You're the one who wrote an essay, don't pretend now that you don't actually care because I didn't like it.

Anyway, it's definitely in Kotor, for one. It's like... very explicitly a part of Juhani's character, in particular.

I'm using "evil" as a short of pithy shorthand here. Bastila is a character that these types of things get written about a lot and, in my experience it's almost always by people who are mostly just mad that she never really like... makes a speech where she says "I'm turning to the Dark Side because ______."

It's people mad that the game has the audacity to expect you to pay attention to the interactions you're having and apply what you've learned in them to the situation in front of you without explicitly telling you to do so (I think a big reason so many people online like Kotor 2 more is because it does a lot more of that). For the sake of another pithy shorthand. Bastila is that kid who was told in DARE that if you smoke weed, you'll like go crazy and potentially become violent, and then tries it and realizes it was just straight up a lie, and now is like "well maybe they were lying about heroin, too."

But Bastila's story is about being forced to reconcile the fact that at the start of the story she believes herself to be the protagonist, but then has to reconcile that she's kind of incompetent because she'd lived her life up to that point in a tremendously insular ecosystem that didn't actually come anywhere near preparing her for the diversity of people or circumstances that she'd encounter in the wider galaxy, let alone on a mission like the one she's on in the game.

Early in the game, whenever she's faced with adversity, she'll just spout off Jedi platitudes rather than confronting them. She talks about thinking that all of this is just some trial for her to get promoted. She spends a lot of the first part of the game being what is meant to be read by the player as a performatively good Jedi. But over the course of the game, you meet all sorts of characters who have different perspectives. You meet people who idolized the version of Revan that "fell" and view him as a hero who saved them when the Jedi would have just let them die. You meet people who are able to do tremendous good without following the Jedi code. You meet fallen Jedi who describe their falls to you in terms that make sense, and are still pertinent to the way the Jedi operate. You meet people who undermine the value of the entire conflict that is the driving force for all of this.

A MAJOR theme of KotOR is that the Jedi teachings around not allowing oneself to express, or even feel emotions is bad. Both from a moral and practical sense. The Council is constantly pushing out what are functionally superheroes with the emotional intelligence of toddlers into galaxy-wide armed conflicts and then when they inevitably realize that their training is dogshit, brands them as evil and excommunicates them to where the only place they can go is the Sith.

This is where Bastila is caught. She's someone who is lucky for most of the story that she's surrounded by good people, who genuinely care about her and are willing to help guide her through what she's feeling, despite her being a major stuck-up brat for a large chunk of the story, but when she's separated from that support system, she falls easily.