I'm rewatching clips of my Mshenko Shepard, and something I don't think I think about enough when it comes to Kaidan is the trauma he has from Vyrnnus, his biotic teacher, and how he then grew up to be a biotic teacher himself in ME3. Sure, I don't personally get the impression he's training inexperienced kids (even if they are the "youth" as he says in London,) so it's not the same, but he's still an instructor. He grows from being worried about letting himself use his biotics too much and losing control in ME1 to eventually trusting himself enough to become a teacher like Vyrnnus, and it feels like there's such a thread to pull there about what that means to him. Like, when asked about it, he says he turned it down at first because he prefers to get his hands dirty, but I have to believe there's a part of him that was scared of putting himself in Vyrnnus' place, too. Kaidan was there once, when he defended Rahna from Vyrnnus and "became" a monster like his classmates all thought Vyrnnus was, and I can't see him ever wanting to go through that again.
But at the same time, could he really let someone else do it? Did part of his decision to eventually agree come from the fact that, if he was the teacher, he could make sure no one like Vyrnnus took the job instead? When Kaidan says in the hospital that Anderson insisted it "had to be" him who took the job, Shepard says that, with his history, he was the perfect choice, then Kaidan tells them that most people in the galaxy still see biotics as freaks and says that accepting and embracing their biotics can be what allows someone to find success. The idea of Kaidan wanting to make sure that other biotics had a teacher who encouraged them like that instead of treating them like freaks or like Vyrnnus did is something so important to me.
