Psst. Hey, kid. /opens trenchcoat of Atton meta

Obviously those two know the truth, and Brianna had the benefit of Echani training to sniff him out, but that's not the baseline. Atton got astonishingly unlucky with his company between probationary Sith Lords and empathic black holes. I generally don't think anyone else looks at him and thinks something doesn't add up… minus one.

These are his thoughts after he's been told the Exile is dead, by the way. Yeah. God, I will never, ever be over how Atton stonewalls you the entire game, filling his brain with card games and porn, dropping sarcastic quips at every opportunity, and when you actually do get a glimpse into his head at the end, it's just... this. This unrelenting bleakness. And to think this is all cut content! In the release game, we wouldn't have known any of this, not even his real feelings towards the Exile! Rush deadlines are a crime.

People complain that Carth is sexist, a lot. And I get where that's coming from, I've got the same issues with his romance as anyone else. I love the bones of Carth's character and remember him very fondly – he's tied for my favorite character from KotOR I, even! But the writing is... flawed, to say the least, and in a way that goes past just 'poorly aged.' I don't think his lines themselves ever go worse than awkward, but there's some more fundamentally unhealthy stuff written into his relationship that I suspect wasn't intentional.

What I find interesting, and what a meme just very succinctly pointed out, is that many of the same people who have beef with Carth are cool with Atton. Who is definitely the more sexist of the two, both incidentally and deliberately. And it's a really interesting differentiation between the two pilots/f!PC love interests/earlygame buddies, because I think their palatability comes entirely down to how the games portray that sexism. So this is my attempt to figure out why one thing works and the other kinda doesn't.

It's a very missable bit of dialogue. You can only get it with a male Exile, and only then if you've cheesed off Brianna by causing her influence to dip 30 points below Visas's. Unfortunately, this also causes Brianna to permanently stop talking to you, so this is something you're only ever gonna see by accident. I only learned that could even happen pretty recently, and that's with maybe 6 male Exile playthroughs under my belt. I guess I'm just very thorough about exhausting everyone's dialogue options all the time.

So. Brianna's permanently cut herself off as a companion, courtesy of Kreia whispering in her ear, and that sucks. But at least your trashman pilot has something to say about it... and whoa boy is it a consolation prize. Atton proceeds to launch into an arm-around-your-shoulders buddy talk that has exactly nothing to do with your problems and everything to do with his personal issues.

Exile: The Handmaiden lost her temper with me.

Atton: Oh, there's a surprise. Trust me, she's a handful - all warriors are. They're not used to dealing with things they can't punch, kick, or break. Look, I know how it is. Me, there's no denying that I'm a good-looking guy. You have it worse, because even though you might not be as good-looking as me, you have that whole tortured past, that command presence. Women want to save you. They think they can help you.

Exile: What are we talking about?

Atton: They think that everyone can be redeemed, and that they're the only ones who can do it. And you don't know if it's you, or the idea of you that they love.

Exile: [Awareness] Are we talking about me or you?

Atton: We're just talking. Like I said, I've never understood women. It's possible they don't love you at all. That they just want to help you... help you hear yourself if you've gone deaf to your own voice. We all lose our way sometimes, and we need someone to pull us back.

Exile: [Awareness] Sounds like you've had that experience before.

Atton: Don't remember. Truth is, I still don't listen to my conscience even when it's shouting. I think there's times I'd rather be completely deaf than hear it. But all this talk doesn't matter. I'm not qualified to give advice. Besides, when I open my mouth, I'm usually lying anyway.

Like. Just. Holy shit, Atton. Yeah, he's clearly talking about the Jedi who tried to save him, but there's so much more to unpack in here. Let's break it down.

“Women want to save you. They think they can help you.” - Atton wants to save you. He wants to be the hero to your story, something he projects at Mical (to the latter's confusion), but which can also be read into a lot of his actions – when he starts taunting the assassin on Telos to draw heat off you, when he runs out on Nar Shaddaa to give you medpacs and do the same thing with the bounty hunters. The hard evidence is on Malachor. If Atton dies, he says it outright: “Did I save you yet?” And if he falls to the Dark Side, he tells Mical that “he wanted to protect [the Exile], to help her” before he lost his chance.

“They think that everyone can be redeemed, and that they're the only ones who can do it.” - Yeah, it's not really about helping the Exile. Atton needs to be the one that 'saves' you, as a balm to his own lack of purpose and self-worth, and he gets real pissy if anyone else does a better job helping you – or god forbid gets close to you. He's constantly insecure, he's unhappy with most new party members when they join up and, and seriously, the only crime Mical ever committed was being a genuinely good dude in a crew full of misfits. Too bad the galaxy's greasiest pilot reads that as a threat.

“And you don't know if it's you, or the idea of you that they love.” - Atton's attraction to you in a nutshell, and that's before you get the question of Force Bonds involved. Like, seriously. Does he genuinely love you as a person, or is he in love with you as an ideal – as someone who could stop running and face the music for their unforgivable crimes, as someone who actually tries to fix the damage they did? As someone who can still find it in them to care about people after the war broke them down? As a Jedi that actually lives up to the ideal both the Council and Revan failed to? As someone he believes he can relate to, because he thinks he knows your reasons for what you did? Are you a stand-in for his dead Jedi and his hundred conflicting feelings over her? Is he just in love with the idea of having a purpose and wants someone he can bury himself in? Is the idea of martyring himself and finally dying for a reason what he's really obsessed with? Pick your flavor, because who knows! He certainly doesn't!

“It's possible they don't love you at all.” - While this has a lot to do with him wondering why the hell anyone would have tried to save him, I also think this is him reflecting on his own confused feelings towards the Exile. They might not be romantic with an M!Exile (or if they are, he's having intense bi denial), but they're absolutely there and he does not know what to make of them.

“That they just want to help you... help you hear yourself if you've gone deaf to your own voice. We all lose our way sometimes, and we need someone to pull us back.” - This has nothing to do with the Exile, the Handmaiden, or anyone who isn't an ex-Sith assassin who had empathy forcibly shoved into their brain after years of progressively more fucked-up descent into all-consuming hatred.

“Truth is, I still don't listen to my conscience even when it's shouting.” - He almost gets away with this one, but Atton's deep in denial here. He doesn't want to hear it, but he can't turn it off, the same way he can't stop feeling things when he used to have total control of his emotions (because he barely felt anything at all.) It's all why he can't go back to who he was, even though he badly misses the certainty he used to feel. Atton is a pro at ignoring his conscience, which definitely has nothing to do with how much he hates himself, total coincidence... but as soon as the Exile gets involved, that goes out the window, because Atton's self-preservation glitches out. Their Force wound tugs on his better nature... or it yanks at his opposite. And if that happens, Atton is very aware of what's happening to him. He succumbs, but he has more to say on the Exile's fall than anyone short of Kreia. And light or dark, his (im)moral compass gets jarred from 'cover my own ass' to 'protect the Exile' and he repeatedly sticks his neck out for no gain, so yeah, I call bullshit here. He's smack in the middle of his biggest crisis of conscience since the Sith.

And then you get to the end of your options, and it's just like, “just make Atton do it.”

Like, Atton was coming to grips with the fact that the Exile used to be a Jedi. They seem decent enough... clueless, and too much of a bleeding heart for their own good, they're the type of idiot who paints a target on their back every time they get out of bed, but at least they were a veteran instead of one of those worthless trust-in-the-Force types and they're not afraid to get their hands dirty when there's people that need to be shot. And hell, if the Jedi kicked them out, that's a point in their favor – maybe even enough for him to worry for them late at night after the juma's really kicked in, because sometimes they just seem so goddamn worn-down and look, he's not totally heartless. Anyone with eyes can see that they're lugging around some heavy shit; of course he's gonna wonder. And then he gets smacked with that.

Malachor V was huge to Atton. It's that theme of all of the crew's stories coming back to that single moment in time. Now, it's important to establish that Malachor is not a single event that broke Atton. He was already in bad straits by the end of the Mandalorian Wars, and heavily disillusioned by all he'd witnessed and done during them. It's not the end-all-be-all of his fall to the Dark Side and it may well have happened anyway. But Malachor was the capstone – a single terrible event that shattered the remainder of his faith. Atton was present during that battle (“You weren't there. You have no idea what happened.” -> “Oh yeah? Shows how much you know. Maybe you're wrong about a lot of other things, too.”) and alludes to trauma over it (“Wish I'd died there, that the storms had dragged me down into Malachor V”). My take is that he was among the forces arrayed for the space battle and barely managed to fly his way out of the gravity well, but you can interpret many different experiences from the loose constraints of canon.

No matter how you slice his involvement, though, Atton felt utterly betrayed by Malachor V. He'd already felt that the Republic was mismanaging its troops, that guys like him were being served up as cannon fodder while useless senators waffled over the measures they desperately needed on the ground and the Jedi sat on their Council thrones offering platitudes of protection while failing to lift a finger in anyone's defense. But here was the absolute worst of it – command straight-up lied to him, him and everyone else in that stars-damned clusterfuck, and sent them out as sacrificial lambs. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers laid out as bait for a goddamn trap. Didn't even get a chance to fucking fight, just a tongue-in-cheek “thank you for your sacrifice”, because if they'd signed up to fight then he guesses that meant they were already dead on paper anyway.

I think it's likely that the way Malachor ends up attributed to Revan was revisionism that happened later, in the same way that Revan accumulated blame for the actions of Malak in the Jedi Civil War. Revan definitely had a lot of blame for what happened at Malachor, but Atton would have hated whoever made that call. Whether he chalked it up to Meetra Surik or Insert Better Exile Name Here or just the Republic in general, he was a furious, bitter mess... and I don't think he would have been so quick to follow Revan if he'd known just how much of a hand they had in Malachor's planning.

Fast forward a decade later, when he meets the person behind that call, the Jedi behind that call, and they're nothing like he would have expected.

And he knows this because he's already seen them in action, gotten to know them a little – likes them, even, and isn't that a damned thing he tries to avoid. Unless your Exile is unusually chatty, Atton probably learns this sometime on Telos; possibly from Lt. Grenn when they get arrested (specifically the fact that the Republic wants to meet with them, that'll set off some alarm bells, and possibly bring in the Exile's full/real name), possibly when they meet Bao-Dur and his habit of using military ranks, possibly from the Handmaiden Sisters when they end up in Atris's Academy, and definitely from the holorecording of the Exile's trial if he hasn't already clued in. If he'd known who they were on Peragus, Atton might've used them to get off the station and planted a vibro in their back as soon as he didn't need them anymore, but now he's seen the kind of person they are – the parts that are just like him, the parts that are better than him – and he doesn't know how to feel.

But in my headcanon, he turns that ship around to Alderaan and forces the Exile to take a vacation for one kriffing moment in the overstuffed responsibility conga line that is their life, and it's peaceful and awkward and maybe a little disastrous at times and romantic if that's your flavor because it's definitely mine, and Drew Karpyshyn can pry that from the rigor mortis of my death-grip fangirl fingers.

-He wants closeness with the Exile, but he's terrified of attachment. He tries to push them away and plays a mean game of “we're not friends and I'm bailing as soon as I get the chance”, but at the same time, he's desperate for a meaningful connection with them.

-He wants to be appreciated and respected for his skills, but wants to keep a low profile and pretend he doesn't have them

-He's calculating and a skilled cold reader, but he constantly says the wrong things anyway

-He complains about selfless do-gooding and believes it's a ticket to ending up taken advantage of, if not dead in a ditch somewhere, but secretly he really admires it

-He's a deserter, but he's loyal to the point of self-destruction

-He's very afraid of the Exile finding out what he was, but once the topic is broached, he's desperate to show them everything he did, to make them see exactly how ugly of a person he is. He doesn't want anyone to see into him, but he wants to be understood. He really doesn't want the Exile to hate him, but he also really does.

-He's crippled with guilt over who he became even as he remains proud of what he did

-He's a coward with a keen nose for danger, but he walks straight into it anyway

-He'll do anything to survive, but he lowkey wants to die

-He despises Jedi, but devotes his life to one and becomes one himself

Premise starts with the endgame. Atton loses the fight against Sion and is tortured to the point of death. The Exile finds him fading, and he confesses to everything – confesses to something that was reciprocated, even, it was just never the right time and now the end of the road is staring them in the face way too soon. And he's so desperate not to die like this, and the Exile so desperate not to lose him now of all times, that he stumbles onto what Sion did. He grabs a hold of his suffering, his spite at the universe, and uses it to power through. He doesn't heal, not really. But he gets back up.

-Atton was a mouthy kid and always had an independent streak that got him into trouble, but he used to be much more of a social animal than he is now. His Alderaanian upbringing and the cheerfully patriotic Republic recruitment drives left him ill-prepared for the reality of the front, and Atton got very attached to his bunkmates in the days that followed. He used the friendly faces in his squad to keep himself grounded from the shit he saw on a daily basis, found that fighting for them was easier than fighting for the ideal of the Republic itself... and one by one, turnover replaced them with new faces. Eventually he started holding his comrades at arms' length because it was easier than getting to know them. No point when they'd all be dead in six months anyway.

-Continuing on that note, it wasn't much of a leap when the Sith taught him to harm and kill innocents as bait. His service had already led him partway down that slope by the time he left the Republic. Ignoring the mass sacrifice at Malachor, which he was present for and which killed what was left of his faith, Atton would have been made to bomb some difficult targets in a desperate and losing war - camps with slaves and children, Mandalorian-overtaken civilian targets, overrun ground battles that still had friendlies on the ground. It didn't take much mental gymnastics to justify his actions when murder was already a well-trodden reality of war.

-Atton's eyes used to be brown. During his Sith days, he began showing dark side corruption – not heavily, as his Force sensitivity was only nascent, but his eyes started to lose color, alongside paling skin and darker, thinner hair. It receded in the years following his desertion, but his eyes never quite returned to the way they used to be, which is why they're a very washed out hazel now.

-Atton sees himself as a deserter, but he's actually fiercely, dangerously loyal to anyone he thinks has earned it, and that's the reason he signed on with Revan in the first place. He's just never had a cause that didn't let him down in the end, and he walked out of the Jedi Civil War too damaged to put his trust in anyone or anything before the Exile and their literally magnetic personality sucked him in.

-He's compulsively aware of ways to kill the people around him, an awareness that's fluid with the environment, all equipment in reach, and the distraction and emotional states of all parties involved. Intrusive thoughts up the wazoo.

-Between the above, the anxiety, and the self-hate, he's usually in a pretty bad mood. The pazaak and other techniques aren't just mental shields for the purposes of keeping out Jedi, they're also tools to help him cut off his thoughts and get out of his head.

-Banter is another mental defense of his. He incites stupid, meaningless arguments to pass the time and occupy his perpetually overclocked brain. Doesn't really matter what he's saying as long as it's something, you know?

-It's hard to say which was worse for his hypervigilance – his days in the Sith, between the cutthroat politics and hunting down literal telepaths, or his days after it, on constant lookout for Republic and Sith alike. Atton's pretty good at keeping his twitchiness under wraps, since his entire shtick is method acting being something he's not. If you startle him out of sleep, though, you're liable to end up in a headlock for the couple of seconds it takes him to get his bearings. It's hard to sneak up on him, but his reaction to being genuinely spooked is vicious. Not a guy to throw a surprise party for.

-Atton's never had a real relationship. If he's 29-32 in 3951, he would have been 16-20 when he joined the Mandalorian Wars, which doesn't leave much room for anything past high school sweethearts. And he was way too broken when he left the Sith some seven-eight years before the events of KotOR II – between the barely contained self-loathing, the walling off everything that might be a real emotion, and the running, there was no way Atton was making connections that he wouldn't compulsively sever. So when he asks Bao-Dur for romantic advice, it's genuine. Atton may be a master of the one-night stand, but he has pitifully little idea what to do about feelings. He swaggers and plays confident, but if the Exile actually took him up on his flirting, he'd be completely flat-footed.

Both of them were young men that got swept up by the Mandalorian Wars, chewed up, and spat out as broken wrecks. And this is true of most of the cast of K2, and a big chunk of the galaxy as per the game's theme, but Atton and Bao-Dur might have closer stories than anyone else in the crew, because they share hatred as their driving force. The guilt that haunts them isn't what they did in the war, it's why they did it and how they felt during it. Bao-Dur saw the destruction of his people and came to hate the aggressors for the senseless violence - Atton saw the destruction of his comrades and came to hate the so-called protectors that could have changed everything but left them to die, and had the gall to claim moral superiority for it. That hate festered and led them to commit mega war crimes that finally collapsed at one focal atrocity. Obviously Atton's path was a lot darker than Bao-Dur's, and his crimes were far more visceral, cruel, and repeated until he met the Jedi that broke him right back, while Bao-Dur built one immensely, unimaginably terrible thing that only he was capable of, and left a bloody and inescapably personal handprint on the fate of the galaxy.

But either way, they had the same response – an inability to find peace, a lot of self-loathing with no outlet, and a ton of drifting until they found the Exile. And their demons aren't so much regret for their actions as it is horror at the people their hate made them into – which is a really important distinction to make, because blowing up a planet with tens of thousands of friendly forces on it and torturing Jedi sound like things that characters would regret at face value, and in a lesser piece of writing, that would probably be the end of it. Not so, in KotOR II. Bao-Dur still believes the war needed to end, and neither of them hates any less now than they did then (though in Atton's case, it's important to note that his hatred of the Jedi later expanded to encompass hate for the Sith as well. He wouldn't do his actions over again, assuming neutral/LS, but it's less out of regret and more out of “fuck you all, you weren't worth my life.” The only action he actually wishes he could take back is killing that last Jedi. Everything else is just disgust and fear at what he realized he had inside him - and like Bao-Dur, that's not something he can unlearn, no matter what he does now.)

They are also unique in that they are the only two crew members that joined the Exile with no ulterior motives. Kreia is an ulterior motive, T3-M4 wants to bring aid to Revan, Brianna joins as a proxy for Atris, Mical is a scout for Carth Onasi, Visas is there to stop Nihilus, Mira is there because nobody else is going to horn in on her bounty, Mandalore is there for the clans and to find news of Revan, Hanharr was forced into servitude, G0-T0 is there to dole out orders, and HK-47 wants to pin down his clones (as well as engage in some good old-fashioned bloodshed, which he'll surely get next to such a walking storm.) These two boys are just deeply in love with the Exile, be that romantically or just a pure, rare bond of shared understanding, and follow them because it's the clearest way to make up for their past, but also because nobody else could get them so deeply.

Atton/Exile gang rise up, I made breakfast

But he's still the kind of guy that hits on random ladies, and scratches his junk in public, and generously showers once per week, and snores like a chainsaw, and flies into a jealous snit whenever another guy looks his not-girlfriend in the eyes. Forget stubble, this guy's loaded up with blackheads. He chews with his mouth open. He says incredibly obnoxious things about women. He smokes inside the ship, recycled air or no. And he's spent enough time in the Red Sector to fill out a catalog of space STDs, because seriously, it's Nar Shaddaa, you really think there's industry standards?

For every “You'll be right here with me, playing pazaak, where they can't reach you,” I need a “So, uh, must be tough being a Jedi... no family... no husband...”

But he's still a scoundrel by nature, horribly jaded, very comfortable with problem-solving via murder, and he believes in neither the Jedi Code nor the pursuit of atonement. His morality is more Exile-centric than anything else, as in “I'm going to do this to protect them” or “I guess I'll do this stupid dangerous thing because they'll think I'm cool.” Love doesn't make Atton a better person, but it puts him through the motions (and if reciprocated, it'd make him a happier one, which would at least improve his behavior a bit.)

All in all, it's something where I think the game's alignment system can be misleading. People look at Atton mirroring the PC's alignment with that big beam of light behind him and go “he's a good guy now!” But nothing in-game really supports that. Does he approve of a LS Exile's actions? Yes, even if it confuses him and he's tsundere about it. Would he do the same thing in their shoes? Nope – that's why he's so inspired by them. Because they went through the same shit he did and still held onto the things he couldn't. Because he fought alongside Jedi in two wars, watched the pacifists cower as the galaxy burned and watched the war heroes turn into psychopaths, and he doesn't trust it at first, but this carved-up shell of a Jedi, the one who pulled the plug at kriffing Malachor V, is the closest thing he's ever seen to what the Jedi were supposed to be. Atton's portrait is gonna be pretty dang light sided while he's ranting at your Exile that all the Jedi who died on Malachor deserved what they got, and he means what he's saying. The game can stick him wherever on that bar it wants, but it's not serenity and goodwill that fills him, it's a messy morass of poison he's been choking down for years.

His arc is more about ceasing to run from himself, sorting out his feelings and his fears, and finally being able to move forward than it is about redemption. You figure he already had his big worldview shift years ago and made zero attempt to make up for any of what he did or mirror the grace he was shown, and, like... Atton's motivations start and stop with the Exile. Everyone else in the party has some other allegiance or some further goal that shapes their path. Bao-Dur wants to rebuild the planets destroyed in the war. Mira wants to reunite the families it broke. Atton wants to help the Exile, and if they're a lady, he wants to get together with her. That's all he wants out of life... unless he goes dark side, which gets ugly real fast.

While a dark Atton crashes straight back down to the bottom of the bar, I think the lightest Atton realistically gets is the grey background with a dusting of blue at his feet. It's like Kreia says – his potential lies downward. Dark Atton is terrifying, a proto-Sion, a hollowed-out obsessive shell of a man who can only feel anything through tearing Jedi down to his level. Light Atton is just a guy.