YMMV / Tales of the Jedi

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• Adaptation Displacement: The Knights of the Old Republic series of games are much better-known than the comics they're loosely inspired by, though they do reference the events of Tales frequently.
• Angst? What Angst?: Cay is already sizing up a discarded droid before Ulic has even stopped the bleeding and takes his toolkit to it as soon as he can, only commenting that he needs a new fighting arm and this model works great for prosthetics.
• Complete Monster:
  • Naga Sadow is the Dark Lord of the Sith during the Great Hyperspace War. A greedy, ambitious Sith Lord, Sadow takes advantage of the arrival of the Daragon twins to slaughter his own people, including his helpless mentor Simus, to launch a war upon the Republic. Manipulating Gav Daragon into becoming his apprentice, Sadow uses him as a weapon and tool, launching a brutal attack on Republican space with intent to slaughter and raze Coruscant, Cinnagar, Kirrek and many other worlds to proclaim himself their ruler. When defeated, Sadow repays Gav rejoining the heroes by locking him in his meditation sphere and detonating a sun to cover his escape, killing Gav in the process. When followed back to his empire, Sadow has the Sith Lords slaughtered to force the rest of his forces to sacrifice themselves before detonating twin suns to kill countless members of his own race. Fleeing to Yavin 4, Sadow performs horrific experiments on his Massassi servitors, devolving them into primitive monsters, all to await the day when he will rise again greater than before.
  • Freedon Nadd is a particularly sadistic Sith lord who is responsible for the Beast Wars of Onderon, the Krath cult, and even the rise of Exar Kun himself. Nadd murdered a Jedi Master in a petty rage when he was rejected from the rank of Knight, and went on to take Naga Sadow as a Dark Side master. Murdering Sadow to steal his title of Dark Lord, Nadd turned the planet Onderon into his own personal fiefdom, wherein swathes of innocents were exiled to die while the rest were infected and tormented by Nadd's evil. For hundreds of years after his physical death, Nadd's spirit lingered and would corrupt his descendants into his puppets to further torment Onderon, subjecting the population of Iziz to torture and murderous outbursts. When the Beast Riders try to make peace with Iziz, Nadd uses Queen Amanoa to try to wipe out the Riders and murder her own daughter, before Nadd slays the loyal Amanoa and King Ommin for failing him and steals their souls. Empowering Satal and Aleema Keto in the Dark Side and orchestrating their heinous Krath cult takeover of multiple worlds, Nadd tortures and mentally breaks the ambitious Exar Kun into accepting the Dark Side and murdering several of Nadd's own followers. Nadd ultimately tries to use Kun in a brand new destructive campaign on the entire galaxy, having bore visions of Kun's power and hoping to twist him into a puppet for mayhem.
  • Exar Kun, beginning his career as an arrogant, brash Jedi Apprentice who considered other species inferior to humans, found himself drawn to the Dark Side. Under the tutelage of the ghost of dead Sith Lord Freedon Nadd, Kun plunged down a dark road where he embraced the darkness and destroyed his master's spirit, claiming lordship of the Sith. As the Dark Lord, Kun would enact alchemical experiments upon his followers, a species called the Massassi, twisting their bodies into weapons of war for his use. Kun would corrupt other Jedi apprentices by having them possessed by Sith Ghosts and sent them to murder their own masters. In the Sith War, Kun marched into the very heart of the Republic, murdered the Supreme Chancellor and delivered a grand speech to the Republic before killing his own Jedi Master in a duel. Kun would then trick several followers into initiating a supernova that would devastate entire star systems, including a genuinely loyal servant, mostly because the man's undying devotion irritated him. When cornered at his home base, Kun sucked the life from the entire Massassi race to preserve his own existence and trapped himself within his temple for four thousand years. When his spirit returned to haunt Luke Skywalker's students, he proved himself as cruel as ever by manipulating Luke's prized students, burning one alive from the inside out and having another use a superweapon to destroy solar systems.
  • Aleema Keto may not be a Sith Lord herself, but she is no less evil and cruel than many of them. A Spoiled Brat questing for adventure, she and her cousin Satal, heirs of the Keto dynasty, discovered the spirit of Sith Lord Freedon Nadd who taught them Sith Magic. They immediately used it to subjugate their home system, overthrowing and encasing their parents in carbonite. Aleema sewed her tutor's mouth shut after giving an illusion of his tongue turning into an eel and later blasted the flesh off his bones in a rage after he spilled her wine. Aleema later conducted the executions for their regime by feeding victims to torture droids while she and Satal launched a crusade that took many lives, terming their faction the Krath after a demon in their childhood stories. Aleema was especially fond of using illusions to Mind Rape her enemies on massive scales. Aleema later seduced a fallen Jedi named Ulic Qel-Droma and manipulated him into killing Satal. When Ulic allied with Exar Kun, Aleema remained by his side until it was convenient to betray him to the Republic, feeding any of Ulic's loyalists to a pet of hers that sucked the life out of them. When Exar and Ulic later gave her command of Sith Lord Naga Sadow's ship, Aleema happily used it to annihilate a star cluster to cook her enemies alive in their ships.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Go here.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Go here.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Go here.
• Heartwarming Moments: The whole process of Ulic and Vima's father/daughter relationship in Redemption.
• It Was His Sled: Ulic kills his brother and has the Force taken from him in punishment. It's one of the more famous events in the series.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • Having assumed the title of Dark Lord of the Sith, Exar Kun marches into the senate building on Coruscant during the trial of Ulic Qel-Droma, uses mind control to force the leader of the senate to admit that the Republic is weak, duels and kills his old Jedi Master and leaves with Ulic unopposed.
  • In the Hyperspace War stories, the dying act of Aarba the Hutt is to use his bulk to crush two Sith warriors to death.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Ulic crosses it when he murders Cay. Ironically, it also forces him to face what he's become.
  • Satal Keto and Aleema have theirs in the very first issue of Dark Lords of the Sith. No details, but it's quite gory.
  • Exar Kun's true embrace of evil comes when he kills his own teacher, Vodo Siosk Baas, severing his ties to the light forever.
• Narm:
  • Cay Qel-Droma yelling, "ULIIIIIC! THEY CUT OFF MY AAAAARM!".
  • The frequent Art Shifts also induce this. Strange coloring choices (such as Ulic getting olive skin in one issue—not a suntan, but olive green) and other issues like characters striking Fanservice poses during otherwise dramatic moments can make it hard to take certain parts of the story as seriously as they were intended.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Exar Kun's final duel with Vodo Siosk-Baas featured the first appearance of the double-bladed lightsaber, and the first appearance of the Galactic Senate of the Old Republic.
  • The series as a whole is this for the Old Republic era, thanks to the aforementioned Adaptation Displacement. Some fans don't even realize that it was the first work set in this time period.
  • Also the first appearance of a Jedi Council (which had never been referred to in any of the G-Level canon sources at the time), and (astonishingly) The Rule of Two, even though it is in an altered form here (there are only two Sith Lords, but there are plenty of canon fodder Sith warriors as well.)
• The Woobie: Aleema and Satal's poor tutor. Aleema decides to use the Force to seal his mouth shut, and turn his tounge into an eel monster, all just for her own sadistic amusment.