#reblogging the fun things
i think i’ve complained about this before but it’s still annoying so here we go again: the problem with the entire old republic era is that everyone and their goldfish gets called “sith,” regardless of the actual degree of connection between them
this makes things a bit taxonomically complex, and encourages the casual player/reader/whatever to smush literally every single entity or faction with the “sith” label into a monolithic, undifferentiated soup of Bad Guys despite the fact that these are, or at least should be, distinct groups of people.
add in frequent writer-level conflation of these groups and their beliefs, goals, and methods, and what you’re left with is A Mess™
so we’ve got:
Oh. Oh yes. Word origins is where the tasty bits are. *Rubs hands together*
The etymologist in me goes fucking bonkers NUTS over this kind of thing because I want to add all the crunchy snacks on top like:
What does the word “Sith” originally translate to? What does it “mean”? What root does it come from? Where are its origins? How did that origin influence its spread as a term and an idea, and how did it develop and morph as time went on? Which cultures saw something different in its origin, and how did they apply it to their own understanding of what “Sith” meant? How did that effect the source as time went on? How did the word spread to the rest of the galaxy, and who was the introducer (because that would definitely have a HUGE impact on how Sith, as a word, was perceived by the greater galaxy)? And being as cultural views and values vary so widely, how did each culture interpret the idea of “Sith” as they were introduced to it? What did they see? How did their subsequent interactions with Sith influence, in turn, Sith’s perceptions of themselves (of any flavour)? And on and on and on. Words as concepts and ideas change so easily and fluidly as they are discovered and used by different people, and that in turn heavily influences the makeup of very thing those words are trying to describe.
It’s like the most convoluted game of telephone you could possibly imagine. How delicious. How delightful. How positively infuriating :3
