@citizenbane said:
So..... Mace > Sidious, Starkiller = Vader and Starkiller actually amounts to something?
Silver would have a heart attack if he found this thread.
I read the book, and I read various things said about the book from the authors and whatnot. Starkiller DID indeed match Vader. Heck, he BEAT Vader. There is no way to argue against that. Anyone who denies that Starkiller is a VERY powerful force user is fooling themselves. Anyone who says "OMG, HE'S DU MOSTEST POWERFULEST ONE EVAH, LOOK AT IM MOVIN DAT STR DESTRAOYAH!" is fooling themselves even more so, but he IS powerful.
And I didn't say Mace is superior to Sidious. I said he legitimately beat him. Weaker people can beat stronger people if their skills are specifically tailored for them. Mace's style of combat allows him to become stronger the more powerful in the Dark Side his foe is. He was never stronger in his life than when he was fighting Sidious.
You can argue until the cows come home that he was faking being beat by Mace so as to draw Anakin over to the Dark Side. To my knowledge there is no actual evidence of that. It's conjecture. It is known that Mace and Yoda were comparable in strength, although Yoda was superior in the ways of the force. If I were Sidious, I would have taken that fight seriously, no matter how strong I was. Either way is possible, but I don't see the "faking losing" bit to be logical. It's too much of a chance for someone who likes to be in control of everything. The only point in which it is certain he was faking was at the very end when he was already disarmed and on his back. He faked being out of power after his lightning barrage. Doesn't mean that he was faking in the duel.
Starkiller is overrated. Anyone who denies that is fooling themselves even more so, and he's not a factor against Sidious.
As for Mace vs Sidious, if we ignore everything else and take the feat at face value, Windu beating Sidious is ludicrously out of line with the rest of his showings against various combatants in the Star Wars universe. There's no proof whatsoever that Mace is superior to the likes of Saesee Tiin or Kit Fisto ---- in Tiin's case, there is actually evidence to the contrary --- and Sidious has blitzed and killed Tiin, Fisto and Agen Kolar while moving so fast Mace couldn't even see what was happening. So did Vapaad make up for this disparity in their dueling abilities and make Mace superior all of a sudden? Hardly. The ROTS novelization states that, at best, Vapaad made Windu an equal to Sidious.
Vaapad made him an open channel, half of a superconducting loop completed by the shadow; they became a standing wave of battle that expanded into every cubic centimeter of the Chancellor's office. There was no scrap of carpet nor shred of chair that might not at any second disintegrate in flares of red or purple; lampstands became brief shields, sliced into segments that whirled through the air; couches became terrain to be climbed for advantage or overleapt in retreat. But there was still only the cycle of power, the endless loop, no wound taken on either side, not even the possibility of fatigue.
Impasse.
And Mace's own senses detected that Palpatine wasn't the least bit worried about the outcome of their duel. Mace was in a position of superiority, having "overpowered" Sidious, and ten seconds later Mace himself comes to the conclusion that Sidious couldn't care less about the threat Mace posed.
"Save your twisted words, my lord. There are no politicians here. The Sith will never regain control of the Republic. It's over. You've lost." Mace leveled his blade. "You lost for the same reason the Sith always lose: defeated by your own fear."
Palpatine lifted his head. His eyes smoked with hate. "Fool," he said. He lifted his arms, his robes of office spreading wide into raptor's wings, his hands hooking into talons.
"Fool!" His voice was a shout of thunder. "Do you think the fear you feel is mine?"
Lighting blasted the clouds above, and lightning blasted from Palpatine's hands, and Mace didn't have time to comprehend what Palpatine was talking about; he had time only to slip back into Vaapad and angle his blade to catch the forking arcs of pure, dazzling hatred that clawed toward him. Because Vaapad is more than a fighting style. It is a state of mind: a channel for darkness. Power passed into him and out again without touching him. And the circuit completed itself: the lightning reflected back to its source. Palpatine staggered, snarling, but the blistering energy that loured from his hands only intensified. He fed the power with his pain.
"Anakin!" Mace called. His voice sounded distant, blurred, as if it came from the bottom of a well. "Anakin, help me! This is your chance!"
He felt Anakin's leap from the office floor to the ledge, felt his approach behind—And Palpatine was not afraid. Mace could feel it: he wasn't worried at all.
And hell, the novelization also outright states that Palpatine could have killed Mace with Force Lightning alone any time he wanted, and that Vapaad, the only thing that was even keeping Mace in the fight, was completely useless against Sidious' lightning.
Palpatine still made no move to defend himself from Skywalker; instead he ramped up the lightning bursting from his hands, bending the fountain of Mace's blade back toward the Korun Master's face.
Mace's blade bent so close to his face that he was choking on ozone. "Anakin, he's too strong for me—"
This was beyond Vaapad; he had no strength left to fight against his own blade.
Finally, in Dark Lord, Sidious muses to himself about how all his plans to pull Anakin over to the dark side have succeeded. This takes place right after the events of ROTS.
As some Jedi had feared from the start, Anakin had been ripe for conversion when Qui-Gon Jinn had first brought him to the Temple, and for well over a decade all of Sidious's plans for the boy had unfolded without incident.
So the novelization, edited by Lucas no less, states that Vapaad only made Windu an equal to Sidious at best, and then states that Sidious wasn't the least bit worried about the threat Mace posed, and then goes on to illustrate Sidious' superiority the minute he uses Force Lightning to bend Mace's saber back.
And as for the point about Mace and Yoda being comparable in strength, I can only assume you're claiming their respective fighting abilities are on par with each other? George Lucas disagrees with you. He's stated explicitly that Yoda's fighting abilities are superior to Mace's. Canon would disagree with you too, seeing as Yoda has defeated Dooku, who is established to be Mace's superior.
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