#exile x atton

[hnnny]

@wr3h gave me a fantastic idea, so I scribbled it out as quickly as I could

[commander-krios]

Commission I received from the ever wonderful @valkblue of my Jedi Exile and Atton Rand! If you haven't commissioned Angie, you need to! A pleasure to work with and super talented. Thank you again <3

[radiant-swtor]

I know his mouth isn't moving yet, but I'm new to this animation thing and I'm trying it out.

@sovonight io hope you like it i'm a big fan of you <3

[sovonight]

a fool and a broken jedi, coming to a space bookstore near you ✨

[aveliney]

started thinking about what if other characters see and hear when you get dark/light side points LOL

[0alix0]

they shtupid :3

[anakliro]

lately everything I do is just another seedy trick to get closer to you

[moravel]

No, I don’t know what the setting or context are. She’s being an overly handsy master and he’s just simping.

[nagarashi]

Yes. Always yes.

... because I love drama, weed, suffering and angst :D

Self-destructive attraction to each other? Yeah.

Forbidden love? Of course!

Toxic relationship? Yep.

[susandsnell]

hey coco! hope ur having a good day! was wondering if u’d like to talk about why u like and what u find compelling with atton/exile? do u have a particular route or headcanon underwhich u prefer them or is it more of an overarching meta appreciation?

Hi, friend!

Thanks so much for the well-wishes. My day's kind of ehh due to continued Issues but the weather's nice and I'm feeling a little calmer. Hope your day is good!

Thank you so much for sending me this and enabling me shamelessly. I've been ride-or-die for Atton/Exile (which is M/F if you played the Jedi Exile as female, which I did and which is 'canon' but let's not talk about the latter lest we kick the hornet's nest) since summer 2011, which is almost 13 years now? Wild. Literally half my life. Anyhow, my reasons/headcanons have changed and evolved just as I've done a lot of growing up since the time I was first obsessed, but I'll do my best to synthesize/organize my thoughts! (Assume all the Restored Content is canon). More under the cut because 'synthesis' is still essay-length for me, God help me.

First off, I tended to play the Jedi Exile as light-sided and Revan as dark sided; I find the narrative of both games to be the most meaningful with these choices. This post basically puts into words why Revan works better as a Dark Sider, but the Exile, to me, as Revan's foil and mirror, works inversely best as a light sider. The game seems to want you to play her light-sided given how Kreia's best stuff/approval lies in that path. KOTOR II is one of the darkest entries to the Star Wars universe by far, but with a light sided exile, it's a story about how moving through life with an unyielding belief in love and justice for others in your heart will ignite that light in the people around you, and repair a broken world/galaxy.

Enter Atton.

KOTOR II is great in that you technically have such a wide range of shipping dynamics/options, and exactly none of them are functional, largely because it's one of the Star Wars media entries with the most harrowingly realistic depictions of war and its psychological impact on the people it touches. Atton Rand happened to be my favourite of all the love interests at the time because of his voice and his snarky meta-jokes (I was a Daria fanatic almost 2 decades too late, what do you want). Nowadays, I love him because his character basically took the Star Wars expanded universe requirement for Han Solo expys and went off the rails with it, making his 'scoundrel' archetype half-his charming and humorous personality, half-a facade to cover severe and quite realistically portrayed war PTSD as well as his actions as Jaq, the torture-happy mercenary. It's "what if the self-serving charming rogue during wartime archetype was brought to its logical conclusion" and I am here for it.

So first you have the parallels and contrasts - both committed atrocities during the Mandalorian wars, but while Atton was loyal to Revan after their fall and never faced justice for his wrongdoings, the (light-sided) Exile turned from Revan and still was scapegoated by the Council. Atton is a character mired in his own bitterness and cynicism, and you have the option to choose to play the Exile as a character driven solely by her morals, even when she'll suffer unconscionably for them, and it is through this unflinching clinging to her morals that she gains the idealism necessary to survive everything she goes through. Atton once sought to rip freewill away from his victims; the Exile unconsciously, slowly saps it through the cipher.

As a young teen, I admittedly was starry-eyed over the 'sheltered good girl manipulated and hurt by so many meets sexy bad boy recovering from his own past and they protect each other as a power couple' archetyping, but it does go a lot deeper than that. Their dialogue options have easy, natural, sexy chemistry that draws you in, but I do think my appreciation goes deeper. This isn't a simple 'fixing the bad boy' because of the narrative device of the Force cipher meaning you quite literally have "I can fix him" and "I can make him worse" as your game mechanics, lol. You get your surface-level fun of their interactions between the proper, well-mannered Jedi and the flirtatious rapscallion, but you also have two people who, for the reasons I outlined above, fundamentally understand each other after harrowing lifetimes spent alone in their pain and trauma.

I'd go so far as to say Atton is the best-placed of anyone to understand the Exile; the Sion ship is compelling and squee-worthy to any Phantom fangirl worth her salt (as I was), but she's everything he couldn't be or fathom, Visas may have felt closer to the pain the Exile did over Malachor V but her worst actions were committed under duress as a captive of Darth Nihilus and not of her own volition (so I argue she's a lot more morally innocent than Atton or the Exile), Mical/The Disciple is the innocence and warmth of the Exile's upbringing untouched by how the Mando wars reforged her and while Brianna/The Handmaiden is excellent as a potential parallel for specifically the Exile's abuse at the hands of the Jedi (Atris in particular), she's still similarly sheltered to Mical. Bao-Dur was with the Exile during the war but the game didn't develop him enough and understands that aspect of her, but they canonically per the dialogue emotionally distanced themselves given the circumstances, and Mira the Bounty Hunter is cool sister-zoned, but I suspect her family being victim to Malachor V would drive a wedge no matter how much forgiveness the game preaches.

Meanwhile, Atton knows and/or loves not pieces of the Exile, but as she is; the battered and betrayed veteran with a lifetime of wrongdoing to atone for that he recognizes in himself, and the naive Jedi she was before that the charming flirt in him likes to tease. And although his backstory is a revelation, and a harrowing one to the Exile, who sees what she might have become had she stayed with Revan, this is what their relationship is; seeing someone in their totality, and loving and honouring the worst with the best. Despite knowing what the Exile's done, Atton values her enough to still care about how she views him that he begs Kreia not to tell her the truth about his past. The two are instantly drawn to each other on Peragus, not just out of necessity but genuine, instinctive protectiveness, attraction, and a deeper sense (be it Force-Assisted or not) of understanding. Atton refers to it in his death scene (if you count that) as love at first sight, and while there was probably initial infatuation, I think there was just such an instant magnetism that grew and grew between them through shared experience. "Don't give up on me now, dammit!" and "You want her, you get through me." come to mind. Atton is the only party member that asks her to train him in the Force, whereas she has to prompt and convince the others into their awakening. He's deeply scarred by his experiences with the Force, not to mention it's actively dangerous to train as a Jedi due to the Exchange, but he's willing to face that for the Exile - he tells her that part of why he wants to train as a Jedi is to be better able to protect and fight for her. One of the first things he does is teach her to play Pazaak in her head to prevent from psychic attacks through the Force/harm through Kreia's force bond - the exact weapon he wielded against others. The tragedy of any Jedi Exile ship is the constant insecurity created by the force-wound/cipher; how much of anyone's choice to follow in their footsteps or love them is their own free will? What power dynamics, unspoken or obvious, arise from it? But Atton's fierce independence and selfishness almost serves as the clearest answer to this. He willingly reawakens himself to the Force to connect with her, to be better able to fight for her. He chose her, a thousand times over, and whatever role the Force Wound plays, he accepts her influence out of admiration for that steadfast-to-a-fault morality I talked about before.

This isn't some corny gender essentialist "she is his redemption" nonsense either, although redemption is a major theme of a light-sided KOTOR 2; by training Atton and others as a Jedi, the Exile is actively doing the work to heal the galaxy she helped to break. By protecting and teaching and bonding with the Exile, Atton is regaining his own humanity through recognizing hers, over and over, the way he failed to recognize those of his victims. They're together in this, in their recovery, in how they've experienced all extremes of morality. Love, in this story, isn't about fixing someone or breaking them, it's about meeting them where they are and walking alongside them, hopefully to someplace better than where you were when you both met. Is it any wonder that he's the one she walks away with in the end? (As if he'd let her walk alone ever again.)

With all this being said, and to address your question, while the route/headcanon preferences I prefer for Atton/Exile create, I think, the richest narrative with what's there, I've definitely got an overarching meta appreciation for them too. I spent my teen years eagerly eating up every possible iteration of them as a couple, and much of what I described above can hold true in a different aspect if people prefer to play them dark-sided, if people hold the tragic dying in your arms ending as canon, and so forth. They're compelling any way you slice them.

[storageofdust]

Revenge

[hnnny]

@wr3h You are so correct, this is the epitome of Valentine's. Thank you for your service

[tobyig]

Only Atton could have me reloading my game because i lost influence with him

[englishwerewolf]

Let 👏 Atton 👏 Smooch 👏 Boys 👏

[thepunchingbag]

Should the Atton and the Exile get into a relationship after the game ends, dear lord god it would be a mess. And I say that as someone who actually ships these two war criminals.

Firstly, it'd be the mother of all learning curves for both of them. For Atton, I headcanon this is his first relationship he's ever had that isn't just casual sex or sex for credits or sex followed by assassination. So, there's lot of hangups. Plus he's emotionally overwhelmed despite trying really, really hard to play it cool. He's not used to someone actually... sticking around. He loves it and he hates it (being the messed up, strange juxtaposition of a man he is). He's got some major self-sabotaging tendencies, so leave it up to him to do/say something that would put their relationship on thin ice too.

Added to that, he probably feels like ANY moment Meetra's going to come to her senses and break the whole thing off. A really screwed-up part of him kind of wants her to. Because, who are they kidding, this is never going to work out. Because he's getting tired trying to camouflage that he breaks out in a nervous sweat at even the thought of her running head-first into battle - sure, he's always been concerned but now it's gone into hyperdrive. Because this is some sort of warped perversion of karma where he gets rewarded for all the fucked up shit he's done; he should be face down in a ditch somewhere, not sharing a bed with a woman way out of his league. Because he's painfully aware Meetra's standards are pathetically low, and he sort of wants her to do better than him. Then again if they ever did break it off - he would never, and I mean literally never, get over it.

I bet there's a lot of "I'm going for a smoke, I'll be right back" moments where he goes off and just breaks down.

And, I headcanon, thanks to her upbringing in a religious cult the Jedi Order, Meetra's over here seeing the Darkside in everything. The Catholic guilt Jedi Order's hangups - strong with this one, it is. They argue over who's going to clean the flux capacitors, she cusses him out, and she worriedly checks her face to make sure her eyes aren't glowing red. She's leading him astray (Atton's rolling his eyes in the background). She's a selfish, sad excuse of a failed Jedi and she's dragging him down with her. Etc, etc, I don't know, despite the fact she's so absolutely done with the Order, she still spent her childhood in a Jedi monastery where she had been indoctrinated/taught in that tradition and the mindset is hard to break. Also, the Force bonds have been an ongoing existential crisis for her since she learned about her fun little "talent" - she's always side-eyeing the situation, secretly thinking that maybe she's mindfucking him into loving her. Even after they grow close, it's always in the back of her mind. Maybe she's just using him to leech life/power off of him like some sort of ghoulish Force vampire.

Still, I think Meetra's the confident one in the relationship and she's ultimately not the sort to back down from a challenge. I think she's more than willing to call Atton out on his BS, and he's good at giving her perspective/a reality check on her martyr complex.

And that's not even getting into the ex-combat veteran PTSD double whammy, or Atton's misogynist vibes.

They obviously are shippable but my god they'd be a hot mess.

[aveliney]

jealous atton makes me feel things 😭 this is from one of his scenes with mical where hes aggressive towards him because he thinks hes trying to take exile from him