Choice
In TSL, the same outcome in the plot can contain many different meanings. For the connection between the Exile and the NPC in question can be understood in many different ways, through their shared history. The Exile is an amnesiac protagonist for the player to inhabit through their repression of their past. But unlike Revan in the previous game, this amnesia does not arise from an acute injury - rather, from a chronic trauma. There are, at the same time, opportunities for the player to (not) act on character knowledge they should have through reflective choices in dialogue trees.
In the final scene of the first act of TSL, the Exile confronts Atris, who has rudely impounded their ship. The Exile once asked Atris to fight with them in the doomed Mandalorian War, but Atris refused, and instead became a member of the Jedi Council. At their last meeting, the Exile was on trial for war crimes, and Atris advocated for their execution. If the Exile blunders through this confrontation, Atris insults them and sends them away as bait for Darth Sion, who seeks to assassinate the remaining Jedi.
Otherwise, the Exile may skillfully discern that Atris' anger at them stems from her frustrated connection with them. According to Echani belief, the best and truest way of knowing another person is to fight alongside them, or against them. (Ideally, both.) Atris regrets her choice not to fight alongside the Exile, to not betray her Jedi ideals (and worse, as we find out on Malachor). She was right, and now she is too proud to admit her old feelings.
Atris always allows the Exile to take their ship and leave. The cunning of this scene as a 'social boss fight' (h/t an old /r/kotor thread), is in the social stakes presented by Atris as a Jedi authority. The argument is stacked greatly in her favor, as the player entering this scene for the first time has not yet seen the Exile's trial, and does not know what they were on trial for. Failure, in this version of 'failing forward', is a matter of whether the player leaves feeling like they were in the right - and why that is.
In a lesson about Revan's intent during the Mandalorian War, Kreia explains that war is fought with one of two goals: either conquest (which lasts only until the occupying force is gone), or conversion. The act of conversion, here, is the act of denying your target the ability to feel that they had any other choice. The victims of this conversion were the Jedi who fought with Revan, even when Revan turned against the Republic. Another example is the Exile themself - who, challenged by Atris and in sore need of a defense, may justify their actions during the war because "they had no other choice."