You know, starred wars?

My hottest swtor take is that the humans on the Sith Empire side should've had features we see on Sith Purebloods. Ie: ridges, no eyebrows, maybe some pink/light orange pigmentation, etc. I get why they didn't bc of budget and time and all, but these mfs have been with the Sith Purebloods for centuries. It dont make sense for two people groups to not be blurred. Yeah, not everybody would be, but they should've had a unique playable species or something.

Whats always given me the ick about how swtor handles the Sith Empire is that mfs are mostly generic humans like sis where tf are the Sith if this their Empire lmao?

Last time through JK I kept wondering what the hell Satele was thinking, putting so much on the Knight's shoulders with so little actual support. Particularly on Corellia, where she hands them command of the Outer Rim Jedi reinforcements despite them having zero real command experience; and the battle of Dromund Kaas/Emperor boss fight, where her plan is to bring the whole Republic fleet to the party but not to send anybody to help the Knight as they fight through Kaas City on foot, steal a shuttle, reach the Dark Temple, and then fight through that unassisted. And then face the Emperor with T7 (and only T7) because anybody else ~might get turned to the dark side.~ Despite Kira and Scourge being, uh, right there.

Essentially, it's all very weird and feels deliberately isolating.

Potential explanations I was kicking around include:

It's just regular contrived MMO protagonist But Thou Must bullshit. The fact that the Knight can ask why but then get brushed off or ignored means the writers knew it was bullshit, and anticipated the player wanting their character to question that bullshit enough to get Jennifer Hale, Kari Wahlgren, and David Hayter to record dialogue about it, but couldn't or didn't come up with a better justification than "because you're the protagonist." This is possible, but deeply unsatisfying and more importantly unhelpful for writing fanfiction about my miserable fuckup Knight, so ehh.

Satele is actively and deliberately setting the Knight up to fail. She has written them off as essentially contaminated--so she'll push them to breaking point, wring as much use out of them as possible, and then discard them. This is ... depressingly consistent with how a lot of Jedi Masters behave towards their students, and it feels extra plausible on a DS Knight, but I feel like that can't be the only thing going on given the stakes of the Knight storyline. If they fuck up even once, if they miss one single trigger, literally everything dies. So what gives?

Then I went through my screencaps and found a bit of dialogue from the end of Chapter 1 that might explain wtf is going on here:

SATELE: But [Angral] also forged our greatest weapon against the darkness. The Force has shown me what lies ahead. The futures of many rest on your actions. You will decide the fate of the Jedi ... the Republic ... the galaxy. KNIGHT: Master, that's quite a burden. I'm only one Jedi. SATELE: The will of the Force can't be denied--but I'll stand by you through everything we must face.

At first this exchange slid right off my brain because it's just, like, Jedi noises. Blah blah blah fate destiny will of the Force you're the protagonist whoaaa blah blah blah.

But the JK story is ... kind of unusual in that it might actually be doing something with the idea of fate and the will of the Force. The Council sense a "growing darkness" while you're still on Tython, and it turns out that they're sensing Tarnis and Angral about to nab the superweapon plans. Scourge has a vision of the Knight during the Revan-Exile-Vitiate battle, and makes that vision come true by betraying his allies. Jomar Chul has a vision of the Knight falling to the dark side if they go after Vitiate with Tol Braga's strike team, and ... that's exactly what happens. JK Voss, as much as I hate it and as much as it contradicts established Voss lore, is playing with the idea of fated self-sacrifice to destroy a greater evil.

And Satele, apparently, has confirmation from the Force itself that the Knight is in fact the protagonist.

She also gets the last word regarding working with Scourge to stop Vitiate, despite Kaedan's skepticism: "He's right. I can feel the truth. Without his help, we are all dead."

So ... I think that what's actually going on in Knight Chapter 3 is that Satele is 100% destinypilled. She thinks the Knight can't fail, because the Force wants them to succeed. And therefore she doesn't need to do more than the absolute bare minimum to help them--she can demand more and more, even to the point of absurdity (*cough* Corellia), and still trust the Force to ensure that everything will turn out all right.

I think that her focus during the battle of Dromund Kaas is not helping the Knight--they're a beneficiary of the fleet battle, but honestly they could've found a way to DK and the Dark Temple without dragging the whole ass navy into it. Her focus is punching the Empire in the face after they punched the Republic in the face on Corellia. It's optics. The Empire made the Core Worlds seem weak and vulnerable? Okay, fine. We took back Corellia and now we'll return the favor over DK.

... I still got nothing regarding why Kira and Scourge can't accompany the Knight to face Vitiate. That, I do believe just comes down to bad writing or some wacky production/Doylist-level issue.

Anyway. With failure off the table, the only real question is how well the Knight handles the pressure to ~meet their destiny~. Which, to Satele, is down to their ability to comport themselves like a proper Jedi--it has nothing to do with her decisions or input. If they rise to the challenge and get a good grade in Jedi and end up light-aligned, they get a pat on the head and a promotion--see, everything turned out great! If they start cracking, if they outright collapse under that pressure and end up dark-aligned, Satele publicly humiliates them without a single word spared to the possibility that maybe this could have been prevented or mitigated if she'd fucking helped them. But it's not her fault and it's not her problem. They should've tried harder, had faith, trusted the Force, been more selfless, accepted their destiny.

... So yeah tl;dr Satele is destinypilled and therefore she feels like she can skimp on the operational and emotional support. And she gets away with it because the Knight is not going to do the macro equivalent of yeeting Valen-Da into a hole out of sheer spite when the entire galaxy is at stake.