and the Sith will rule the galaxy."








The seemingly coincidental emergence of consecutively stronger dark siders is explained by the dark side being concentrated in just two individuals at a time as opposed to thousands; in great numbers, the dark side becomes diluted and its wielders are generally less powerful. Conversely, when dark siders are few, the Force’s principle for maintaining balance then ensures that those born in times when the light side is dominant are exceptionally powerful in the dark side. In essence, the Banite Sith were amassing ”an arsenal of dark side potency” that would accumulate and grow with each generation.






“The Force provides, Sidious,” Plagueis said after a moment. “As nature provides more male beings in the aftermath of war, the Force, ever mindful of balance, provides beings strong in the dark side when light has ruled for too long. This Zabrak bodes well.”


While some have argued it’s possible some Sith killed their masters by means other than direct confrontation, this is false. Darth Sidious notes generations of Sith had directly challenged their Masters, and Darth Plagueis states the generations preceding him had passed all their knowledge to their apprentice in anticipation of a duel; had guile and deceit been common tactics to dispose of Sith Masters, then obviously no one would be anticipating a formal challenge. Plagueis had also often repeated that Bane’s system ended with Tenebrous’ death: that the apprentice would no longer need to be stronger than the Master; if there had been Sith who had killed their Masters by misdirection and guile rather than in fair combat, then obviously they wouldn’t need to be stronger than their Master, but then Plagueis’ comments would make no sense. All in all, it’s just far more likely every Banite Sith up to Plagueis killed their Master in fair combat than not. However, even were this not the case (it still is), it would not defeat Banite scaling since the quotes declare each successive Sith ultimately became stronger than the last regardless of how their Master perished.

The missions to Lianna, Saleucami, and Abraxin were still fresh in his thoughts. On a philosophical level he understood why the generations of Sith Lords that had preceded him had trained apprentices, to whom they had bequeathed their knowledge of the dark side of the Force in anticipation of an eventual challenge for superiority. But with the Grand Plan culminating, it made no sense to challenge or kill beings of equal power unless they posed a threat to Plagueis’s personal destiny. The Sith line would continue through him or not at all. Thus the need for a partner rather than an underling; a cohort to help put into play the final stages of the imperative. It had long been his belief that the dark side would provide that one when the time was right.


Sidious knew that his own powers had increased tenfold over the decades, but he couldn’t be certain he had learned all of Plagueis’s secrets—“his sorcerer’s ways,” as the Sun Guards referred to them—including the ability to prevent beings from dying. He sometimes wondered: Was he a level behind? Two levels behind? Such questions were precisely what had driven generations of Sith apprentices ultimately to challenge their Masters. The uncertainty about who was the more powerful. The need to test themselves, to face the definitive trial. The temptation to take the mantle by force, to put one’s own spin on the power of the dark side—as Darth Gravid had attempted, only to set the Sith back countless years …


“How often you said that the old order of Bane had ended with the death of your Master. An apprentice no longer needs to be stronger, you told me, merely more clever. The era of keeping score, suspicion, and betrayal was over. Strength is not in the flesh but in the Force.”


The Order of the Sith Lords (the Banites' formal name) consisted of 29 Sith Masters before Darth Plagueis. It has been suggested the 30 figure also includes failed apprentices, but this makes little sense: Plagueis states they are "the select few who refused to be carried by the Force and who carry it instead." Being a Sith is a way of life that lasts from initiation to death; ergo, to fail at being a Sith is to fail at life from Plagueis' view, and obviously an apprentice who proved too weak to kill their Master or abandoned the Order is a failure. How exactly does a person like that fit the description of "the select few who refused to be carried by the Force and who carry it instead"? They don't. I think everyone ultimately knows what this quote means despite multiple attempted denials.

“And so you will. But not from spurious sources. We are not some cult like the Tetsu’s Sorcerers of Tund. Descended from Darth Bane, we are the select few who refuse to be carried by the Force and who carry it instead—thirty in a millennium rather than the tens of thousands fit to be Jedi. Any Sith can feign compassion and self-righteousness and master the Jedi arts, but only one in a thousand Jedi could ever become a Sith, for the dark side is only for those who value self-determinism over all else that existence offers. Only once in these past thousand years has a Sith Lord strayed into the light, and one day I will tell you that tale. But for now, take to heart the fact that Bane’s Rule of Two was at the start our saving grace, putting an end to the internecine strife that allowed the Jedi Order to gain the upper hand. Part of our ongoing task will be to hunt down and eliminate any Sith pretenders who pose a threat to our ultimate goals.”


A logical consequence of Banite scaling is that each consecutive Sith also had more Force potential than their predecessors. Two prove this, let’s examine two scenarios: in the first one, the Master continues to grow alongside the apprentice; in the second one, the Master reaches their full potential before the apprentice kills them. For the apprentice to eventually surpass an ever-growing Master, they themselves need to increase in strength faster, which necessitates a greater Force potential. Similarly, killing a Sith Lord who has reached their full potential and becoming stronger than them also necessitates the apprentice having a greater Force potential. Therefore, we can confidently say that each successive Banite Sith had superior Force potential than their Master.

I. DARTH COGNUS

When Darth Cognus was still the Huntress, she faced off against Darth Bane in an enervated condition. She was strong enough to blunt his connection to the Force with Force suppression to a very high degree; Bane only tore through the Force-negating shroud once he drew on “his pain and rage in one single instant,” unleashing ”the full power of the dark side.” The Huntress then managed to evade Bane’s strikes in melee combat and was too quick for Bane to simply chop her down when she charged at him, having to jump out of the way. He also deemed her a ”real threat” despite her not even having a lightsaber.

All this flashed through Bane's mind in less than a tenth of a second - just enough time for it to register before the sonic detonators on either side of him went off.

Their earsplitting shriek staggered Bane, causing him to stumble forward into the room and away from the door and possible escape. His hands instinctively flew up and clutched at his ears, his travel pack dropping to the floor. And then the enemy fell upon him.

They poured out like a swarm of insects, bursting into view from every side. Four soldiers armed with stun rifles sent a barrage of bolts raining down from the balcony; Bane - still reeling from the sonic detonators - barely had enough time throw up a protective barrier to shield him from the assault.

As he did so, he felt something fighting him. Some power was trying to block his ability to call upon the Force to shield himself. It wasn't strong enough to stop him, but it did hinder his efforts just enough so that a flicker of energy passed through the barrier.

His muscles seized as he was hit; his back arched and his arms and head were thrown back. Every nerve in Bane's body lit up as if it were on fire. The pain lasted only an instant, but it was enough to knock him to the floor in a crumpled heap.

He didn't stay down, however. He sprang back to his feet, simultaneously drawing his lightsaber with his right hand as he sent a blast of lightning out from the fingertips of his left. The violet bolts should have incinerated all four of his targets on the balcony, yet again the strange power interfering with his ability to draw upon the Force hindered his efforts.

Three of the victims were electrocuted, dying before they even had a chance to scream. The fourth, however, managed to throw herself back from the balcony's edge, evading the deadly attack.

Bane never got a chance to finish her off. A pair of soldiers emerged from a hallway on the left, and three more appeared from the hall on the right. They opened fire with tangle guns, sending out long streams of sticky, synthetic webbing.

The soldiers were smart; they coordinated their efforts. Two fired at his feet, looking to glue him to the floor. The others aimed for the chest and torso, looking to pin his arms to his sides with the viscous strings. But Bane wasn't about to let himself become immobilized.

Leaping up, he grabbed onto the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, holding himself with his free hand. Swinging his legs to build momentum, he launched himself up over the railing and onto the balcony, giving him the advantage of higher ground.

He came down with a heavy thud, the inexplicable power that still impeded his connection to the Force robbing him of a graceful landing. The bodies of the three dead soldiers were scattered about him. To his right were the stairs leading back down to the foyer; straight ahead was a long hall leading to another wing of the mansion.

A female Iktotchi stood at the far end of the hall, a long, thin knife held in each hand. She grinned at Bane, and in that moment he knew who was interfering with his ability to use the Force.

She broke into a run, charging down the hall toward him. Bane dropped into a fighting crouch to meet her attack, knowing her knives were no match for his lightsaber. It was only then that he noticed the flash grenades lying by the dead bodies at his feet.

They exploded with a burst of intense light and chemical smoke that blinded Bane. Disoriented, he fell back against the balcony's railing. An instant later he felt the sole of the Iktotchi's boots strike him hard in the chest, sending him tumbling backward over the banister to the marble floor four meters below.

He hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath from his body, leaving him gasping for air. The impact jarred his lightsaber from his grip, sending it skittering across the floor. An instant later his prone form was enveloped by the webbing from the tangle guns, pinning him to the ground.

Blind and immobilized, Darth Bane's fury saved him. Years of training allowed him to focus all his pain and rage in one single instant, drawing on it so he could unleash the full power of the dark side. Once again he felt the Iktotchi's barrier opposing his efforts, but this time he tore through it like it wasn't even there.

For a moment it was as if the world around him was frozen in place. Though his eyes were still suffering the effects of the flash grenade, the Force rushing through his body gave him an otherworldly awareness of his surroundings - the scene was burned into his brain in exquisite detail.

The soldiers were scattered about the foyer, scrambling to take up new positions in preparation for the next stage of the battle. They were well trained, but he could still sense their fear: they knew the fight was far from over. The Iktotchi had leapt over the railing in pursuit of him. She hung poised in the air above him, her twin blades held out to the either side as she braced for landing. Bane could even see himself lying on the floor, buried beneath a thick, wet blanket of rapidly drying chemical adhesive.

The frozen tableau lasted only a fraction of an instant, but it told the Dark Lord everything he needed to know. And then the instant was gone, and everything became a blur of motion again.

The Iktotchi landed just as Bane unleashed a wave of crackling electricity that burned away the webbing of the tangle guns. She dropped to one knee and tried to stab her knives into him as he lay on the floor, but through the Force Bane saw her coming. He managed to roll aside, escaping with only a long, deep cut along one of his forearms as he scrambled back to his feet.

In response to his call, his lightsaber flew up from the floor and into his waiting hand, but the Iktotchi was already retreating. Now that he was no longer helpless, she was eager to fall back and let others step in.

Several more flash grenades exploded around him, but Bane was unaffected; he was no longer relying on his physical sight to guide him. Fresh streams of webbing arced across the room toward him, but this time he incinerated them while they were still in the air. Half a dozen concussion grenades tossed in from every side clattered on the floor at his feet. As they exploded, Bane simply enveloped himself in the Force, creating a protective cocoon that absorbed the impact and left him standing completely unharmed.

Two men popped up from behind a nearby couch and fired at him from point-blank range with their stun guns. Bane slapped the incoming bolts away with his lightsaber, then thrust out a hand to send the couch slamming straight back into the wall, crushing the men who had been using it for cover.

Then he was on the move, bearing down on two of the soldiers carrying tangle guns. He sliced them both in half horizontally with a single blow from his lightsaber, carving a perfect line just above their belts. Another volley of stun bolts came too late to save them; Bane was already gone.

A single flip and he was back on the balcony again, face-to-face with the Iktotchi.

"You can't escape," he told her.

"I wasn't trying to," she hissed back at him, lunging forward with her knives.

She was quicker than Bane expected, coming in low and fast. He didn't have time to simply chop her down; instead he had to spin out of the way.

He tried to take one of her arms with his lightsaber on a counterthrust as she slipped past, but the Iktotchi anticipated his move and managed to contort her body so that his blade caught nothing but air.

They had switched positions from their first engagement; she was now the one standing with her back to the balcony railing. Bane thrust out with the Force, the impact sending her hurtling backward over the railing as her kick had done to him less than a minute earlier.

Somehow the Iktotchi managed to turn in the air so that she landed on her feet. Because of this, she was able to spring to safety when Bane sent a blast of lightning hurtling down toward her. Instead of her charred corpse, it left only a smoking circle on the floor.

Soldiers were firing their stun guns at him again from the stairwell. Bane didn't even bother to strike back at them; he simply dodged their attack by vaulting over the railing and dropping back down to the floor below. The soldiers were nothing to him; it was the Iktotchi he was interested in now. She was the only opponent who posed any real threat. Eliminate her and he could deal with the soldiers at his leisure.

He landed on the floor in a crouch, absorbing the impact. And then everything went black.


To explain why the Huntress was able to contend with Bane so well in other areas yet seemingly be turned into a ”charred corpse” by a single blast of Bane’s lightning, the first reason is simply that she wasn’t actively defending and as such had a passive barrier on at best; the second reason is that tutaminis is comparatively a much harder ability to use than lightning: the latter can be used untrained and we’ve seen many neophytes do it, but ”it is a challenge for even the most powerful Jedi Masters” to deflect lightning. Thus, Bane would have inflicted an amount of damage on the Huntress that was disproportionate to the actual gap in power between the two, which was magnified by the Huntress having only passive barrier instead of an active one.





Now, Bane, even in this fatigued condition, was powerful enough to incinerate four mercenaries with a single burst of lightning. The most we’ve seen of Darth Nyriss’s uncharged lightning, by comparison, is turning two guards into smoking husks. @Meatpants highlighted this in his post well. He also covered the fact that while tutaminis is disproportionately difficult, telekinetic barriers are disproportionately effective and hard to penetrate. Therefore, tearing through an active telekinetic barrier is a more difficult task than overpowering someone’s tutaminis. Bane would therefore have had a harder time snapping Zannah’s neck in Rule of Two than Revan ashing to Nyriss. Note that she’s expecting Bane to attack immediately if she missteps, and even though she believes Bane would crush her, she still wouldn’t just let it happen without some sort of resistance, so she most likely had an active barrier on.



She could feel Bane’s power—whole once more—coursing through his veins. She could feel the heat of his anger, and she knew one wrong word and he’d snap her neck in two with the Force.


This is where the Huntress comes in. She had no formal training whatsoever as of Dynasty of Evil. All her feats in that story “came from natural ability. Pure instinct. Raw power.” She was able to use even difficult abilities “through sheer force of will.” Yet even untrained, she was strong enough to be relative to a weakened Bane - or in other words, probably more powerful than Nyriss from what we’ve seen of the latter, going by the comparison between her and Bane’s lightning. Now, consider that gap between RoT Zannah and a non-orbalisk RoT Bane is seemingly bigger than the one between Revan and Nyriss; Zannah by this point had gone through 50% of her Sith training, and Bane wasn’t as powerful as when he was encrusted with orbalisks, much less his even stronger version in Dynasty of Evil. The gap between an untrained Force-user (the Huntress) and a Force-user more powerful than DoE Bane (peak Cognus) would obviously be larger than the gap between a Zannah with a decade of training under her belt and a Force-user weaker than DoE Bane, given Cognus’s superior Force potential to Bane and Zannah - she may start out stronger but she will consequently also have more room to grow. Therefore, theoretical peak Darth Cognus should be able to turn a Nyriss-tier/Nyriss+ character in DoE Huntress to ash with far greater ease than Revan did to Nyriss.

The Huntress brought her shuttle in low over the desert wastelands that covered the majority of Ambria's surface. Though she had received no formal training, she was highly attuned to the Force, allowing her to feel it rising up from the sun-baked dirt as her ship skimmed across the surface.


She was stalking him slowly, cautiously creeping around the tail end of the ship. And in that moment Set realized his opponent had no formal training in the ways of the Force. She was operating on instinct. She had never been taught the most basic skills - like how to sense the location of opponents even when they were out of sight.



She had told him her name was the Huntress, and that she had spent the past five years as a freelance assassin, honing her ability to identify and exploit weakness in her targets. It was hard to argue with the results; in her brief encounters with Bane she had already demonstrated both notable ambition and incredible potential. Her achievements were even more impressive when one considered that she had never been given any formal training in the ways of the Force. Everything she did came from natural ability. Pure instinct. Raw power.

Her ability to disrupt the Force in others only gave further testament to her strength. She had never been trained in this rare and difficult technique; she simply unleashed it against her enemies through sheer force of will: crude but effective.

II. DARTH GEAN

Despite not having finished her training and more than half of the Banites’ accumulated knowledge not being known to her as it was destroyed in the rampage of her Master, Darth Gean nonetheless penetrated the Force barrier Gravid had raised around their fortress and bested him. Gravid had more than twice the Force knowledge she did, yet Gean still defeated him while unarmed. Furthermore, Gravid’s stewardship of the Sith order was described as “brief,” indicating it was significantly shorter than average (933 years / 30 Sith ≈ 31 years/Sith), which means Gean must have surpassed him unfathomably quickly. Gravid apparently being insane during the fight has been addressed in a previous post of mine and @DarthAnt66 himself has expressed to me in PMs that he may concede the Gravid insanity point - and even if he were insane, there is no proof that it would have affected his power level as we have examples of seemingly crazed Force users like Vaylin or Lord Kaan whose strength wasn’t diminished at all. Safe to say none of the arguments against Gean’s feat are valid.

Sadly he could glean only so much from the texts, crystals, and holocrons stored in the library. Crucial knowledge had been lost during the brief mastery of Darth Gravid, and many of the most important elements of Sith training since had been passed from Masters to apprentices in sessions that had been left unrecorded. More to the point, Darth Tenebrous had had very little to say regarding death.


“Your thoughts betray you,” Plagueis said. “Do you think that Malak’s powers were weakened by Revan’s lightsaber? Bane by being encrusted in orbalisks? Do you think Gravid’s young apprentice was hindered by the prosthesis she was forced to wear after fighting him?”


A human Sith Lord whose short reign had elapsed some five centuries earlier, Gravid had been persuaded to believe that total commitment to the dark side would sentence the Sith Order to eventual defeat, and so had sought to introduce Jedi selflessness and compassion into his teachings and practice, forgetting that there can be no return to the light for an adept who has entered the dark wood; that the dark side will not surrender one to whom, by mutual agreement, it has staked a claim. Driven increasingly mad by his attempts to straddle the two realms, Gravid became convinced that the only way to safeguard the future of the Sith was to hide or destroy the lore that had been amassed through the generations—the texts, holocrons, and treatises—so that the Sith could fashion a new beginning for themselves that would guarantee success. Barricaded within the walls of a bastion he and his Twi’lek apprentice, Gean, had constructed on Jaguada, he had attempted as much, and was thought to have destroyed more than half the repository of artifacts before Gean, demonstrating consummate will and courage, had managed to penetrate the Force fields Gravid had raised around their stronghold and intercede, killing her Master with her bare hands, though at the cost of her arm, shoulder, and the entire left side of her face and chest.


This is also a reason why the power progression of the Banites was not broken as some have argued: Gean still defeated Gravd in fair combat while at a great disadvantage even though she had less than half the Force knowledge he did. Furthermore, “real knowledge” was passed from Master to pupil in unrecorded training sessions, and the teachings of holocrons were deemed secondary. Thus, it is likely the Banites from this point forward had become so advanced that the teachings of the ancient Dark Lords became superfluous to their power; complimentary but ultimately unnecessary.

Darth Plagueis gazed at him. “You are impatient. You see no value in learning about weapons or explosives, Force suggestion or the healing arts. You hunger for power of the sort you imagine is to be found on Korriban, Dromund Kaas, Zigoola. Then let me tell you what you’ll encounter in those reliquaries: Jedi, treasure hunters, and legends. Of course there are tombs in the Valley of the Dark Lords, but they have been plundered and now draw only tourists. On Dxun, Yavin Four, Ziost, the same is true. If it’s history that has caught your fancy, I can show you a hundred worlds on which esoteric Sith symbols have been woven covertly into architecture and culture, and I can bore you for years with tales of the exploits of Freedon Nadd, Belia Darzu, Darth Zannah, who is alleged to have infiltrated the Jedi Temple, and of starships imbued with Sith consciousness. Is that your wish, Sidious, to become an academic?”

“I wish only to learn, Master.”

“And so you will. But not from spurious sources. We are not some cult like the Tetsu’s Sorcerers of Tund. Descended from Darth Bane, we are the select few who refuse to be carried by the Force and who carry it instead—thirty in a millennium rather than the tens of thousands fit to be Jedi. Any Sith can feign compassion and self-righteousness and master the Jedi arts, but only one in a thousand Jedi could ever become a Sith, for the dark side is only for those who value self-determinism over all else that existence offers. Only once in these past thousand years has a Sith Lord strayed into the light, and one day I will tell you that tale. But for now, take to heart the fact that Bane’s Rule of Two was at the start our saving grace, putting an end to the internecine strife that allowed the Jedi Order to gain the upper hand. Part of our ongoing task will be to hunt down and eliminate any Sith pretenders who pose a threat to our ultimate goals.”

Sidious remained silent for a long moment. “Am I to be equally distrustful of the lessons contained in Sith Holocrons?”

“Not distrustful,” Plagueis said gravely. “But holocrons contain knowledge specific and idiosyncratic to each Sith who constructed them. Real knowledge is passed by Master to apprentice in sessions such as this, where nothing is codified or recorded—diluted—and thus it cannot be forgotten. There will come a time when you may wish to consult the holocrons of past Masters, but until then you would do better not to be influenced by them. You must discover the dark side in your own way, and perfect your power in your own fashion. All I can do in the meantime is help to keep you from losing your way while we hide in plain sight from the prying eyes of our enemies.”


It’s doubtful Gravid’s dissidence had any real impact on the Banites’ mastery of the Force in the aggregate. Yes, Plagueis noted Gravid set them back considerably and Sidious noted he set the Sith back countless years, but nothing about the Force is mentioned in the text. More likely it was referring to taking over the Republic, which is not contingent on strength in the Force but political connections; Gravid’s premature death probably merely caused the collapse of some of their networks, and Gean had to pick up the pieces. That’s all the damage that was ultimately done.

For while toppling the Jedi Order and the Republic was essential to the task of restoring order to the galaxy, that goal belonged to the realm of the ordinary—to the world that was nothing more than a byproduct of the eternal struggle between the light and dark forces, both of which were beyond any concepts of good or evil. The greater goal of the Sith involved toppling the Force itself, and becoming the embodiment of the galaxy’s animating principle.


Doubt tugged at the corners of Sidious’s mouth. “The Jedi won’t simply stand by and do nothing, Master. While I have no affection for them, I do respect their power. And weakening the Republic without weakening the Jedi could provide them with justification for attempting a coup. They have the numbers to succeed.”

Plagueis took it under advisement. “Their time is coming, Sidious. The signs are in the air. Their Order might have already been decimated had it not been for the setback Darth Gravid dealt the Sith. But his apprentice carried the imperative forward, and each successive Sith Lord improved on it, Tenebrous and his Master most of all, though they wasted years attempting to create a targeted virus that could be deployed against the Jedi, separating them from the Force. As if there were some organic difference between the practitioners of the light and dark sides; as if we communicate with the dark side through a different species of cellular intermediaries! When, in fact, we are animated by the same power that drives the passion of these beings gathered below. Target midi-chlorians and we target life itself.”


Sidious knew that his own powers had increased tenfold over the decades, but he couldn’t be certain he had learned all of Plagueis’s secrets—“his sorcerer’s ways,” as the Sun Guards referred to them—including the ability to prevent beings from dying. He sometimes wondered: Was he a level behind? Two levels behind? Such questions were precisely what had driven generations of Sith apprentices ultimately to challenge their Masters. The uncertainty about who was the more powerful. The need to test themselves, to face the definitive trial. The temptation to take the mantle by force, to put one’s own spin on the power of the dark side—as Darth Gravid had attempted, only to set the Sith back countless years …


Now, think about the implications of Gean defeating her Master like this. She was able to defeat Darth Gravid with her bare hands, while he was armed with a lightsaber and had more than twice the Force knowledge she did. Yes, Gean was severely injured and the fight was evidently close, but just think of how difficult beating someone with an instant-kill weapon while you yourself are unarmed really is, and then consider that Gravid had vastly greater experience, and understanding and knowledge of the Force than she did, which is usually the deciding factor in battles. Gean would have had no chance in melee, and he was probably the more skilled Force-wielder, so it can be reasonably inferred she overcame him through sheer power as she was outclassed in all other areas. Beating an opponent around 15 generations above Darth Bane, Zannah, and Cognus through sheer unrestrained might in the Force is by itself a tremendous accomplishment, but it's made all the more astonishing when Gravid's stewardship of the Sith Order was historically considered "brief" in comparison to the average Banite Master, which means Gean must have surpassed her mentor remarkably quickly, making her Force potential simply enormous. And per the Banite system, each consecutive Sith must have more potential than the last, so everyone after her would be even more of a prodigy than Gean. Now, give Gean’s immediate successor a lightsaber, full knowledge of the Banite archives, and completed training - basically all the things Gean lacked when confronting Gravid - and it's probable they would outright slaughter Gravid. This is even more true for Gean’s apprentice’s apprentice, and their apprentice, and so on.

III. DARTH TENEBROUS’S MASTER

Tenebrous’ Master opened a rend in the fabric of the Force by bursting the light side bubble the Jedi Order had erected over the galaxy, which was the first time the Jedi felt the dark side in more than eight centuries:

The task before him was at once invigorating and daunting, and in the eye of that cycloning storm he could hear the faraway voices of all those who had laid the groundwork of the Sith imperative—the Grand Plan; those who had enlivened the hurricane with their breath and lives: Darths Bane and Zannah, and on down through the generations that had included Cognus, Vectivus, Ramage, and Tenebrous. One hundred years earlier, Tenebrous’s Twi’lek Master had opened a small rend in the fabric of the Force, allowing the dark side to be felt by the Jedi Order for the first time in more than eight hundred years. That had been the inauguration, the commencement of the revenge of the Sith. And now the time had come to enlarge that rend into a gaping hole, a gaping wound, into which the Republic and the Jedi Order would to their own hazard be drawn.


The rend that Tenebrous’s Twi’lek Master had opened in the fabric of the Force had been felt by the Jedi, and already the Order was beginning to show signs of circumspection and languor. The Republic, too, had been similarly undermined, by encouraging corruption in the Senate and lawlessness in the Outer Rim systems, which had become the dumping grounds for the Core.


The Force bubble itself was similar to those generated by creatures that drew on the Force to avoid predation by natural enemies. The relationship between the arboreal ysalamir and its adversary, the vornskr, provided a curious example, in that the latter was attracted to the former by the very mechanism the ysalamir employed as a defense. Where an extremely low midi-chlorian count might have bolstered the odds of survival, nature had instead made the ysalimir species strong in the Force. So strong, in fact, that several of the creatures acting in concert could create a Force bubble encompassing kilometers rather than meters. In a sense, the Jedi Order had done the same on a galactic scale, Plagueis believed, by bathing the galaxy in the energy of the light side of the Force; or more accurately by fashioning a Force bubble that had prevented infiltration by the dark side, until Tenebrous’s Master had succeeded in bursting the bubble, or at least shrinking it. How the Order’s actions could be thought of as balancing the Force had baffled generations of Sith, who harbored no delusions regarding the Force’s ability to self-regulate.


Take note that the Jedi Order had never felt the dark side in anything or anyone up until Tenebrous’ Master did the feat. It goes to show how efficient the bubble was in preventing the infiltration of the dark side: disabling it from taking root in any way, shape or form. And those are the conditions the early Banites from Darth Zannah and Darth Cognus onwards operated under.

Also, it’s often argued because of this that cosmic feats aren’t indicative of a Force user’s personal power, but that argument relies on several unfounded assumptions. Firstly, there’s no evidence the Jedi Order was actively maintaining the light side bubble of their own power; ergo, Tenebrous' Master didn’t actually contest his strength against that of the entire Jedi Order in a real-time showdown and win so thoroughly the Order was never again able to rebuild their creation. Rather, Plagueis likens what the Jedi did to the ysalamiri: generating a Force bubble via their very nature itself rather than any active exertion. The visible absence of the Sith and the overwhelming numbers of Jedi would understandably have bathed the galaxy in the light much like a powerful dark side user inhabiting a location for a lengthy period of time can transform said location into a dark side nexus, but done in reverse. Tenebrous’ Master simply had the strength to puncture the Jedi’s bubble and make them feel the dark side from across the galaxy even though said bubble was supposed to - and had been successful at for the past eight centuries - prevent the dark side from taking any hold whatsoever.

Continuing with Plagueis’ ysalamiri analogy, this feat is similar to Luke Skywalker experimenting with techniques to counteract the effects of the reptilians’ Force bubble and Valkorion doing so to Nathema’s void in order to maintain their ability to feel and draw on the Force even while inside said Force-neutralizing fields, although done on a galactic scale and to a bubble comprised of the light side of the Force as opposed to an absence in the Force. Like Tenebrous’ Master, Luke and Valkorion overcame odds that should have been impossible: they used the Force in a space where the Force should not exist by combatting the void with the very thing it was trying to keep out. Tenebrous’ Master in turn used the dark side in a space where it shouldn’t exist, but went even further by bursting the bubble completely or at the very least shrinking it; imagine Luke erasing the ysalamiri’s Force bubble or Valkorion restoring the Force to Nathema so completely that the void would for all intents and purposes cease to exist (something that did in fact occur after his death), and you get the picture.

"Would she? Obi-Wan and Yoda never talked about what the distant future held for me. Maybe if I hadn't spent the past few years trying to learn how to overcome ysalamiri and tune my lightsaber to cleave cortosis ore, I'd know what course the Jedi should take now. It's the dark side that calls constantly for aggression and revenge—even against the Yuuzhan Vong. The stronger you become, the more you're tempted." Luke gazed at his wife. "Maybe Jacen's right about there being alternatives to fighting."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hU2_M0CUhtU&t=257s

IV. DARTH TENEBROUS

When Darth Tenebrous was a mere apprentice, he went ”far beyond the simplistic Force studies imposed on him by his Master” and dispatched him in a duel ”with his customary efficiency,” denoting that it wasn’t particularly difficult and that he didn’t struggle very much.

More than a century before, when Tenebrous had been but a Sith apprentice himself, the magnificent computational power of his Bith brain had led him far beyond the simplistic Force studies imposed on him by his Master. He had always been far too intelligent to be seduced by the traditional Sith metaphysical twaddle of dark destiny and the witless fantasy of endless war against the equally witless Jedi Order. Soon he had confirmed to his own satisfaction that the dark side of the Force, far from being some malevolent mystic sentience bent on spreading suffering throughout the Galaxy, was in truth merely an energy source, and a tool with which he could impose his will upon reality. It was a sort of natural amplifier he could use to multiply the effectiveness of his many useful abilities.


After disposing of his Master, Tenebrous searched for an apprentice of his own, a quest that took decades.

Once his analysis had been parsed to its nth degree, polished into a gem perfect beyond the possibility of flaw, Tenebrous had devoted every second of every day of his life to fulfilling his plan. Nothing would be left to chance. He had exterminated his doddering Master with his customary efficiency, and had embarked immediately on a decades-spanning quest for an apprentice of his own. And not just an apprentice, but the apprentice: one possessed of a very specific combination of particular skills - primarily surrounding the direct perception and manipulation of midi-chlorian activity - but also a range of weaknesses, from short-sighted concern with personal profit to an unconquerable dread of the unknown realms beyond the walls of death.


He concocted a scheme where he would enlist a Force-sensitive female as an agent to romance another Force-sensitive acquaintance of his to produce a child even stronger in the Force. The result of this was Hego Damask. When he was old enough that he was growing closer to his father’s business life - meaning he was probably an adolescent and thus around 15 years old - Tenebrous started to visit his parents. On one of these visits, his parents revealed to Hego that he would be placed under Rugess Nome’s - Tenebrous’ public alias - care, and five years after that, his apprenticeship properly began and he was christened Darth Plagueis.

No one held him responsible for his playmate’s plunge from the window, but, soon after, the steady stream of playmates began to dry up. Worse, his father began to grow distant—even while Hego found himself becoming more and more a part of Caar’s world. He considered that his father might be lying about having the power, or had come to think of Hego as some kind of monster. And yet he observed his father employing his eldritch powers of persuasion and manipulation in business dealings.

Like Muunilinst, Mygeeto received many important visitors, and at times it struck Hego that, in lieu of his being able to explore the galaxy, the galaxy was coming to him. On several occasions, his father met with Jedi Knights and Padawans who came in search of Adegan crystals, which the Jedi Order used in the construction of training lightsabers. Hego had long since perfected his ability to mask his powers from others. Even without revealing his true nature to the Jedi he was able to sense in them a kind of like-minded power, though one that was clearly at cross purposes with his own. From early on he knew that he could never be one of them, and he began to abhor their visits, for reasons he couldn’t grasp. Even more puzzling, he came to sense a power closer to his own in a Bith visitor named Rugess Nome. Nome wasn’t a Jedi but a starship engineer, who arrived in a luminous vessel of his own design. Before long, however, Hego began to suspect that his mother was the reason for Nome’s frequent visits. And the suspicion that there was something between them incited feelings of anger and jealousy in young Hego, and a kind of conflicted despondency in his father.

Hego had made up his mind to bring his power to bear on the intolerable situation when, during one of Nome’s visits, he was summoned to his father’s office, where Caar, his mother, and the Bith were waiting. Without looking at his wife, Caar had said, “You are of our blood, Hego, but we can no longer raise you as our progeny.”

Hego had looked from his father to his mother in mounting distress, fearing the very words Caar added a moment later. With a nod toward Nome, he said, “In truth, and in ways that you will eventually come to understand, you belong to him.”

A decade later, Hego would learn that while Caar had, in fact, done his best to keep his Force abilities to himself, he had come to the attention of Nome when the two had chanced to meet on High Port Space Center. Years would pass before Nome found Hego’s mother, whom he had conscripted not as an apprentice—for she wasn’t strong enough in the Force—but as a disciple, whose task it had been to romance Caar and bear the fruit of that seduction: a child whom Nome and Bith science predicted would be born strong in the Force. Hego’s parents had safeguarded the secret until his power had begun to reveal itself. And then a deal had been brokered: Hego, in exchange for the realization of Caar Damask’s lifelong dream of being accepted into the upper echelon of the InterGalactic Banking Clan.

Five years after the revelation in the office, Caar was recalled to Muunilinst to become director of the treasury branch of the IBC. Hego’s mother vanished, never to be seen again by either husband or son. And Hego’s apprenticeship to Sith Lord Darth Tenebrous commenced.


Tenebrous then trained Plagueis for the duration of the average human lifespan, which in Star Wars is around 100-120 years.

Plagueis weathered the gentle rebuke. He had been apprenticed to Tenebrous for as many years as the average human might live, and still Tenebrous never failed to find fault when he could.


So Tenebrous would have had at least a hundred years to grow in power after defeating his Master, potentially even 140. That’s exponentially more than the time Tenebrous spent as an apprentice, during which he already not only surpassed his Master, but far surpassed him. The gap between peak Tenebrous and his Master should therefore be ginormous.

V. DARTH PLAGUEIS

As Tenebrous’ physical senses perished and he was left solely with his own consciousness attached to his maxi-chlorians, he found his connection to the Force to have multiplied to a level he had not previously imagined possible. Given spirit Tenebrous is still Tenebrous, I do not see why he should be excluded from Banite scaling just because he lacks a body. Therefore, Darth Plagueis is so powerful that his power is literally physical Tenebrous’ power multiplied to a grander level physical Tenebrous believed possible, and physical Tenebrous already receives the benefits of Banite scaling per his triumph over his own Master.

Now that his body's physical senses had altogether perished. Tenebrous found his perception of the Force to be proportionately heightened. With glorious precision, he could trace the slightest wisp of Plagueis' clumsy Force-probing as his apprentice sought to record and analyze every detail of Tenebrous's death. He could feel Plagueis himself: crouched nearby, his eyes closed, the long spiderish fingers of one hand stretched forth as though to snatch Tenebrous' disappearing midi-chlorians from mid-air.


Now, dead at last, he could begin to enjoy the fruits of his lifelong labor. In the Force, he could feel that his body had already suffered irreversible brain-death, yet his consciousness remained, fully aware, fully functional, and connected to the Force in a manner more intimate than he had ever believed possible. Freed now of the crude biological processes that mark the passage of time, Tenebrous found he could perceive the measured tick of each individual nanosecond while simultaneously comprehending the entire sweep of galactic eons.


Now wholly giving himself over to panic, Tenebrous turned his will upon undoing the damage he had done. With all his multiplied power, he yanked his maxi-chlorians back out from Plagueis' body in a spray of Force energy from his eyes, his mouth, the wound and every other cell. He had to think - he had to find a way out - or perhaps he didn't. Perhaps there wasn’t one.


Tenebrous deemed altering midi-chlorians challenging, and his experiments often produced “unexpected and unfortunate side effects,” denoting an inability to fully command them to do even the most basic of tasks, and required the aid of Bith science to remove them from the Force’s purview and transform them into maxi-chlorians. Plagueis, on the other hand, could command midi-chlorians to do his bidding without any noted difficulty or accidental side effects. As influencing midi-chlorians is contingent on willpower and therefore Force power (more on this later), this makes Plagueis comparable to Tenebrous in power and superior in mastery even as of Part II (the Plagueis novel is divided into three parts: Part I takes place between 67 and 65 BBY, Part II between 54 and 52 BBY, and Part III between 34 and 32 BBY).

Midi-chlorians were, after all, merely symbiotic organelles that contribute to the organic processes of the living cells they inhabit. Due to their role in Force interactions, altering them was singularly challenging - they had an unsettling tendency to spontaneously express unexpected and unfortunate side effects - but by applying the full analytic prowess of his vast Bith brain and the preternatural power of his Bith senses to detect and resolve sub-microscopic structure, he eventually succeeded in creating a retrovirus that would transform normal midi-chlorians into long-lived maxi-chlorians.


In the same way that the pre-Bane Sith had been responsible for their own extinction, the great dark side Lords of the past had doomed themselves to the nether realm through their attempts to conquer death by feeding off the energies of others, rather than by tapping the deepest strata of the Force and learning to speak the language of the midi-chlorians. Plagueis was finally learning to do that, and was just beginning to learn how to persuade, prompt, cajole, and coax them into action. Already he could command them to promote healing, and now he had been successful in enticing them to lower their defenses. If he could compel a murderous Yinchorri to become peaceful, could he—with a mere suggestion—accomplish the opposite by turning a peaceful being into a murderer? Would he one day be able to influence the leaders of worlds and systems to act according to his designs, however iniquitous? Would he one day conquer not only death but life, as well, by manipulating midi-chlorians to produce Forceful beings, even in the absence of fertilization, as Darth Tenebrous might have attempted to do with gene-splicing techniques and computers?


Tenebrous also believed that the ascendancy of the dark side could not be artificially influenced or hurried by the Sith, and that Bith science would be needed to be combined with it. Yet Plagueis and his own apprentice, Sidious, “waged etheric war” on the Force, determined to “suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side.” After months of meditation and concentration, they “brought the power of their wills to bear, asserting sovereignty over the Force,” “as if some deity had been tipped from its throne.” The common argument against this is that ”no counterforce had risen against them,” yet a careful reading of the text reveals that this was after ”the Force had yielded,” which makes since the pair had to meditate intensely for months and the Force was dethroned in a single moment, not over time, proving it was actively fighting back against them for months before succumbing. After this feat, Plagueis resurrects and kills Venamis over and over by manipulating his midi-chlorians ”which would have been inert and unresponsive,” indicating he had not previously been able to command midi-chlorians to revive beings, denoting an increase in power. After this, Plagueis essentially reverses aging. And finally, ”Drunk on newfound power,” Plagueis attempts ”an even more unthinkable act: to bring into being a creation of his own. Not merely the impregnation of some hapless, mindless creature, but the birth of a Forceful being. The ability to dominate death had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t equivalent to pure creation.” Plagueis does this by attempting to telepathically contact and influence the midi-chlorians of every living organism in the galaxy - in essence, communion with the Living Force as a whole - although the Force thwarted his attempt and his attempts to birth a Forceful being ended up causing his lab animals to succumb to diseases. Still, Plagueis at this point should be far more powerful than Tenebrous.

That Tenebrous had targeted him came as no shock to Plagueis. He and the Bith had reached an impasse decades earlier regarding execution of the Sith imperative. The product of one of the galaxy’s most ancient civilizations, Tenebrous believed that victory could be achieved through a mating of the powers of the dark side and expert Bith science. With the aid of sophisticated computers and future-casting formulas, the varied beings of the galaxy could be provided for, and the Jedi Order would gradually dwindle and disappear. Tenebrous had tried to persuade Plagueis that the Force did not play games of chance with the galaxy; and that while the fated ascendancy of the dark side could be predicted, its rise could not be influenced or hurried by the Sith.


The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.

The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.

On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die.

Then, by manipulating the Bith’s midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D’s processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith’s organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.

But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn’t been enough for him. And so after Sidious had returned to Coruscant, he had devoted himself to internalizing that ability, by manipulating the midi-chlorians that animated him. For several months he made no progress, but ultimately he began to perceive a measured change. The scars that had grown over his wounds had abruptly begun to soften and fade, and he had begun to breathe more freely than he had in twenty years. He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvenating itself. Beneath the transpirator, areas of his skin were smooth and youthful, and he knew that eventually he would cease to age altogether.

Drunk on newfound power, then, he had attempted an even more unthinkable act: to bring into being a creation of his own. Not merely the impregnation of some hapless, mindless creature, but the birth of a Forceful being. The ability to dominate death had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t equivalent to pure creation. And so he had stretched out—indeed, as if invisible, transubstantiated—to inform every being of his existence, and impact all of them: Muunoid or insectoid, secure or dispossessed, free or enslaved. A warrior waving a banner in triumph on a battlefield. A ghost infiltrating a dream.

But ultimately to no end.

The Force grew silent, as if in flight from him, and many of the animals in his laboratory succumbed to horrifying diseases.

Regardless, eight long years later, Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.


Over the next decade, Plagueis continued to skyrocket in power, having devoted ”two standard decades to day-and-night experimentation with midi-chlorian manipulation and attempts to wrest a few last secrets from the Force.” While his initial attempt at creating a Forceful being had failed, he eventually became powerful enough to ”master the equally powerful energies of order and disorder, creation and entropy, life and death.” This is exemplified in his ability to create new midi-chlorians from scratch to increase his own midi-chlorian count. He also did this with the cadaver of Darth Venamis, whose midi-chlorians had years ago melded back into the Force, yet Plagueis was able to create enough of them in the span of twenty hours that Venamis’s spirit could use it as a sufficient tether in the material world, meaning at least 1,250 per cell. Just consider the implications: midi-chlorians are what determine a Force-user’s connection to the Force, and the more one has them, the greater one’s Force potential and thus growth rate will be. If Plagueis is able to create as many as 1,250 midi-chlorians per cell in under twenty hours, he would, as a Sith Lord obsessed with accruing power, abuse that to hell and back on himself. Thus, over the last few years of his life, his growth rate would have become exponential, each growth spurt greater than the last. His maximum midi-chlorian count technically also isn’t limited below 20,000 given that that was merely the greatest the Jedi had ever recorded, and Plagueis himself only intoned it was the greatest in history long prior to perfecting his abilities.

Seen through the Force, he was a nuclear oval of mottled light, a rotating orb of terrifying energy. If the Maladian attack had weakened him physically, it had also helped to shape his etheric body into a vessel sufficiently strong to contain the full power of the dark side. Determined never again to be caught off guard, he had trained himself to go without sleep, and had devoted two standard decades to day-and-night experimentation with midi-chlorian manipulation and attempts to wrest a few last secrets from the Force, so that he—and presumably his human apprentice—might live forever. His inward turn had enabled him to master the equally powerful energies of order and disorder, creation and entropy, life and death.


Regardless, eight long years later, Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.


On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die.

Then, by manipulating the Bith’s midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D’s processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith’s organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.


Plagueis focused his attention on the vat in front of him where the remains of the Bith Sith Lord, Darth Venamis, floated in a semitransparent bath of preserving fluid. Venamis’s corpse was still animated and twitching spasmodically with the last dregs of life that Plagueis invested in it, only to snatch it away again. He had been working for almost twenty uninterrupted hours on this particular project with limited success, and the notification from his droid signified a welcome diversion.


“Between Lord Sidious and myself.” Plagueis returned his attention to the Bith in the vat before him, although his thoughts were now far away from the resurrected Venamis. “The Zabrak’s assassination mission inside the prison is of great interest to me. As you know, I have extended a great deal of latitude to Lord Sidious in the past.”

Reaching out with the dark side, Plagueis watched in a distracted way as Venamis’s lifeless face stirred in the viscous chemical soup, one eye opening and rolling up to gaze at him. Then he continued. “Especially now, as we approach the pivotal moment in our plans for Palpatine’s impending chancellorship, I find his increasing tendency toward self-reliance to be disturbing. Of course the time will come when I will let him know that I was the one who provided Iram Radique with the fully functional geological compressor that he needed—and thus allowed Maul to complete his mission. But the moment of revelation is not yet ripe.”




Now, let’s rewind the clock nine years back, to right after when Plagueis was done with Venamis for the first time. He began to manipulate the midi-chlorians to internally heal the damage done to his own body over his long life, but it takes him months of concentration and effort to get any progress done, and even then only “a measured change” took place. Contrast that with him, a decade later, regenerating himself Darth Sidious’s Force lightning when the latter was ”drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had.”

But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn’t been enough for him. And so after Sidious had returned to Coruscant, he had devoted himself to internalizing that ability, by manipulating the midi-chlorians that animated him. For several months he made no progress, but ultimately he began to perceive a measured change. The scars that had grown over his wounds had abruptly begun to soften and fade, and he had begun to breathe more freely than he had in twenty years. He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvenating itself. Beneath the transpirator, areas of his skin were smooth and youthful, and he knew that eventually he would cease to age altogether.


Crackling from his fingertips, a web of blue lightning ground itself on the Muun’s breathing device. Plagueis’s eyes snapped open, the Force gathering in him like a storm, but he stopped short of defending himself. This being who had survived assassinations and killed countless opponents merely gazed at Sidious, until it struck him that Plagueis was challenging him! Confident that he couldn’t be killed, and in denial that he was slowly suffocating, he might have been simply experimenting with himself, actually courting death to put it in its place. Momentarily taken aback, Sidious stood absolutely still. Was Plagueis so self-deluded as to believe that he had achieved immortality?

The question lingered for only a moment, then Sidious unleashed another tangle of lightning, drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had.


One might at first glance think these feats to be different, but in reality, they are very similar. In both instances, Plagueis is healing damage done to his body; both aging and Force lightning kill and ultimately disintegrate the flesh - it’s the exact same phenomenon, but at different speeds. Aging takes over a century while the lightning of someone as powerful as Sidious on an unprotected - to make it clear, Plagueis wasn’t using a Force barrier to tank it; he was effectively defenseless -  humanoid body is basically instantaneous. In short, 32 BBY Plagueis summoned vastly more power in a combat situation, while weakened, in a fraction of a second, than 42 BBY Plagueis managed to summon by focusing his strength over the course of multiple months. That’s a factual occurrence in the lore, not a fan-made calculation. To put that into context, in The Old Republic: Revan, Darth Nyriss’ uncharged lightning blasts are absorbed by Meetra Surik’s Force barrier and are only able to knock the Jedi Exile off her feet.

Dazed, he looked up just in time to see another bolt of violet lightning catch Meetra in the chest. Like Nyriss, she threw up a barrier to save herself from the worst of it, but she was still knocked from her feet.


After this, Nyriss begins charging another blast of lightning. Based on the narration in the audiobook version of the novel, she did this for about 20 seconds if we judge the time solely off the dialogue, or for about 45 seconds if we count the entire length of the narration. Regardless, the exact time is irrelevant, as the bolts were still said to be strong enough to “incinerate” Meetra Surik and Lord Scourge simultaneously; contrast that with just Surik tanking her uncharged lightning to the chest, and the massive disparity in power between uncharged and charged Force attacks becomes evident. Furthermore, when Revan steps into the scene, he intercepts Nyriss’ attack with his hands, and then deflects it back at her. Nyriss erects a full Force barrier before the blast hits her, “but the bolts ripped it apart and continued on unabated,” “leaving only a pile of charred ash” upon making contact with her. This again highlights that colossal disparity: Nyriss’ uncharged power is utterly insignificant in the face of her charged power.

“Did you think I would be as easy to defeat as Xedrix?” Nyriss shouted, raising her lightsaber triumphantly above her head.

The air around her began to crackle and grow hot as she gathered herself for the killing blow. Scourge felt the energy building inside her, and he knew he would be powerless to stop it. Nyriss was too powerful; her command of the dark side was too strong.

“Gaze upon me and see your doom!” she declared. “I am Darth Nyriss, Lord of the Sith. I am the conqueror of Drezzi, the destroyer of Melldia, and a member of the Dark Council!”

Scourge braced himself for the end.

Just then, Revan emerged from the cell. He had pulled the hood of his Jedi robe up to cover his head, and he wore the red-and-gray mask, hiding his face.

A dozen bolts of lightning sprang from Nyriss’s hand, arcing across the room to incinerate her enemies. Instead of leaping back into the cell to avoid the deadly attack, Revan stepped forward to intercept it.

Both hands were held in front of him, his arms fully extended at shoulder height, his thumbs touching and his fingers splayed wide. He drew the bolts of lightning into his waiting grasp, channeling them away from their intended targets and absorbing their power.

“I am Revan reborn,” he said to Nyriss. “And before me you are nothing.”

Nyriss’s eyes went wide as Revan unleashed the power of her own attack against her. She tried to throw up another Force shield, but the bolts ripped it apart and continued on unabated. The lightning engulfed her, the intense heat consuming her instantly, leaving only a pile of charred ash.


Revan in the heat of combat is able to summon as much if not more power than Darth Nyriss is able to over the course of focusing and charging for 20 to 45 seconds. A differential as wide as this is enough for disintegration through an active Force defense. Now, just imagine a gap where one combatant is able to muster more power in a fraction of a second than the other is able to over the course of literal months. With 42 BBY already being significantly more powerful than Darth Tenebrous and recipient to full Banite scaling, the extent to which TPM Plagueis is Tenebrous’s superior is simply incomprehensible. It’s not even a disintegration-tier gap; it’s far, far, far greater than that. Again, this is explained by, and should only be expected of, Plagueis being capable of increasing his own midi-chlorian count by at least 1,250 per cell every 20 hours. The power he should logically gain from that would be astronomical, which, I feel, is reflected well in the feats comparison.

CONCLUSION

It should be noted that what I have written here is merely about a handful of Banite Sith as there isn’t much information of the rest that’s pertinent to this specific debate. So, when considering the gaps presented herein, keep in mind that this is essentially a lowball; that the Banites number 30 and each is stronger than the last, and I have only touched upon a few of them. And yet even those few indicate the chasm between Darth Bane and Darth Plagueis is so huge that words cannot describe it; Revan’s scaling from Exar Kun and whatnot is so hilariously insignificant by comparison, especially when Bane himself might not be that far off Revan to begin with. The idea that his feats are better than Plagueis’s still also begs proving: Ant’s dismissal that Plagueis’s feats are unquantifiable, and that thus demonstrates Revan’s superiority does not do that, is reliant on the argument from ignorance. one of the most prolific logical fallacies employed in Star Wars debating. An argument from ignorance, wherein the ignorance stands for a lack of contrary evidence, asserts that a proposition must be true because it has not yet been proven false or that a proposition must be false because it has not yet been proven true. The flaw in this type of thinking is best demonstrated when it is reversed and applied to Revan:

Premise 1: Revan has never defeated Darth Malgus as of The Old Republic: Deceived.
Conclusion: Revan is incapable of defeating Darth Malgus as of The Old Republic: Deceived.

And of course, if Revan is not capable of defeating Malgus, then Malgus is capable of defeating Revan and would not even need an amp of any kind, meaning Revan would never even make the top 15 list. Many TOR wankers would immediately begin assembling a body of evidence indicating Revan is more powerful, masterful, skillful etc. than Malgus as proof that not having defeated someone isn’t sufficient proof of an inability to defeat that person. And the same logic applies in Plagueis’s case: simply because he has not done something does not mean he is incapable of doing that; and simply because cosmic feats are not stated to be impressive in the context of more conventional displays of power does not mean it they aren’t.  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; inactivity does not equate to inability. The only way to actually prove a character’s superiority to another is to establish a ceiling for the opponent and then demonstrate how one’s own character is above that ceiling.