Originally Posted by
Derah
Actually you kill Kai Leng even if you don't take the interrupt. The only difference between taking it or not, is that if you take it, you break his sword and then gut him like a fish. Without taking the renegade interrupt, you simply dodge his stab, then gut him like a fish.
My best guess as for why breaking his sword is considered renegade, is because the "chivalrous" thing to do would be to let him attempt his pointless attack before finishing him off, whereas the renegade action is to deny him even his little attempt and just squash his ego before killing him.
Frankly, after all the little shit put us through, I felt no remorse stabbing the renegade interrupt in every single one of my playthroughs.
My biggest gripe with the paragon/renegade system is that on the whole, I didn't like 100% of the choices in either system. There were several paragon choices that were just stupid, stiff, boring, and made you seem like you had a stick up your ass. And there were just as many choices that were renegade, but made you look like a racist, an asshole, and a xenophobe.
The best approach was then to take the best of both worlds, the badass renegade actions (Breaking Kai Leng's sword, Punching that asshole quarian admiral who nearly blew me up, shutting up that incredibly annoying krogan, shove a gun in Conrad's face to scare him off throwing his life away, shooting that corrupt turian politician and headbutting that asshole krogan who was berating my baby grunt) while at the same time, taking the awesome paragon options (Disabling the gun of that newbie merc so he didn't die, hugging tali when she sees her father dead, preventing Garrus from becoming a revenge-obsessed freak, and pistol-whipping David's brother for putting him through hell)
However, playing as a "Paragade" means your Charm/Intimidate scores suck ASS, and thus you end up with either needing to cheat your way into maxing them out to get proper quest resolutions, or having to settle with shitty outcomes to certain quests.
ME3 did it much better, because regardless of your paragon/renegade score, your fame meter is what determined if the charm/intimidate would be successful.
Hopefully the new system in place in MEA will do something like that.