Work Text:
I have not played KOTOR or gone deep into any Star Wars ephemera to get the details, so some of this is handwaving past stuff in the Wookiepedia.
I had, in another not-a-fic, thrown around the question of, if the dark side is emotion and the light side is serenity, where do 'positive' emotions fit into things? If you look on ff.net, I have a self-indulgent piece of silliness that in passing suggested that the Sith Code actually evolved as a slave's rallying cry for freedom (it's in the fourth section/chapter 3 if you really want to look, but it's a throwaway sentence).
I found myself going back and turning the idea over, and then today I looked at the origins in-universe of the Sith Code and had an idea.
It's worldbuilding time!
Once again, we're stretching back in time to before anything in any Star Wars canon for this.
Let's say that at the dawn of the Jedi, you had a temple with two internal paths (like I said in the notes above, I know this isn't a new idea, but since I don't have the references I can't link them). At that time, you don't have the dark and the light side, you have the Way of Serenity and the Way of Passion. So, when an initiate starts down one path or the other, they choose the mantra to follow that best suits them. You have, of course, the so-called old Jedi code (Way of Serenity) and I have backformed the code for the Way of Passion:
Serenity Passion
Emotion, yet peace. In Emotion, Passion
Ignorance, yet knowledge. Through Passion, Purpose.
Passion, yet serenity. With Purpose, I walk the Path.
Chaos, yet harmony. On the Path lies the Way.
Death, yet the Force Through the Way I bring Succour
By Succour, I create Peace
So, both of these are service-oriented orders. The Way of Serenity strives to let go of the temporal, while the Way of Passion places itself firmly in the physical state of being. While the Serenity one strives to reach a constant state of equanimity being fundamentally about the spiritual, the Way of Passion is about stamping out injustice and using your anger at that injustice or the way it makes you happy to see people happy in peacetime to provide the impetus to do things. It also meant that you walked a seesawing tightrope, using your positive and negative feelings as a kind of counterweight. The important difference was that instead of giving it to the Force, you were transmuting anger into drive. The thing is, there wasn't a higher rate of falling to what we think of as the Dark Side, because while the Serenity Way had less risk because you weren't flinging your emotions around, they also tended to be way more blindsided by feelings when one of them did something like fall in love and then lose that person to some tragedy. So, Passion had a higher risk, but also a better capability of pulling back from the edge because they ran on emotions and were therefore more used to watching themselves for that imbalance.
Then, at some point, you have a Passion person who is enslaved or helps Force-sensitive slaves to have a rebellion. That's when the more or less 'current' version of the Sith code was invented. But at that time, it was about helping those slaves to turn helpless rage and hatred to something constructive. However, the first line is different.
Passion, not Peace.
Through Passion, I gain Strength.
Through Strength, I gain Power.
Through Power, I gain Victory.
Through Victory my chains are Broken.
The Force shall free me.
See, the first line is supposed to be about complacency masquerading as peace. That is, it's not that the concept of peace is a lie, it's that doing nothing because you don't want to rock the boat despite injustice is the lie. At the time of this apocryphal slave uprising it's about creating something that would help the slaves find inner strength.
The problem is that this new code gradually makes its way into broader use and along the way a new force sect builds. Over time, the two sides of the old Force order part ways and take very different paths. With that other, newer, slaves' Code making the rounds, the Way of Passion gets twisted until the Sith emerge.
According to the Wookiepedia, the Sith Code was invented several millennia back. But, what if that was just someone who changed the first line of the Slave Code to "Peace is a lie. There is only Passion"? In a bid to lose the old associations with the actual history - something that was already on its way to being totally lost anyhow - it gets retconned in Sith histories.
Meanwhile, the Way of Serenity had evolved into the Jedi. A stricter, less sympathetic service organisation, and they used one of the oldest tricks in the book, revisionist history. They've quietly shed any mention that there were twin paths back in the day and renamed themselves Jedi. They got rid of any mention of the original Way of Passion, especially making sure that no one thinks to ask about using emotions for anything, just burying the idea of using positive emotions as well as negative ones in the Force. They demonize the earliest appearances of the Sith, even though back a bazillion years ago, they were ambitious, but not actually evil. With that demonization, the former Way of Passion had responded with a sort-of inevitable, "Well, if you want me to be the bad guy, then I'm the bad guy."
By the time the Sith Wars start, neither side genuinely recalls where they started. The Jedi respond to the Sith Code by eventually doubling down on the emotionless facade:
There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force.
So, now, rather than saying you reach peace by passing through passion, that ignorance can be fixed by seeking knowledge etc. etc., you have this, which basically pretends that the experience of a person living in the world means absolutely nothing. The Sith meanwhile have lost any thought for the greater good and have turned entirely to personal ambition and immediate temporal success.
Now, that's the 'history' upon which this idea rests, so let's get to the plot, such as it is.
Anakin is doing a project and stumbles across the records of the Sith code. In some Jedi ethics or history course, Anakin brings it up, suggesting that the Sith might have been a slave revolt gone wrong. Everyone is appropriately awful about it to him, but Anakin sticks by his guns and points out how close it is to what he learned from his mother about transmuting fear of death into the ability to withstand punishment, turning anger into impetus to survive beatings, using the fleeting happiness of small moments to fuel desire to keep going and how close that is to what the Sith say.
This has a few effects. The first is that this is the first time anyone at the temple has heard that Anakin was a slave at any point and we have the usual spread of reactions of people rushing off to rescue Shmi, apologies for not understanding that Anakin's fear and inner darkness are not some brat who can't deal with separation from his mother but a genuine fear from a real source. This allows Anakin's teachers to recontextualise attachment for him, now that they understand where he's coming from. However, this also has the spinoff of a bunch of Anakin's peers and some others genuinely questioning the temple dogma about the dark side.
The last effect is happens after Shmi is freed and visits her son at the Jedi Temple and hears all about the Sith Code. She gets to talking to Jocasta, who finds an intelligent woman whose intellect was smothered by being a slave and adopts Shmi as a totally-not-a-padawan-what-are-you-talking-about-Yoda-and-Mace?
"You've been teaching her Force use."
"She already knows how to use the Force. I'm helping her have better control."
"You got her a lightsabre."
"It's not illegal for a non-Jedi to have one."
"You have her taking Padawan classes as independent study."
"What? I can't give her an education?"
"You're cheating."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Anyhow, Shmi does all this hardcore research, looking places Jedi historians didn't look precisely because they assumed the origin point of the Sith was eeeeeeviiiiiiil! Shmi goes looking for slave revolts and other not-evil things. As time passes Jocasta gets more and more up in arms about the holes that Shmi is finding because she's looking in places Jedi just don't look normally. She and Jocasta go on exciting adventures, trailed after by an intensely anxious Anakin who is certain his mother is going to die from visiting all these Sith sites (and thus learns to let go because his mother talks him out of freaking out) and by an Obi-Wan who is getting his nerd on while speaking on behalf of conservative Jedi because he's clinging to perfection out of terror the Jedi will find out he's a fake (and thus learns to stop acting like a perfect serene Jedi and how to tell Anakin that he loves him because Jocasta talks him out of freaking out). Eventually they find references to some ancient other site on what everyone knows is an old Jedi Temple. Except when they look at things with Shmi's new perspective, they figure out about the two sides of the ancient temples.
Jocasta may be a Jedi, but she's actually an academic first and when she and Shmi have finished parsing through ancient literature on using the Way of Passion, Shmi teaches Anakin how to channel his feelings and then promptly revives the ancient Way of Passion. When the war starts, there is a small temple of the Way of Passion that is filled with academics, wayward nightsisters of Dathomir, a rescued Maul, former slaves, Maul's brothers and periodically Anakin Skywalker. Anakin is taken by suprise by Dooku the first time they meet, but the next time he runs into a Sith, he's prepared and slam dunks them because he's not just using 'The Dark Side', which only uses anger and hatred, he's using a balance of emotions, which gives him way more amplification and they have no idea how to counter. Unlike a Jedi, who would get totally swamped by The Dark Side and flail, Anakin has both anger that braces him against the other anger, and joy and love and what-all that actively counters the dark and Dooku and Ventress don't actually know how to deal with that. Also Shmi finds all the force-sensitive clones and teaches them how to use the Force. The war is way way easier that way.
Obi-Wan, despite his misgivings, has learned to work with and around Way of Passion users and teaches anyone willing to listen about how to deal better with that. When he's captured on Jabiim with that Sith mask, he's learned how to reach around The Dark Side and still get it off.
Yoda is, of course, horrified when he learns that everyone around him is falling to the Dark (or at least, that's how he feels about it) and goes to yell at Shmi, who up with this will not put.
When Shmi and Anakin go to Coruscant to yell at the senate about their slave army Shmi sees right through Palpatine and there's a dramatic showdown in the Senate where Palpatine pulls his lightsabres on Shmi and he gets gunned down by the entire Coruscant Guard based on some regulation or other about Force-sensitive maniacs pulling weapons in the Senate Dome. Anakin does some sort of Force whosit to fix the Darkness and turn it into a normal situation which is not actually all light, but the normal swirl of a full spectrum of greys between light and dark.
Everyone lives happily ever after and Shmi becomes known as the Grandmistress of the Way of Passion temple, but she also Indiana Joneses with Jocasta still because it's just a good time.