★ Top Fifteen Tournament #8 - Darth Plagueis

Also, gIvE mE sTaRs.

DarthAnt66 wrote:@The Ellimist: Classes are over. May the odds be ever in your favor.  

You're the one who's going to need the odds to be in your favour.

Anyway, can someone give me a tally of the current votes?

Yeah, them being equals was never my case. I said Jinn was “mentioned in the same breath as Mace”, which he was. There’s no arguing with that. It doesn’t make them equals, which they aren’t, and is not what I said. What it does do is inform the reader that Jinn and Mace are the standout duellists that Bondara has sparred with. Not Mace and any member of the B-team or Mace and any other Jedi, but Mace and Jinn.


As to Mace being deadlier, yeah he is – which is why I posted the source stating it and specifically put it in the scaling chain. It seems you follow the scaling chain and agree with it, so what are you even debunking?

So what the hell was the point of this?

This scales Plagueis in TPM to be superior to Maul, who is superior to Qui-Gon, who is mentioned in the same breath as Mace Windu (but is less deadly) who is Yoda's equal.


Now that we have firmly cemented Plagueis to be a TPM titan via feats and scaling, we move onto why that isn't his ceiling. 

You're using a bizarre argument to try and claim Plagueis is a TPM titan at least based on...Qui-Gon, yet you now say Mace is noticeably better than Qui-Gon. So how does the Maul scaling in any way put Plagueis as a TPM titan?

Power growth or raw power? Again, not my case. You either have a false premise for your argument or you are strawmanning.

So your argument was that, in lightsaber skill, Plagueis ~ TPM Mace/Yoda? Because you need a lot more to substantiate than an arbitrary scaling chain built on conjecture if so.

This is just nonsensical.


Bondara is comparing his contemporaries. Jedi he has actually sparred with. Mace has sensed Anakin’s and Yoda’s power and deems Kar to be in the same ballpark. The Sith quote what, lists humans and near-humans across different eras? So not contemporaries, or sparring partners who know each other and can compare them to others. 


Try bringing in relevant quotes rather than pulling mental gymnastics to say my reply proved your point . 

If you bothered to use that thing between your ears known as your brain, you'd realise they aren't "mental gymnastics". The Anoon quote applies no comparison between Qui-Gon and Mace, which is literally what you said:

Now that we have established the disparity between Maul and Plagueis, we can then establish parity with Yoda, via Qui-Gon Jinn. The Jedi Master can last half-a-minute to a minute against a combatant that we know can stomp Maul, and we also know that Qui-Gon at this time is second in the Order only to Yoda in terms of their mastery of Ataru and has been compared to Mace Windu, who through various accolades is Yoda's equal during TPM:

Your entire comparison is built on two quotes: one which establishes Mace as noticeably "a bit" superior, and another that you yourself concedes them as just standing out to Anoon:

Yeah, them being equals was never my case. I said Jinn was “mentioned in the same breath as Mace”, which he was. There’s no arguing with that. It doesn’t make them equals, which they aren’t, and is not what I said. What it does do is inform the reader that Jinn and Mace are the standout duellists that Bondara has sparred with. Not Mace and any member of the B-team or Mace and any other Jedi, but Mace and Jinn.

So far, you have no evidence to back up your bold claim that Mace and Jinn are comparable beyond a quote which literally cements Mace's superiority. Your scaling currently functions like this:

1) Jinn is compared to TPM Mace.
2) Mace is Yoda's equal.
3) Maul defeated Jinn.
4) Plagueis >>> Maul.
5) Therefore, Plagueis is comparable to the TPM titans.

You have offered absolutely no substance between one BS quote - which you ignored the context and wording of - and another you're now hurriedly scrambling to pretend you always intended to just say Qui-Gon stands out compared to other Jedi - as for which, we have no idea if Anoon sparred the b-team, so this Jinn > b-team argument is horsecrap - and wasn't comparable to Mace...yet you still argue Plagueis can compared to TPM titans based on superiority to Maul and Maul's superiority to Jinn.

This only proves that Sidious does not actually believe himself to be Plagueis’s superior as he doesn’t bat an eye at Plagueis being powerful enough to both dominate the Force (through Midichlorian Manipulation) into granting him physical immortality, and cause such tremors as the one he felt.


If he really did think himself more powerful he would be confident in his ability to disable and contain Plagueis, even if he couldn’t kill him. Instead, he showed fear and wariness and wouldn’t even go near the body physically.

Go back and read what I said before. Already debunked this.

No, this is something that actually happened earlier in the novel:

Darth Plagueis wrote:With 11-4D deep in processing mode, Plagueis withdrew a vial of his own blood and subjected it to analysis. Despite the recent amplification of his powers he sensed that his midi-chlorian count had not increased since the events on Bal'demnic, and the analysis of the blood sample confirmed his suspicions.

And the extent of this amp would be...?

Zannah is the first one to take in Bane’s power, which is passed down the Banite line from master to successor.

Not nearly to the same extent, lol. That's why the later Banite Sith > the earlier ones.

You have to prove that, rather than just saying it and expecting me to take it at face value despite evidence to the contrary.

Because this power boost literally correlates with him reaching new heights and gaining the power of his past Banite Sith. He physically couldn't experience this level of growth without killing Plagueis. 

We’re not talking about other beings, we are talking about Sidious. Anakin’s power growth bears no relevance.

Once again, missing my argument. Try reading instead of skimming.

Even if we did take your arguments as solid (which they're not), he's still far below ROTS Mace and ROTS Sheev, who has thirteen years of growth on his post-boost TPM self. 

Next.

@BoD

So what the hell was the point of this?

You'd have to tell me. You're the one that in one post questioned the scale and then in another agreed with it.

You're using a bizarre argument to try and claim Plagueis is a TPM titan at least based on...Qui-Gon, yet you now say Mace is noticeably better than Qui-Gon. So how does the Maul scaling in any way put Plagueis as a TPM titan?

I'm not "now claiming", as I never said Jinn and Mace were equal, which is a big part of your argument.

Show me where I called them equal.

So your argument was that, in lightsaber skill, Plagueis ~ TPM Mace/Yoda? Because you need a lot more to substantiate than an arbitrary scaling chain built on conjecture if so.

No, my argument, if you bothered to read it, was that Plagueis being Sidious's equal or better puts him significantly above Maul. I then went on to scale Maul to Jinn and then from Jinn's accolades scaled him to Mace and Yoda.

Plagueis and Sidious are decidedly above Maul, and Mace and Yoda are decidedly above Jinn. Maul beat Jinn.

No conjecture here.

So far, you have no evidence to back up your bold claim that Mace and Jinn are comparable beyond a quote which literally cements Mace's superiority. Your scaling currently functions like this:

1) Jinn is compared to TPM Mace.
2) Mace is Yoda's equal.
3) Maul defeated Jinn.
4) Plagueis >>> Maul.
5) Therefore, Plagueis is comparable to the TPM titans.

You have offered absolutely no substance between one BS quote - which you ignored the context and wording of - and another you're now hurriedly scrambling to pretend you always intended to just say Qui-Gon stands out compared to other Jedi - as for which, we have no idea if Anoon sparred the b-team, so this Jinn > b-team argument is horsecrap - and wasn't comparable to Mace...yet you still argue Plagueis can compared to TPM titans based on superiority to Maul and Maul's superiority to Jinn.

 

As said above, when you ignore (or rather, cherry pick) parts of my argument you can make it look however you want.

Go back and read what I said before. Already debunked this.

Except you didn't.

And the extent of this amp would be...?

We don't know, just like we don't know the extent of Sidious's amp.

Not nearly to the same extent, lol. That's why the later Banite Sith > the earlier ones.

Obviously. She's the first one.

You said she didn't get an amp. I proved she did.

Because this power boost literally correlates with him reaching new heights and gaining the power of his past Banite Sith. He physically couldn't experience this level of growth without killing Plagueis. 

Yes, and as I've proven Plagueis got a power boost and reached new heights after Tenebrous's death. It still wasn't enough to put him on Tenebrous's level.

Once again, missing my argument. Try reading instead of skimming.

Even if we did take your arguments as solid (which they're not), he's still far below ROTS Mace and ROTS Sheev, who has thirteen years of growth on his post-boost TPM self. 

Next.

Try reading mine, and being civil.

Interesting post @NotAA3, will read in more detail in a bit.

The anti-Plagueis lightning strawman

One of the main points behind the Plagueis lightning “debunk” is that Plagueis’s clothes weren’t affected, so this means it isn’t impressive for him to tank it.

Of course, not all Force attacks in Star Wars are tailored to cause environmental damage, so this doesn’t mean that the lightning was weak. Since Sidious tapped more deeply into the dark side than he ever had, it clearly wasn’t.

The “debunk”’s response is that the lightning isn’t weak, but just different, and so the scaling doesn’t work.

That’s a strawman. The main point isn’t necessarily the visible physical damage (though that can still be a discussion), but whether it succeeded in the goal of defeating Plagueis. If Sidious used another form of lightning that did less physical impact but he insta-killed Plagueis, this would be a valid debunk. But since it clearly failed to be as effective as even Darth Bane’s lightning should’ve been on an unshielded, drunk, half-asleep Plagueis if Plagueis weren’t as powerful and capable in MM as he is, there are only two explanations:

- Sidious used some pathetic, super inefficient form of lightning for some reason where he had to draw more deeply on his power than ever before to achieve little.
- Plagueis is stupendously powerful and/or skilled in MM (just as indicated by the Force itself intervening against his abilities with it).

Can anyone give an updated vote tally w/ names? I am voting for revan btw.

Plagueis gets my vote

I. REVAN’S LIMIT

I’m sorry, Ant, my friend, but the sad reality of Revan is that he will always be limited by what he showed in the Temple of Sacrifice. Or rather, what he didn’t and couldn’t show. Courtesy of yourself:



Revan’s aim during the fight was to channel the power of the Force resonance that he created with the Temple’s machine core ”into an immense attack” which upon completion would have dealt ”massive damage to enemies within 1k.” It’s important to note here that he wasn’t using the Temple itself as a weapon - otherwise the resulting attack would have eradicated all life on the moon instead of merely causing havoc in a one-kilometer radius - but was rather channelling power through his own body and preparing to release it like any conventional Force attack. The in-game effect “Resonance” - cited in the screenshot above - applied to Revan during the fight takes 125 seconds to activate, so the obvious conclusion, especially when you yourself supported the validity of gameplay, is that Revan canonically needed to charge his attack for over two minutes while drawing on external power sources before he was capable of devastating life in a one-kilometer radius. Your own assessment of this in our Super Fight III debate, that you have frequently referred back to in your post, was as follows:

You’re ignoring the context of the attack. Revan thought the strike team was stuck on the floor below, but he stretched his attack across a kilometer radius. Clearly Revan wasn’t just trying to kill the strike team but “all enemies in a 1 km radius” (link), i.e. the "Imperial and Republic command fleets" that solidified their position directly up to the TOS. Moreover, the attack was “kinetic” (link), meaning it would be done via telekinesis, not Force drain, making your contention a false analogy. So, sure, Revan required time and aid to telekinetically kill perhaps hundreds of Jedi and Sith in a giant Force wave. If Revan had done that without time and aid, this debate would be versus Abeloth instead.

It looks to me you’re not contesting the idea he was channelling the power through his own body - nowhere do you say otherwise and you even claim Revan sought to “telekinetically” kill his enemies en masse, for which he “required time and aid.” Unless your opinion has changed in the months since, we appear to be in agreement over the mechanics and events of the Temple of Sacrifice fight. Except of course that I want citations for the Republic and Imperial fleets and potentially hundreds of Force-users being in the vicinity.

Regardless, the fact that Revan tried to manually slaughter his victims indicates that if he could have done so without amplifications and charging his power for two minutes, he would have. And this doesn’t just go for telekinesis but any ability, Force drain included. Revan is therefore far from destroying an entire biosphere like Vitiate.

II. DARTH PLAGUEIS’S MAGNITUDE

And then there's the alleged supremacy quotes.

I'll dive into Darth Plagueis blurb and Lucasfilm Licensing policy in a follow-up post to The Ellimist tomorrow, but I want to address the DK Readers quotes now. Since the release of Star Wars The Old Republic, Palpatine has only received "most powerful" accolades from the DK Readers series. However, those sources are explicitly written in-universe (link) and from a perspective that is either not omniscient or follows Lucas', not Lucasfilm Licensing's, continuity chronology instead (note: Lucas and Lucasfilm Licensing run two alternate Star Wars continuities). The DK Readers series describes the Sith as a "many centuries old" (link) organization that "fought a war" with the Jedi (link), which matches Lucas' take that the Sith are only a two-thousand year old cut that fought one war with the Jedi. Moveover, DK Readers holds that Plagueis died before Palpatine trained Maul (link), that Boba Fett died in the sarlacc pit (link), and that Palpatine was the "final Sith Master" (link), all of which are also Lucas continuity-specific claims. Again, either the source is not omniscient or it's in-universe perspective is following Lucas' timeline. Either way, it's not usable here.

1. Everything prior to April 25th, 2014 is Legends canon unless stamped with the Infinities logo or otherwise declared non-canon on a case-by-case basis. There are no “Lucas continuity” sourcebooks, period. Battle for Naboo is perfectly acceptable as Legends material.

2. The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia is ”compiled by some omniscient committee of historians and scholars taking a look back over tens of thousands of years of galactic history [...] 150 years after the Battle of Yavin.” Furthermore, ”The author/editor is solely responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation.” Given we have a precedent, an in-universe source isn’t necessarily non-omniscient because the errors within can be blunders by the author, not indicative of the ignorance of the person(s) from whose perspective(s) it is written. A third person omniscient perspective should always be assumed by default because otherwise nothing is certain; if everything is questionable, then truth literally cannot be obtained and Star Wars debating as a hobby ceases to function. The claim that a specific source is written from an inherently fallible, non-omniscient perspective needs to be proven on a case-by-case basis, every time.





2.5. This isn’t a counter-argument per se, moreso explaining the implications of your argument if it’s accepted. The Old Republic Encyclopedia is ”Written entirely in-universe” and states that ”In the final moments of the Battle of Rakata Prime, Jedi Knight Bastila Shan confronts Darth Malak aboard the Star Forge.” Obviously, anyone who is familiar with the events of Knights of the Old Republic knows this to be false - Bastila was not a Jedi Knight as she had deserted the Jedi Order and joined the Sith (yes, she was redeemed, but she would have to be formally accepted back into the Order to regain her title), and she did not confront Malak but instead left the job to Revan in fear of being corrupted by Malak’s power if she faced him: ”If we face Malak I am afraid his dark presence will overwhelm me. It would not be wise to expose myself to such temptation.” You have made the argument in the past that The Old Republic Encyclopedia is from an omniscient perspective, but the book containing an error like this indicates otherwise. If the source can’t get events that took place only three hundred years prior right, then everything preceding the immediate timeframe of the MMO that the source writes about is called into question. By your logic, this would make it unusable. Every Revan supporter and TOR wanker who has thus far been in agreement with Ant’s argument should also keep this in mind and ponder whether they fine with sacrificing The Old Republic Encyclopedia for this argument.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7fYRlBCuwc&feature=youtu.be&t=26m40s

I would wager most debaters have Revan's power at least in the ballpark of Caedus' and Plagueis'. If so, it's going to come down to the differentiating characteristics of the three. The rest of this posts highlights Revan's unique advantages and why they make him a relatively far more difficult opponent to defeat.

Um, that’s a bold assumption. Why would people even have a reason to have Revan with Plagueis? You’ve only given them arbitrary feats like beating Star Forge Malak or ashing Nyriss that don’t connect to Plagueis at all. You’ll have to prove he is in the Muun’s league in power, because for my money he isn’t. Revan expressly caps out infinitely below Vitiate per the Ziost-Yavin comparison above - the latter devoured a planet; the former couldn’t drain life in a one-kilometer radius - so any argument you have for their supposed parity is clearly not considering some element that alters the perceived power dynamic between them. Vitiate in turn is capped beneath Darth Sidious by an omniscient declaration that Sidious is the most powerful Sith ever as of The Phantom Menace, even before the boost he gained from slaying his Master.





Darth Plagueis ties into this by way of his power rivalling that of his apprentice during The Phantom Menace. Merely two years prior, Sidious noted Plagueis passively emitting ”terrifying energy”, and over the two years leading up to TPM, he never considered confronting his Master in a direct duel, instead hatching a scheme to literally nuke him from orbit as detailed in Maul: Lockdown and the latter chapters of Darth Plagueis. Most clearly, Sidious disposed of his Master ”upon receiving the skill and ability to do so,” indicating that he did not have ”the skill and ability” to defeat Plagueis at any point significantly prior. Even then, he seemed exceptionally hesitant and even following the intensification of his powers, Sidious seemed outright frightened at the prospect of Plagueis’s survival.

Just arrived on the Hunters' Moon, Sidious studied Plagueis as the Sith Lord and his droid, 11-4D, viewed a holorecording of a black-robed Zabrak assassin making short work of combat automata in his home on Coruscant, some hovering, some advancing on two legs, others on treads, and all firing blasters.

Twenty years had added a slight stoop to the Muun's posture and veins that stood out under his thinning white skin. He wore a dark green utility suit that hugged his delicate frame, a green cloak that fell from his bony shoulders to the fort's stone floor, and a headpiece that hewed to his large cranium. A triangular breath mask covered his ruined, prognathous lower jaw, his mouth, part of his long neck, and what remained of the craggy nose he'd had before the surprise attack in the Fobosi. A device of his own invention, the alloy mask featured two vertical slits and a pair of thin, stiff conduits that linked it to a transpirator affixed to his upper chest, beneath an armored torso harness. He had learned to ingest and imbibe through feeding tubes, and through his nose.

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.






Revan’s gimmicks would have to outweigh the colossal power disparity between Plagueis and Malgus (far greater than the one between Revan and Malgus) in combat effectiveness for the amp Malgus needs to defeat Revan to be greater than the one he needs to be defeat Plagueis. I feel like this is a good point to talk about those.

III. REVAN’S GIMMICKS

This might be the most underrated ability in the mythos. To preface by addressing a long-standing counter to teleportation, the fact the “Master Force Adept” that oversees “the Emperor’s Imperial Archive” on Coruscant knows how to teleport (link) does not mean it’s a commonplace ability. This adept was in charge of and has unique access to Palpatine’s private vaults. A strike team of the Nightsister Silri, her rancor, and multiple bounty hunters tore through the Imperial Archive defenses but explicitly needed yslamari to counter the adept’s teleportation haxx.

This perfectly illustrates my point above: despite one of the Emperor’s dark side adepts possessing teleportation, he doesn’t even seem to be on the Emperor or Darth Vader’s radar. Palpatine is known for frequently testing his apprentice’s mettle and looking for replacements, even turning to a ”pool of minor wizards and political sycophants” as pointed out by you during Super Fight III. Yet this particular teleporter adept never seemed to catch his eye as a worthy opponent for Vader despite the Sith cyborg mainly and often only utilizing his lightsaber and simple telekinesis in battle. The facts that Vader himself made it his goal to ”Never suffer rivals” and was personally in charge of overseeing the training of the dark side adepts on Byss, as seen in the comics Darth Vader and the Ghost Prison and Evasive Action: Recruitment, respectively, support this belief. No amount of esoteric shenanigans - teleportation included - is going to outdo pure power in a fight if the disparity is large enough.

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."

Correction: the passage you cited is from the perspective of Darth Sidious, not Plagueis. Read Chapter 25 if you don’t believe me. But yes, Sidious believed that “there can be no return to the light for an adept who has entered the dark wood” - he characterized the redemption of Ulic Qel-Droma as him merely turning on Exar Kun like all Sith do, and even decades later believed wholeheartedly that Darth Vader could never be turned back to the light.

“Hundreds of years after Sadow’s death, a Jedi named Freedon Nadd revived Sadow’s spirit. Nadd became the new Dark Lord, and he used his powers to conquer the world Onderon. Following Sadow’s example, Freedon Nadd also preserved his own spirit in a tomb. Many centuries later, Nadd’s spirit was awakened by the Jedi Exar Kun, who became the next Dark Lord. Exar Kun allied with a wayward Jedi named Ulic Qel-Droma, and together they established a Sith Order ruled by two, a Master and apprentice. These two Dark Lords of the Sith failed to conquer the Jedi because they wound up fighting each other, as did their successors, another pair of former Jedi, named Revan and Malak. History, it seemed, was repeating itself.” Sidious looked at Maul, “Am I going too fast for you?”


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuPe-ly0BHM

The Emperor: “Welcome, young Skywalker. I have been expecting you. You’ll no longer need those. Guards, leave us. I’m looking forward to completing your training. In time, you will call me ‘Master.’”

Luke Skywalker: “You’re gravely mistaken. You won’t convert me as you did my father.”

The Emperor: “Oh, no, my young Jedi. You will find that it is you who are mistaken about a great many things.”

Darth Vader: “His lightsaber.”

The Emperor: “Ah, yes, a Jedi’s weapon. Much like your father’s. By now you must know your father can never be turned from the dark side. So will it be with you.”

So, Revan has repeatedly shown to be able to merge Jedi and Sith ideologies, even across overlapping consciousness (1), literally distinct entities of himself (2), or as a fully-fledged dark-sider (3). Plagueis, per his own admission, either lacks the willpower and/or mastery to do any that. Consider this the Revanite rebuttal to the whole "Plagueis has probed the deepest depths of the Force" shannaegings. Revan has too, just for the Unifying Force instead of the Living Force. And, unlike the midichlorian argument, this actually offers a direct comparison whereas Revan never had the luxury to study midichlorians for a century.

I’m genuinely curious if you’ll now drop this point or if you’ll double down - because if the latter, you’d essentially be asserting that “OT Palpatine, per his own admission, either lacks the willpower and/or mastery to do any of that. Consider this the Revanite rebuttal to the whole ‘Sidious has created a shroud of the dark side across the galaxy and dampened the foresight of 10,000 Jedi with his personal power, defeated the most powerful Jedi in history, tanked Marek’s suicide blast at point blank range, mind-wiped possibly the entire one-trillion populace of Coruscant, almost perfected the world-destroying Force storms we would see in action merely six years later, and much more’ shenanigans. And unlike all the previous shit, this actually offers a direct comparison whereas Revan never had the luxury to gather the works of knowledge from a million worlds or whatever.” In fact, only the character we’re examining has been changed from Plagueis to the Emperor but the logic of your argument remains the same, so technically, you should, in accordance with consistency and good faith integrity, double down on your stance. But since I’m a Good Samaritan, I’ll save you from having to argue Revan is more powerful than Return of the Jedi Emperor Palpatine by refuting the idea that attaining balance is an indication of power.

Allow me to introduce everyone to the Je’daii Order, the precursor to the Jedi Order that was founded on the principle of maintaining balance in the Force that existed over 25,000 BBY. If the Je’daii strayed too far into either the light or the dark, their home planet Tython would react with violent cataclysms, forcing the Je’daii to maintain balance within themselves in order for the planet to remain peaceful. As a necessary precaution, they would exile unbalanced individuals to Tython’s two moons, Ashla and Bogan, so that they would not threaten the tranquility on Tython. In fact, so sensitive was Tython to imbalance that only the arrival of a dark-sided ship, the deaths of few Rakatans and the dark side power and emotions of the Force Hound Xesh caused a Force Storm of apocalyptic proportions which threatened the entire planet. The fact that the Je’daii are able to maintain peace in such a Force-volatile environment is an excellent testament to just how in balance with the Force they are.





Now to look at individual cases. Lanoree Brock’s alignment in the Force is described as ”suspended at the most perfect balancing point between” light and dark, ”influenced by both yet pulled in neither direction.” This is virtually identical to the description about Revan “drawing on both the light and dark sides for strength,” having “learned to balance on the knife-edge between them” and wielding ”the dual philosophies of Sith passion and Jedi tranquility" in tandem. She also uses the Force balance, drawing on both sides simultaneously just like Revan, except for a different application in the form of Je’daii alchemy, but the core principle is still the same. Yet despite this, Lanoree’s power level reaches its ceiling at grenade level when she struggled to shield herself from one. Another Je’daii, Sek’nos Rath, also struggled to lift a relatively small boulder while amplified by Tython’s Force nexus, yet he should logically be in balance like every other Je’daii.

As she looked back down at the injured Noghri, she saw the shell of his mask peel back and a wisp of smoke from within. Voice activated! she had time to think, and then she put every shred of strength and every measure of power she had in the Force into shielding herself from what came next.

She barely heard the explosion.

***

For a moment, as she saw the Wookiee’s face and felt its strong, furry hands hauling her to her feet, she thought she was back on Ska Gora with her fingers hovering over laser cannon triggers. Then she remembered what had happened and smelled acrid smoke on the air.

“I’m fine,” she said. Dizziness swept over her and she composed herself, breathing deeply. The female Wookiee grumbled a question, and Lanoree nodded. “Really. Fine.”

The few people around her—the Wookiee; several humans; a tall, eyeless Miraluka with slatted mask—observed in stunned silence. When Lanoree looked beyond them, she understood their amazement at her survival.

The Noghri had packed quite a blast. There was nothing left of him, and the site of the explosion was the center of a wide swath of blackened and broken marble. Detritus littered the lobby. He had killed himself without a second thought, and it was incredible that no one else had been caught by the blast.

I was there, Lanoree thought, looking at the small, cracked crater in the marble floor. She had been blasted across the lobby, protected and shielded by the Force that she was so rich in, and for a few moments she tingled with something approaching ecstasy. She took a deep breath and felt a rush of well-being. Perhaps it was relief. Or maybe she was simply realizing that it was good to be alive.


Ashla and Bogan were out of sight, along with Tython, a hundred sixty million kilometers away on the other side of Tythos. Yet she felt their pull and presence, as did every Je’daii wherever they might be in the system. Ashla was light and Bogan dark, and they tugged at her with a comforting gravity, as if she were suspended at the most perfect balancing point between the moons, influenced by both yet pulled in neither direction.


In that room long ago with Master Dam-Powl, before the tragedy with Dal and while Lanoree was still wide-eyed with wonder and potential, the lessons she learned had felt amazing.

Your future lies in the alchemy of flesh, Dam-Powl had said. I saw it in you the moment we met, and nothing has dissuaded me from that. It is a talent, for some, that lies on the edges of acceptability. It is a strong, challenging power, and you must be firmly balanced to attempt it. You must not let heavier desires tempt you. The dark side lurks close to what I do here, Lanoree, and I am always vigilant. Don’t be tempted. Don’t be drawn. Maintain your balance.

The words had always remained with her. Remembering them now Lanoree did as instructed, but there was too much pain, too much pressure. Her mind wanted to find balance in the Force, but her heart forged onward. Dal would not wait for her to be ready. Every moment she wasted here brought them all closer to tragedy.

“You might want to turn away,” she told Tre. But Tre only shook his head and sat in the corner of the cabin, eyes half-closed. After she had saved herself, she’d do what she could for him.

The experiment was as she had left it. Traveling alone, she had long spells when she could concentrate on perfecting such alchemies, and though she was still young, she knew that her talent was great. Proof of that lay before her now. She lifted the cover and the flesh throbbed. Blood dribbled from imperfect yet adequate veins. Vestigial limbs waved weakly and without purpose. At one edge a blind eye opened, pupil milky white. Even if it did see, there was no mind to understand.

The iris had her coloring because it was a part of her.

The life that animated this flesh was formed by Lanoree and drawn from the Force. Over time she had molded the single collection of cells—taken from her own arm, a splash of blood, and marrow—into this, an object with a form of life that was all her own. Its movement still troubled her, as did its partial familiarity. But where there was no brain, there was no mind, and without a mind it was meat. That was all. Living, pulsing, replicating meat. She continued to tell herself that even as she wondered whether it felt pain.

The power she sometimes experienced as she molded flesh to her own desires was shocking, but right now she found meaning in her experiments at last. It’s not just alchemy, Dam-Powl had told her. It’s not just learning the art for the sake of it. It’s practicing to be the artist.

Lanoree gathered herself, resting her hands on either side of the experiment’s small pedestal. Her wound was deep and wide, its edges weeping and its depth burning. But at the moment Dal had tried to kill her, she had gathered herself behind the Force, and it had swallowed much of the impact. If she hadn’t done that—an instant, an instinctive action—her heart and lungs would have been blasted across the mine’s floor. Her brother believed her dead. At least she had given herself a chance.

She breathed deeply and welcomed the Force flowing through her. Closed her eyes. Shut away the pain that threatened to make her sick, the tiredness that lured her down to sleep, and death. The Force grew stronger in her, tingling in her fingertips and toes, her neck, her wounded chest, and she directed it into her experiment.

The alchemy came alive within her. It was a burning star with a dark heart. That, I have to watch, she thought, but agonies swept through her, distracting her. The power was wonderful. She smiled.

The flesh before her started to bubble and boil, and without opening her eyes she stripped off her tattered robe and undergarments and leaned forward.

The smell of burning flesh filled the Peacemaker.

She heard a pitiful whine from Tre but did not look. If he was afraid, he could cover his eyes.

Bogan loomed and she opened her mind’s eye to embrace its darkened surface, and at the same time she felt a warm, wet touch between her breasts. It caressed the angry wound and numbed. Lanoree welcomed the contact and sought more, leaning farther forward until she was directly over the pedestal of flesh. My flesh, my experiment, my very own alchemy of self.

She sought and found Ashla, a bright spark within the Force. And experiencing herself in balance, the talents she had been made aware of at Anil Kesh, and which she had been practicing for so long, began to flow.

Flesh flowed with them.




If balance in the Force is a testament to an individual’s potency relative to those incapable of achieving it, then you’re literally arguing people who struggle to shield themselves from grenade explosions and lift stones are stronger than the guy who erected multiple fortress-wide Force barriers and killed a Sith Lord more powerful than Darth Bane in combat. Obviously Gravid’s feats in themselves force a contradiction, proving your thesis false. Not to mention that, again, it’s not even certain if Gravid went mad as the only account of that is from Sidious’s point of view who likewise misconstrued Ulic’s redemption. Revan’s achievements relating to balance are irrelevant to this debate.

Revan died on the Foundry. The strike team confirmed, "I saw you die. I watched you take your last breath and say your last words." Spirit Revan also stated, "I died," and, "The Emperor's follower struck me down," and the resurrected Revan states, "I was dead." However, and this is important, Revan's dual "wisdom" and "focus" consciousness were still tethered together until after his death. This is affirmed by twice over. Spirit/"wisdom" Revan states, “My actions [on the Foundry] were those of a madman, consumed by rage I am glad to have left such evil behind” (link)meaning he was still joined with "focus"/dark Revan and still to blame for the Foundry madness. Spirit/"wisdom" Revan also states, “When I died, I had come to terms. I was ready to become one with the Force, but I soon realized that was only what part of me wanted” (link). This reveals that Revan’s spirit bifurcation did not happen “when [Revan] died” but “soon” thereafter—perhaps longer if there was a time gap between spirit Revan’s “realization” and the split itself. Given the “journey into the Netherworld is instantaneous” after death (link), and the fissure did not happen “instantaneous” with his death, Revan must've went to the Netherworld still whole. Accordingly, for dark Revan to transfer his spirit back into his corpse, he had to escape the Netherworld. Note that Palpatine said, “An ancient Naboo legend speaks of a realm called Chaos, blocked by a sextet of impenetrable barriers. If Chaos exists, then it takes a sufficiently determined mind to overcome and return to life” (link), meaning that dark Revan breaking free from such was an incredible feat replicated only by Palpatine himself and perhaps Darth Krayt. Note that Plagueis, obsessed with immortality, would have almost certainly tried to do this also, but apparently to no avail.

Obi-Wan Kenobi explained to Anakin Skywalker that there is a period in the Netherworld where the deceased spirit remains conscious and has the opportunity to become a Force ghost before their mind loses cohesion. From the example of Galen Marek, we know that the deceased spirit can still observe the physical world in this state. This is most likely the way in which every Sith spirit is able to return from the dead so long as they have an anchor strong in the dark side to latch onto to. Note how Obi-Wan, despite being a Force spirit, is still able to exist in the physical realm and has to manually shift his psyche to the Netherworld, bifurcating the nature of a Force spirit’s existence into two distinct states of being. Plagueis himself noted this and described the ancient Sith spirits as having trapped themselves between the physical realm and the Netherworld, a dark side anchor keeping them tethered in the former while the pull of the void wrenching them simultaneously towards the latter. So when Sith spirits die, they instantly go to the Netherworld but pull themselves back out through willpower and maintain their presence in the physical world through a dark side focal point.

Had Obi-Wan's spirit not witnessed Vader's action, he never would have believed it. Vader, the same monster that Obi-Wan had left to die on Mustafar, had sacrificed himself to save his son. And suddenly ObiWan realized where he had failed. For unlike Luke, Obi-Wan had not only believed that Anakin was completely consumed by the dark side, but had actually refused to believe that any goodness could have remained within Vader. And by refusing to allow that possibility, Obi-Wan had condemned not only his former friend but his own capacity for hope.

Fortunately, Luke's unwavering faith in his father's innate goodness had proved to be a stronger force than the power of the dark side.

Obi-Wan recalled what Qui-Gon Jinn's spirit had told him so long ago, when he said that Obi-Wan was not ready, and that he failed to understand. For so many years, Obi-Wan had thought Qui-Gon meant that he wasn't ready to comprehend details about Anakin's conversion to the dark side. But now, he finally understood his Master's words.

I wasn't ready to forgive Anakin. And he won't be entirely free unless I do.

Unfortunately, just as Obi-Wan realized that Anakin Skywalker lived, he also knew that Anakin would not live much longer. As Luke hauled his dying father toward a shuttle, Obi-Wan's spirit shifted his own psyche to another realm. And he waited.

After Anakin died in his son's arms, Obi-Wan called out into the void, "Anakin."

A moment later, Obi-Wan heard a familiar voice return from the darkness. "Obi-Wan? Master, I'm so sorry. So very, very —"

"Anakin, listen carefully," Obi-Wan interrupted. "You are in the netherworld of the Force, but if you ever wish to revisit corporeal space, then I still have one thing left to teach you. A way to become one with the Force. If you choose this path to immortality, then you must listen now, before your consciousness fades."


"No!" the apprentice cried, dropping his defenses to strike one last time at the Imperials. Energy surged through him. He felt as though a star had blazed to life in his chest. Driven by concern for his friends rather than himself, he embraced the Force completely, utterly, and was rewarded with strength that made his efforts with the dark side look like those of a child. His nerves were on fire. Streamers of light radiated from his skin. His bones glowed like radiant lava.

He saw rather than felt the massive shock wave that consumed a large portion of what remained of the observation dome. A glowing bubble of fire tore the stormtroopers to shreds and engulfed Vader and the Emperor. Shrapnel filled the air like dust caught in the beam of the Death Star's powerful laser.

Tossed like a leaf, the Rogue Shadow fled in haste, ramp snapping shut on its precious cargo.

The apprentice felt himself leaving his body again. Or was his body leaving him this time? He felt ripped apart by the energy that had flowed through him. Every cell was in shock; every fiber shook. The fire on his face possessed no heat at all. His limbs felt as distant as the farthest arms of the galaxy. He was amazed there was enough left of him to think at all.

Weakened by the blast, the dome's supports gave way. It collapsed into the superlaser dish, triggering a series of conventional explosions. Stormtroopers converged on the site. Through the dense smoke, two figures were visible from the apprentice's rarefied perspective.

Darth Vader struggled to his feet from the rubble, even more damaged than before. He reached out for support and found only his Master, scowling.

Together, unspeaking, they searched the rubble.

When they found what they were looking for, neither of them looked any happier for it.

"He is dead," the Dark Lord intoned, gazing dispassionately at the body at their feet.

This moment, the apprentice thought. I saw this!

"Then he is now more powerful than ever." The Emperor glanced up, watching sourly as the Rogue Shadow sped away into the busy sky. "He was meant to root out the Rebels, not give them hope. His sacrifice will only inspire them."

"But now we know who they are, my Master. I will hunt them down and destroy them, as you always intended-starting with the traitor Bail Organa."

The Emperor waved him silent and turned to walk away. "Patience, Lord Vader. Far better to destroy a man's hope first. Or that of someone close to him ..."

Hope will never he destroyed, the apprentice thought. Not now. It'll survive anything else you can throw at them . . .

Darkness pressed in. He didn't fight it. Juno was safe. That was all he cared about now. He didn't need to be there to see what happened next. He could imagine well enough.

With his last thought, he whispered his own name.


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.

It had been theorized by Jedi and Sith alike that balance between the light and dark sides was actually under the guidance of a group of discorporate entities—the ones called the Celestials, perhaps—who had merged themselves with the Force thousands of generations earlier, and had continued to guide the fate of the galaxy ever since. In effect, a higher order of intermediaries, whose powers were beyond the understanding of mortal beings. But many Sith viewed the notion with disdain, for the theoretical existence of such a group had little bearing on the goal of making the Force subservient to the will of an enlightened elite. Only the Sith understood that sentient life was on the verge of a transformative leap; that through the manipulation of midi-chlorians—or the overthrow of the Forceful group that supervised them—the divide between organic life and the Force could be bridged, and death could be erased from the continuum.

As evidenced by those few Lords who had managed to perpetuate their spirits after physical death—foremost among them Emperor Vitiate, who was said to have lived a thousand years—the ancient Sith had come halfway across that bridge. But those few had been so focused on worldly power that they had ended up trapping themselves between realms. That they had never provided the Order with guidance from beyond attested to the fact that their influence had been negligible, and had long since faded from the world.

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?




Revan managing to will himself back is therefore not something to be wanked in itself as every Sith spirit has replicated the feat. What determines the impressiveness of post-mortem existence is how long one can subsist in the physical world without an anchor. For Revan, he himself states he was dead ”for all of a blink” and as such would not have spent any amount of time in an anchorless state, further corroborated by the fact that his period in the Netherworld was be coterminous with the location of his death as seen with Galen Marek’s case. His spirit would therefore be in the proximity of his body and, going by Occam’s Razor, his dark half merely used it as a tether. Note that even though Revan almost immediately plunged his spirit into his corpse, it still took him time to regain enough power to animate and make it function fully. Darth Marr explains that upon striking him down, the Hero of Tython did not just destroy Vitiate’s physical form but actually ”wounded his spirit,” which explains why he was reduced to ”the brink of oblivion” and had to feed off of the Revanite conflict to recover; Palpatine notes that a part of himself was severed upon his death on Endor, which then manifested as an ”emotional bloodstain” and a dark side nexus in the exact spot where he died in space as noted by Mara Jade and Leia Organa Solo - these instances explain why Darth Krayt, despite driving his spirit into his corpse upon death like Revan, could not instantly rise back up and appeared dead to Wyyrlok until he had gathered enough strength to fully begin controlling his body again. Revan’s case would thus be the same as all of the above, explaining why it took so long for him to return and why his corpse appeared inanimate to the strike team who had just vanquished him on the Foundry,  despite only being dead, in his own words, for a blink. Darth Andeddu’s case seems to be the only exception, but that can be easily reconciled by the fact that his spirit was not violently wrenched from his body like with the others, and he had millennia to slumber and gather his power in a holocron before re-entering the flesh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL_UCFq0bIE&t=1m23s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EaCRYXjkVU&t=2m45s



Organa Solo's gaze drifted away from Mara to the window, and Mara could feel a tightening of the other woman's sense. "I was at Endor a couple of months ago," she said.

An icy sensation crawled up Mara's spine. She'd been at Endor, too, taken there to face Grand Admiral Thrawn . . . and she remembered what the space around the world of the Emperor's death had felt like. "And?" she prompted. Even to herself, her voice sounded strained.

Organa Solo heard it, too. "You know what I'm talking about, don't you?" she asked, her eyes still on the lights of the Imperial City. "There's some shadow of the Emperor's presence still there. Some of that final surge of hatred and anger. Like a—I don't know what."

"Like an emotional bloodstain," Mara said quietly, the image springing spontaneously and vividly into her mind. "Marking the spot where he died."

She looked at Organa Solo, to find the other woman's eyes on her. "Yes," Organa Solo said. "That's exactly what it was like."








Now, to address Plagueis’s case. The reason why he was seemingly unable to drive his spirit back in and reanimate his corpse like Revan simply comes down to a difference in circumstances. To preface, when a body begins to die, its midi-chlorians begin to die one-by-one as well and vanish back into the Cosmic Force. This process begins even while the host is still conscious and physically aware of their senses and surroundings, or in other words, when their spirit is still in their body. Look at the death of Darth Tenebrous as an example, both from the perspectives of Plagueis and Tenebrous himself: the former noted that ”The Bith’s moribund midi-chlorians were winking out, like lights slowly deprived of a power source, and yet Plagueis could still perceive Tenebrous in the Foirce,” and the latter observed that ”Even with the jerking and convulsing in his body’s last reflexive rebellion against the fall of eternal night” “he could feel each individual midi-chlorian wink out in turn.”

Tenebrous was paralyzed and unconscious but not yet dead. Plagueis had no interest in saving him—even if it were possible—but he was interested in observing the behavior of the Bith’s midi-chlorians as life ebbed. The Jedi thought of the cellular organelles as symbionts, but to Plagueis midi-chlorians were interlopers, running interference for the Force and standing in the way of a being’s ability to contact the Force directly. Through years of experimentation and directed meditation, Plagueis had honed an ability to perceive the actions of midi-chlorians, though not yet the ability to manipulate them.

Manipulate them, say, to prolong Tenebrous’s life.

Looking at the Bith through the Force, he perceived that the midi-chlorians were already beginning to die out, as were the neurons that made up Tenebrous’s lofty brain and the muscle cells that powered his once-able heart. A common misconception held that midi-chlorians were Force-carrying particles, when in fact they functioned more as translators, interlocutors of the will of the Force. Plagueis considered his long-standing fascination with the organelles to be as natural as had been Tenebrous’s fixation on shaping the future. Where Bith intelligence was grounded in mathematics and computation, Muun intelligence was driven by a will to profit. As a Muun, Plagueis viewed his allegiance to the Force as an investment that could, with proper effort, be maximized to yield great returns. True, too, to Muun psychology and tradition, he had through the decades hoarded his successes, and never once taken Tenebrous into his confidence.

The Bith’s moribund midi-chlorians were winking out, like lights slowly deprived of a power source, and yet Plagueis could still perceive Tenebrous in the Force. One day he would succeed in imposing his will on the midi-chlorians to keep them aggregate. But such speculations were for another time. Just now Tenebrous and all he had been in life were beyond Plagueis’s reach.


Dying, Tenebrous observed with mild surprise, was turning out to be not only pleasant, but wholly wonderful; had he ever suspected how much he'd enjoy the process, he wouldn't have wasted all these decades waiting for his foolish apprentice Plagueis to do him in.

So, even as he lay gasping around the icy barbs that pierced his lung, Tenebrous smiled. Even with the jerking and convulsing in his body's last reflexive rebellion against the fall of eternal night, even as organ systems shut down one by one to maintain the last shreds of light and life within the vast intricacies of his brain - massive beyond even those of other Biths, a people justly legendary for their intellectual prowess - Tenebrous found himself particularly enjoying the incremental disappearance of his own midi-chlorians.

His Force-perception was even more acute than the magnifying powers of his enormous eyes; in the Force, he could feel each individual midi-chlorian wink out in turn, a spreading wave of darkness, like stars eclipsed by the silhouette of an approaching ship.

Or falling through the event horizon of a black hole.

Ah, darkness. Darkness at last. The darkness he had dreamed of. The darkness he had planned for. The darkness that was his one true love. The darkness he had taken as his name.

Was he not Darth Tenebrous?

His vision dimmed. His hearing became a rush of wind like static on an electrovoder - and then silence. The sole sensation registered by his quivering flesh was the rip of shattered bone and slow suffocation choking his consciousness, as his shredded lung could supply only a fraction of the oxygen required by his massive brain.

It hardly mattered. Shielded from suffering by his command of the Force, Tenebrous observed the death agony of his physical form with appropriately Bithan dispassion. And now his impossibly refined perceptions detected the brush of Plaugueis' mind, as the apprentice probed the vanishing midi-chlorians of his dying master with his own use of the Force, as Tenebrous had known he would. Tenebrous had spent decades making sure that Plagueis would be unable to resist doing exactly that.

Everything was proceeding according to plan.


As Revan was killed in battle and only managed to utter a single sentence before his spirit departed into the Netherworld, there would have been a far greater quantity of living midi-chlorians present in Revan’s body at the moment of his death than in Tenebrous’s due to it happening comparatively much sooner. His body would still have been rich in the Force when his dark half repossessed it, as he himself stated he was dead ”for all of a blink” and no longer. Plagueis, on the other hand, suffered a death in the same vein as Tenebrous’s: not sudden, but slow and within the confines of his body. The process of midi-chlorian decay would have started at the moment he began dying, which is the moment his breathing apparatus was disabled by Sidious, and near the conclusion of his tirade, Sidious even remarked that the Force was failing in Plagueis’s body, clearly referring to his dying midi-chlorians as they are what generate the Living Force, indicating that his midi-chlorians had been disappearing for the entire time. Thus, at the exact moment of Plagueis’s death, his body would have contained so little midi-chlorian activity - and therefore Living Force energy, which Sith spirits are dependent on to remain in contact with the physical world - compared to Revan’s corpse that it would hardly have made for a suitable vessel. Revan’s case was also made easier by the fact that his robes and mask were infused with immense dark side energy, making them good anchors for a spirit, much like Darth Nihilus with his own mask and robes.

"There's the rub, you see," Sidious said in a philosophical tone. "All the ones you experimented on, killed, and brought back to life... They were little more than toys. Now, though, you get to experience it from their side, and look what you discover: in a body that is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can't accomplish what you're asking of them."




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSLVfaqJtNA&t=12m25s

With Revan dying on the Foundry then essence transferring back into his corpsed established, it logically follows that Revan’s sustained existence could not be contingent on the physical wellbeing of a corpse. “Physical wellbeing” and “corpse” are diametrically opposed concepts. Instead, we need just refer to the only other character to essence transfer into their corpse: Darth Andeddu. Instead, we need just refer to the only other character to essence transfer into their corpse: Darth Andeddu. Per Darth Wyyrlok, “You animated your own body after its death. Your mind functioned, your body responded to its commands." (link) / "You transferred your intellect to what we assumed was a holocron. It was more. It was a shell - just as that moldering corpse is a shell. Your mind forces your body to obey even though dead!” (link) In other words, Andeddu animated his decaying corpse through willpower. The same should be true for Revan, and indeed that’s exactly what spirit Revan said: “You've carried on, dragging the remains of a body that should have long since faded to dust.” Revan “dragged” (i.e. exhibited forceful exertion over) “the remains of a body” (i.e. a corpse). It likewise follows that defeating such a being would necessitate snuffing out their will or control over their corpse, not thrusting a lightsaber into their already decaying heart. In fact, Wyyrlok defeated Andeddu exactly this way (link). This explains why after Revan lost the will to live, spirit Revan noted he was now "too weak" and "won't last," further solidifying a direct correlation between Revan’s sustainability and willpower. Recall Darth Sion’s demise in the dark side ending: “You have defeated me - flesh and belief, both cast down.” Meetra eroded Sion’s will to live, and he gave up and died. Likewise, Revan’s reason for resurrecting and existing was to destroy Vitiate (link), so seeing Vitiate trick him and escape into the galaxy as an incorporated entity destroyed him.

Now, I'm not trying to convince you that a group of Force users could grab their lightsabers and wack Revan for five minutes without him dying. There's obviously limits to his damage soak. It would logically be increasingly difficult to animate one's body the more damage it takes, and even Revan's will has limits. Though, neither Vitiate, the Dread Masters, nor even the Netherworld could break him. Revan should definitely have far higher durability and pain tolerance than Caedus or Plagueis, and it's very likely Revan can tank some direct lightsaber strikes. Malgus may need an exorbitant amp to ravage Revan's body enough to render it impossible to animate. And as a proof-of-concept, look no further than his infamous kilometer-radius explosion feat:

Revan channeled the energies of The Machine to devastate all life in a one-kilometer radius, with his pulsations of power during the channel already afflicting all in the radius. The strike team attacked Revan (link), causing the energies “overload” or “backlash” inside of him. Any conventional Force user would die if a kilometer-spanning energies released within them; internal organs aren’t coated with a Force shield. Revan surviving suggests his body is highly tethered to his will, not biological functions.

The ”periodic kinetic damage” delivered by the Force resonance is unquantifiable. How much damage was delivered? We don’t know, except that the channel was potent enough to cause ”massive damage” to enemies within one kilometer ”Upon successful completion” which we do know Revan didn’t achieve - the channel could have been interrupted within the first five seconds for all we know. Therefore, the actual amount of energy that Revan endured upon the detonation of the backlash is entirely unquantifiable. Now, you have established the following premises:

1. ”Revan’s sustained existence could not be contingent on the physical well-being of a corpse” / “It likewise follows that defeating such a being would necessitate snuffing out their will or control over their corpse, not thrusting a lightsaber into their already decaying heart.”
   
2. ”Any conventional Force user would die if a kilometer-spanning energies released within them; internal organs aren’t coated with a Force shield.”
   
3. ”Revan surviving suggests his body is highly tethered to his will, not biological functions.”
   

With that, let’s now examine the following feat of Darth Bane’s:

Zannah felt the gathering dark side power of her Master, but in the instant before he unleashed the storm of deadly purple lightning, the Ithorian reached up from the floor and clutched him by his ankle. A shimmering blue globe surrounded them both as the mortally wounded Jedi released his own power in his final, dying act.

Instead of arcing across the room to destroy the one-armed Jedi, the lightning that flew from Bane's fingers reflected off the inside of the shimmering blue globe encasing him. The bolts ricocheted around wildly inside the globe, creating a storm of energy so intense that Zannah had to shield her eyes and look away. She heard Bane's scream rising above the sharp crackle of electricity, and when she looked back she saw the globe vanish and her Master fall to the ground in a charred and smoking heap.


When Zannah first reached Bane's side, she was sure her Master was dead. The lightning had reduced his clothes to ash, and his gloves and boots had melted away. The flesh of his face and hands was charred and burned, covered with blisters that oozed a runny yellow pus. Several of the parasites on his chest and stomach hadn't survived, their brown shells turned black and brittle by the lightning's electrical charge. Wisps of still-smoldering smoke crept out from beneath their shells, bringing with it a sickly stench that made Zannah's stomach churn.

Then she saw Bane's chest rise and fall, his breaths so shallow and faint she had almost missed them. He must have slipped into unconsciousness as his body went into shock from the unbearable pain. She paused, half expecting to see his seared skin and tissue begin to regenerate, but his injuries exceeded even the ability of the orbalisks to heal him, and nothing happened.


He recognized the voice of his apprentice, and his mind slowly began to reassemble the pieces of what had happened. He remembered the battle with the Jedi on Tython; he remembered unleashing a storm of Force lightning at the last of his foes. He remembered the kriffing shield the Ithorian Master had thrown up around him. After that, all his memories were of unbearable pain.

Somehow the Jedi's barrier had trapped Bane inside the center of the dark side storm. The electricity had enveloped him, millions of volts arcing through his body, cooking his flesh from the inside and throwing his muscles into an endless series of violent seizures that threatened to rip his body apart.

The energy had coursed through the orbalisks embedded in his skin, too. The creatures absorbed the power, hungrily devouring it until they became so engorged that the soft, pliant flesh of their underbellies had began to swell. Squeezed ever tighter against the unyielding chitin of their own exterior shells, they'd begun to burrow deeper into Bane. He remembered screaming as thousands of tiny teeth started sawing away at subcutaneous tissue, chewing through muscles, tendons, and even bone.

But burrowing deeper hadn't stopped the creatures from feasting on the electricity coursing through Bane's frying innards. They'd continued to expand until they had begun to pop, rupturing like overfilled balloons pinched beneath the hard shells.

Bane had stayed conscious through the torture of the electricity cooking him alive and the agony of the teeth burrowing into his flesh. But the indescribable pain from the chemicals released by the exploding orbalisks dissolving his body on a cellular level finally caused him to black out … only to wake up here.


First and foremost, one’s attention should be directed to the fact ”Several of the parasites on his chest and stomach hadn't survived, their brown shells turned black and brittle by the lightning's electrical charge.” In case someone isn’t aware, orbalisks shells are lightsaber-resistant, as in, they can literally tank lightsaber strikes effortlessly. This is seen many times by the book when Bane and the Jedi strike team on Tython attempt to cut through the orbalisks, to no avail. Yet Bane’s lightning was enough to reduce their shells ”brittle,” and Bane himself endured that same lightning, ultimately better than the orbalisks did, in spite of the lightning ”cooking his flesh from the inside,” “frying innards”. On top of that, Bane was simultaneously experiencing ”thousands of tiny teeth” “sawing away at subcutaneous tissue, chewing through muscles, tendons, and even bone.” What’s incredible is that ”Bane had stayed conscious through the torture of the electricity cooking him alive and the agony of the teeth burrowing into his flesh,” only blacking out upon experiencing ”the indescribable pain from the chemicals released by the exploding orbalisks dissolving his body on a cellular level.” Now, as a reminder, your premise was that “internal organs aren’t coated with a Force shield,” from which you conclude that ”Revan surviving suggests his body is highly tethered to his will, not biological functions.” Bane’s case should therefore be identical: lightning was ravaging his innards, and regular, squishy organs are obviously not more durable than literal lightsaber-resistant material under normal conditions (a much weaker Bane has disintegrated non-Force-users with casual bursts of his lightning, proving this), so Bane surviving suggests that, indeed, like Revan, his body is more linked to and dependent on his strength of will than ordinary biological functions.

He stood motionless, his ears picking up wet slurping sounds. As his eyes became accustomed to the dim light he was able to make out a colony of strange crustaceans clinging to the roof. They were almost fiat, and somewhat oval in shape - a circular shell that tapered to a point near either end. They varied in size from slightly smaller than a fist to as broad across as a large dinner plate, and their coloring ranged from bronze to a reddish gold. The slurping came as they dragged themselves along the ceiling, crawling over one another and leaving glistening trails of slime in their wake.

As he studied them, one of the creatures fell away from the others and dropped down toward him. Bane swatted it aside disdainfully with one hand, sending its hard shell bouncing and skittering across the cavern floor.

A second later another broke free and tumbled down. Bane ignited his lightsaber and slashed at it. The blow batted the creature away, sending it flipping end-over-end into a far corner of the room. Bane stared in amazement - the lightsaber should have sliced the creature clean through. But his weapon hadn't even left a scratch on its hard, gleaming shell.


Bane had tried the Force next, probing deep inside to better understand what was happening to him. He could sense the creatures feeding on his power, gorging themselves on the dark side energies coursing through every fiber and cell of his being. But though they were parasites, they were also giving something back. As they fed, they pumped a constant stream of chemicals into his body. The alien fluids burned like acid as they were absorbed into his circulatory system; it felt as if every drop of blood were boiling ... but the benefits were too powerful to be ignored. In addition to his miraculous healing abilities, he felt stronger than he ever had. His senses were keener, his reflexes quicker. And on his chest and back where the creatures had latched on, their virtually impenetrable shells would serve as armor plates capable of withstanding even a direct strike from a lightsaber.


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. But instead of toppling, the big man kept coming, never even breaking stride. He would have plowed straight into Raskta, trampling her under his heavy boots, had she not cartwheeled to the side at the last possible instant.

Bane never stopped, his momentum carrying him straight toward Farfalla. The Jedi Master had a moment to register the strange armor coat of hard, shiny shells he wore beneath his clothes. Then he, too, leapt to the side to avoid being crushed, surviving only because his reflexes were heightened by Worror's power.

Now, let’s compare this to Revan’s feat. 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. Revan’s maximum damage soak can therefore be quantified, and it’s certainly not high enough to endure a direct hit from a lightsaber, whose potency is greater than that of ”a small nuclear blast”:

There was one thing he would say about the Hutts: when it came to protecting their valuables, they didn't scrimp. The door was a marvelous piece of machinery, precision-tooled to very precise measurements. It might not withstand a Jedi and his lightsaber, but it would keep a horde of safecrackers busy for a month, and would easily withstand a small nuclear blast.


To be fair, Bane himself evidently isn’t able to tank a lightsaber strike through sheer will; however, he is capable of enduring even greater intensity if the totality is delivered over a prolonged period of time rather than in a single, concentrated burst, albeit even then he was unable to fully keep his body intact and sustained grievous injuries, but overall he mitigated 99.9% of the lightning. And it should be noted that Bane’s willpower did increase from there. In Dynasty of Evil, he experienced the sensation of Darth Zannah’s dark side tendrils, which caused pain ”unlike anything Bane had ever experienced before,” with the text even comparing it to the aforementioned feat of being electrocuted by his own lightning. It’s also worth noting that the pain went ”far beyond any mere physical sensation” and ”clawed at the core of his spirit.” In other words, the tendrils were concurrently a physical attack and a spiritual attack directly at his very soul. Despite this, Bane stayed conscious and almost immediately managed to dodge the next tendril. Contrasted with him in Rule of Two blacking out from the far lesser pain of having “the chemicals released by the exploding orbalisks dissolving his body on a cellular level,” Bane’s feat here denotes a substantial increase in willpower over the decade.

Bane saw the strange black mist crawling across the dirt and knew this was no illusion. Somehow Zannah had given substance and corporeality to the dark side, transforming it into half a dozen shadowy, serpent-like minions rising up from the ground.

Suddenly the tendrils flew at him. He slashed out with his lightsaber to chop the closest one in half, but the blade simply passed through the black mist with no effect. Bane threw himself to the side, but the tip of the tentacle still brushed against his left shoulder.

The material of his clothes melted away as if it had been splashed with acid. A chunk of flesh beneath simply dissolved, and Bane screamed in agony.

Once, orbalisks had fused themselves to his body with a burning chemical compound so intense it had nearly driven him mad. Ten years ago they had been removed when Bane's flesh had been literally cooked by a concentrated blast of his own violet lightning. During her interrogation, Serra had pumped him full of a drug that had felt like it was eating him alive from the inside. But the excruciating pain he felt from the mere touch of the dark side tendril was unlike anything Bane had ever experienced before.

The damage was far from life threatening, but it nearly sent Bane into shock. He fell hard to the ground, his jaw slack and his eyes rolling back into his head. His mind was reeling from the brief contact. The pain radiated through every nerve in his body, but what he felt went far beyond any mere physical sensation. It was not the raw heat of the dark side but rather the empty chill of the void itself spreading through him. It touched every synapse in his mind, it clawed at the core of his spirit. In that instant he tasted utter annihilation, and felt the true horror of absolute nothingness.

Somehow he managed to stay conscious, and when the next tentacle coiled in he was able to scramble to his feet and roll out of the way.


Later on in the fight Bane gets hit by the tendrils even more severely. If a ”mere touch of the dark side tendril was unlike anything Bane had experienced before” in terms of pain despite the damage being ”far from life threatening,” one can only imagine how much greater the pain of losing an entire limb to the tendrils would be. That is exactly what happened to Bane, and not only did he stay conscious, but he had enough willpower left to perform essence transfer on Zannah. This is, again, clearly indicative of exponentially greater willpower than what he had in Rule of Two.

With his foe unarmed and helpless at his feet Bane brought his arm down for the coup de grace, only to have it intercepted mid-swing by one of the dark side tendrils. It wrapped itself around the elbow. Skin, muscle, sinew and bone dissolved instantaneously, severing the limb.

His disembodied forearm and fist tumbled harmlessly to the ground, his lightsaber flicking off as the hilt slid from his suddenly nerveless fingers. The Dark Lord didn't scream this time; the pain was so intense it left him mute as he collapsed to the ground.

Everything went black. Blind and alone, he felt the void closing in. In desperation he reached out with his left hand, clutching Zannah's wrist as she lay on the ground beside him. With his last act, he summoned all his remaining power and invoked the ritual of essence transfer.


To conclude, Bane, like Revan, exerts his will over his body, forcing it to withstand punishment infinitely greater than what an unprotected human body would normally be capable of enduring. His willpower is great enough to tank prolonged exposure to lightning that turned lightsaber-resistant orbalisks shells ”black and brittle” and then some, only reaching his limit when hit by the dark side given ”substance and corporeality” by amplified Sith magics of an otherwise equally powerful Force-user. Bane’s feats are a bit hard to compare to Revan’s, but we should have a rough idea, given Revan’s inability to also endure a lightsaber strike, that they’re not worlds apart or anything. Even if Revan is somewhat more powerful, he is in all likelihood far closer to Bane than Plagueis in the Banite line.

Spoiler:

IV. DARTH PLAGUEIS’S MIDI-CHLORIAN MANIPULATION

Before we delve into Plagueis’s feats themselves, it’s important to build off of Bane since we’ve just mentioned it. Banite scaling is a familiar concept to many but I feel it needs to be reiterated. To those unfamiliar with it, the core idea is that 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 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 Banite Masters numbered around 30 in total. Just imagine a scaling chain with thirty links, each having defeated the previous one in combat, and the gap between the beginning and the end of the chain would obviously be huge. Large disparities have existed even between just two generations; take Darth Tenebrous, for example, who went ”far beyond the simplistic Force studies imposed on him by his Master” before killing him ”with his customary efficiency” while still a mere apprentice, before having more than a century to grow in power further. With the already incredible power held by Darth Bane, it’s truly insane to think about a guy who defeated someone with over 25 generations of power creep over him and considered their understanding of the Force ”simplistic” at such a young age, only grow vastly more from there - and ultimately still be far surpassed in turn by Darth Plagueis.

“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.”


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.


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.


The Banite line of course culminated with Darth Sidious, not only the most powerful Sith Lord in the last millennium but ”the most powerful Sith ever,” period. And as detailed in the previous sections, Plagueis was neck-to-neck with this guy as of The Phantom Menace. Further proof of this is the feat he achieved in his death scene, which has been unjustly vilified and misconstrued in this thread. First, the full scene, and then my analysis:

Plagueis had given the Sun Guards the night off, and the only other intelligence in the sprawling apartment was the droid 11-4D, their servant for the occasion, pouring wine into expensive glassware as they removed their cloaks.

“Sullustan,” Plagueis said, holding the glass up to the light and swirling its claret contents. “More than half a century old.”

“A toast, then,” Sidious said. “To the culmination of decades of brilliant planning and execution.”

“And to the new meaning we will tomorrow impart to the Rule of Two.”

They drained their glasses, and 11-4D immediately refilled them.

“Only you could have brought this to fruition, Darth Plagueis,” Sidious said, settling into a chair. “I will endeavor to live up your expectations and fulfill my responsibility.”

Plagueis took the compliment in stride, neither haughty nor embarrassed. “With my guidance and your charisma, we will soon be in a position to initiate the final act of the Grand Plan.” Making himself more comfortable on the couch, he signaled for 11-4D to open a second bottle of the vintage. “Have you given thought to what you will say tomorrow?”

“I have prepared some remarks,” Sidious said. “Shall I spoil the surprise?”

“Why not.”

Sidious took a moment to compose himself. “To begin, I thought I would say, that, while we in the Senate have managed to keep the Republic intact for a thousand years, we would never have been able to do so without the assistance of a few beings, largely invisible to the public eye, whose accomplishments now need to be brought into the light of day.”

Plagueis smiled. “I’m pleased. Go on.”

Speaking in a low monotone, Sidious said, “Hego Damask is one of those beings. It was Hego Damask who was responsible for overseeing development of the Republic Reserve Administration and for providing financial support for the Resettlement Acts that enabled beings to blaze new hyperspace routes to the outlying systems and colonize distant worlds.”

“That will come as a revelation to some.”

“In a similar fashion, it was Hego Damask who transformed the Trade Federation—”

“No, no,” Plagueis interrupted. “Now is not the time to mention the Trade Federation.”

“I thought—”

“I don’t see any problem with calling attention to the arrangements I facilitated between the Republic and the Corporate Alliance and the Techno Union. But we must take care to avoid areas of controversy.”

“Of course,” Sidious said, as if chastised. “I was speaking off the top of my head.”

“Try a different approach.”

So Sidious did.

And as the night wore on, he continued to amend and improvise, touching on Damask’s childhood on Mygeeto and on the elder Damask’s contributions to the InterGalactic Banking Clan during his term as co-chair. Wineglass in hand, Sidious paced the richly carpeted floor, often vacillating between confidence and misgiving. More than once, Plagueis voiced satisfaction with everything he heard, but he urged Sidious to save his energy for the morning. By then, though, Sidious was too wound up to heed the advice and kept reworking the order of the remarks and the emphasis he gave to certain points.
The droid brought out a third, then a fourth bottle of the Sullustan wine.

Pleasantly intoxicated, Plagueis, who had wanted nothing more than to revel in the sweet taste of victory, was beginning to find his collaborator’s performance exhausting, and wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and drift into imaginings of his march into the Senate Rotunda; the looks of surprise, astonishment, and trepidation on the faces of the gathered Senators; his long-anticipated emergence from the shadows; his ascension to galactic power …

Unfortunately, Sidious wouldn’t let him.

“That’s enough for now,” Plagueis tried one final time. “You should probably return home and get at least a few hours’ rest before—”

“Just one more time—from the beginning.”

“The beginning?”

“Lord Plagueis, you said you wouldn’t rest until our win was a matter of fact.”

“So it is, and so I shall, Darth Sidious.”

“Then let us celebrate that, as well.” Sidious beckoned to 11-4D. “Fill our glasses, droid.”

With dreamy weariness beginning to get the better of him, it was all Plagueis could do to lift the glass to his nose. No sooner did he set the drink down than it tipped over, saturating the tablecloth. His eyelids began to flicker and close, and his breathing slowed. In twenty years of never having had to contend with Plagueis in a state of sleep, the transpirator clicked repeatedly in adjustment, almost as if in panic.
A few meters distant, Sidious came to a halt, gazing at Plagueis for a long moment, as though making up his mind about something. Then, blowing out his breath, he set his own glass down and reached for the cloak he had draped over a chair. Swirling it around himself, he started for the door, only to stop shortly before he reached it. Turning and stretching out with the Force, he glanced around the room, as one might to fix a memory in the mind. Briefly his gaze fell on the droid, its glowing photoreceptors whirring to regard him in evident curiosity.

A look of sinister purpose contorted Sidious’s face.

Again, his eyes darted around the room, and the dark side whispered:

Your election assured, the Sun Guards absent, Plagueis unsuspecting and asleep …

And he moved in a blur.

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.

“Let’s go over the second part of the speech, shall we,” he said, smoothing his tousled cloak. “You useless old fool.”

With a snarl, he threw the cloak back behind his shoulders and leaned toward Plagueis, planting his palms on the low table that was now puddled with spilled wine.

“It was Hego Damask as Darth Plagueis who came to Naboo, determined to suck the planet dry of plasma and set the Trade Federation up as its overseers. It was Hego Damask as Plagueis who then set his sights on a seemingly confused young man and, with meticulous skill, manipulated him into committing patricide, matricide, fratricide. Darth Plagueis who took him as an apprentice, sharing some of his knowledge but withholding his most powerful secrets, denying the apprentice his wishes as a means of controlling him, instilling in him a sense of murderous rage, and turning him to the dark side.” Sidious stood to his full height, glaring.

“It was Plagueis who criticized the early efforts of his apprentice, and who once choked him in a demonstration of his superiority.

“Plagueis, who denigrated him in private for hiring an inept assassin to carry out the murder of Senator Kim—and yet who allowed himself to be tricked by the Gran and nearly killed by mercenaries.

“Plagueis, who turned away from the Grand Plan to focus entirely on himself, in an egotistical quest for immortality.

“Plagueis who had the temerity to criticize his apprentice for having inculcated too much pride in the assassin he had trained.

“Plagueis who attempted to turn his equally powerful apprentice into a messenger and mere intermediary.

“And Plagueis who watched in secret while his apprentice tasked their true intermediary to reveal the reborn Sith to the galaxy.”

Sidious paused, then, in derision, added, “Plagueis the Wise, who in his time truly was, except at the end, trusting that the Rule of Two had been superseded, and failed to realize that he would not be excused from it. Plagueis the Wise, who forged the most powerful Sith Lord the galaxy has ever known, and yet who forgot to leave a place for himself; whose pride never allowed him to question that he would no longer be needed.”

Still struggling for breath, Plagueis managed to stand, but only to collapse back onto the couch, knocking a statue from its perch. Sidious moved in, his hands upraised to deliver another bolt, his expression arctic enough to chill the room. A Force storm gathered over the couch, spreading out in concentric rings, to wash over Sidious and hurl objects to all corners. In the center of it, Plagueis’s form became anamorphic, then resumed shape as the storm began to wane.

Sidious’s eyes bored into the Muun’s.

“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.”

He laughed. “You lost the game on the very first day you chose to train me to rule by your side—or better still, under your thumb. Teacher, yes, and for that I will be eternally grateful. But Master—never.”

Sidious peered at Plagueis through the Force. “Oh, yes, by all means gather your midi-chlorians, Plagueis.” He held his thumb and forefinger close together. “Try to keep yourself alive while I choke the life out of you.”

Plagueis gulped for air and lifted an arm toward him.

“There’s the rub, you see,” Sidious said in a philosophical tone. “All the ones you experimented on, killed, and brought back to life … They were little more than toys. Now, though, you get to experience it from their side, and look what you discover: in a body that is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can’t accomplish what you’re asking of them.”

Hatred stained Sidious’s eyes.

“I could save you, of course. Return you from the brink, as you did Venamis. I could retask your body to repair the damage already done to your lungs, your hearts, your aged brain. But I’ll do no such thing. The idea here is not to drag you back at the last moment, but to bring you to death’s door and shove you through to the other side.”

Sidious sighed. “A tragedy, really, for one so wise. One who could oversee the lives and deaths of all beings, except himself.”

The Muun’s eyes had begun to bulge; his pale flesh, to turn cyanotic.

“You may be wondering: when did he begin to change?

“The truth is that I haven’t changed. As we have clouded the minds of the Jedi, I clouded yours. Never once did I have any intention of sharing power with you. I needed to learn from you; no more, no less. To learn all of your secrets, which I trusted you would eventually reveal. But what made you think that I would need you after that? Vanity, perhaps; your sense of self-importance. You’ve been nothing more than a pawn in a game played by a genuine Master.

“The Sith’ari.”

A cruel laugh escaped him.

“Reflect back on even the past few years—assuming you have the capacity. Yinchorr, Dorvalla, Eriadu, Maul, the Neimoidians, Naboo, an army of clones, the fallen Jedi Dooku … You think these were your ideas, when in fact they were mine, cleverly suggested to you so that you could feed them back to me. You were far too trusting, Plagueis. No true Sith can ever really care about another. This has always been known. There is no way but my way.”

Sidious’s eyes narrowed. “Are you still with me, Plagueis? Yes, I detect that you are—though barely.

“A few final words, then.

“I could have let you die in the Fobosi district, but I couldn’t allow that to happen when there was still so much I didn’t know; so many powers that remained just outside my reach. And as it happened, I acted wisely in rescuing you. Otherwise how could I be standing here and you be dying? I actually thought you would die on Sojourn—and you would have if the Hutt hadn’t tipped you off to Veruna’s scheme.

“And yet that also turned out for the best, for even after all you taught me, I might not have been able to take the final steps to the chancellorship without your help in manipulating the Senate and bringing into play your various and sundry allies. If it’s any consolation, I’m being honest when I say that I could not have succeeded without you. But now that we’ve won the race, I’ve no need for a co-chancellor. Your presence, much less your unnecessary counsel, would only confuse matters. I have Maul to do what the risk of discovery might not allow me to do, while I execute the rest of the Grand Plan: growing an army, fomenting rebellion and fabricating intergalactic war, corralling the Jedi and catching them unawares …

“Rest easy in your grave, Plagueis. In the end, I will be proclaimed Emperor. The Sith will have had their revenge, and I will rule the galaxy.”

Plagueis slid to the floor and rolled facedown. Death rattled his lungs and he died.


The scene begins by Plagueis and Sidious sitting down to revise the speech Sidious would give the following day when he would ascend to the chancellorship. Plagueis keeps chugging down wine, and in the end becomes so inebriated he passes out, so keep in mind his hazy and clouded mind most likely significantly compromised his ability to call on the Force with clarity. His transpirator also starts acting up, clicking “repeatedly in adjustment, almost as if in panic” due to “never having had to contend with Plagueis in a state of sleep” “In twenty years.” Sidious remains sober, however, and decides to fire Force lightning at his Master, specifically at the breath mask. So not only was he drunk and drowsy, but Plagueis was outright “suffocating” - keep that in mind for the following.

Sidious’ lightning causes Plagueis to wake up and begin focusing the Force, ”but he stopped short of defending himself,” forgoing a conventional Force defense in favor of ”experimenting with himself” by tapping directly into his midi-chlorians to keep himself alive, “actually courting death to put it in its place,” “Confident that he couldn’t be killed.” In response to the challenge, Sidious increases the intensity of his lightning, “drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had,” meaning that he was putting more power into his lightning than any other feat he had ever done, including unbalancing the Force alongside Plagueis or speedblitzing Darth Maul. Despite this, there is never made any note of Plagueis suffering damage, internal or external; in fact, Sidious’ description of the Muun after his death has him looking “almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace,” and he notes ”Hego Damask would appear to have died because of a malfunction of the breathing apparatus.”

Sidious moved to the window, then turned to regard the murder scene. Hego Damask would appear to have died because of a malfunction of the breathing apparatus. He would have the droid alert the medtechs. But no autopsy would be performed, and no inquest would follow. Holos of their appearance at the Galaxies Opera would run on the HoloNet, and pundits would weigh in. Senator Palpatine might garner even greater sympathy; his delight in being elected to the chancellorship diminished by the sudden death of a powerful financial ally.


Wary of approaching the corpse of his former Master, he called on the Force to roll the aged Muun over onto his back. From that angle Plagueis looked almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace—a physical characteristic rarely encountered in a Muun. But then Plagueis had never been an ordinary Muun, nor an ordinary being of any sort.


For all intents and purposes, Plagueis was left unscathed by Sidious’ attack. Again, this is without erecting any kind of Force defense - no Force barrier, no tutaminis, not even a passive Force shield - just his unprotected body being healed by his midi-chlorians faster than the lightning could destroy it. It’s unclear whether Sidious unleashed another barrage during his tirade; there is no mention of it, but the text states after Plagueis attempts to stand that Sidious’ hands are “upraised to deliver another bolt,” yet the text never clarifies whether he actually fired more bolts, although it would be bizarre for him to gesture in such a manner if he didn’t, possibly indicating he is shooting lightning at Plagueis while speaking as well. Regardless, the point is that Plagueis, while blackout drunk and asphyxiating, endured the most powerful attack of the most powerful Sith Lord in galactic history up to that point, who was stronger than himself at the time, simply by keeping himself alive with midi-chlorian manipulation rather than defending himself conventionally, without suffering a scratch.

Before I’ll go over your specific rebuttals, I’ll pre-emptively address one misconception for the sake of the audience. The claim Plagueis couldn’t prevent himself from being choked out carries no merit because at the beginning, the text notes he was “in denial” that he was suffocating; in other words, he didn’t even believe it was happening, so he saw no need to rectify the situation. As the scene progresses, “Still struggling for breath, Plagueis managed to stand, but only to collapse back onto the couch.” So by the time Plagueis did realize he was actually dying, he was so unfocused and weakened from intoxication and suffocation that he couldn’t even stand. His enfeebled state is further highlighted in his following telekinetic attack: “A Force storm gathered over the couch, spreading out in concentric rings, to wash over Sidious and hurl objects to all corners. In the center of it, Plagueis’s form became anamorphic, then resumed shape as the storm began to wane.” Plagueis can’t even focus his power on the enemy in front of him and instead unleashes a haphazard Force wave in all directions that accomplishes nothing. In fact, the wave was so weak it only hurled furniture all over the place - we know Plagueis’ power level is much higher than that as seen with him atomizing Maladians two decades prior and scaling from Darth Bane collapsing a temple, so that should be clear cut evidence he was in an abysmal state near the end of the scene; Sidious even outright states “in a body that is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can’t accomplish what you’re asking of them,” attributing his failure to command his midi-chlorians to his shit condition, not any insufficiency in power level.

Plagueis' robes weren't even destroyed despite only using midichlorian manipulation, which would have repaired his cells but not his cloth, meaning Palpaitne's attack wasn't trying to incinerate Plagueis but was more similar to what we saw in Return of the Jedi. Vader's flesh and outer armor visibly weren't significantly affected either, but the lightning still "ravaged" his innards and fatally wounded him. Likewise, Luke was outwardly normal but inwardly suffered "sudden and massive calcification of his skeletal structure." The "abrupt drop" in Luke's "blood minerals caused muscular microseiures all over his body" that would have been chronic if not for extensive treatment. So, there's no telling how much Palpatine's single burst affected him anyway. All around, the feat's wholly unquantifiable at best, legitimately unimpressive at worst.

Sidious realizes just before electrocuting him that Plagueis was challenging him” and that he was literally trying to put death in its place. He then asks the question: ”Was Plagueis so self-deluded as to actually believe he had achieved immortality?” The text then states that ”The question lingered only a moment, then Sidious unleashed another tangle of lightning, drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had.” It’s extremely obvious to anyone capable of connecting the dots that Sidious pulled out his maximum potency specifically to meet Plagueis’s challenge and to find an answer to the question that had been in his mind just a few seconds ago: was Plagueis actually unkillable? Ergo, he was clearly trying his damndest to kill Plagueis with his lightning, but to no avail.

The idea that there are somehow two variants of Force lightning, one which delivers heat and the other which merely increases the electrical output, fundamentally makes no sense because heat is an intrinsic property and side-effect of electricity; there’s no such thing as increasing electricity without increasing the heat along with it. The lore also never makes such a distinction, treating all manifestations of Sith lightning as one and the same. Darth Bane even stated that lightning rampaging in the internal organs will both calcify the skeleton and roast flesh if sustained for long periods of time.



The comparisons to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader are faulty because electrical discharges have the potential to be lethal long before they begin to char skin or flesh, so the Emperor hardly needs to evoke his full potency to an infinitely less powerful, defenseless, and weakened Luke; and Darth Vader’s suit is specifically designed to mitigate heat per Darth Vader: A 3-D Reconstruction Log, explaining why he seemingly suffered no external wounds: ”Excess heat is bled through the metal surface via radiator conduction pads, a system that preserves the helmet seal.”

Regardless, the idea that Sidious was using some inherently non-lethal variety of Sith lightning, fueled ”drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had”, when his clear intent was to kill Plagueis, is beyond asinine. Plagueis’s clothes not being incinerated isn’t a sign of the attack being weak: Luke’s clothes were unaffected as well and he was smoking, indicating something was burning; Darth Marr was likewise smoking and stated later that ”Valkorion destroyed my flesh” but his hood and other fabric in his armor were unaffected; etc. The Force lightning may have been simply directed at the organs, or whatever the case, a lack of collateral damage doesn’t prove a lack of intensity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqaiKmm8gsY&t=63s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd9QFR-WyOg&t=2m45s

So, let’s go through the scaling really quickly again: Sidious > Plagueis >>>...>>> Bane = lightning rivalling the intensity of a lightsaber blade; being able to endure that lightning better than lightsaber-resistant material. Sidious’s lightning should therefore be ludicrously potent, most likely matching or even exceeding the potency of lightsabers (in RotS he does in fact demonstrate this), and while a singular burst from Sidious’s lightning is difficult to compare to prolonged exposure to Bane’s lightning, Plagueis tanking it with no major injuries is still utterly insane, and he scales massively above Bane enduring his own lightning anyway. And to make this clear, Plagueis’s unprotected organs would have instantly been atomized by lightning had he not been using midi-chlorian manipulation, so even if he did sustain some internal damage like you postulate, he still managed to negate 99.9% of its potency just by healing himself.

PREMATURE CONCLUSION

I typed this thing for 22 hours straight with only two minor eating breaks in between. I planned to continue into the offensive midi-chlorian manipulation section and a proper conclusion but my brain stopped functioning, so I am handing this section over to @The Ellimist who will finish what I have not addressed.

@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

I would urge everyone tagged to seriously think about this and make sure you genuinely believe who you are voting really deserves the vote, instead of giving into personal preferences or political allegiances. Now, the arguments proffered herein are all out in the open for your consideration. I hope everyone will weigh them fairly and deem Darth Plagueis the victor of this round.

DEATH OF MIDICHLORIAN MANIPULATION:

The set-up here is that Plagueis was drunk and just fell asleep. Palpatine seized the opportunity and fired Force lightning to malfunction Plagueis' mask. 

Let's first establish Palpatine's motive: he did not want to kill Plagueis quickly.

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.

"Let's go over the second part of the speech, shall we," he said, smoothing his tousled cloak. "You useless old fool."

With a snarl, he threw the cloak back behind his shoulders and leaned toward Plagueis, planting his palms on the low table that was now puddled with spilled wine.

After Palpatine "unleashed another tangle of lightning," he stopped attacking. Instead, he started a speech despite knowing Plagueis was trying to repair his midichlorians. Palpatine's lack of urgency means a.) Palpatine believed his "tangle of lightning" immobilized/crippled Plagueis so he didn't need to press the attack, and/or b.) Palpatine believed Plagueis would suffocate to death regardless so he didn't need to press the attack. At the least, option (b) is validated by Palpatine internally stating that Plagueis is "in denial that he was slowly suffocating," showing he's confident Plagueis will die regardless of any midichlorian manipulation defense. 

Given at least option (b) is true, that means that, since Plagueis' death was inevitable anyway, Palpatine preferred to give a speech and have Plagueis slowly die than to quicken his death and not gloat. So, when Palpatine "unleashed another tangle of lightning," note that both c.) Palpatine knew Plagueis would die irregardless of the attack and d.) Palpatine did not want to insta-kill Plagueis with the attack anyway (again, or else he would have pressed the attack).

So, the next question is, if Palpatine didn't want to insta-kill Plagueis with the attack, why did he "draw more deeply on the dark side than he ever had?" Aren't those mutually exclusive? Actually, no. Palpatine, enraged at Plagueis, can "draw more deeply on the dark side than he ever had" to maximize Plagueis' agony and suffering. That is consistent with Palpatine allowing Plagueis to slowly suffocate, which prolongs Plagueis' agony unnecessarily.

Is it even possible for Palpatine to maximize Plagueis' agony and suffering without killing him, though? 

Consider how, against Luke, Palpatine was described as "livid," "energy-seething," "infuriated," "furious," and "enraged." Moreover, Palpatine was "bent on the annihilation of Luke," "attempted to kill Luke," fired "merciless energy at Luke," and "called upon all his dark side powers in a fury of Force lightning." Ergo, like against Plagueis, an enraged Palpatine unleashed "all" of his power against Luke. The only difference is, unlike against Plagueis, Palpatine explicitly sought to annihilate Luke. Note that Luke was not even defending against this uber attack, as his tutaminis was overwhelmed long before. He was consistently described as "barely conscious" and "defenseless."



The case shows a lethal-intent Palpatine can unleash his full power against a defenseless body and not instantly kill them / fry up their body / incinerate them. Moreover, the case shows a lethal-intent Palpatine can unleash his full power and still cause no apparent visible effects against the defenseless body. This only makes sense if Palpatine traded efficiency for his personal pleasure. Palpatine must have tailored the lightning in a way so that, even though he's still unleashing his full power, Luke would not instantly die. I propose this 'tailoring' is done by prioritizing its 'drain life' and 'quasi-electrical' effects (the raw energy tearing through Luke's body) OVER its 'heat effects' (which is what scorched the orbalisks, incinerated Nyriss, burnt Revan, crisped the Prophets of the Dark Side, etc.). 

Continuing from the point that "drew more deeply on the dark side than he ever had" to maximize Plagueis' agony and suffering, the same 'tailoring' must have been done. Instead, Palpatine must have further prioritized the less-lethal aspects of Force lightning over the more-lethal aspects. This is reinforced by Plagueis' clothing seemingly not even being burnt by Palpatine's point-blank lightning attack. Palpatine noted that Plagueis "would appear to have died because of the breathing apparatus," so his clothing must have been inconspicuous, and Palpatine looked at Plagueis' corpse and noted the normalcy of his clothing: "Also sprawled there, Plagueis: his slender limbs splayed and elongated head turned to one side. Dressed in finery, as for a night on the town."

So, what effects did Palpatine's all-out, non-instakill lightning have, and to what extent did Plagueis counter it?

To start, let's look at Luke. As I noted, Luke's body suffered no apparent visual effects. His body looks perfectly fine. However, internally, Luke suffered "sudden and massive calcification of his skeletal structure," and the "abrupt drop" in Luke's "blood minerals caused muscular microseiures all over his body," which would have been "chronic" without science fiction medicine. This, or something far worse, could have happened to Plagueis as well. The text does not comment either way, so there's no way of knowing. Furthermore, Vader was "mortally wounded" by the lightning ravaging his innards. It took Vader four minutes to die, not to mention his death was rapidly accelerated by his life-support also being destroyed anyway. Plagueis could have literally been mortally wounded by Palpatine's lightning and we do not know either-way. 

Key point: the text never states Plagueis successfully used midichlorian manipulation to partially or fully heal his body.

Plagueis supporters will point out that, afterwards, he still stood up and briefly summoned a telekinetic storm. That does not change the fact the attack did not intend to instakill Plagueis, could have still significantly damaged his innards, and could have even mortally wounded him anyway. Most importantly, Palpatine actively allowed Plagueis to try to heal himself from the lightning attack after it happened. It's not as if Plagueis' midichlorian manipulation did anything instantly. Palpatine even noted it's a rather slow process: "He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvinating itself. " If amped Malgus and Plagueis fought and Plagueis allowed Malgus to hit him with Force lightning, Plagueis would be screwed. He would now have to continue to fight from a significantly injured as his midichlorians healed. However, his focus and power will be divided to also having to fight Malgus, making it far more difficult to even heal. Plagueis using midichlorian manipulation instead of a barrier would probably straight-up ruin the fight for him, and it might even be in-character for him to do that. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzgjd3KuWbA -> Listen to the audiobook if you don't believe me. Palpatine shoots him with lightning at 0:56 then lets Plagueis try to repair his midis for minutes until he tries and fails to stand again at 3:45.

Also, Palpatine seemed to believe that Plagueis' internals got damaged: "He would have the droid alert the medtechs. But no autopsy would be performed, and no inquest would follow." Besides internal damage, I don't see why Palpatine wouldn't want an autopsy. Alcohol being in Plagueis' system isn't particularly suspicious.

---

Though, let's hypothetically say you still believe Palpatine intended to instakill Plagueis with that attack and dislike my Force lightning "tailoring argument." That means that a "defenseless" Luke can tank lightning that scales infinitely above ashing Nyriss. You would basically have to contend that ROTJ Luke's unconscious, depleted, near-death passive Force aura (not even Force barrier, as that would have long been destroyed) scales above Plagueis' active midichlorian manipulation, as ROTJ Palpatine is radically more powerful than TPM Palpatine. If so, then I expect you to change your vote to ROTJ Luke. Though Joruus C'Baoth, Gethzerion, and Kueller all directly scale above ROTJ Luke, so vote for them instead.

Phenomenal post azronger

@Azronger: I appreciate the effort behind the post. It'll take me a few days for me to share my thoughts to you, though that should be fine as Revan's projected to make it to the run-offs anyway.

Good posts both. I might vote on this one out of respect for the effort

I will retract vote cause I am not gonna read the debate and find out who wins.

Azronger's post ragdolls the anti-Plagueis and pro-Revan arguments quite thoroughly. Let's clean up house against a valiant effort by Ant that is nonetheless short of the mark:

Did Sidious want to kill Plagueis efficiently? (Yes)

DarthAnt66 wrote:
The set-up here is that Plagueis was drunk and just fell asleep. Palpatine seized the opportunity and fired Force lightning to malfunction Plagueis' mask. 

Let's first establish Palpatine's motive: he did not want to kill Plagueis quickly.

In order for that to be true, Palpatine would have to believe that his ability to kill Plagueis was a given, and that he didn't need to worry about the possibility of defeat. If he were cautious about Plagueis's power, he would certainly prioritize killing or at least incapacitating Plagueis over giving a speech. He certainly would not have used "the dark side more deeply than he ever had"  to fail to even prevent him from trying to stand or unleash a TK storm.

If your response is "he wasn't toying with Plagueis because he can kill him slowly without going easy on him", then one would expect him to have rendered Plagueis completely unable to move, or at the least almost unable to, as he had with Luke in RotJ. But Plagueis was more functional than Luke was, which suggests that there was a limit to what Palpatine could do to him through the lightning.

Does this match the evidence? Let's see:

The Muun's renewed vigor had taken Sidious by surprise. The mere fact that he had escaped the devastation on Sojourn made him seem almost omnipotent.  - Plagueis novel

Hmmm...just some pages before, Palpatine describes his master as "almost omnipotent". Clearly, he was gung ho about fooling around with him.  

BTW, that Sojourn attack was a nuclear weapon that destroyed "everything within a twenty-kilometer radius from ground zero". Guess who procured it to kill Plagueis with?

Yep, Darth "wants to kill Plagueis slowly" Sidious. He tried to discreetly kill his master with a nuclear weapon, but now you're telling me that he was just toying with him?

Let's look at this:

In true Sith tradition, Palpatine murdered his Master upon receiving the skill and ability to do so. - The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia

In other words, Palpatine had only JUST acquired the skill and ability to kill his master. The idea that he was so much stronger that he could afford to slowly torture him is ridiculous (BTW, this quote would mean that Plagueis scales to essentially the same level as Darth Sidious in a combative sense, and thus over Vitiate/Revan, even without any of this midichlorian scaling).

Back to the Plagueis novel:

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...

This isn't very long before Plagueis's death, and Palpatine still wonders how far ahead of him his master is. Does this sound like someone who wants to give Plagueis the opportunity to fight back?

And even when Plagueis dies:

Something was shading his sense of triumph: a vague awareness of a power greater than himself. Was it Plagueis reaching out from the far side of death to vex him? Or was the feeling a mere consequence of apotheosis?

He wonders whether a power greater than himself was his master. He clearly doesn't think Plagueis is don't-kill-efficiently tier.

Oh, and:

And now dead.

Or was he?

Uncertainty rippled through Sidious, rage returning to his eyes. A tremor of his own making, or one of forewarning?

Was it possible that the wily Muun had deceived him? Had Plagueis unlocked the key to immortality, and survived after all? Never mind that it would constitute a petty move for one so wise-for one who had professed to place the Grand Plan above all else. Had Plagueis become ensnared in a self-spun web of jealousy and possessiveness, victim of his own engineering, his own foibles?

If he hadn't been concerned for his own safety, Sidious might have pitied him.

Wary of approaching the corpse of his former Master, he called on the Force to roll the aged Muun over onto his back. From that angle Plagueis looked almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace-a physical characteristic rarely encountered in a Muun. But then Plagueis had never been an ordinary Muun, nor an ordinary being of any sort.

Yeah, OK, clearly he would be interested in slowly killing Plagueis and giving him a chance to launch TK storms at him.  

The interesting conclusion to this is that even if you want to ignore all midichlorian manipulation / lightning scaling, Darth Plagueis STILL scales to being nearly as powerful as a Palpatine who was already the most powerful Sith Lord in galactic history. And this was after the existence of Vitiate's character, if you want to use the completely unsupported "shedding limitations" argument (which was debunked).

Here's the other smoking gun: even if Palpatine just wanted to go for pain and not killing, he STILL would've made sure that Plagueis couldn't even get up, let alone launch an attack back, if he could. This is obvious given that he was so paranoid that he still pinned his body and examined it from a distance even after sensing his death.

After Palpatine "unleashed another tangle of lightning," he stopped attacking. Instead, he started a speech despite knowing Plagueis was trying to repair his midichlorians. Palpatine's lack of urgency means a.) Palpatine believed his "tangle of lightning" immobilized/crippled Plagueis so he didn't need to press the attack, and/or b.) Palpatine believed Plagueis would suffocate to death regardless so he didn't need to press the attack. At the least, option (b) is validated by Palpatine internally stating that Plagueis is "in denial that he was slowly suffocating," showing he's confident Plagueis will die regardless of any midichlorian manipulation defense. 

Except that he was Force choking Plagueis? The lightning didn't work, so instead he choked him (lack of oxygen is an entirely different mechanism in terms of damage from heat/shock). Your argument is based on the circular reasoning that the lightning was working, even though the text never indicates that and instead emphasizes the lack of oxygen over the effects of the lightning.

Is your argument just that there were like a few seconds of delay between the lightning and the Force choke? Firstly, Sidious had just drawn more deeply on the dark side than he ever had, so it isn't that hard to believe that he wouldn't immediately start exerting himself again. Secondly, by this logic Sidious was holding back against Yoda as well.

This entire line of reasoning is a red herring anyway, because even if you want to argue that Sidious was gloating and taking his time after the second burst of lightning, that second burst is what we are talking about, and to do it he drew more deeply on the dark side than he ever had. Occam's razer laughs in the face of the notion that this means he was just using more exertion and energy than he had to unbalance the cosmic Force...to increase pain? Against a master that he thought seemed nearly omnipotent, who he didn't know whether he was many steps behind, against whom his first plan to kill was to drop a >>>100 megaton nuclear bomb on, who a source states he killed as soon as he was strong enough to, and who he was still scared of even when he was dead?

Isn't it more reasonable to conclude that Palpatine used full potency lightning, just as the text states, and that he maybe, at most for your case, started gloating after that?

This is a very unique level of gymnastics that isn't used in any other feat. In any other feat, an explicit statement that a character was using an offensive attack while drawing more deeply on the dark side than ever would be sufficient evidence that he was going for lethality, not that he was actually drawing on the dark side to a level that was actually greater than any conventional dark sider in galactic history to cause some more pain (which wasn't even apparent - there's no mention of Plagueis screaming or seeming in especial agony - he seemed more concerned about his breathing apparatus).  

Given at least option (b) is true, that means that, since Plagueis' death was inevitable anyway,

You're once again missing the part where Palpatine Force choked him.

Actually, no. Palpatine, enraged at Plagueis, can "draw more deeply on the dark side than he ever had" to maximize Plagueis' agony and suffering. That is consistent with Palpatine allowing Plagueis to slowly suffocate, which prolongs Plagueis' agony unnecessarily.

Based on what?

No - really - based on what?

Isn't the argument that Palpatine was doing what he did with Yoda - going all-out interspersed with gloating and some laughing - more logical than the argument that involves twisting a straightforward statement to mean something completely different?

The "nearly omnipotent" guy Palpatine tried to kill with a nuclear bomb is apparently the same guy Palpatine actually didn't want to kill quickly?

Note that Luke was not even defending against this uber attack, as his tutaminis was overwhelmed long before. He was consistently described as "barely conscious" and "defenseless."

Plagueis was sufficiently conscious to launch a TK storm. He was far less defenseless than Luke (and the quote does not suggest that the entire duration of the lightning was at full power, since it's clear that Palaptine distinguishes between before and after Luke "will die"). Nor does Palpatine doing this in a totally different situation where he did not fear Luke (who at that stage, you yourself argue is one-shot fodder material for him), and hardly was terrified about whether RotJ Luke was many steps ahead of him in power as Palpatine was of Plagueis, mean that he would do so against Plagueis. At the most, this would just be an impressive feat for RotJ Luke.

Palpatine can unleash his full power and still cause no apparent visible effects against the defenseless body.

Firstly, this is just circular reasoning, since the second lightning attack, which was the 100% power one, was done against a Plagueis who was using MM.

Secondly, the lethality of Force attacks isn't necessarily tied to its environmental damage. E.g. Valkorion's lightning that killed Darth Marr didn't even damage the ground or Marr's body. The point here is not the specific way that the damage manifests, but how potent it was in killing/immobilizing the target. That is where Sidious would allocate his power to; the most straightforward solution isn't that he was just going for torture.

If Plagueis had instantly died from the lightning without physical damage, it would not be a very impressive feat. What is impressive is that the lightning didn't kill him and didn't even incapacitate him.

The text does not comment either way, so there's no way of knowing.

Again; Plagueis could still stumble up from it, he could still use TK, and he needed to get Force choked over an extended period of time to die.

A slower, less complete lethality that didn't even stop the target from still standing and using Force attacks would not have required Palpatine to draw more deeply on the dark side than ever.

Furthermore, Vader was "mortally wounded" by the lightning ravaging his innards. It took Vader four minutes to die, not to mention his death was rapidly accelerated by his life-support also being destroyed anyway. Plagueis could have literally been mortally wounded by Palpatine's lightning and we do not know either-way. 

You are very vocal about Anakin having been super-amped.

Key point: the text never states Plagueis successfully used midichlorian manipulation to partially or fully heal his body.

If his MM were unsuccessful, then without a barrier Plagueis would've been killed instantly. If Palpatine didn't want to kill him instantly (which he did), he would've been COMPLETELY incapacitated.

It's not as if Plagueis' midichlorian manipulation did anything instantly. Palpatine even noted it's a rather slow process:

Palpatine acknowledged that he had no idea what the limits of his master's powers were.

Also, Palpatine seemed to believe that Plagueis' internals got damaged: "He would have the droid alert the medtechs. But no autopsy would be performed, and no inquest would follow." Besides internal damage, I don't see why Palpatine wouldn't want an autopsy. Alcohol being in Plagueis' system isn't particularly suspicious.

The mechanics of choking from a broken breathing apparatus would not match the mechanics of being telekinetically strangled, and a medical droid could have figured out that it wasn't just an apparatus malfunction, especially if the apparatus itself could be examined and determined to have been disabled in a forceful way.

Though, let's hypothetically say you still believe Palpatine intended to instakill Plagueis with that attack and dislike my Force lightning "tailoring argument." That means that a "defenseless" Luke can tank lightning that scales infinitely above ashing Nyriss. You would basically have to contend that ROTJ Luke's unconscious, depleted, near-death passive Force aura (not even Force barrier, as that would have long been destroyed) scales above Plagueis' active midichlorian manipulation, as ROTJ Palpatine is radically more powerful than TPM Palpatine. If so, then I expect you to change your vote to ROTJ Luke. Though Joruus C'Baoth, Gethzerion, and Kueller all directly scale above ROTJ Luke, so vote for them instead.

The faults in the Luke comparison aside, you can certainly vote for many candidates over Plagueis. In the case of a runoff between Plagueis and Revan, however, this point doesn't matter unless if Revan scales directly off of those you mentioned, which he doesn't.

Even if you don't care about the lightning feat...

The evidence is still overwhelming that Plagueis has parity to TPM Sidious, who has supremacy quotes above Revan (in addition to both of them having the insane feat of unbalancing the entire Force on raw power). Once again:

In true Sith tradition, Palpatine murdered his Master upon receiving the skill and ability to do so. - The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia

Meet Darth Sidious – the most powerful Sith Master who ever lived.

--Darth Maul, Sith Apprentice

^ the tl;dr of my post above is:

1. Palpatine was super-paranoid about his master's power, tried to get him killed with a nuclear bomb, thought he was "nearly omnipotent", and even after his death was scared to go near his corpse. (by comparison, Palpatine can oneshot RotJ Luke, per Ant's own position and the position of most of us here)

2. A source says that Palpatine killed his master when he had acquired the skill and ability to do so, suggesting parity between the two - and Palpatine at this point has multiple supremacy quotes that put him far above Revan. So even without any midichlorian manipulation debate, Plagueis still wins.

3. If Palpatine were going for pain without being careless (and he was very careful against Plagueis, as shown), he would've completely immobilized him instead of making him strong enough to try to stand and launch Force attacks...unless if Palpatine's full power wasn't enough.

4. Palpatine switching from lightning to Force choke doesn't mean he wasn't trying to kill him with the lightning (that failed).

5. Palpatine gloating and monologuing doesn't mean his actual attacks weren't optimized for lethality, unless if you think they were restrained against Yoda as well.

6. Force attacks don't have to cause environmental damage to be super-powerful; the explanation for lack of environmental damage isn't that the attack couldn't have been maximized for lethality.

Also, you can refer to Azronger's very thorough posts above.

(The Yoda point bears mentioning - it can be used to say that Yoda didn't actually take the full lethality of Palpatine's lightning in their final lightning lock because Palpatine had paused to gloat and laugh some times in the fight)

That was the most thorough dressing down of Revan wank I've seen in a while. The stuff about lightning was pretty brutal too.

Lightning probably attacks both the spirit and the body, as it's noted as having life draining elements (granted lots of things can damage the spirit so its not that special). Would make sense since the amulets in TotJ were noted as being particularly lethal to Sith spirits and when Ulic attacks Nomi etc it is stated to be Force Lightning that he is using. It doesn't really behave like normal electricity so that explains why it defies certain physical laws and doesn't scorch fabric even when you think it ought to.

Spirit midichlorian stuff was great as well.

@BoD

Fair points, but we also know that Sidious has absolutely no idea how powerful Plagueis is, as I addressed in my response to Corvinus:

IIRC the quote you cited is actually ten years before the events of TPM, but in any case it's before TPM. Sidious also says in the actual quote that his power has increased "tenfold", implying that his powers are constantly growing. But even then this is all irrelevant because Sidious killed Plagueis "upon receiving the skill and ability" to do it.

Sidious' fears are two-fold:

1) He fears Plagueis truly became immortal and has evolved beyond Sheev's abilities to destroy.
2) Sheev isn't actually aware of the limits of Plagueis' strength. His fears are based on a reverence of Plagueis emphasised throughout the novel, as shown above. We also have Plagueis being wary of antagonising pre-boost Sidious, who while Sidious doesn't know the limits of Plagueis' strength, Plagueis knows - or more accurately, can predict - the limits of Sheev's.

All of these speculations about post-boost Sheev and Plagueis' comparability are founded around Sidious' insecurity around his own power, but we have explicit evidence he had no idea what Plagueis' limits and full power looked like. Sidious' fear isn't proof that Plagueis actually is more/comparably powerful, merely that Sidious fears the possibility of an immortal, invulnerable being with mysterious power limits he himself isn't sure of. What we do have is Plagueis doing everything he can to avoid angering Sidious:

Actually, there's a myriad of source that say Sidious learnt all of Plagueis' secrets (Link); in fact, one of those sources says that Sidious killed Plagueis after learning the last secret. We can still consider that there are contradicting sources, but it's fairly clear that Sidious knew pretty much all of. Yes, it's fair to count the fact that Sidious could never be fully certain, but that doesn't really detract from the main point here.

The para. I posted stands. Consider also that it's heavily implied that Plagueis' spirit vexes Sidious from beyond the grave before being subsumed in the Force, and that this power is greater than post-boost Sidious'.

Also, the Sidious supremacy quote are not at all confined to the DK Readers series. Even if one wants the buy the rather contrived proposal that the DK books are some alternative universe, that wouldn't actually deal with all of the other supremacy quotes, many of which already apply by TPM. That same TPM Sidious, of course, had only just received the ability to kill his master, as the previously mentioned quote said.

I vote for Plagueis now. Lovely debate.

A Meta-Note on Revan and Nexuses

The evidence is very overwhelming that Yavin IV was one of the most powerful dark side nexuses in the galaxy (stronger than one that drove Jedi insane), and that Revan was additionally in the most concentrated part of that nexus. It is very clear that Satele's dispersed BM, only a fraction of which was going into hindering Revan (if any at all), couldn't have overcome this when she was overwhelmed by the Yavin IV nexus (to say nothing of the dark temple),  nor could a nearly powerless spirit Revan who literally couldn't even appear before dark Revan until the latter's power had subsided on his defeat.

Thus, basically all of Revan's major feats are invalid (in addition to being exaggerated even as is).

Nonetheless, I think a lot of observers' desires to rationalize away the nexus, even if the most supported in-universe conclusion is that Revan's feats aren't usable, come from a distaste for nexus arguments on the basis that they aren't holistically sound / aren't actually factored in intent-wise.

Now firstly, in this case the power of the nexus is emphasized within the same mission.

Secondly, if you want to use this kind of dismissal on the basis of holistics, you must also admit that the "his lightning didn't affect Plagueis's clothing!" is un-holistic. More broadly, the idea that Plagueis was far beneath TPM Sidious, or that the converging indicators:

• Plagueis's development in-universe where he goes from doubting his power to realizing that it was beyond all past Sith (with Vitiate's name dropped).
  
• Sidious's musings about Plagueis's powers, where he is very wary of his master, regards him as "nearly omnipotent", wonders whether "the Force had ever been as strong in anyone", wonders whether a power greater than himself he felt was Plagueis, etc.
  
• The novel blurb, stating unambiguously that Plagueis was the most powerful Sith who ever lived.
  
• The unbalancing of the Force through raw power, indicating the unprecedented power of the last Banites.
  
• The Force itself creating Anakin to stop Plagueis's midichlorian manipulation (and, later, Sidious).
  
• Plagueis's arrival on Naboo causing an unprecedented planetary winter.
  
• Plagueis's control over midichlorians being so great that he could brute-strength replicate sorcery.
  

Can all be dismissed holistically as a giant misdirection, doesn't make sense. In reality, it's very clear that the Plagueis novel depicts endgame Darth Plagueis as an unimaginably powerful entity who was on the cusp of basically breaking the Force (and was already kind of doing that). He was ultimately outwitted by his apprentice, but Palpatine himself may have called Plagueis a "fool" many times, but he never once doubted his power.

So if you want to use holistics, the arguments against Plagueis's overall placement as a peer to Sidious don't work. If you don't want to argue holistics, then the nexus debunk still applies (in addition to the lightning feat, etc.).

A Meta-Note on Supremacy Quotes

I know some people don't like supremacy quotes. But they're still canon in Legends, and the arguments against them haven't held up. Shedding limitations makes no sense, at least not for sources that don't break the fourth wall.

What makes the Sidious supremacy quotes so solid is just how many times they are repeated. It's not one or two, it's something like a dozen across different sources. More than a few apply to TPM Sidious.

Sidious's placement isn't just based on "well here are the Sith that have been published, well Sidious has better feats, so he gets supremacy quote". It's thematically relevant to Sidious's placement as the ultimate (conventional) threat in Star Wars and the culmination of the Sith. And Plagueis is depicted as being his peer, at least at that point in time.

Now if you don't care about the holistics, then it's much simpler - the supremacy quotes apply, because they're stated in valid Legends content.

Lightning vs. Choke

Another point:

If Ant is correct in that Palpatine was using his full power not for lethality, but to maximize pain, why did he switch from lightning to Force choke?

Presumably his Force choke isn't more painful than the "more deeply on the dark side than ever" lightning that is apparently some special kind tailored for pain (according to Ant). And there would be enough gaps for Plagueis to hear Sidious's speeches.

Rather:

in a body that is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can't accomplish what you're asking of them

The lightning failed (or else Sidious would keep using it - and Force lightning's main function isn't to "choke"). What worked was an extended Force choke. But that's because the function that oxygen provides to the body is very different from some function that prevents physical damage; it's about providing individual cells with energy that those cells are adapted to process, and to do other things like filter out carbon dioxide. 

Nor is the meme that "Plagueis can't stop a Force choke" an actual argument - this is a drunk, half-asleep Plagueis who had just tanked full power Force lightning from the most powerful Sith Lord in history, and then said most powerful Sith Lord in history is now choking him while his breathing apparatus is failing. "Force choke" isn't some weak technique if it's being used by Darth Sidious.

So it's pretty clear that Sidious wasn't trying to go for a special kind of pain lightning, or else he would have kept on using it (since allegedly the failing apparatus was enough, according to Ant, to make him die, and that Ant is claiming the lightning was also mortally wounding him). Rather, he tried to directly destroy or at least completely incapacitate Plagueis with the most powerful lightning he'd ever used, and that failed, but then he realized that Force choke would work.

But in the context of a fight, actually beating someone who isn't drunk, half-asleep, and without a barrier with Force choke is basically impossible unless if the power disparity is so massive that the fight could've been ended in numerous other ways anyway (unless if that combatant has MM).

-----

It's More than the Lightning

I do want to emphasize that while the lightning feat is very solidly supported, you don't even have to care about it to see the evidence that Plagueis is a peer of Sidious per the encyclopedia, Plagueis supremacy quote, and Palpatine's own musings, and that Palpatine is explicitly the most powerful Sith Lord in galactic history by that point, putting him concretely above Vitiate. Nor do you have to see that a massively pre-prime Plagueis can unbalance the cosmic Force on raw power, or that his midichlorian manipulation and attempted galaxy-wide TP was considered a fundamental threat by the Force to the point of triggering the creation of Anakin Skywalker as a defense mechanism, or that his presence can create planetary winters. 

Meanwhile, Revan has no scaling above Plagueis. He only has an alleged "well these are his feats and they kinda look better" case, but that case doesn't work either, especially without a super-super nexus. If you line up their best feats / scaling, Plagueis absolutely wins. Let's do a summary of some of them:

• Unbalancing the entire cosmic Force on sheer power.
  
• Creating a planetary winter with his appearance.
  
• Atomizing a half dozen armored Maladian assassins with a quick Force wave despite being vastly pre-prime, near-death with a failing heart, and being so weakened he couldn't even use Force lightning.
  
• Massive scaling over Tenebrous's master, who popped a hole in the galactic light side bubble generated by the collective Jedi Order.
  
• An absolutely ludicrous level of scaling (30 generations of continuous growth) over Darth Bane, who killed lightsaber-proof orbalisks with his lightning, deflected an entire rain storm with his lightsaber, one-shotted 30 tukata as a trainee of a few months, etc.
  
• A level of scaling that is basically unfathomable over Kaan, who telepathically compelled thousands of Sith across the galaxy to join him and then had them in a trancelike TP spell, which included being able to forcibly rip them out of their firestorm ritual - but then his TP couldn't even remotely affect a massively pre-prime Bane.
  
• Tanking Sidious's full-powered lightning while half-asleep, drunk, and without any barrier.
  

Revan at most could be said to have a larger sheer quantity of random feats because he's in a lot more source material, while Plagueis is mostly covered in a single novel where he's deliberately hiding his power for much of it. That doesn't have anything to do with power though.

It's also worth noting the description of the effects of Plagueis's death:

Two beings in a galaxy of countless trillions, but what had transpired in the suite would affect the lives of all of them. Already the galaxy had been shaped by the birth of one, and henceforth would be reshaped by the death of the other. But had the change been felt and recognized elsewhere? Were his sworn enemies aware that the Force had shifted irrevocably? Would it be enough to rouse them from self-righteousness? He hoped not. For now the work of vengeance could begin in earnest. 

His eyes sought and found an ascending constellation of stars, one of power and consequence new to the sky, though soon to be overwhelmed by dawn's first light. Low in the sky over the flatlands, visible only to those who knew where and how to look, it ushered in a bold future. To some the stars and planets might seem to be moving as ever, destined to align in configurations calculated long before their fiery births. But in fact the heavens had been perturbed, tugged by dark matter into novel alignments. In his mouth, Sidious tasted the tang of blood; in his chest, he felt the monster rising, emerging from shadowy depths and contorting his aspect into something fearsome just short of revealing itself to the world.

Plagueis's death is compared to Anakin's birth in cosmic significance, to the point where it's rearranging the orbit of stars (the prose is far too specific to be a throwaway hyperbole). He is very consistently depicted as a being of unprecedented power, to the point where his mastery of the Force was becoming a threat to the Force itself:

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.

Why would the Force itself need to actively flee from Plagueis and retaliate against his experiments if he wasn't a serious threat to accomplish these things?

Of course, the Force's ultimate counter was Anakin Skywalker, the Chosen One. 

This speaks to Plagueis's overall power and mastery over the Force. Plenty of other feats speak to his combat mastery, from his lightning tanking to his handling of the maladian assassins to Palpatine's fear of fighting him. He is clearly depicted as the most powerful Sith Lord of all time before Palpatine's ascendance.

There are several quotes stating that Sidious' success on a macro-galactic level is a direct result of his power in the Force. We already all know this is how it works: those who have the most influence on galactic events tend also to be the most powerful, whether it be the Cade's, HoT's, Revans, Ulics or Anakins of the world, or the Vitiates, Kuns, Sidious and Krayts. Considering the fact the Force is an all-binding energy field with a shared consciousness, sense perception where all space and time springs forth from, it's obvious why Force users have a disproportionate influence over events in their sphere of influence, and as their power increases so too does that influence. The most powerful and successful of the Sith in galactic history (Sidious and Krayt) often speak about or are accoladed with phrases like "bend the Force to my will" or "embodiment of the dark side", because they are the few who are intimately conscious of this connection between the Force, the galaxy and their own willpower. Pretty sure there are quotes about how the entire battle in RotJ was contingent upon the duel happening above Endor, and its no coincidence that in that room was concentrated three virtual demigods (even if their powers were somewhat dormant or blunted at the time). And the Empire fell apart as soon as its connection to Sidious' will was broken. Same deal with Krayt: he was so bound up with the dark side that most dark siders felt his presence in their mind perennially until he died, then again when he came back. Krayt could reach into the dark side like a skype call and put a vision of himself into the mind of every vaguely dark side aligned being in the galaxy, and as soon as he died "millions" (or however many there actually was) of Sith Troopers promptly lost their minds and suicide bombed Coruscant. Then the Sith Empire promptly fell apart around him. The Sith Troopers weren't an indirect extension of Krayt's will, nor was Sidious' dark side adept army - they were a direct extension of and reflection of his power. Having so many beings under your thumb is something more than mere political influence but is completely contingent on your power manifesting. Plagueis attempted to reach out and contact every living being in existence and the Force felt so threatened by this that it began to directly fight back by killing his animals off.

Star Wars is a narrative all about power. The power levels tend to reflect and fall in line with the narrative. This is why "normy" fans tend to understand intuitively what the rough pecking order is even though their understanding is superficial and arguments abysmal. Yes, they get things wrong, but "you know it when you see it".

It's foolish to either ignore what we call "holistic" or "authorial intent" altogether seeing as the narrative is built on storytelling and not random technicalities caused by sourcebook quotes. Indeed the sourcebooks themselves reflect the narrative rather than the reverse. At the same time, it's a bit too brain dead to just say "X is the DLOTS so he beats every non-DLOTS from every other era", otherwise Kaan would defeat Ulic Qel-Droma. Different eras do have different power levels and the balance of the Force does oscillate, even if the underlying narrative principles remain the same.

The Banites also have tons of quotes in the Plagueis novel saying that the result of the 1,000 year plan was that the Sith had pretty much literally woven their collective will into the Cosmic Force (which encompasses all of time simultaneously, for the record), and Sidious being the culmination of this metaphysical invasion of Sith consciousness means that he, individually, embodies the dark side to such an extent that the balance of the Force is contingent on his life or death. This comes back to the thing about macro-galactic events being played out on an individual level when you consider that Anakin was born purely to stop Sidious, which he eventually did.