Thread:MPK/@comment-31421-20200202201639/@comment-29301-20200203193529

Alas, poor Ataru: no lover of KotOR II, yet I have nothing for you to read that isn't involved in it. :P

Originally I was going to include Meetra's trial on Coruscant, but what I came up with just seemed redundant, and not distinct enough from the game's version of the scene to be worth including. There were more than a few other chapters that I ended up cutting for similar reasons.

(Home) Meetra's initial reasons for finding the Jedi Masters are the same as in the game (unless the player goes dark side and hunts them from the get-go), so I thought that goes without saying. As for why exactly she decides she no longer needs them, I had thought that was also self-explanatory, though I may indeed have been mistaken there.

(Quickening) You're right to be confused about the whole red blade thing. My own headcanon notion of where red lightsabers come from and what their associations were in this time period is not what you'd get from the EU (it's not Sith-related, as Tales of the Jedi established that even Sith as recent as Exar Kun didn't care what color blade they used, but I won't waste your time explaining it all here); naturally, I'd forgotten that it's entirely inside my own head.

As for your other point, you're mistaken; I dare say that if you were to pick up either KotOR game and give it another play-through sometime, you would have no trouble at all believing that even a good and well-balanced Jedi (which Meetra is not) would have a loathing for kinrath. :P

(Condemned) Meetra's ethical calculus is that she only really cares what happens to you if (1) you're one of her friends/companions or (2) you're an absolutely helpless schmuck like Lootra (which, as Atton is able to guess, is largely a way for Meetra to salve her own guilty conscience). Her indifference to people outside those two groups is typified by her scene with Kiph on Onderon.

There's another layer to what goes on in the Dxun chapter, though - and I suppose it may be a case of me doing my characterization so "subtly" that what I want to portray doesn't actually make it into the story. The real reason that Meetra accepts Davrel's challenge is not simply that she doesn't care whether he lives or dies - if that's all there was to it, she might well have just told him to piss off and gone on with her day. It's really that, in him, she sees herself as she was after Malachor: someone useless, doomed to be left behind by the people he once belonged with. So when Meetra insinuates to Mira that it would be wrong to "condemn him to live," she's really talking about herself at least as much as about Davrel.

(Spirits) Who the "little light" is will be clear when you read Torchbearer. Which tells me that I probably shouldn't have written that reference in if I wanted people to read Critical Points first.

I must profusely thank you for your feedback. Some of it was indeed helpful. It's considerate of you to include the caveat about your distance from and/or disinterest in KotOR II, and it means a lot to me that you'd take the time to read this story and give your thoughts on it anyway. Whenever you have the time to get through Torchbearer, I'll be most eager to hear what you think of it; that was a much more ambitious and laborious project than this one.