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attonposting · 1 year

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Okay, so Carth keeps coming up lately, both by people who love him and people who don't, and I thought I'd throw my two cents into the ring.

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.

Carth Onasi is introduced as a stand-up guy. He stays behind as long as he possibly can to save other survivors on the Endar Spire; he believes in the Republic wholeheartedly, he serves to protect and approves when you do the same, and other characters sing his accolades. He's supposed to be wholesome, but with PTSD-related trust issues that cause friction between him and you.

Atton Rand is the opposite of that. You find him in a jail cell, he's untrustworthy and a cad, at any given moment he's either abrasive or lying through his teeth, he complains when you help people, and when you get to the bottom of his trust issues, you find out he's a worse guy than you ever could have imagined.

It's much too oversimplified to say that Carth is supposed to be a good person and Atton is not, that's not where the problem comes from, but it will become relevant later.

When Carth starts flirting with you... okay. The biggest, most obvious problem is that the game wants you to be into it. Carth flirts and continues to flirt after you can tell him to stop. Sure, whatever; that's not egregious. You can respond to Carth's flirting positively or negatively, and that's great... but when you do respond negatively, the game loves to pull you into these playful insult exchanges where your PC shouts and pouts while Carth taunts you. There's where the issues start. Even when the player is trying to shut him down, they get dragged along for the ride anyway, and the narrative decides that this is also romantic. Thus KotOR I only has a shallow understanding that it's presenting a situation a woman may want nothing to do with. It's kind of impressive that you can actually call Carth sexist in-game, and yet it doesn't feel like the game actually understands that he is in fact being sexist.

Actually, no. Maybe I'm reading too deep into this, maybe this is why I'm so forgiving to Carth as a character, but I don't think the problem is Carth, I think the problem is that the game is being sexist in this particular spot. I was more annoyed by my own return dialogue options than anything Carth said to me - especially the ones where I was being mean. It felt like f!Revan was being pigeonholed hard into the writer's idea of 'women', that it was not an especially flattering or nuanced view, and there wasn't anything that I actually wanted to say. Definitely the writer did not understand my perspective as a player – but that's not a problem unique to K1 and it's one even the sequel is super guilty of at times, so I'll move on for now.

When Atton makes skeevy remarks, you always have at least one dialogue option to call him out for it, and you cannot ever react positively to what he says. Either you smack him down or you ignore him. This is extremely important. Yes, you could argue that it's not as accommodating to how different players might react... but what this establishes is that the game is self-aware. It does not think what Atton is doing is in any way attractive, or that it should be interpreted positively. Instead it acknowledges what a lady's probable reaction to his unwanted advances would be and encourages the player to express it, and the way that's written isn't a playful back-and-forth, it's the Exile snapping at him and Atton backtracking. Atton's being a piece of shit, but instead of stirring up chemistry, the narrative goes out of its way to mete out karma – hence everyone else on the ship mocking him, or the comically topical details like him being an unwashed loser who smells terrible and scratches his junk in public. Whether you like Atton or not, the game wants you to know that it thinks he sucks, and you are never left feeling like there is an unsettled score.

On the contrary, this lack of self-awareness is what makes Carth's romance in K1 hard to swallow if you didn't start out receptive to it. When you can react negatively to Carth's comments, it doesn't feel like you can do so in an intelligent way. The tone is very “Ugh, MEN, amirite” rather than “I don't like the turn this conversation has taken and would like to just be your colleague again” or just “Stop.” - which is probably what you wanted to say if you were just platonically enjoying or less-amicably bickering with your dorito-jacket companion when the gorgeouses started coming out of left field.

Worse, when you actually can shut Carth's romance down, it involves being a dick to him and stomping hard on his personal issues. Like I'd understand if a player was angry with him at this point, because again, you've been forced into a romance arc even when you were telling the game no as much as it would let you - but there's a huge difference between wanting to tell a guy to back off and wanting to shit on his dead wife or his Sith kid or his blown-up planet. I dunno, I'm not that vindictive! I think there's only a couple of options at the very end of his romance tree where you can turn him down... not even amicably, it's still rude, just without being a Grade-A asshole, and by that point, you have been through a lot of flirting you presumably didn't want to be involved with. Generally, the game won't let you break things off with him without being a dick, even if you never agreed to board that train in the first place. Now loop back to the way that K1 unfailingly portrays Carth as a great guy, whose flaws have nothing to do with his upstanding sense of morality, and there's where the dissonance comes from. Not only does the game push you into his romance after you said no, it makes you the bad guy for trying to get out of what he initiated.

But there's another issue in the timing of the Carth relationship. He starts his flirting while he's expressing intense distrust and standoffishness with your PC. With Carth's nonstop skepticism about your trustworthiness, and constantly bringing up his issues with you... at least during Taris and Dantooine, it comes off more like his attraction to you is superficial and not as a result of him growing to like you, something that's pushed by how it's always focused on shallow hooks like your appearance or your 'cute' attitude. It's very awkward. I do not think this was the writer's intent. I think Carth's supposed to be captivated by what he's seen you do, and that's just going in recursive loops in his paranoid little brain and making things harder for him. By the end of the romance, it's extremely clear that Carth's into you for you. But it's clumsily handled at the start.

Contrast this with Atton, who starts off aggressively sexist towards a female Exile, fifty times more offensive than anything Carth ever does. Literally the first line he gets is leering at the PC's forced state of undress, mocking her vulnerability, and he continues in that vein for much of Peragus. He creeps on your nudity at least four times off the top of my head, he ogles you, he complains about women, he tries to hit on you, he even contemplates the possibility of Sexy Kreia (which is a level of dickery I can scarcely comprehend.)

But that tapers off and disappears around the time he starts showing actual romantic interest in your PC, like when Kreia threatens him and it's revealed how much your opinion matters to him, or when he asks Bao-Dur for advice. And a female PC never sees it again. This creates the opposite impression – that Atton's attraction is a result of your time together. Sure, he's still a pig, but it follows that he wasn't making serious passes at you on Peragus because his behavior now that he is actually interested in you has changed. And it implies that in an actual relationship, that would not be how he'd view or treat you, which I think is crucial for how willing people are to ship Atton with their Exiles.

Now, this is all a product of how K2 did not actually answer that question and let you romance Atton, because with Carth, it's the opposite and you see exactly how he behaves once he gets into a serious relationship. It involves spanking. Things could be very different if K2 actually had fleshed out romances. It's hard to say, because both the PC and the crew were very thoughtfully written (I will take a bold step here and say that K2's characters were on the whole written much better than K1's), but on the other hand, Atton is still the worst and I'm pretty sure the game would want to remind you of that if you agreed to play tonsil hockey with him. And it may have crashed into the same pitfall that Carth's did; if the game railroaded your interactions with Atton up to some point, it'd leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth who wasn't already signed up for the ship.

With the way things are, Atton not only gets a free pass to be interpreted as generously as his fans want and easily ignored by those who weren't keen on him, he even gets an interest boost from this because people will always want what they can't have.

Anyway. With a male PC, you'll continue to see Atton make sexist remarks towards other female characters and can even have a wingman chat with him that is entirely him projecting his issues all over women. He doesn't make these comments with a female PC, suggesting that he's on his best behavior... but that he'd still totally be a leering asshole if he wasn't trying to impress you. With a male PC and Carth, his sexism is nonexistent, again probably because he was never intended to be sexist and it's a product of clumsy/oblivious writing.

There's an additional layer with Atton and the question of how much anything he does is an act, but that doesn't exonerate him from any of the crap he says. I could write a separate essay on Atton and his relationship with women, but the guy is very much a womanizer who's terrified of the idea of intimacy and has a lot of shitty opinions that stem from his defensive need to believe that nothing emotional is ever real or relevant to him. He might've been casing the Exile on Peragus, but his chauvinism is genuine.

But I digress. The tl,dr; is that Atton acts less sucky the more he crushes on you and Carth acts more. Combo that with how their respective games make Atton pay for being creepy but give the strong impression they want you to go along with Carth's nonsense, and it's a little less mystifying why Carth gets so little benefit of the doubt while the King of Trash enjoys fandom sexyman status. His romance is almost predicated on the fact that he's a scumbag, where Carth's is very confused to whether the awkward parts should exist or not.

There's a bit more that kinda hurts Carth. The flirting... well, from what I remember it just got “wow, okay then” later on, and I found it way more silly than offensive in any way, but him repeatedly bringing up how you remind him of his dead wife doesn't help the relationship much and suggests that Carth may be projecting someone else over you. I can live with that, drama's tasty and it doesn't prevent a real connection from burgeoning. You can make the exact same argument for Atton anyway, and I think his is way worse. My major issue is at the end of the game. Mr. Trust Issues does not react well to the events on the Leviathan, when it turns out he was right to have kept an eye on the PC all along. It's great payoff! And I absolutely adore his discussion after that, when he admits his struggles to reconcile you and Revan, how he tried but he can't hate you, how helping you gave him something real when revenge only left him hollow. Seriously, for all the shade it gets, there's some really great stuff in his romance too - you just have to stick it out long enough to see it. But then, on Rakata Prime, Carth seems to reconcile his crisis of faith and finally, wholeheartedly decide to love you in a way that falls flat on its face. He confirms you're a good person because you're not Revan anymore, like Revan is some purely evil part of you you've now cast off, when... that really seems more like denial than anything else, and not the foundation for anything healthy.

Seriously, I wish they'd handled that with more nuance. It would have counted for so much in my books.

All of that said. I know I just went after the man like a vending machine with a stuck bottle of chocolate milk, but I think the sexist vibes in Carth's romance are worst at the start and that he does not deserve the sheer amount of flack he gets. I've seen far worse offenders in the world of video game romances, and this might drive some controversy in and of itself, but I vastly prefer Carth x f!Revan to Bastila x m!Revan. There's a whole 'nother pile of issues in K1's other official ship (f in chat for Juhani), and I think those are much harder to deal with than the ones here. If anything frustrates me with Carth's romance, it's how unnecessary all of the bullshit is. I really want to get into it! The concept is perfectly fine! I love the character! There's good stuff in there! And when I replay KotOR, it's not that difficult to close my eyes to the bleh parts and enjoy the rest, especially once the first couple of conversations are past. Again, all Carth needed was a more conscientious writer at the wheel.

I'd be really interested in hearing other people's takes, both on how they interacted with either of those romances or where their interpretations differed from mine. I only have my own perspective and that of a few people I've talked to over the years, and I'm given to understand this is something of a fandom hot topic!

#carth onasi #atton rand #kotor #kotor 2 #kotor ii #basically a dissertation on how framing makes all the difference #i'm sorry carth #i love you a lot but your writing is so bad #kotor remake pls fix

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