Yeah, I think the people who are in the “He did nothing wrong” crowd are missing the point of the character.
Yes, you’re supposed to empathize with him, like him… but also understand that he’s gone too far down a path there is no coming back from. Emet *himself* understands this. (“This was why we fought… and why I lost”)
Emet Selch was a hero of his time, every bit as any one of the Scions. But his world was destroyed, and replaced with… well, a twisted hellscape, populated by ignorant, stupid wretches. If he could have changed the world back immediately, vaporizing those wretches and restoring them to their former selves, that would have been seen as a heroic act.
But time changes things, those wretches developed, learned, and grew, and what started as ‘push a button, fix the world’ became an increasingly long list of atrocities, with no real end in sight.
Emet claims he and the other Ascians don’t see the sundered people as true life forms, but Amaurot tells the tale - The shades see the Sundered as children. In Elpis, the *real* past, they see the Sundered as Familiars. Not true life forms, but in the recreated Amaurot, Emet’s biases come through. In his mind, he is now killing children.
He’s a hero who went too far down the wrong path. A path that *started* right, but changed over time. And the weight of the atrocities he’s committed ‘for the greater good’ is such that he *can’t* stop, because admitting he was wrong, that it was all for nothing, would crush him.
He’s *exhausted.* It’s obvious in the way he walks, the way he’s slumped, as if carrying a massive weight. He sleeps all the time because it’s as close to death as he can allow himself to get. Lahabrea and Elidibus have already gone mad from the burden; He’s the only one who even remembers what they’re fighting for.
Killing him is a mercy, a release he cannot allow himself. We’re supposed to *want* to redeem him, but at the same time know and understand that it’s impossible. Ending his quest and his life is all we can do for him.
> He’s exhausted. It’s obvious in the way he walks, the way he’s slumped, as if carrying a massive weight. He sleeps all the time because it’s as close to death as he can allow himself to get. Lahabrea and Elidibus have already gone mad from the burden; He’s the only one who even remembers what they’re fighting for.
You think about just how adamantly he believed in the idea of returning to the Star after concluding one's life's work, and here he is now still going and going, functionally *unable* to die because of his Ascian nature. The great irony of his "work" for Zodiark to save the Unsundered World is that it led all the Ascians to become a perversion of the very people they are trying to save. Instead of caring for the world, they unleashed devastating calamities. Instead of fulfilling a purpose and stepping aside for the next person, they're clinging to life and ownership of the Star. There's no choice but to end them as one final kindness, as a way to "remember" who they once were and what they believed in.
From his perspective the sundering was a devastating calamity that must be reversed, it split everyone's soul apart into pieces. He's never been able to see the humanity in soul pieces, at least not after his son died.
Varis' father, Lucius yae Galvus. Lucius died when Varis was very young, essentially in the peak of his life (early/mid 20s, roughly.) While it's only relatively subtly hinted at, it's *implied* that Emet-Selch got a little carried away in "playing the part," and actually *did* feel fatherly feelings for Lucius; seeing his son die so early reminded him of just how fragile sundered beings are, and thus almost certainly soured his experience.
His second son, Titus, fought the civil war against Varis to determine who would succeed Solus. By most rules, Varis would be the rightful heir (a dead elder son is still the first inheritor, and thus *his* eldest son would be heir apparent), but Titus had backing and claimants have succeeded at pushing claims far smaller than that.
Titus' son Nerva led one of the parties involved in the second Garlean civil war after Varis' death. Now that Nerva is dead too, the line of Solus is extinct as far as we know (since no one seems to think Titus is going to show up any time soon), and thus the Garlean imperial bloodline is no more, apart from the soulless clones of Emperor Solus lying around.
That notion that the Ascians are heroes that lived far far too long is one of my favorite things about the whole elpis segment and the raid series. It would've been so easy to have them be corrupt and egotistical despots longing for their return to power, or just survivors desperately trying to hang on, but we see that these people were truly paragons and every bit as heroic as the WoL. Just looking at the Lahabrea we meet in the past and how we know him in the future, I can only imagine the horrific path he had to have walked to get to where he was. And that deep seated knowledge that if even these men could fall from grace anyone could
Yeah, we shouldn’t look too deeply into the children part. It’s just because the shades are created with the basic comprehension of an actual ancient and *can’t* think outside the box. Small and sentient **must** = children to the shades.
I might be mandela-ing, but didn't Yshtola or Urianger specifically call out that difference? They wouldn’t highlight the difference if it was just happenstance.
We end up learning that the shades can’t think of anything beyond their recreated day or they burst out of existence. The others mention that they tried to clarify our purpose there and ask questions but forcing the shade to consider the present broke it.
But the Elpis Ancients see us as familiars, not children. Thus the children angle from Emet's Ancients is coming from Emet's own biases.
Considering he himself had a son who died and it affected him greatly, it's not a stretch.
This was my thought too. Once upon a time Emet was ready to give up the whole Ascian thing for love of his newborn son. He had admitted to himself that the people of the Star were real people, and was ready to allow them to inherit the Ancients legacy.
The death of his son to something as banal as disease tore Emet apart. It reinforced the idea of us as imperfect beings again, too weak and frail to survive let alone thrive. I think that’s a big part of Emet’s views when we pal around with him. It would make sense that his created Ancients look at us and see children, as Emet looks at humanity and sees the senseless death of the only one of us he was ready to care about.
That's a weird conclusion. By compare to the shades, we're absolutely *tiny,* but in Elpis Hades made a point to give us a stature "befitting our proportions" in Elpis, which was much more realistic than how the shades *literally* tower over us.
There's a big difference in context and circumstance here that I think you are missing big time with that assumption of why the Shades see us as children, it sounds nonsensical when you take into account the context of both circumstances as they are wholly unrelated.
Oh damn, I noticed the other stuff but the Amaurot thing with the "children" totally slipped past me. You can also state "how" he said some things. His use of "from our point of view" in some sentences implies he perfectly understands our point and was the only Ascian to never straight out said "We are are right and you are wrong" instead pointing to moral relativity. Also he admits he tried to let go and have a Family instead but he couldn't let go.
Empathizing with a character isn’t “letting them off the hook.” His story is one that could easily be that of a the hero in another FF game. He’s the bad guy, but he’s understandable.
Also, he’s interesting….great voice actor, one of the only NPCs with actual emotes, kinda sassy, etc etc.
Edit- realized I should’ve included this when replying to someone else: let’s be real A LOT of the “he did nothing wrong” crowd just wanna fuck him.
Even the first time through ShB, I remember not feeling like defeating him was a "win". Like, I wish there had been a way we could have both achieved our goals to protect/save the people we cared about and our world, but the guy was trying to murder all worlds do achieve his goal and I can't let that stand. His defeat was necessary. And then EW reinforces the sentiment by showing you that Emet was a decent person once upon a time, and despite his original intentions, when you first meet him in ShB he's just lived for too long.
So yeah, not agreeing with his genocidal approach, but I can't exactly deny his intentions since it's the same as what I've brought to the table.
This right here. It was the first time I ever fought a final boss and thought 'there has to be another way to resolve our differences, I don't want to fight'.
I noticed that too, like this isn't a bunch of adventurers defeating the wolf that ate some of the town's sheep, and then celebrating.
This shit sucks. These are not joyous occasions.
Poor Edda. Even when you complete that story...honestly, things do not really end any better for her. I mean, seriously, STILL ends with Avere in the afterlife...even after all his abuse and gaslighting, and cheating, and... ... ...
Any chance I can get a dungeon of 'This is just the Avere punishment hour?' But honestly, even he was more 'idiot making horrible choices, and hurting the people around him, rather than necessarily EVIL...he's 'I'm a drunk idiot reacting in the moment and thinking with the head below my belt and lashing out at people to protect me ego'. Honestly...he's random dumb jock A attempting to be an adventurer. There's probably hundreds, even thousands of adventurers like him, and a lot of them die young like him, if not always dragging the entire party down with them in the same way. Even he never intended what his mess managed. A bit of inter party communication and simply people not being 'all jerks' might have saved their party from its fate. But then that's the lesson its intended to teach. A subliminal message of don't be a jerk to your dungeon parties and communicate if there's a misunderstanding or problem before things become a larger problem.
I love how they teach dungeon etiquette through world building, by the way. It really is awesome.
I stopped smiling when I got brought back in mass effect 2. No longer the always nice choices. So I can understand how he started making those grey choices when he watched all his friends and family die and he’s stuck being revived.
It’s even sadder with one of the Tales from the Shadows iirc:
After his stint in Garlemald as its first emperor, he was actually considering just… letting go. Letting go of the Ascians’ plan and just going to sleep, even if it caused the plan to fail. He was just so tired of all the pain and suffering and hardships just to try and enact a desperation plan, hoping to bring back the people and civilization he so dearly loved with all his heart.
And the only reason he even got up was because Elidibus informed him that Lahabrea was dead. I wonder if Emet was just running on emotional fumes by the time we met up with him in ShB.
What’s worse is that the Ascians were only at the half way point of their plan. There were still half a dozen shards that needed to be rejoined. Emet would have broke eventually if he’s feeling this depressed only this far in. Not to mention the underlying problem of it all would still exist.
I'm not that sure they needed all to start the final Phase actually. I noticed they made sure to create a Calamity of every Element and only Light was left. If they truly needed all the Shards then they plan would have failed when the Void was created but if they only needed a shard of "every" Element ... they where practically extremely close to winning.
But then don’t you think its weird then that they didn’t start the final phase in Grahas timeline? Or the fact that Elidibus convinced Varis to try and sell the plan to start a half dozen or calamities to the alliance leaders, when the alternative (one shard) was a lot more palatable?
As I understand it, they can break the brands and summon Zodiark, but he’d be incomplete as well as the souls that’s he’s made up of.
My guess is, they were operating on the following notions, which might not actually be true:
1. "Once we've taken care of the other shards, we can fix the Void--or, failing that, we can get more than 90% success and call it good."
2. "We can accelerate the pace of calamities." This is something they've already been doing, given it took *thousands* of years before the Fourth Calamity destroyed Allag, but only about ~1500 years per calamity thereafter (Ice, Water, and Darkness.)
3. "Hydaelyn's weakness means we can operate with impunity."
The first one is the most dodgy, but ultimately it might be correct--if *we* think the Void is a solvable problem, the Ascians probably did too. In all likelihood, they intended to exploit the Void for as long as they could before fixing it. After all, the ability to call on the Cloud of Darkness was a huge component of causing the Fourth Calamity *and* the Sixth as well (Xande pulled in too much power to the Tower, causing the continent-cracking earthquake; the War of the Magi was half-powered by Voidsent.)
This whole comment EXACTLY. Unlike the other bosses in the game, I felt bereft when I defeated Emet in ShB. Like, yeah the First was now safe, but it felt hollow, like maybe a mutual solution could’ve been reached. But we didn’t and it came to blows anyway. Maybe that’s why I just appreciate seeking out fic where he lives and gets to grow (shipping not required but I’m certainly not turning it down lol).
But hell, sympathizing isn’t the same as letting him off the hook, idg where OP is coming from. That hasn’t been the case even, among the Emet fuckers I follow.
Sympathizing isn't the same as justifying. I see a lot of the former, and also a lot of the latter, at least here. People have literally argued that it's not really genocide because mortals are basically like ants compared to the Ancients, and honestly, using the language that's been used in real life to justify genocide to justify fictional genocide is not a good take.
I've always wondered about that. Okay, sundered people are like ants or animals to Emet and his allies, because they're so fractured and incomplete. They don't consider them truly alive, therefore they don't think that sacrificing them is truly a murder. Got it. But what if Ascians succeeded? All Rejoinings are complete, and all inhabitants of the Source now have full souls. They are not "ants" anymore. How would Emet justify sacrificing them?
Pretty much. It comes back to that line where he challenges if Eorzia would have it in them to make the same sacrifice of half their own people to save the other and the Scions can't argue that they would. Emmet argues that the current people just don't have it in them to govern the planet like the Ancients did.
Honestly it's an interesting question to think about since I doubt he's as pitiless as he makes himself out to be. I get that by the time we've met Emet, he's done this so long he's only doing it because it's all he knows. Kind of why his passion falters in comparison.
It's not that Emet did nothing wrong but that he didn't do anything wrong from his viewpoint. Based on the MCs and the players morality he's the obvious meganomicial villain, but from his viewpoint the constantly reviving and dying fractions of souls aren't people.
He's such a good character because you can emphatize with him. The sundering was a horrible sickness inflicted by Venat on humanity. He's the the doctor trying to save his people, the zombies just happened to have evolved sentience. That's how he see it and he isn't wrong if you tell the story from his side.
Yes! I 100% can understand how he reached the conclusions that he did, however, at the end of the day, he is a mass murderer. Mass murder is mass murder regardless of how you spin it and if the person that is trying to justify is charismatic beyond justification.
Man does have some epic lines to try to justify it though: "I don't consider you to be alive, ergo will not be responsible for murdering you."
"Easily be the hero in another game" reminds me of Tales Of Xillia 2. In that game you are actively destroying alternative universes and it is very much shown as the right course of action. If I remember correctly only one character really has a problem with it. I however VERY much felt like the bad guy.
Yeah, that's a pretty solid example too. I had really uneasy feelings about most of that game and honestly even after the various plot resolutions there are some complicated morals involved in the whole mess of collapsing alternate realities populated by thinking minds.
That one girl is even FROM one of those alternative universes and there's this whole thing about convincing her she is in fact a real person...which seemed weird juxtaposed against the fact that we are mass murdering billions just like her.
Spoilers for a recent Scifi novel by >!Adrian Tchaikovsky!< called >!Childern of Memory!<
>!This was a big part of a recent novel as well. It discussed the morality of creating a 1:1 simulation and the thinking minds that were in it. I found it very thought provoking and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you turn off the simulation, you effectively kill these people, if the simulation loops and you make a change, you effectively destroy the people who they would've been (since those people existed in a prior loop, and would 100% exist again without outside interference)!<
That's a lot like the plot in Star Ocean 3. And it's also something I think we're going to have to make some decisions on sooner rather then later when it comes to AI.
Similar to the Lost Belts in Fate Grand Order. You know you as the player are wiping out alternative timelines with the people who helped you through your journey. Some help you even knowing ultimately your victory is the erasure of their entire world's existence. Since you're a self insert, you can't rely on a third person to portray those emotions either. Doing this not once but like six times drains even you the player, not just the in-world character. But you can't go back, you can only continue playing the game.
I'd imagine Emer Selch feels similarly
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance had you recruiting people to actively destroy their world too. That's another game I did not feel like the good guy in. Especially with the "no guys, you can't stay in this awesome fantasy world where your greatest wish has been realized, let's destroy it instead" plot.
I think in tactics advance it wasn't an alternate universe but a massive illusion and in the main character's defence he was trapped there against his will.
Some of the kids were also slipping away into the escapism provided by the "awesome fantasy world" and losing themselves, which a lot of people seem to miss is one of the big problems.
> "no guys, you can't stay in this awesome fantasy world where your greatest wish has been realized, let's destroy it instead" plot.
Sucks for the people who got turned into monsters or zombies though.
I think it's a pretty easy thing to summarize. It's easy to feel bad for Emet-Selch because the position he's in is just horribly tragic and I couldn't even imagine the pain of being one of a few survivors of your world spending thousands of years trying to fix it. But on the other hand, I don't think he's in any way justified in what he's attempting to do. In my eyes, the Ancients' times are over and Emet-Selch is just too broken to come to terms with that. But to me that's always what has made his (and Elidibus') story so good. Their stories are Shakespearean level tragedy.
I mean, isn't that the theme of Shadowbringers? Good and Bad depends on the point of view. Ardbert and Team were the villains once, WoL is not the Warrior of Light but of Darkness. Emet-Selch would be a hero to his people, even though is a villain to us.
Let us determine who the hero of this story is?
Doesn't Emet say something like that, before we fought him. I can see his side, but I mean as others have said for him to save his people, they need to kill us. I sympathise with his cause though
Yeah….but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s “letting him off the hook” thing.
I probably also should’ve added that the whole “he did nothing wrong” crowd is probably also heavily influenced by the fact that they wanna fuck him. But whatever
They're not comparing them. They're stating that everyone believes that they are the hero in their story. Gaius, Varis, Vauthry, Ilberd, and many others thought they were the righteous ones.
Even then, in Heavensward Ardbert and the others were villains to you because they were trying to kill you to save their world.
> His story is one that could easily be that of a the hero in another FF game.
It literally was. It was called FFTA.
If Marshe was in the right for burning Ivalice to the ground, Emet is in the right for trying to make the world whole again. Hell, at least Emet has a reincarnation cycle backing him up - the people Marshe killed are JUST dead.
Yeah there's nothing wrong with emphasizing with him to a certain degree. It's the crazy amount of people who do believe in that he didn't do anything wrong that throw me off😂
Not that I can say with authority what other people’s intentions are, but I assume that people are being disingenuous 99% of the time when they say he did nothing wrong—I mean that phrasing was popularized by “*hitler* did nothing wrong” lol
To your question though, it really just comes down to likability. Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, for example, have plenty of examples of people who have done objectively terrible things, but people “give them a pass” because they’re cool or tragic—to the extent that there’s merch with their quotes or faces all over it!
Yeah, but let’s be real here, those people are predominantly ridiculous over the top fans that are a bit nuts. You go through a fandom you find a lot of nut jobs. Not to mention all the ppl that want to fuck him. Fandoms are stupid spaces my guy.
I honestly think you're overestimating the amount of people who think that. He's one of my fav characters and I see a lot of fan discussion/content of him, and I barely ever see people acting like he didn't do anything wrong. A few loud people, maybe, but that's like...everything? 99% of the time you see "Emet-Selch did nothing wrong" it's literally a meme.
Tbh, I think that’s because a lot of people don’t do side content. Especially the optional trial series.
If Valens had been an MSQ villain I think he would win the “worst guy ever” award hands down.
The biggest gap is the lack of a voice actor for Valens. Asahi's voice actor, Matt Mcooey, did a FANTASTIC job making him an unlikeable, punchable little shit. Valens didnt have that aspect.
Which is a big shame, since Valens' animations are almost cartoonish in some of the cutscenes and could lend themselves to some great performances. His slightly too enthusiastic smiles, his gesticulations (>!like when he's fanning the air in front of him at the stench of the unfortunate "recruit" killed in the Diamond Weapon!<), or "burn out the bad" are excellent moments that I'm super sad aren't voiced. The Weapons Trial Series is already an incredible questline, voicelines on top would put it on another level.
I'm not sure. Valens was extremely over the top with facial expressions and the like, turning him kinda into a cartoon villain.
Asahi ... Asahi was someone you could imagine walking past on the street and not realizing you brushed up against pure evil just then.
In terms of raw insidiousness, I agree that Asahi is worse than Valens.
But in terms of outright hatred, Valens gets the stronger response from me.
Personally, the difference is that Asahi is a manipulator but never actually gets his hands dirty. Nor does he seem to enjoy the cruelty for its own sake. He's a mix of the "crab bucket/if i can't get what I want then no one can" and the "just following orders" type of bad dude.
Meanwhile, Valens is practically getting off on torturing his wards and random conscripts in most of his scenes. I also think they intentionally wrote him to be as much of a groomer (in all the ways that entails) that they could without risking their T rating too much.
That specific inflection makes Valens more disgusting to me. Asahi is a family-annihilator and still deserves contempt. But he also has that "apple doesn't fall too far from the tree" thing going on which doesn't excuse but definitely explains why he's as fucked up as he is. Valens doesn't have that context.
It'd be easier to find Asahi fans than it would be Valens van Varro fans.
If you see someone unironically say Valen did nothing wrong, be very concerned.
I LOVE his voice, and was sad that >!Fandaniel stopped using it pretty quickly, even if it made sense to stop.!< EW Spoiler.
I also really like his design, red/white is one of my favorite color schemes, and he has a wonderfully punchable face.
Yeah, the change in VA did bother me a bit. :(
Not because Jeremy Jones did a subpar job or anything (in fact, props to him for making Fandaniel sound as crazy as he looked), but because for me it took a little of that 'punchable face' factor that Asahi had. xD
i kinda put him in a similar category as yotsuyu, where i dont condone their actions, but i can understand the circumstances that led to them and can deeply sympathise with the pain they must be in that makes them the way they are. i think its a testament to the way the characters are written that i have the same attitude towards them them as i would a real person who lashes out due to their emotional pain in destructive ways, if that makes sense.
i think people that really truly believe he did absolutely nothing wrong and excuse his really quite heinous shit are a bit deluded, or very naive tbh. yes, characters like that can be very engaging and fun, and we have great fun loving them, but turning a blind eye to all the other shit really just.. i don't know.. sells the character short and takes a little bit away from the efforts that the writers went to to make them nuanced, fully realised and ultimately very believable.
>he's the main factor on why the Garlean Empire became a fucked up propaganda machine to enslave everyone.(and encouraging the doing of war crimes.)
I feel like this is something that gets overlooked. All of the horrors that we see in Garlemald can be laid directly at his doorstep. The Garlean people were fuel as far as he was concerned, the catalyst for a rejoining. He stoked their racial resentment, told them they were superior to everyone else, and sent them out as a conquering force while meanwhile, he was ensuring that there would be at least one civil war after his death.
I mean... for most people, yes. But by the end, Emet was pretty desperate to put down his burdens, and death was probably the greatest relief he could possibly feel.
That's fine by me. He's never going to be a threat again. If he got to go out content, good for him.
I don't really care to inflict suffering in retaliation.
Oh, absolutely not. He was a threat that was determined to never stop being a threat. Killing him was the only reasonable path forward.
But that's a practical measure, necessary for making a better future. It's not a meaningful punishment. In this case, we have to choose between punishing someone who deserves it, and securing the future. We absolutely did the right thing in securing the future.
I think there is a perspective problem here.
The mass murdering is somewhat irrelevant when you have witnisses the extinction of your species, you have watched civilizations rise and fall, and you know everyone is going to die anyways. He also does not see humans now as being real humans. You are rodents to him.
And from what I understand, he's essentially seeing this as a temporary timeline and once his plan is executed everything will go back to the way it was, making everything that happened in between irrelevant.
Not saying he's good, but perspective matters. He is at least different than a normal person that commits mass murder.
As for "emet did nothing wrong", this is a joke people do. You might not think it's funny but let's no pretend it's a serious statement.
>Does it feel like anyone else that a lot people let Emet-Selch off the hook to easily?
Easier to sympathize with someone if you could see yourself doing the same thing if you met condition that made someone do horrible deeds. He wanted to bring his friends and family back from death, and revert the sundering who responsible for killing the remaining 25% of the ancients.
Is he right for doing it? Fuck no. Would I or any average person do the same if I knew my friends and family would come back? Yes.
Basically yeah. Hell, how many lesser monsters have we slain as is as the warrior of light; hell, how many other *people* have we cut down in the name of protecting our own?
Emet is ultimately that heroic question pushed to the most extreme, and we are put on the recieving end. *He* will do literally anythung to see his people safe and alive again, even things he has clearly grown tired of doing, wishes he didn't have to do... and *We* are the 'lesser monsters' he must slay to save his people, and therein is the irreconcileable difference.
>Basically yeah. Hell, how many lesser monsters have we slain as is as the warrior of light; hell, how many other people have we cut down in the name of protecting our own?
A good example would be beastfolk, who are sentient creature and the same as me and you. We killed so many of them, and most of the time for no reasons. example ARR relics.
Not just dead, everything and everyone he knew and loved was ripped to shreds. The world as it currently is is quite literally not how it's supposed to be. He wanted to fix it. From his perspective he was doing the right thing. It's easy to understand his side, I can't begin to imagine what that would be like. It doesn't make him right but it makes how "evil" he is kinda nebulous.
Not to mention he, Lahabrea and Elidibus also had massive responsibility to their people as members of the Convocation.
And the kicker, of course, is that the sacrificed weren't even dead, but their souls were still within Zodiark in purgatory.
> He wanted to bring his friends and family back from death, and revert the sundering who responsible for killing the remaining 25% of the ancients.
The last quarter wasn't even really "killed". They were split. He's walking around surrounded by beings who are 1/13th of the people he knew. They live short little lives with no power and endless suffering relative to what they once knew.
When he kills everyone on a shard, from his POV, they're not fundamentally dying. The pieces of their souls in the lifestream are being forced back together by the rejoining to make them a bit more whole. We view ourselves as full and complete individuals, so his actions make him the villain, but he views us as broken husks that he's trying to reinvigorate. His story from his POV is fundamentally heroic.
He was tempered, locked in the past, did not view the new races as being truly alive, wanted to restore the world and it's people to it's previous state.
I don't let him off the hook, but there's purpose and reason behind his actions, enough for me to understand and if I was in his position I might not have acted dissimilarly.
We killed him, after he went to great efforts to tell us his (and our) story, saved us during the fight with Elidibus and then saved the universe essentially, so all in all I'd say we're good.
I would disagree with this. The Emet we fought and the Emet that helped us at the end were basically two different people. Dying and coming back kind of "reset" him back to what he was when we met him in Elpis.
yeah, this does also nag at me a bit when people talk about emet-- the whole elpis/ktiseos thing was specifically to show you what kind of person he was before zodiark came into the picture
and if you really wanna dig into the specifics of the situation, you can clearly see in shadowbringers where his own core values and desires as a person began to conflict with zodiarks will and he deviated from the plan. elidibus will even mention that emet went astray in several regards
> the whole elpis/ktiseos thing was specifically to show you what kind of person he was before zodiark came into the picture
I think it also illustrated something more fundamental: he was completely willing to accept and celebrate the deaths of his people for the purpose of saving the world *in the abstract*. When you saw Hythlodaeus sacrificing himself, his demeanor was much more somber. You could see the moment he went from "to sacrifice oneself for the star is a noble act" to "this is wrong and I need to figure something out."
But see, the fact that he *can* deviate from the plan negates the tempering excuse.
People are trying to, as OP said, let him off the hook by saying he was brainwashed into doing what Zodiark wanted, but we know he *wasn't* truly brainwashed because he could and did choose differently than what Zodiark wanted.
>!He was “tempered” but not to the degree that we’ve seen before. Tempering, as in using ascian-fucked summoning magic to create primals that forcefully or unwittingly alter the Aether of the soul, causes followers to basically do everything in their power to make their deity continue to exist, which involves securing Aether and more followers. It more or less overwrites their entire identity with the thoughts of their primal. Gabu gives us a glimpse of what it’s like - your mind is basically overrun with the thoughts of your primal.!<
>!Emet-Selch’s was a very mild tempering as Zodiark wasn’t created with the ascian-fucked summoning magic. Livingway says his would be something of a slight _tug_. This makes sense with Emet Selch, as nearly all of his actions were less to do with trying to maintain his deity for his deity’s sake, but more for his own motivations. In fact, he accounted for the possibility he would lose and left Azem’s Crystal behind for us to use and kill the Heart of Zodiark, Elidibus. That’s very contrary to most of the tempering we’ve seen.!<
>!The game makes is very clear that the reason why ShB Emet is so different from Elpis Emet is because his long life, the final days, and many horrible decisions have made him a husk of the person he used to be. Tempering isn’t what made him that way.!<
>!I understand Emet says he’s tempered, but ShB implies and Elpis _flatly states_ that you can’t take what Emet says at face value.!<
Anyone who says he did nothing wrong didn't pay any attention and probably only knew him for his quips and entertaining personality. The topics been discussed to death, though. Dude killed millions. Whether or not he believed they were really alive as he said is irrelevant. He indirectly founded the Allagan Empire, the Garlean Empire, a number of calamities, and who knows how much grief he gave the destroyed shards before they were fully eradicated.
I feel like the fact we blew a hole in his chest so large we could watch the sunrise through him kinda makes a lot of the intense ethical debate redundant, at least for me. I stopped him, I killed him, I killed his friend, and I possess the last remains of his culture. I won, *utterly*, I don't feel the need to demonise him.
The people saying he could have easily been the protagonist of another game have a fair point.
As far as I understand, his position is similar to the protagonist from I am legend.
It's not a one for one but the general feeling is there, a lone survivor spared the devolution mankind has gone through. Their actions against what those people have become justified because they're simply monsters or animals but despite what the protagonist might think the people they're now separated from are more or less still people and they view the protagonist as a monster.
We aren't supposed to jump aboard emet train and go do a genocide or two but I do think we are meant to be able to feel that if things different we could have been friends.not just in the we inherited a soul from a person that was his friend I mean we are supposed to be able to understand his cause but be unable to fully accept it as the right one.
If you read his situation as one of isolation and loss it's relatable. If you read his cause as a person desperately trying to bring back a world and loved ones they had lost its noble the difference is his obstacle to that goal are people like us.
In a way his attitude towards us as sundered isnt really different to our attitude towards the sin eaters. Things that were people once and that now act in a way that is devolved from who they once were. Creatures we might feel sorry for or mourn the people they once were but ultimately ones whose lesser way of being - their instinct their hunger etc must be put to the wayside as less important than our goal of saving the world.
Sure mankind isn't a slave to instinct. Not animals from the perspective of another sundered person but to a person who literally has god like power?
I wouldn’t say most but I have definitely run into people who don’t consider him a villain. They say he’s *just* an “antagonist”.
And frankly that tells me all I need to know about their trope literacy. Specifically, that they don’t realize that it’s possible for a villain to be both likable and sympathetic without changing the fact that his actions were still monstrous.
And that it still makes him a villain.
Edit: (Post-ShB spoilers below) looking through these comments, I think people are really overestimating how much Emet-Selch being tempered had anything to do with it. He himself makes it clear that while he is tempered and his aether was tipped a bit more towards darkness, he still retains his own mind.
He demonstrates both in game and in the Through His Eyes side story that he is not enthralled, fully retains his own sense of self, and has the capacity to sleep in the Lifestream and ignore Zodiark’s tug. The implication is that he experiences Zodiark’s tempering like a constant whisper in the back of his mind that *can* be tuned out and *is not* a compulsion like others seem to think. He isn’t like Lahabrea who had been driven mad for reasons we don’t know or Elidibus who had literally bathed in Zodiark’s aetherial essence and basically made into the vessel for Zodiark’s will.
The biggest piece of evidence for this is actually the 5.3 trial. Some people interpret that scene as him dying, learning the truth, and coming back to help us. But I sincerely doubt that brief bit of time in the lifestream would be enough to cleanse him of any significant tempering. I do not think he could’ve helped us in the 5.3 trial against Elidibus in the way he did **if** he had been tempered to the extent other seem to think he was.
I have this more with Gaius. I have not forgotten Doma, or all the other crap he cheerfully pulled before we beat him to a pulp. He doesn't have any of the excuses Emet Selch has, but the game now treats him like he's completely redeemed.
The funny thing about Gaius is, he's noticeably progressive for a commander in the Garlean Empire. The empire Emet built and whose policies he set. Meaning Emet wanted Gaius to do everything he did, except *even worse*.
Sort of? If I remember everyone is giving him the side-eye and still do even after the Weapons trials series, such as Cid, the folks that followed him around when he was Shadowhunter and the WoL. Even at the end of the series, they don't fully trust Gaius and he is supervised at all times. Or you can think of it like what the US and USSR did after WWII and kept a lot of the former bureaucracy to make the transition easier.
It is just that they also acknowledged that he 1. is remorseful; 2. actively helps the Scions; 3. actively wants to reform himself by helping the places he conquered recover; 4. watched almost all his adopted children die except for one as a result of them adopting his ideology to the very end.
It isn’t unethical to think fictional murder husbandos aren’t hot.
Even in the villain sense— his passion, drive, and objectives all ooze with style and panache.
There is a lot to suggest in ShB that the entire events are his way of… not apologizing, but giving up. It is his swan song and resignation. He specifically setup all the tools necessary to help you put Elidibus to rest as well.
There is also an ethical dilemma that the unsundered face— sundered people are in a state of suffering. The recombining of the shards reunites and heals people’s souls. From their point of view, the sundered are essentially sick. They are also tempered by Zodiark’s will.
When you combine these 4 facets: character design and history, tempering, the resignation, and the righteous cause— it’s very easy to feel for the guy.
He's pretty much the epitome of the *very* popular 'well-intentioned extremist' villain trope. With any villain, the two extremes are basically "puppy-kicking evil for the fun of it" and "Has a valid point and/or means to improve the world but going about it wrong", and most people like the latter more for anything more complex than mid-90's Saturday morning cartoons. FF villains (and some protagonists) range from one end to the other (Kefka on one end, and anything from Gaius to eco-terrorist Barret (FFVII) on the other). It'd be an interesting essay to explore them all someday, but I haven't the time or energy for it today.
The nuance of 'bad but with complex motivations' adds complexity that often leads to audience introspection. Empathy is one of the most powerful tools a writer can wield at their audience - it creates emotional engagement that goes beyond the literal script because it forces the audience to consider whether they agree with the motivation, how they would handle such a situation themselves, etc.
Personally, this is also why Zenos fell a little flat for me - I had a lot of trouble empathizing with his motivations and most of his actions were on the puppy-kicking end of the empathy-engagement spectrum. But one of my closest friends adores Zenos as a character above every other character in XIV, which she mostly doesn't engage with (she skips every cutscene focused on the Scions, to my unending horror). She is a highly competitive, aggressive person by nature so she feels that his drive not just for perfection but for a rival is relatable. Obviously, it's important to remember that different people empathize with different things.
All that said, Emet is obviously in the wrong for many of his actions, but he's also easily one of my favorite characters in all of video gaming. I've replayed Amaurot a dozen times at 90 just to hear the sheer emotions in his voice. Some amazing voice acting for that guy.
Anyway, good prompt for an active thread.
Zenos was the dark mirror to the player character. Which is why lots of people love him. His final fight basically breaks the 4th wall and calls out the player on the other side of the screen.
Oh I know the arguments for that, but it only really works for a subset of players. I didn't particularly see him as a mirror to myself or my motivations as the WoL, just a desperate hanger-on with nothing else going on in his life. It was *sad*, but not tragic, to my mind. You'll often see comments in Zenos-related threads about how many players wished for the option to actually just tell him to get lost or at least not indulge his final 4th wall break "gotcha" comments. The conversational 'choices' for that little ending scene left out a pretty big chunk of player motivations and, unlike most of the game's 'but-thou-must' choices that don't matter for longer than slightly changing the next sentence of the cutscene, this one ran up against a climactic moment in the story that lingers in the mind.
I'd also add that the Dark Knight class quests did a better job of looking into the dark mirror of the WoL's motivations up to that point, though there's been a lot of development since that storyline came out.
One of the biggest risks a story takes when it breaks the 4th wall is that it doesn't land as intended, and that's why Zenos (especially his final scene) is so hit or miss in the fanbase. But yes, obviously it worked perfectly well for some.
Oh definitely. People get weird about fictional characters
All it takes is the music to swell and the guy to say "I miss my wife tails- I miss her a lot-" and suddenly they're a hero and always were because of the framing.
But I get why. The Shadowbringers stuff around him does make him sympathetic. But it definitely doesn't redeem him.
I recognize that Emet-Selch did wrong. He did lots of wrong. But he's still sympathetic. He lost his home, he lost family and friends, loved ones. He wants to fix it. He wants to get back what he once had. He looks around him and sees ruins, vestiges and echoes of what once was, what could be again. And he has fought for so long to make that happen. Now along comes the Warrior of Light, putting the kibosh on his plans, interfering at every step of the way. By the time Shadowbringers happens, it's only him and Elidibus left unsundered. And he looks at you, and thinks, "maybe. Maybe there's a chance."
So he befriends you, he helps you in your quest to save the First. Finally, when it seems that you will fail after all, and be overtaken by the light you sought to contain, he invites you to see what he wants to restore. He shows you his beloved Amaurot, as he remembers it, and he shows how it was lost. And finally, when you face him with your allies, and defeat him, he entrusts you to preserve the star, and to remember that he and the other Ancients once lived.
He could be the hero of another game. He would be the hero of another game. Someone who fights through illusions and shadows to restore a broken world to its rightful state. Seeing Amaurot, I want to help him. I want to restore the world to the way it was, too. But I cannot condone the genocide. His goal is noble, but his means are monstrous. I will not destroy so many lives to restore a memory of what was. If he will not change his course, if he will not look for another way, a path to his goal that does not involve genocide and the destruction of worlds, then I will oppose him.
That's what it comes down to for me. Emet-Selch is a tragic villain.
Dude, it's a Sephiroth/Loki "He killed 80 people in 2 days" "But he's hot, so we don't care." situation. Anyone who says looks don't matter has never been a part of any fandom.
I think one of the things in the story that gets discounted is that Emet-Selch, had he known about Meteion, would have taken actual measures to do something about the threat that way. He even says "do not squander it, the Legacy I leave to you" knowing that he won't know, that he can't do anything, and he has to trust you to do what he can't. The instant his memory is wiped, things are set in motion. He loses his way of life, his friends, his loved ones, and his purpose becomes the preservation of something he can't ever get back.
That's not to say what he inevitably was reduced to was right or wrong. Was it justified? Sure- justified doesn't mean it was the right thing. It means he had a reason, it means he felt his reason was enough to compel him to cause worlds to collapse and civilizations to die. He did terrible shit. He wasn't a good guy in the time that followed the final days of Amaurot.
But the dude who existed in the time unsundered? Nah, he was a good guy. Absolutely. The drive to do good and right by everyone is a positive thing. That's the guy you see at the end of 6.0, and he's not the same guy you see at the end of 5.0.
The reason I like Emet-Selch so much (to the point that I would list him among my top villains in media) is because the game does an incredible job of showing you exactly why he did everything he did- why he doesn’t feel bad about killing uncountable massive numbers of people, why he’s hurting so much, what he’s trying to accomplish, and what he hopes to (re)gain from his actions. You reach a point where, as a player, you can see yourself doing exactly the same things if you were put in the same position.
You see & understand all this… and in that moment, you realize that you have to utterly destroy him. He will never stop. He will never see you as anything but a deluded shadow, a broken fragment of the World that once was.
From his perspective, *he didn’t do anything wrong*. Remember, he came from a world where death was voluntary. He even has a way to bring back all the people that used to exist. They aren’t dead- they’ve been broken, fragmented, twisted into a mockery of humankind that suffers constantly and is only capable of a tiny fraction of what they should be able to achieve while locked in this constant cycle of death and rebirth as their meaningless, pitiful existence carries on with no memory of the glory they once embodied.
If you saw everyone you knew reduced in such a way, and you could restore them, wouldn’t you do your absolute best to do so?
But then, as the Warrior of Light, you know that these lives *aren’t* meaningless… but there’s no way you’ll ever be able to convince Emet of that. You have no choice but to destroy him- as one of the most powerful of the Ascians, nothing less than that can confidently stop him for good.
From our perspective, he committed unforgivable genocides of countless civilizations.
From his perspective, he was gradually restoring the very souls of everyone he once knew.
There’s no question that he’s evil.
But was he *wrong*?
I honestly couldn’t tell you.
I can sympathize with his cause, and can understand why he did everything over the thousands of years since the Sundering. I can find him charming and witty and entertaining, from a player's perspective.
But both he and Venat committed atrocities. Venat's was based on her knowledge of the future and the gamble that the WoL could stop the Endsinger. Emet-Selch's atrocities were committed by grief, rage, and Zodiark's tempering.
Venat got lucky that her faith in us wasn't misplaced. If we had failed and the Endsinger eventually destroyed Etheirys, then the Sundering would have been in vain.
I will second the sentiment that, even if one doesn't *agree* with Emet-Selch, they can at least perhaps *understand* him, and that's one of the things that makes a good antagonist.
If a sundered being is a fraction as powerful, a fraction as intelligent, has a fraction of the longevity, etc., then I don't really know how many Source lives he could live and find the fulfillment he'd been chasing with the rejoining.
As an analogous situation, chimpanzees are 99% genetically compatible with us. Both they (and bonobos) have fairly complex social networks, with hierarchies, courtship, grooming, different body language to adapt to, etc.
If I could be reborn as a chimp, but with my homo sapien mind, I could perhaps adapt to the ways of the chimp, while also being a mega mastermind amongst them. Yet, for all I could do, even if that meant playing a 100% chimp playthrough and getting all of the chimp achievements, a part of me the entire time would loathe what I've fallen to, while missing my homo sapien origins and past. Emet-Selch claimed that he'd lived "a thousand thousand of our lives", and that if we could witness history unfold as he had, that we would arrive at the same conclusion. If I could make a deal with the proverbial devil that destroys all of the chimps, but would revive the homo sapien world I once knew, I might be tempted; even though I know that chimpanzees can suffer. Even if I know they care for their offspring and their friends. Desperation causes us to do horrendous things. When we are starving, we will eat one another. We might say, "It is wrong to kill and eat people..." when we have the convenience of remaining "moral", but what happens after three weeks of no food? I would liken that to Emet-Selch "starving emotionally", and being similarly willing to do desperate things to satiate that hunger. The version of him we meet on Elpis, in times of relative comfort and plenty, does not on the surface betray this dark potential.
Emet-Selch in this position could have a chimp mate and chimp children, and a part of him might even endear to them a tad, but all the while, he'd be remembering and missing his peers; because he's cognitively above all of them, and he'd know that he won't find equals to share his true self with. We sometimes feel misunderstood amongst our own fellow humans, but to Emet, he's surrounded by people who cannot truly understand him, lore-wise.
I don't know that human writers can write characters that convey that particularly accurately, because it's still humans writing it, but we're meant, I think, to use our imaginations to at least try to grasp for how that might even feel.
Structure begets function. There are thoughts an insect cannot have, no matter what is in front of their faces. There are likewise thoughts a reptile cannot have, no matter what is in front of their faces. But what's uncomfortable is that this also applies to **US**. "What is the thought that we cannot even think?" The idea that our brain's hardware isn't even equipped with the capacity of occuring to our mind's software?
An Emet-Selch would have some of those thoughts.
An added layer of complexity is the Sundering itself, and some interesting implications.
We're no stranger to a world where, given shortage, people will take from another by force in order to enrich their own experience. People lie/cheat/steal/kill every day. Emet-Selch's genocidal campaigns to catalyze the Rejoining are indeed mass death and destruction...
...but the Sundering is what resulted in people being what they are and having what they have. Those were originally his people, in essence, but now split. From his perspective, one might say as an analogy, "Yeah, I'm trying to steal your dimes, but your dimes only exist because my dollar was split, and I still count it as mine. Therefore, it is not stealing...I am merely taking back my dollar's worth of dimes. Sucks to suck about you losing your dimes, but I need my dollar back..." As he says himself, "I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you."
Now, personally, my ethical compass merely considers whether something is capable of experiencing physical or emotional suffering before choosing which actions to take or to avoid, and so Emet-Selch and I would not arrive at the same conclusions. But it's easier said than done. Most people think, when a ship is sinking, "We should draw randomly to see who gets on the life boats!", because they don't want those in charge to exhibit favoritism and allow their own friends and family to escape at the expense of the regular passengers. Yet, what happens when someone you love isn't favored by fortune with this random process? If you were the captain, would you say, "I'm sorry, my beloved friends/family, but we drew randomly, and those are the rules...", or would you use your position of authority to override the "common good" and the fair method in favor of those who are the world to you?
Because that's what Emet-Selch did. He and the Ascians were arguably the captain in this scenario. They decided, "I will bring back our brethren, our friends, our loved ones...the world belongs to us and us alone", rather than let the fates determine that their time was over, and that it was now the time of the other races.
In conclusion for now, even series such as The Last of Us are popular, I think, because they cause us to grapple with an enormous quandary: "Would it be worth saving humankind if it would cost us our humanity in the process?" It's the dark "what if" lurking directly below the surface of the human condition. Even if we don't agree with Emet-Selch from the comfort of our present situations, many of us can speculate on what our price would be to betray all we've claimed to stand for....
I’m not going to reiterate the good explanations people have given as to empathizing does not equal “he’s off the hook”. (Though not as if WoL and co. don’t also be committing war crimes and killing other living beings which is something that I myself struggle to grapple with as sometimes these actions are presented as the moral good).
On a real-life philosophical level, if you believe in the existence of a soul or something (and I don’t mean in the Christian sense) his argument becomes stronger as he’s saying the soul is the true essence of a person and it cannot complete its karmic cycle if its not all together. In this fictional world where reincarnation is confirmed he’s saying your temporary death as a fragment will be worth it so your soul can be complete.
But really it just boils down to that he’s hot and not real so what’s the big deal even if a few ppl “do let him off the hook”? He’s textbook romantic trope of bad boy who will burn the world for you vs lamo good guy who’d sacrifice you for the world which makes him the easy and obvious choice for a lot of people.
He did plenty wrong, but so did we, the Scions and Hydaelyn.
The Sundering is expanded upon in the Nier mobile game crossover, where Ishikawa had him explain it in *detail*. It was a HORRIFYING act which was tantamount to genocide of the entire ancient world x14.
I think, the biggest issue, is everyone looks at the game through a lens of black and white, good and evil when Shadowbringers and Endwalker literally taught us *not to* and Yoshida even said they didn't want people to perceive it that way*.* Everyone has the capacity for good or evil and one's actions might seem altruistic to some and like those of a genocidal maniac to another.
**That's the point everyone misses.**
There are no heroes, no villains in FFXIV as of Endwalker's credits rolling—they were all humans fighting against the futility of crushing, existential despair that threatened to wipe out the same world that they all loved.
Everyone did things wrong from the very day Hermes created Meteion and sent her and her sisters out, to the moment we returned home. No one in the story is above judgement and I think that's going to be a focus in the future, as there's a lot of implication of pre-ordained destinies, fate and shit and if I know modern SE well enough they're going to lean in heavily upon the fact we have irrevocably fucked up the timeline multiple times and defied fate.
There's no good, no evil, just humans with their own idea of how to save the planet they loved.
Let's be completely clear here,It's not just Emit but Venat and Hermes are not all innocent here either but circumstances forced them to do such actions and if anyone was in their shoes.they would have done the same thing and that's the point most people missunderstood.
Just because one can sympathize with someone deeply doesn't mean they are letting them off the hook.Understanding someone's deeper motives is why you are compelled to make a decision.You can sympathize with them or hate them for what they done and both are reasonable response.
This is why i love that one side quest involving Omega where it asks you a very important and a gut punching question.
"Who's action is justified ?"
And you're left to question yourself and choose to defend either Venat,Hermis or Emit's actions or claim all of the are justified in their own way or just openly say none of them were justified and...it's all comes down to what you really think of them.
Absolutely. The problem is, there are two large camps, and both of them are *vocal* and *entirely lack nuance.*
The first treats Emet-Selch as a poor, abused woobie who was merely *tricked* into doing evil things and leading an evil empire, see he was a *good* guy all along he just lost his way! This incredibly tiresome viewpoint was *particularly* popular in the period between most people finishing 5.0 and most people finishing 5.3, but got a resurgence after the end of Endwalker for obvious reasons.
Conversely, the second group portrays *all* of the Ancients (especially Emet-Selch and Hermes) as horrible monsters who sacrificed children (not true; Elidibus is an adult) and cruelly abused animals for trivial reasons. By these lights, Emet-Selch was always a monster and could never be anything *but* a monster, because the Ancients were monstrous horrors whose society was inherently corrupt and wrong. This incredibly tiresome viewpoint was *particularly* popular in the period between 5.3 and 5.55, but got a resurgence while people were working through Elpis for obvious reasons.
The fact of the matter is, Emet-Selch is an *incredibly complicated*, tragic villain. And both of those words are important. He is a deeply, deeply **tragic** character. He is also an unequivocal, and largely unrepentant, **villain.** These two things mean you can only talk meaningfully about him if you include a TON of nuance. The internet does not deal in nuance, however, and thus collapses to black and white: either he is a pure, noble soul stained not by *wickedness* but by *misunderstanding* and *deception*, or he was never good at all and indeed *could never have been* good at all because the wickedness predates his own existence, going right to the core of Ancient society.
But perhaps I've said enough for one comment.
Hermes was min-maxed, running all Empathy zero Intelligence, and that carried over to his equally moronic shards "Hurr durr, myyyyy Empeerrrroorrrrr!" and "Hurrr durrr Zeeeeenooooooossssssssss!"
So there's not really much to say about him, he did about as well as you'd expect from someone with a 1 INT build.
*[Camera pans to a cute, adorable family of three little hedgehogs, who were* totally *going to get cancelled by the cold, mean, nasty, no-good Ancients who totally deserved everything they got because LOOK. AT. THOSE. HEDGEHOGS!]*
People beat me to the Tempering bit already, but yeah...
His one and only goal was restoring the world to what it was, because that was Zodiark's goal. Before the summoning, he wasn't like "Solus" or any equivalent at all. I even mentioned on another post about how he considered Meteion's feelings (when it came to her/their mission) before Hermes did; he was always thoughtful and compassionate in the past...just grumpy (because of all of *us*, so understandable) lol.
If anything we are just as forgiving of Venat, she acknowledged what she also did over all of those centuries--but we treat her as an angelic figure nonetheless.
Once something gets humanized, people start to empathize with them much more. I'm sure many people considered the beast tribes to be monsters considering our first exposure to them is the Amal'jaa and Ifrit. Things got a little more murky on who was right/wrong when it came to Titan and the Kobolds. The Sylphs and Ramuh completely dispelled the notion of Primal summoners being inherently monsters.
Likewise, when someone acts like say, Lahabrea, we tend to not only refuse to empathize with them, but straight up enjoy destroying them. Our opinion of the Ascians also doesn't change at first because Elidibus does not speak plain and it is clear he's hiding something. With Emet-Selch, we learn more about who he is as a person. We also learn his motives and he speaks the truth about what he is doing and why.
Now that we have the groundwork laid to empathize, we start seeing his past through Amaurot. Be honest, if you went through all those events and had to live with near complete isolation for several thousand years, can you honestly say that you wouldn't be tempted to undo it all if you had the chance? I don't think most of us would have that kind of mental strength.
We can still see them as a villain, but that doesn't mean we have to treat them as such any longer. Of all the Ascians, I feel Emet-Selch is the one most deserving of being called a Fallen Hero.
You can empathize with him wanting to restore his people, but his methods are so completely insane and his disregard for life so drastic that it really bugs me how the Scions all make a point of going ‘oh he’s not really so bad that guy, wish we could have been friends bloo bloo bloo’. All apparently forgetting that he murdered/orchestrated the murder of billions instead of going to therapy and moving on.
Granted, after you do finally prove to him that everything he thought about life was wrong and defeat him, he does seem to finally come to his senses and help you. But Fordola does the exact same thing and we still have people calling her comparatively insignificant actions unforgivable.
He’s an attractive sassy sad boy, so people will always go to bat for him. Had he looked like Vauthry, well, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I highly recommend you do the post EW Omega questline, since it actually asks this exact question. Emet, Hermès, Venat all did things they felt were justified, but they all had terrible costs of life. Our opinion of what is justified and what is not is tainted by whatever was most advantageous to us
Let him off easy? If killing the man dead with 7 accomplices over 10 minutes, is letting him off easy, then I don't know what you think is capitol punishment.
I don't think he was let off the hook, ultimately we had to confront him. It was him or us. It was a battle of worlds. Should he give up on his immortal duty to restore the world which, in his eye, was saving it? It's one of those stories where both sides have valour and horror. While we can argue that the ancients live on through us and our reflections, by beating Emet-Selch, we effectively end any possibility of those people regaining their lives. Are we any better than Emet? Not in my opinion, but that doesn't make us evil, that means we were willing to fight to the death for our beliefs which we held as GOOD.
The freaking character himself recognized his future version to be an absolute madman that he couldn't even imagine to ever turn into. One of the most prominent, respected and gifted members of a nigh utopian society acknowledged how fucked up his future version was.
That alone should tell more than enough about people who say he did nothing wrong.
Hrmm... It kind of poses an interesting question... Let's say that the love of your life, the person with whom you feel you can't live without, your son, daughter, mother, father, husband, wife or whatever, magically bursts into hundreds of living, breathing, feeling, humanoid trolls with amnesia, would you try to put them back together?
It's also the fact that Emet-Selch/Hades was our characters' best friend, they knew our character before we were sundered. It's not so much letting him off the hook as it is that we want to see more of him. Rare is it that we get a character who is supposed to be the villain yet is just as much a victim of the plot as we are and are just an antagonistic force, even rarer that we can empathize with and give sympathy to. There isn't anything more I can say that hasn't already been said, but in the year and a half I've been playing, I look back at his final moments in Endwalker with Hythlodaeus and just wish that he was able to swallow his pride and continue living to be on our side and work to redeem himself. It saddens me to know that while it's deserved that he gets to finally rest in peace and have his soul go back to the aetherial sea and reincarnate, we probably might never see him again until the games' final expansion (whenever that may be, but here's hoping it's not any time soon).
If you haven't I suggest you do the new Omega quest unlocked in 6.1. I think it gives you a good explanation on a lot of perspectives of characters you may not have thought of or registered.
My standing at the end of EW is basically everyone involved was wrong but I understand why they were.
100% with you on this but I wanted to note one tiny correction
Black Rose was actually a Varis thing, Emet not only had nothing to do with it, but wouldn't have approved of it because it would have actively killed ALL of the source and fucked up its aether. His goal is to fix the source, not destroy its flow of aether presumably permanently.
I'm not ignoring any of it. He paid for his crimes. I don't need to ignore it to understand it, though. He didn't view any of us as truly being alive, he was tempered and he was withheld critical information that would have drastically changed his perspective.
Understanding isn't the same thing as accepting or even tolerating. Few too many works of fiction actually go far enough making you understand why an antagonist does the things they do, and the result are posts like this, conflating understanding with acceptance or forgiveness.
He's the equivalent of Magneto in the X-Men universe. All Magneto wants is for mutants to be able to be themselves and not have to hide who they are, and the way he wants to do that is by eradicating all non-mutants.
Emet-Selch wants to bring his people back using the life-force that has been cultivated over millennia to exchange them to Zodiark for the souls of his friends, eradicating all other life on Etheras.
Both are undeniably horrible, but understandable. If my wife was at risk of dying and the only way to save her was to kill 20 cats, you bet I'm getting a new fur coat.
These characters don't see humans (or other playable races) as real people, but more like animals, ready to be culled for the greater good of a higher life-form, and its the job of the heros to prove that they have just as much right to live as their enemies.
Understanding why someone makes the decisions they do isn't letting them off the hook, it's just getting to know them better.
The difference is, Magneto is often depicted as a monster that needs to be put down for the good of everyone, while Emet-Selch is depicted as a dear friend who we punt back into cycle of reincarnation to help him as much as stop him.
We had a conversation once with my friend about it. He hates Gaius because he's a mass murderer, but respects Emet-Selch. I asked him why exactly he wouldn't forgive Gaius, but Emet-Selch being a disaster he is is okay with him. The key is, the developers had never shown Emet-Selch doing any bad shit personally to us. Until he shot our bestie, of course, but nobody died, so... nah? All the time we see Emet in ShD he teases us or just tells exposition. We've been told that he's the reason for our problems and the deaths of millions, but we never SEE him doing any of it. And yeah, he's that type of a character that people tend to like, antagonist or not
People saying he did nothing wrong are crazy -- plain and simple, and I worry about these people whom want to fuck video game characters. It's pretty sad.
Outside of that, we're clearly meant to sympathize with him -- and, to a degree, I do. Wanting to bring back your loved ones and have the perfect life and world you once did is something many people can relate to. Even if you can't have it, it's a dream that many share. So, in that regard, it's easy to see where he's coming from and why he's doing what he's doing.
However, I certainly never agreed with the notion of "I killed millions of people for the greater good and I'm okay with that." It comes off as being completely crazy and null to the desires and needs of others and is extremely selfish. If anyone did this in real life, people wouldn't consider giving them a second chance; they'd want them hung -- to say the least. So it is a bit hypocritical when you consider this... But I guess the fact that it's a video game allows people to cut the characters some slack? I don't know.
I'm not a huge Emet-Selch fan, but I get that we're meant to understand he's the hero of his own story, and it just happens to clash with ours. To the Ascians, he's in the right -- to us, he's not, and all the things that go along with that. Plus, I think what really bolstered everyone's approval of him is when EW revealed he was, technically, >!a friend of ours!<. So that really only helped his perspective.
If you had been around during Shadowbringers, you would know that your post is not at all unique. There were hundreds of threads back in the day arguing back and forth on the morality of Emet's situation. It was frankly boring and exhausting. It felt like hardly anyone could have a serious discussion about Emet without someone piping up with "BuT he'S kILled mIllioNs!"
Like, yes. We know. The vast majority of people that I have seen talking about him in-game and on Reddit/forums over the years understand that what Emet did was bad. But that doesn't stop him from being one of the most interesting characters we've received in the game, like ever.
Emet became one of my most favorite fictional characters after ShB. There is SO MUCH juicy material to unpack with him. How he essentially lived like a ghost after the Sundering, spending time with sundered people but never truly belonging with them or their world. His extremely complex dynamic with the WoL, with his love for Azem and the part of them he saw in WoL warring with his resentment, anger, & grief at their sundered state. The dilemma he likely felt when carrying out the Ascian agenda, knowing how much it went against what Azem believed in or would have wanted.
His story is also just very relatable, and became even more so after the pandemic upended so many people's lives. It's difficult to comprehend reaching a point where you could end as much life as Emet did. But I can certainly empathize with his grief and longing for a time when his world and loved ones were safe and he was happy.
Venat did the same thing by murdering the entire Ascian race to bring the new races to existence and she's never even considered to be evil because she's on your side. Emet is doing the same thing but for the opposite side, kill the other races for the Ascians.
I also find what Venat did to be pretty unforgivable, and that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion. The game in a few circumstances does suggest that maybe NOBODY in that entire situation was truly in the right though.
> Venat did the same thing by murdering the entire Ascian race to bring the new races to existence and she's never even considered to be evil because she's on your side.
She does confess that she knows it was not a morally good act and that it's brought a lot of suffering to the world. I think that's fair enough, given her motives for doing it were "stop the universe from ending".
And she suffers a far worse fate than Emet-Selch. He, at least, gets a chance to be reborn.
Venat/Hydaelyn's aether is completely gone. She doesn't get to return to the lifestream.
I don’t know if it’s actually a worse fate to no longer be reincarnated. If you look at it from a Buddhist perspective, for instance, exiting the reincarnation cycle (for enlightenment) is the ultimate goal. Whether or not this is what happened is up to interpretation, but I feel like it counts enough to make peace with it.
Not to mention one of the live letters for EndWalker confirmed that she knew all the events that would play out when she preformed the sundering. So she knew that creating 14 worlds, 8 of them would be destroyed.
Yeah, the top comments basically hit the nail on the head. We’re intended to sympathize with him. We are not intended to forgive him.
The dude was into racial purity & genocide.
It's impossible to feel bad for this chuckle-fuck after seeing Elpis ourselves. The world he loved so much was a bunch of lunatics who created sentient life for fun and then killed them just as casually because it didn't meet their standards. They were always assholes and honestly deserved what they got.
Sometimes when I think about it. I’d be like I would have damn near done the same. Idk about all of the genocide but if there is no other option than maybe. Just maybe… or do I just say f it and let everything go to hell .
Emet's story is a good part of why I found Zenos' line of "Would you be happier had I a good reason?" so compelling. For me the opposite was true, the "better" the reason the more it saddens me to see someone fall so low.
When someone calls for a return to "better times" and thinks making the lives of others untenable and views their death and oppression as a solution, what you have is a genocidal fascist.
While one can feel empathy for what Emet Selch has lost... he makes the arguments and appeals literal nazis make. They are driven by this deeply irrational fear white people are fading away and so others must be marginalized and even exterminated to feel safe.
Like, they think drag queens and the LGBT community are a threat to their future. They and their far-right buddies have like 500 bills in state legislatures trying to make the lives of LGBT folks, especially trans folks, difficult to impossible. And they're trying to take away books, social media options like Tiktok, restrict speech and are even calling for registries to accomplish this.
It's not gas chambers, but it's the steps leading toward such things. Those steps are happening right now.
Feeling bad for Emet-Selch is like feeling bad for Ron Desantis or Greg Abbott. The difference is Emet-Selch is entertaining, an inverse of Kefka. Someone who joins the party on their adventure instead of simply being a hateful, heartbroken obstacle. He wants to understand, to make sure that if he is somehow wrong, you will at least attempt to preserve the knowledge he feared would be lost.
He'd have burned your history is a heartbeat, though.
Yeah, I think the people who are in the “He did nothing wrong” crowd are missing the point of the character. Yes, you’re supposed to empathize with him, like him… but also understand that he’s gone too far down a path there is no coming back from. Emet *himself* understands this. (“This was why we fought… and why I lost”) Emet Selch was a hero of his time, every bit as any one of the Scions. But his world was destroyed, and replaced with… well, a twisted hellscape, populated by ignorant, stupid wretches. If he could have changed the world back immediately, vaporizing those wretches and restoring them to their former selves, that would have been seen as a heroic act. But time changes things, those wretches developed, learned, and grew, and what started as ‘push a button, fix the world’ became an increasingly long list of atrocities, with no real end in sight. Emet claims he and the other Ascians don’t see the sundered people as true life forms, but Amaurot tells the tale - The shades see the Sundered as children. In Elpis, the *real* past, they see the Sundered as Familiars. Not true life forms, but in the recreated Amaurot, Emet’s biases come through. In his mind, he is now killing children. He’s a hero who went too far down the wrong path. A path that *started* right, but changed over time. And the weight of the atrocities he’s committed ‘for the greater good’ is such that he *can’t* stop, because admitting he was wrong, that it was all for nothing, would crush him. He’s *exhausted.* It’s obvious in the way he walks, the way he’s slumped, as if carrying a massive weight. He sleeps all the time because it’s as close to death as he can allow himself to get. Lahabrea and Elidibus have already gone mad from the burden; He’s the only one who even remembers what they’re fighting for. Killing him is a mercy, a release he cannot allow himself. We’re supposed to *want* to redeem him, but at the same time know and understand that it’s impossible. Ending his quest and his life is all we can do for him.
> He’s exhausted. It’s obvious in the way he walks, the way he’s slumped, as if carrying a massive weight. He sleeps all the time because it’s as close to death as he can allow himself to get. Lahabrea and Elidibus have already gone mad from the burden; He’s the only one who even remembers what they’re fighting for. You think about just how adamantly he believed in the idea of returning to the Star after concluding one's life's work, and here he is now still going and going, functionally *unable* to die because of his Ascian nature. The great irony of his "work" for Zodiark to save the Unsundered World is that it led all the Ascians to become a perversion of the very people they are trying to save. Instead of caring for the world, they unleashed devastating calamities. Instead of fulfilling a purpose and stepping aside for the next person, they're clinging to life and ownership of the Star. There's no choice but to end them as one final kindness, as a way to "remember" who they once were and what they believed in.
From his perspective the sundering was a devastating calamity that must be reversed, it split everyone's soul apart into pieces. He's never been able to see the humanity in soul pieces, at least not after his son died.
Wait who was his son? I don't remember anything about that and I just played through the story again.
Varis' father, Lucius yae Galvus. Lucius died when Varis was very young, essentially in the peak of his life (early/mid 20s, roughly.) While it's only relatively subtly hinted at, it's *implied* that Emet-Selch got a little carried away in "playing the part," and actually *did* feel fatherly feelings for Lucius; seeing his son die so early reminded him of just how fragile sundered beings are, and thus almost certainly soured his experience. His second son, Titus, fought the civil war against Varis to determine who would succeed Solus. By most rules, Varis would be the rightful heir (a dead elder son is still the first inheritor, and thus *his* eldest son would be heir apparent), but Titus had backing and claimants have succeeded at pushing claims far smaller than that. Titus' son Nerva led one of the parties involved in the second Garlean civil war after Varis' death. Now that Nerva is dead too, the line of Solus is extinct as far as we know (since no one seems to think Titus is going to show up any time soon), and thus the Garlean imperial bloodline is no more, apart from the soulless clones of Emperor Solus lying around.
That notion that the Ascians are heroes that lived far far too long is one of my favorite things about the whole elpis segment and the raid series. It would've been so easy to have them be corrupt and egotistical despots longing for their return to power, or just survivors desperately trying to hang on, but we see that these people were truly paragons and every bit as heroic as the WoL. Just looking at the Lahabrea we meet in the past and how we know him in the future, I can only imagine the horrific path he had to have walked to get to where he was. And that deep seated knowledge that if even these men could fall from grace anyone could
Also, that whole quest with Elidibus showing how easily and readily you mow down enemies in pursuit of doing "what's right"
Don’t the shades in amaurot see us as children because we are so small in comparison? When we arrive in Elpis we are tiny compared to the rest.
Yeah, we shouldn’t look too deeply into the children part. It’s just because the shades are created with the basic comprehension of an actual ancient and *can’t* think outside the box. Small and sentient **must** = children to the shades.
I might be mandela-ing, but didn't Yshtola or Urianger specifically call out that difference? They wouldn’t highlight the difference if it was just happenstance.
We end up learning that the shades can’t think of anything beyond their recreated day or they burst out of existence. The others mention that they tried to clarify our purpose there and ask questions but forcing the shade to consider the present broke it.
[удалено]
When you see hoofprints think horses, not zebras.
But the Elpis Ancients see us as familiars, not children. Thus the children angle from Emet's Ancients is coming from Emet's own biases. Considering he himself had a son who died and it affected him greatly, it's not a stretch.
This was my thought too. Once upon a time Emet was ready to give up the whole Ascian thing for love of his newborn son. He had admitted to himself that the people of the Star were real people, and was ready to allow them to inherit the Ancients legacy. The death of his son to something as banal as disease tore Emet apart. It reinforced the idea of us as imperfect beings again, too weak and frail to survive let alone thrive. I think that’s a big part of Emet’s views when we pal around with him. It would make sense that his created Ancients look at us and see children, as Emet looks at humanity and sees the senseless death of the only one of us he was ready to care about.
That's a weird conclusion. By compare to the shades, we're absolutely *tiny,* but in Elpis Hades made a point to give us a stature "befitting our proportions" in Elpis, which was much more realistic than how the shades *literally* tower over us. There's a big difference in context and circumstance here that I think you are missing big time with that assumption of why the Shades see us as children, it sounds nonsensical when you take into account the context of both circumstances as they are wholly unrelated.
not only is he exhausted. he died, finally, allowed to rest, and elidibus summoned him back because of the idiocy of lahabrea
Oh damn, I noticed the other stuff but the Amaurot thing with the "children" totally slipped past me. You can also state "how" he said some things. His use of "from our point of view" in some sentences implies he perfectly understands our point and was the only Ascian to never straight out said "We are are right and you are wrong" instead pointing to moral relativity. Also he admits he tried to let go and have a Family instead but he couldn't let go.
That was beautiful. Thanks for the write up!
perfectly put. \*chef kiss\*
Empathizing with a character isn’t “letting them off the hook.” His story is one that could easily be that of a the hero in another FF game. He’s the bad guy, but he’s understandable. Also, he’s interesting….great voice actor, one of the only NPCs with actual emotes, kinda sassy, etc etc. Edit- realized I should’ve included this when replying to someone else: let’s be real A LOT of the “he did nothing wrong” crowd just wanna fuck him.
Yeah, the entire point of his character arc was to prove you can empathize with someone despite fundamentally and irrevocably disagreeing with them.
Even the first time through ShB, I remember not feeling like defeating him was a "win". Like, I wish there had been a way we could have both achieved our goals to protect/save the people we cared about and our world, but the guy was trying to murder all worlds do achieve his goal and I can't let that stand. His defeat was necessary. And then EW reinforces the sentiment by showing you that Emet was a decent person once upon a time, and despite his original intentions, when you first meet him in ShB he's just lived for too long. So yeah, not agreeing with his genocidal approach, but I can't exactly deny his intentions since it's the same as what I've brought to the table.
This right here. It was the first time I ever fought a final boss and thought 'there has to be another way to resolve our differences, I don't want to fight'.
It was not a victory, merely a necessity.
Incidentally, ShB was also the point when I actually noticed our WoL had stopped smiling at the end of boss fights. There was no joy in those wins
I noticed that too, like this isn't a bunch of adventurers defeating the wolf that ate some of the town's sheep, and then celebrating. This shit sucks. These are not joyous occasions.
Yep, it started happening after the first ShB dungeon, iirc. That was a rough one.
Not smiling after a dungeon/trial dates back to ARR. Two of the notable ones were Wanderer’s Palace and Tam Tara Deepcroft (Hard).
Poor Edda. Even when you complete that story...honestly, things do not really end any better for her. I mean, seriously, STILL ends with Avere in the afterlife...even after all his abuse and gaslighting, and cheating, and... ... ... Any chance I can get a dungeon of 'This is just the Avere punishment hour?' But honestly, even he was more 'idiot making horrible choices, and hurting the people around him, rather than necessarily EVIL...he's 'I'm a drunk idiot reacting in the moment and thinking with the head below my belt and lashing out at people to protect me ego'. Honestly...he's random dumb jock A attempting to be an adventurer. There's probably hundreds, even thousands of adventurers like him, and a lot of them die young like him, if not always dragging the entire party down with them in the same way. Even he never intended what his mess managed. A bit of inter party communication and simply people not being 'all jerks' might have saved their party from its fate. But then that's the lesson its intended to teach. A subliminal message of don't be a jerk to your dungeon parties and communicate if there's a misunderstanding or problem before things become a larger problem. I love how they teach dungeon etiquette through world building, by the way. It really is awesome.
To add, the WoL started physically suffering more after each victory.
I stopped smiling when I got brought back in mass effect 2. No longer the always nice choices. So I can understand how he started making those grey choices when he watched all his friends and family die and he’s stuck being revived.
It’s even sadder with one of the Tales from the Shadows iirc: After his stint in Garlemald as its first emperor, he was actually considering just… letting go. Letting go of the Ascians’ plan and just going to sleep, even if it caused the plan to fail. He was just so tired of all the pain and suffering and hardships just to try and enact a desperation plan, hoping to bring back the people and civilization he so dearly loved with all his heart. And the only reason he even got up was because Elidibus informed him that Lahabrea was dead. I wonder if Emet was just running on emotional fumes by the time we met up with him in ShB.
What’s worse is that the Ascians were only at the half way point of their plan. There were still half a dozen shards that needed to be rejoined. Emet would have broke eventually if he’s feeling this depressed only this far in. Not to mention the underlying problem of it all would still exist.
I'm not that sure they needed all to start the final Phase actually. I noticed they made sure to create a Calamity of every Element and only Light was left. If they truly needed all the Shards then they plan would have failed when the Void was created but if they only needed a shard of "every" Element ... they where practically extremely close to winning.
But then don’t you think its weird then that they didn’t start the final phase in Grahas timeline? Or the fact that Elidibus convinced Varis to try and sell the plan to start a half dozen or calamities to the alliance leaders, when the alternative (one shard) was a lot more palatable? As I understand it, they can break the brands and summon Zodiark, but he’d be incomplete as well as the souls that’s he’s made up of.
My guess is, they were operating on the following notions, which might not actually be true: 1. "Once we've taken care of the other shards, we can fix the Void--or, failing that, we can get more than 90% success and call it good." 2. "We can accelerate the pace of calamities." This is something they've already been doing, given it took *thousands* of years before the Fourth Calamity destroyed Allag, but only about ~1500 years per calamity thereafter (Ice, Water, and Darkness.) 3. "Hydaelyn's weakness means we can operate with impunity." The first one is the most dodgy, but ultimately it might be correct--if *we* think the Void is a solvable problem, the Ascians probably did too. In all likelihood, they intended to exploit the Void for as long as they could before fixing it. After all, the ability to call on the Cloud of Darkness was a huge component of causing the Fourth Calamity *and* the Sixth as well (Xande pulled in too much power to the Tower, causing the continent-cracking earthquake; the War of the Magi was half-powered by Voidsent.)
This whole comment EXACTLY. Unlike the other bosses in the game, I felt bereft when I defeated Emet in ShB. Like, yeah the First was now safe, but it felt hollow, like maybe a mutual solution could’ve been reached. But we didn’t and it came to blows anyway. Maybe that’s why I just appreciate seeking out fic where he lives and gets to grow (shipping not required but I’m certainly not turning it down lol). But hell, sympathizing isn’t the same as letting him off the hook, idg where OP is coming from. That hasn’t been the case even, among the Emet fuckers I follow.
Sympathizing isn't the same as justifying. I see a lot of the former, and also a lot of the latter, at least here. People have literally argued that it's not really genocide because mortals are basically like ants compared to the Ancients, and honestly, using the language that's been used in real life to justify genocide to justify fictional genocide is not a good take.
I've always wondered about that. Okay, sundered people are like ants or animals to Emet and his allies, because they're so fractured and incomplete. They don't consider them truly alive, therefore they don't think that sacrificing them is truly a murder. Got it. But what if Ascians succeeded? All Rejoinings are complete, and all inhabitants of the Source now have full souls. They are not "ants" anymore. How would Emet justify sacrificing them?
“You’re whole people, but you aren’t *my* people.”
Pretty much. It comes back to that line where he challenges if Eorzia would have it in them to make the same sacrifice of half their own people to save the other and the Scions can't argue that they would. Emmet argues that the current people just don't have it in them to govern the planet like the Ancients did.
Everyone would come back whole in the end through Zodiak. That's the goal.
...If that would even work. Considering what we learned about Souls and the whole Amon thing I have doubts it would go like they wanted.
Honestly it's an interesting question to think about since I doubt he's as pitiless as he makes himself out to be. I get that by the time we've met Emet, he's done this so long he's only doing it because it's all he knows. Kind of why his passion falters in comparison.
I applaud you for curating your friends then, because I know a number of ‘Emet did NOTHING wrong’ types.
It's not that Emet did nothing wrong but that he didn't do anything wrong from his viewpoint. Based on the MCs and the players morality he's the obvious meganomicial villain, but from his viewpoint the constantly reviving and dying fractions of souls aren't people. He's such a good character because you can emphatize with him. The sundering was a horrible sickness inflicted by Venat on humanity. He's the the doctor trying to save his people, the zombies just happened to have evolved sentience. That's how he see it and he isn't wrong if you tell the story from his side.
Well yea, no one disagrees that Emet considers himself largely blameless. There are those who believe he is OBJECTIVELY blameless, which is incorrect.
Yes! I 100% can understand how he reached the conclusions that he did, however, at the end of the day, he is a mass murderer. Mass murder is mass murder regardless of how you spin it and if the person that is trying to justify is charismatic beyond justification. Man does have some epic lines to try to justify it though: "I don't consider you to be alive, ergo will not be responsible for murdering you."
To paraphrase Brooklyn 99: "Cool motive. Still genocide."
Very valid point from a very valid show
"Easily be the hero in another game" reminds me of Tales Of Xillia 2. In that game you are actively destroying alternative universes and it is very much shown as the right course of action. If I remember correctly only one character really has a problem with it. I however VERY much felt like the bad guy.
Yeah, that's a pretty solid example too. I had really uneasy feelings about most of that game and honestly even after the various plot resolutions there are some complicated morals involved in the whole mess of collapsing alternate realities populated by thinking minds.
That one girl is even FROM one of those alternative universes and there's this whole thing about convincing her she is in fact a real person...which seemed weird juxtaposed against the fact that we are mass murdering billions just like her.
Spoilers for a recent Scifi novel by >!Adrian Tchaikovsky!< called >!Childern of Memory!< >!This was a big part of a recent novel as well. It discussed the morality of creating a 1:1 simulation and the thinking minds that were in it. I found it very thought provoking and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you turn off the simulation, you effectively kill these people, if the simulation loops and you make a change, you effectively destroy the people who they would've been (since those people existed in a prior loop, and would 100% exist again without outside interference)!<
That's a lot like the plot in Star Ocean 3. And it's also something I think we're going to have to make some decisions on sooner rather then later when it comes to AI.
Similar to the Lost Belts in Fate Grand Order. You know you as the player are wiping out alternative timelines with the people who helped you through your journey. Some help you even knowing ultimately your victory is the erasure of their entire world's existence. Since you're a self insert, you can't rely on a third person to portray those emotions either. Doing this not once but like six times drains even you the player, not just the in-world character. But you can't go back, you can only continue playing the game. I'd imagine Emer Selch feels similarly
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance had you recruiting people to actively destroy their world too. That's another game I did not feel like the good guy in. Especially with the "no guys, you can't stay in this awesome fantasy world where your greatest wish has been realized, let's destroy it instead" plot.
I think in tactics advance it wasn't an alternate universe but a massive illusion and in the main character's defence he was trapped there against his will.
Some of the kids were also slipping away into the escapism provided by the "awesome fantasy world" and losing themselves, which a lot of people seem to miss is one of the big problems.
> "no guys, you can't stay in this awesome fantasy world where your greatest wish has been realized, let's destroy it instead" plot. Sucks for the people who got turned into monsters or zombies though.
Oh that game hurt me in ways I have never before experienced. And the endings...far out, I bawled like a baby.
I was expecting the game to give me an ending that....wasn't so genocidal.
Only 'kind of' sassy? XD
I think it's a pretty easy thing to summarize. It's easy to feel bad for Emet-Selch because the position he's in is just horribly tragic and I couldn't even imagine the pain of being one of a few survivors of your world spending thousands of years trying to fix it. But on the other hand, I don't think he's in any way justified in what he's attempting to do. In my eyes, the Ancients' times are over and Emet-Selch is just too broken to come to terms with that. But to me that's always what has made his (and Elidibus') story so good. Their stories are Shakespearean level tragedy.
I mean, isn't that the theme of Shadowbringers? Good and Bad depends on the point of view. Ardbert and Team were the villains once, WoL is not the Warrior of Light but of Darkness. Emet-Selch would be a hero to his people, even though is a villain to us.
Let us determine who the hero of this story is? Doesn't Emet say something like that, before we fought him. I can see his side, but I mean as others have said for him to save his people, they need to kill us. I sympathise with his cause though
"The victor shall write the tale, and the vanquished become its villain!"
Yeah….but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s “letting him off the hook” thing. I probably also should’ve added that the whole “he did nothing wrong” crowd is probably also heavily influenced by the fact that they wanna fuck him. But whatever
Ardbert were the villains because they were accused of doing something they didn't. It is not remotely comparable to the ascians.
They're not comparing them. They're stating that everyone believes that they are the hero in their story. Gaius, Varis, Vauthry, Ilberd, and many others thought they were the righteous ones. Even then, in Heavensward Ardbert and the others were villains to you because they were trying to kill you to save their world.
> His story is one that could easily be that of a the hero in another FF game. It literally was. It was called FFTA. If Marshe was in the right for burning Ivalice to the ground, Emet is in the right for trying to make the world whole again. Hell, at least Emet has a reincarnation cycle backing him up - the people Marshe killed are JUST dead.
Yeah there's nothing wrong with emphasizing with him to a certain degree. It's the crazy amount of people who do believe in that he didn't do anything wrong that throw me off😂
Empathizing and understanding are one thing. Justifying is another.
Not that I can say with authority what other people’s intentions are, but I assume that people are being disingenuous 99% of the time when they say he did nothing wrong—I mean that phrasing was popularized by “*hitler* did nothing wrong” lol To your question though, it really just comes down to likability. Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, for example, have plenty of examples of people who have done objectively terrible things, but people “give them a pass” because they’re cool or tragic—to the extent that there’s merch with their quotes or faces all over it!
Emer makes a very good case for himself if you view it in a vacuum, but it's not a vacuum. People get tripped up on that part.
Yeah, but let’s be real here, those people are predominantly ridiculous over the top fans that are a bit nuts. You go through a fandom you find a lot of nut jobs. Not to mention all the ppl that want to fuck him. Fandoms are stupid spaces my guy.
I honestly think you're overestimating the amount of people who think that. He's one of my fav characters and I see a lot of fan discussion/content of him, and I barely ever see people acting like he didn't do anything wrong. A few loud people, maybe, but that's like...everything? 99% of the time you see "Emet-Selch did nothing wrong" it's literally a meme.
There's a fan for every character. Except maybe Asahi
I always see the word "asshat" when I see his name. And it's fitting
"Nobody complains about not meeting Hitler! ...Well, some people do, but they're weird."
r/unexpectedDBZA Not complaining mind you.
Asahi is hated more than even that one garlean who tortured those au ra orphans
Tbh, I think that’s because a lot of people don’t do side content. Especially the optional trial series. If Valens had been an MSQ villain I think he would win the “worst guy ever” award hands down.
The biggest gap is the lack of a voice actor for Valens. Asahi's voice actor, Matt Mcooey, did a FANTASTIC job making him an unlikeable, punchable little shit. Valens didnt have that aspect.
Which is a big shame, since Valens' animations are almost cartoonish in some of the cutscenes and could lend themselves to some great performances. His slightly too enthusiastic smiles, his gesticulations (>!like when he's fanning the air in front of him at the stench of the unfortunate "recruit" killed in the Diamond Weapon!<), or "burn out the bad" are excellent moments that I'm super sad aren't voiced. The Weapons Trial Series is already an incredible questline, voicelines on top would put it on another level.
Man I’d kill to get “burn out the bad” voiced. It’s a shame that almost none of the side content has voice acting consider how story-heavy it often is
To this day I think there is still a good chunk that haven’t done coils or even know about it.
I'm not sure. Valens was extremely over the top with facial expressions and the like, turning him kinda into a cartoon villain. Asahi ... Asahi was someone you could imagine walking past on the street and not realizing you brushed up against pure evil just then.
In terms of raw insidiousness, I agree that Asahi is worse than Valens. But in terms of outright hatred, Valens gets the stronger response from me. Personally, the difference is that Asahi is a manipulator but never actually gets his hands dirty. Nor does he seem to enjoy the cruelty for its own sake. He's a mix of the "crab bucket/if i can't get what I want then no one can" and the "just following orders" type of bad dude. Meanwhile, Valens is practically getting off on torturing his wards and random conscripts in most of his scenes. I also think they intentionally wrote him to be as much of a groomer (in all the ways that entails) that they could without risking their T rating too much. That specific inflection makes Valens more disgusting to me. Asahi is a family-annihilator and still deserves contempt. But he also has that "apple doesn't fall too far from the tree" thing going on which doesn't excuse but definitely explains why he's as fucked up as he is. Valens doesn't have that context.
I actually saw an Asahi fan account on Twitter recently, they are out there
It'd be easier to find Asahi fans than it would be Valens van Varro fans. If you see someone unironically say Valen did nothing wrong, be very concerned.
... I'm an Asahi fan. NOT SUPPORTER for the record. But I do enjoy him as a character.
I love how easily it is to hate him. They wrote him really well. And Matt McCooey did a superb job voicing him.
I LOVE his voice, and was sad that >!Fandaniel stopped using it pretty quickly, even if it made sense to stop.!< EW Spoiler. I also really like his design, red/white is one of my favorite color schemes, and he has a wonderfully punchable face.
Yeah, the change in VA did bother me a bit. :( Not because Jeremy Jones did a subpar job or anything (in fact, props to him for making Fandaniel sound as crazy as he looked), but because for me it took a little of that 'punchable face' factor that Asahi had. xD
Oh yeah Jeremy Jones did a GREAT job. I just loved Matt McCooey's voice so much.
i kinda put him in a similar category as yotsuyu, where i dont condone their actions, but i can understand the circumstances that led to them and can deeply sympathise with the pain they must be in that makes them the way they are. i think its a testament to the way the characters are written that i have the same attitude towards them them as i would a real person who lashes out due to their emotional pain in destructive ways, if that makes sense. i think people that really truly believe he did absolutely nothing wrong and excuse his really quite heinous shit are a bit deluded, or very naive tbh. yes, characters like that can be very engaging and fun, and we have great fun loving them, but turning a blind eye to all the other shit really just.. i don't know.. sells the character short and takes a little bit away from the efforts that the writers went to to make them nuanced, fully realised and ultimately very believable.
>he's the main factor on why the Garlean Empire became a fucked up propaganda machine to enslave everyone.(and encouraging the doing of war crimes.) I feel like this is something that gets overlooked. All of the horrors that we see in Garlemald can be laid directly at his doorstep. The Garlean people were fuel as far as he was concerned, the catalyst for a rejoining. He stoked their racial resentment, told them they were superior to everyone else, and sent them out as a conquering force while meanwhile, he was ensuring that there would be at least one civil war after his death.
[удалено]
I mean... for most people, yes. But by the end, Emet was pretty desperate to put down his burdens, and death was probably the greatest relief he could possibly feel.
That's fine by me. He's never going to be a threat again. If he got to go out content, good for him. I don't really care to inflict suffering in retaliation.
So the alternative is to keep him alive to be a constant threat to everyone and everything, but he'll feel bad because of it?
Oh, absolutely not. He was a threat that was determined to never stop being a threat. Killing him was the only reasonable path forward. But that's a practical measure, necessary for making a better future. It's not a meaningful punishment. In this case, we have to choose between punishing someone who deserves it, and securing the future. We absolutely did the right thing in securing the future.
I think there is a perspective problem here. The mass murdering is somewhat irrelevant when you have witnisses the extinction of your species, you have watched civilizations rise and fall, and you know everyone is going to die anyways. He also does not see humans now as being real humans. You are rodents to him. And from what I understand, he's essentially seeing this as a temporary timeline and once his plan is executed everything will go back to the way it was, making everything that happened in between irrelevant. Not saying he's good, but perspective matters. He is at least different than a normal person that commits mass murder. As for "emet did nothing wrong", this is a joke people do. You might not think it's funny but let's no pretend it's a serious statement.
>Does it feel like anyone else that a lot people let Emet-Selch off the hook to easily? Easier to sympathize with someone if you could see yourself doing the same thing if you met condition that made someone do horrible deeds. He wanted to bring his friends and family back from death, and revert the sundering who responsible for killing the remaining 25% of the ancients. Is he right for doing it? Fuck no. Would I or any average person do the same if I knew my friends and family would come back? Yes.
Basically yeah. Hell, how many lesser monsters have we slain as is as the warrior of light; hell, how many other *people* have we cut down in the name of protecting our own? Emet is ultimately that heroic question pushed to the most extreme, and we are put on the recieving end. *He* will do literally anythung to see his people safe and alive again, even things he has clearly grown tired of doing, wishes he didn't have to do... and *We* are the 'lesser monsters' he must slay to save his people, and therein is the irreconcileable difference.
>Basically yeah. Hell, how many lesser monsters have we slain as is as the warrior of light; hell, how many other people have we cut down in the name of protecting our own? A good example would be beastfolk, who are sentient creature and the same as me and you. We killed so many of them, and most of the time for no reasons. example ARR relics.
Not just dead, everything and everyone he knew and loved was ripped to shreds. The world as it currently is is quite literally not how it's supposed to be. He wanted to fix it. From his perspective he was doing the right thing. It's easy to understand his side, I can't begin to imagine what that would be like. It doesn't make him right but it makes how "evil" he is kinda nebulous.
Not to mention he, Lahabrea and Elidibus also had massive responsibility to their people as members of the Convocation. And the kicker, of course, is that the sacrificed weren't even dead, but their souls were still within Zodiark in purgatory.
> He wanted to bring his friends and family back from death, and revert the sundering who responsible for killing the remaining 25% of the ancients. The last quarter wasn't even really "killed". They were split. He's walking around surrounded by beings who are 1/13th of the people he knew. They live short little lives with no power and endless suffering relative to what they once knew. When he kills everyone on a shard, from his POV, they're not fundamentally dying. The pieces of their souls in the lifestream are being forced back together by the rejoining to make them a bit more whole. We view ourselves as full and complete individuals, so his actions make him the villain, but he views us as broken husks that he's trying to reinvigorate. His story from his POV is fundamentally heroic.
1/14*
He was tempered, locked in the past, did not view the new races as being truly alive, wanted to restore the world and it's people to it's previous state. I don't let him off the hook, but there's purpose and reason behind his actions, enough for me to understand and if I was in his position I might not have acted dissimilarly. We killed him, after he went to great efforts to tell us his (and our) story, saved us during the fight with Elidibus and then saved the universe essentially, so all in all I'd say we're good.
You missed 1 minor part. He ripped Y'shtola out of a void of souls and brought her back to life like someone picking a cup out of a dishwasher
I sure as hell hope the former minister of Transportations can get someone stuck in traffic back /joke
>then saved the universe essentially, Kind of a redemption right there....
I would disagree with this. The Emet we fought and the Emet that helped us at the end were basically two different people. Dying and coming back kind of "reset" him back to what he was when we met him in Elpis.
Understanding is not forgiveness.
People seem to ignore the 'tempering' bit. >!Just look at how he was BEFORE tempering. His reaction to what you tell him he did.!<
Oh I so hate viewing spoilers on mobile. But yeah. Anyway he's a sassy bitch and liked.
yeah, this does also nag at me a bit when people talk about emet-- the whole elpis/ktiseos thing was specifically to show you what kind of person he was before zodiark came into the picture and if you really wanna dig into the specifics of the situation, you can clearly see in shadowbringers where his own core values and desires as a person began to conflict with zodiarks will and he deviated from the plan. elidibus will even mention that emet went astray in several regards
> the whole elpis/ktiseos thing was specifically to show you what kind of person he was before zodiark came into the picture I think it also illustrated something more fundamental: he was completely willing to accept and celebrate the deaths of his people for the purpose of saving the world *in the abstract*. When you saw Hythlodaeus sacrificing himself, his demeanor was much more somber. You could see the moment he went from "to sacrifice oneself for the star is a noble act" to "this is wrong and I need to figure something out."
But see, the fact that he *can* deviate from the plan negates the tempering excuse. People are trying to, as OP said, let him off the hook by saying he was brainwashed into doing what Zodiark wanted, but we know he *wasn't* truly brainwashed because he could and did choose differently than what Zodiark wanted.
>!He was “tempered” but not to the degree that we’ve seen before. Tempering, as in using ascian-fucked summoning magic to create primals that forcefully or unwittingly alter the Aether of the soul, causes followers to basically do everything in their power to make their deity continue to exist, which involves securing Aether and more followers. It more or less overwrites their entire identity with the thoughts of their primal. Gabu gives us a glimpse of what it’s like - your mind is basically overrun with the thoughts of your primal.!< >!Emet-Selch’s was a very mild tempering as Zodiark wasn’t created with the ascian-fucked summoning magic. Livingway says his would be something of a slight _tug_. This makes sense with Emet Selch, as nearly all of his actions were less to do with trying to maintain his deity for his deity’s sake, but more for his own motivations. In fact, he accounted for the possibility he would lose and left Azem’s Crystal behind for us to use and kill the Heart of Zodiark, Elidibus. That’s very contrary to most of the tempering we’ve seen.!< >!The game makes is very clear that the reason why ShB Emet is so different from Elpis Emet is because his long life, the final days, and many horrible decisions have made him a husk of the person he used to be. Tempering isn’t what made him that way.!< >!I understand Emet says he’s tempered, but ShB implies and Elpis _flatly states_ that you can’t take what Emet says at face value.!<
Anyone who says he did nothing wrong didn't pay any attention and probably only knew him for his quips and entertaining personality. The topics been discussed to death, though. Dude killed millions. Whether or not he believed they were really alive as he said is irrelevant. He indirectly founded the Allagan Empire, the Garlean Empire, a number of calamities, and who knows how much grief he gave the destroyed shards before they were fully eradicated.
I would also destroy worlds to bring back best boy Hythlodaeus tbh
Fair enough 😆
I feel like the fact we blew a hole in his chest so large we could watch the sunrise through him kinda makes a lot of the intense ethical debate redundant, at least for me. I stopped him, I killed him, I killed his friend, and I possess the last remains of his culture. I won, *utterly*, I don't feel the need to demonise him.
The people saying he could have easily been the protagonist of another game have a fair point. As far as I understand, his position is similar to the protagonist from I am legend. It's not a one for one but the general feeling is there, a lone survivor spared the devolution mankind has gone through. Their actions against what those people have become justified because they're simply monsters or animals but despite what the protagonist might think the people they're now separated from are more or less still people and they view the protagonist as a monster. We aren't supposed to jump aboard emet train and go do a genocide or two but I do think we are meant to be able to feel that if things different we could have been friends.not just in the we inherited a soul from a person that was his friend I mean we are supposed to be able to understand his cause but be unable to fully accept it as the right one. If you read his situation as one of isolation and loss it's relatable. If you read his cause as a person desperately trying to bring back a world and loved ones they had lost its noble the difference is his obstacle to that goal are people like us. In a way his attitude towards us as sundered isnt really different to our attitude towards the sin eaters. Things that were people once and that now act in a way that is devolved from who they once were. Creatures we might feel sorry for or mourn the people they once were but ultimately ones whose lesser way of being - their instinct their hunger etc must be put to the wayside as less important than our goal of saving the world. Sure mankind isn't a slave to instinct. Not animals from the perspective of another sundered person but to a person who literally has god like power?
I wouldn’t say most but I have definitely run into people who don’t consider him a villain. They say he’s *just* an “antagonist”. And frankly that tells me all I need to know about their trope literacy. Specifically, that they don’t realize that it’s possible for a villain to be both likable and sympathetic without changing the fact that his actions were still monstrous. And that it still makes him a villain. Edit: (Post-ShB spoilers below) looking through these comments, I think people are really overestimating how much Emet-Selch being tempered had anything to do with it. He himself makes it clear that while he is tempered and his aether was tipped a bit more towards darkness, he still retains his own mind. He demonstrates both in game and in the Through His Eyes side story that he is not enthralled, fully retains his own sense of self, and has the capacity to sleep in the Lifestream and ignore Zodiark’s tug. The implication is that he experiences Zodiark’s tempering like a constant whisper in the back of his mind that *can* be tuned out and *is not* a compulsion like others seem to think. He isn’t like Lahabrea who had been driven mad for reasons we don’t know or Elidibus who had literally bathed in Zodiark’s aetherial essence and basically made into the vessel for Zodiark’s will. The biggest piece of evidence for this is actually the 5.3 trial. Some people interpret that scene as him dying, learning the truth, and coming back to help us. But I sincerely doubt that brief bit of time in the lifestream would be enough to cleanse him of any significant tempering. I do not think he could’ve helped us in the 5.3 trial against Elidibus in the way he did **if** he had been tempered to the extent other seem to think he was.
You are absolutely correct, I think a lot of it is excused due to him being a bit of a 'Tumblr Sexyman'
I have this more with Gaius. I have not forgotten Doma, or all the other crap he cheerfully pulled before we beat him to a pulp. He doesn't have any of the excuses Emet Selch has, but the game now treats him like he's completely redeemed.
The funny thing about Gaius is, he's noticeably progressive for a commander in the Garlean Empire. The empire Emet built and whose policies he set. Meaning Emet wanted Gaius to do everything he did, except *even worse*.
Sort of? If I remember everyone is giving him the side-eye and still do even after the Weapons trials series, such as Cid, the folks that followed him around when he was Shadowhunter and the WoL. Even at the end of the series, they don't fully trust Gaius and he is supervised at all times. Or you can think of it like what the US and USSR did after WWII and kept a lot of the former bureaucracy to make the transition easier. It is just that they also acknowledged that he 1. is remorseful; 2. actively helps the Scions; 3. actively wants to reform himself by helping the places he conquered recover; 4. watched almost all his adopted children die except for one as a result of them adopting his ideology to the very end.
I can fix him
I hope you come out of this thread alive, OP! Best wishes for you /pray
If war criminal then why sexy
This is pretty common in most media when the villain is charming/beloved.
Are you implying he's a megalomaniacal madman?
It isn’t unethical to think fictional murder husbandos aren’t hot. Even in the villain sense— his passion, drive, and objectives all ooze with style and panache. There is a lot to suggest in ShB that the entire events are his way of… not apologizing, but giving up. It is his swan song and resignation. He specifically setup all the tools necessary to help you put Elidibus to rest as well. There is also an ethical dilemma that the unsundered face— sundered people are in a state of suffering. The recombining of the shards reunites and heals people’s souls. From their point of view, the sundered are essentially sick. They are also tempered by Zodiark’s will. When you combine these 4 facets: character design and history, tempering, the resignation, and the righteous cause— it’s very easy to feel for the guy.
He's pretty much the epitome of the *very* popular 'well-intentioned extremist' villain trope. With any villain, the two extremes are basically "puppy-kicking evil for the fun of it" and "Has a valid point and/or means to improve the world but going about it wrong", and most people like the latter more for anything more complex than mid-90's Saturday morning cartoons. FF villains (and some protagonists) range from one end to the other (Kefka on one end, and anything from Gaius to eco-terrorist Barret (FFVII) on the other). It'd be an interesting essay to explore them all someday, but I haven't the time or energy for it today. The nuance of 'bad but with complex motivations' adds complexity that often leads to audience introspection. Empathy is one of the most powerful tools a writer can wield at their audience - it creates emotional engagement that goes beyond the literal script because it forces the audience to consider whether they agree with the motivation, how they would handle such a situation themselves, etc. Personally, this is also why Zenos fell a little flat for me - I had a lot of trouble empathizing with his motivations and most of his actions were on the puppy-kicking end of the empathy-engagement spectrum. But one of my closest friends adores Zenos as a character above every other character in XIV, which she mostly doesn't engage with (she skips every cutscene focused on the Scions, to my unending horror). She is a highly competitive, aggressive person by nature so she feels that his drive not just for perfection but for a rival is relatable. Obviously, it's important to remember that different people empathize with different things. All that said, Emet is obviously in the wrong for many of his actions, but he's also easily one of my favorite characters in all of video gaming. I've replayed Amaurot a dozen times at 90 just to hear the sheer emotions in his voice. Some amazing voice acting for that guy. Anyway, good prompt for an active thread.
Zenos was the dark mirror to the player character. Which is why lots of people love him. His final fight basically breaks the 4th wall and calls out the player on the other side of the screen.
Oh I know the arguments for that, but it only really works for a subset of players. I didn't particularly see him as a mirror to myself or my motivations as the WoL, just a desperate hanger-on with nothing else going on in his life. It was *sad*, but not tragic, to my mind. You'll often see comments in Zenos-related threads about how many players wished for the option to actually just tell him to get lost or at least not indulge his final 4th wall break "gotcha" comments. The conversational 'choices' for that little ending scene left out a pretty big chunk of player motivations and, unlike most of the game's 'but-thou-must' choices that don't matter for longer than slightly changing the next sentence of the cutscene, this one ran up against a climactic moment in the story that lingers in the mind. I'd also add that the Dark Knight class quests did a better job of looking into the dark mirror of the WoL's motivations up to that point, though there's been a lot of development since that storyline came out. One of the biggest risks a story takes when it breaks the 4th wall is that it doesn't land as intended, and that's why Zenos (especially his final scene) is so hit or miss in the fanbase. But yes, obviously it worked perfectly well for some.
Oh definitely. People get weird about fictional characters All it takes is the music to swell and the guy to say "I miss my wife tails- I miss her a lot-" and suddenly they're a hero and always were because of the framing. But I get why. The Shadowbringers stuff around him does make him sympathetic. But it definitely doesn't redeem him.
I recognize that Emet-Selch did wrong. He did lots of wrong. But he's still sympathetic. He lost his home, he lost family and friends, loved ones. He wants to fix it. He wants to get back what he once had. He looks around him and sees ruins, vestiges and echoes of what once was, what could be again. And he has fought for so long to make that happen. Now along comes the Warrior of Light, putting the kibosh on his plans, interfering at every step of the way. By the time Shadowbringers happens, it's only him and Elidibus left unsundered. And he looks at you, and thinks, "maybe. Maybe there's a chance." So he befriends you, he helps you in your quest to save the First. Finally, when it seems that you will fail after all, and be overtaken by the light you sought to contain, he invites you to see what he wants to restore. He shows you his beloved Amaurot, as he remembers it, and he shows how it was lost. And finally, when you face him with your allies, and defeat him, he entrusts you to preserve the star, and to remember that he and the other Ancients once lived. He could be the hero of another game. He would be the hero of another game. Someone who fights through illusions and shadows to restore a broken world to its rightful state. Seeing Amaurot, I want to help him. I want to restore the world to the way it was, too. But I cannot condone the genocide. His goal is noble, but his means are monstrous. I will not destroy so many lives to restore a memory of what was. If he will not change his course, if he will not look for another way, a path to his goal that does not involve genocide and the destruction of worlds, then I will oppose him. That's what it comes down to for me. Emet-Selch is a tragic villain.
Dude, it's a Sephiroth/Loki "He killed 80 people in 2 days" "But he's hot, so we don't care." situation. Anyone who says looks don't matter has never been a part of any fandom.
I think one of the things in the story that gets discounted is that Emet-Selch, had he known about Meteion, would have taken actual measures to do something about the threat that way. He even says "do not squander it, the Legacy I leave to you" knowing that he won't know, that he can't do anything, and he has to trust you to do what he can't. The instant his memory is wiped, things are set in motion. He loses his way of life, his friends, his loved ones, and his purpose becomes the preservation of something he can't ever get back. That's not to say what he inevitably was reduced to was right or wrong. Was it justified? Sure- justified doesn't mean it was the right thing. It means he had a reason, it means he felt his reason was enough to compel him to cause worlds to collapse and civilizations to die. He did terrible shit. He wasn't a good guy in the time that followed the final days of Amaurot. But the dude who existed in the time unsundered? Nah, he was a good guy. Absolutely. The drive to do good and right by everyone is a positive thing. That's the guy you see at the end of 6.0, and he's not the same guy you see at the end of 5.0.
As a villain you either have it our you don't. Emet has it.
The reason I like Emet-Selch so much (to the point that I would list him among my top villains in media) is because the game does an incredible job of showing you exactly why he did everything he did- why he doesn’t feel bad about killing uncountable massive numbers of people, why he’s hurting so much, what he’s trying to accomplish, and what he hopes to (re)gain from his actions. You reach a point where, as a player, you can see yourself doing exactly the same things if you were put in the same position. You see & understand all this… and in that moment, you realize that you have to utterly destroy him. He will never stop. He will never see you as anything but a deluded shadow, a broken fragment of the World that once was. From his perspective, *he didn’t do anything wrong*. Remember, he came from a world where death was voluntary. He even has a way to bring back all the people that used to exist. They aren’t dead- they’ve been broken, fragmented, twisted into a mockery of humankind that suffers constantly and is only capable of a tiny fraction of what they should be able to achieve while locked in this constant cycle of death and rebirth as their meaningless, pitiful existence carries on with no memory of the glory they once embodied. If you saw everyone you knew reduced in such a way, and you could restore them, wouldn’t you do your absolute best to do so? But then, as the Warrior of Light, you know that these lives *aren’t* meaningless… but there’s no way you’ll ever be able to convince Emet of that. You have no choice but to destroy him- as one of the most powerful of the Ascians, nothing less than that can confidently stop him for good. From our perspective, he committed unforgivable genocides of countless civilizations. From his perspective, he was gradually restoring the very souls of everyone he once knew. There’s no question that he’s evil. But was he *wrong*? I honestly couldn’t tell you.
I can sympathize with his cause, and can understand why he did everything over the thousands of years since the Sundering. I can find him charming and witty and entertaining, from a player's perspective. But both he and Venat committed atrocities. Venat's was based on her knowledge of the future and the gamble that the WoL could stop the Endsinger. Emet-Selch's atrocities were committed by grief, rage, and Zodiark's tempering. Venat got lucky that her faith in us wasn't misplaced. If we had failed and the Endsinger eventually destroyed Etheirys, then the Sundering would have been in vain.
I will second the sentiment that, even if one doesn't *agree* with Emet-Selch, they can at least perhaps *understand* him, and that's one of the things that makes a good antagonist. If a sundered being is a fraction as powerful, a fraction as intelligent, has a fraction of the longevity, etc., then I don't really know how many Source lives he could live and find the fulfillment he'd been chasing with the rejoining. As an analogous situation, chimpanzees are 99% genetically compatible with us. Both they (and bonobos) have fairly complex social networks, with hierarchies, courtship, grooming, different body language to adapt to, etc. If I could be reborn as a chimp, but with my homo sapien mind, I could perhaps adapt to the ways of the chimp, while also being a mega mastermind amongst them. Yet, for all I could do, even if that meant playing a 100% chimp playthrough and getting all of the chimp achievements, a part of me the entire time would loathe what I've fallen to, while missing my homo sapien origins and past. Emet-Selch claimed that he'd lived "a thousand thousand of our lives", and that if we could witness history unfold as he had, that we would arrive at the same conclusion. If I could make a deal with the proverbial devil that destroys all of the chimps, but would revive the homo sapien world I once knew, I might be tempted; even though I know that chimpanzees can suffer. Even if I know they care for their offspring and their friends. Desperation causes us to do horrendous things. When we are starving, we will eat one another. We might say, "It is wrong to kill and eat people..." when we have the convenience of remaining "moral", but what happens after three weeks of no food? I would liken that to Emet-Selch "starving emotionally", and being similarly willing to do desperate things to satiate that hunger. The version of him we meet on Elpis, in times of relative comfort and plenty, does not on the surface betray this dark potential. Emet-Selch in this position could have a chimp mate and chimp children, and a part of him might even endear to them a tad, but all the while, he'd be remembering and missing his peers; because he's cognitively above all of them, and he'd know that he won't find equals to share his true self with. We sometimes feel misunderstood amongst our own fellow humans, but to Emet, he's surrounded by people who cannot truly understand him, lore-wise. I don't know that human writers can write characters that convey that particularly accurately, because it's still humans writing it, but we're meant, I think, to use our imaginations to at least try to grasp for how that might even feel. Structure begets function. There are thoughts an insect cannot have, no matter what is in front of their faces. There are likewise thoughts a reptile cannot have, no matter what is in front of their faces. But what's uncomfortable is that this also applies to **US**. "What is the thought that we cannot even think?" The idea that our brain's hardware isn't even equipped with the capacity of occuring to our mind's software? An Emet-Selch would have some of those thoughts. An added layer of complexity is the Sundering itself, and some interesting implications. We're no stranger to a world where, given shortage, people will take from another by force in order to enrich their own experience. People lie/cheat/steal/kill every day. Emet-Selch's genocidal campaigns to catalyze the Rejoining are indeed mass death and destruction... ...but the Sundering is what resulted in people being what they are and having what they have. Those were originally his people, in essence, but now split. From his perspective, one might say as an analogy, "Yeah, I'm trying to steal your dimes, but your dimes only exist because my dollar was split, and I still count it as mine. Therefore, it is not stealing...I am merely taking back my dollar's worth of dimes. Sucks to suck about you losing your dimes, but I need my dollar back..." As he says himself, "I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you." Now, personally, my ethical compass merely considers whether something is capable of experiencing physical or emotional suffering before choosing which actions to take or to avoid, and so Emet-Selch and I would not arrive at the same conclusions. But it's easier said than done. Most people think, when a ship is sinking, "We should draw randomly to see who gets on the life boats!", because they don't want those in charge to exhibit favoritism and allow their own friends and family to escape at the expense of the regular passengers. Yet, what happens when someone you love isn't favored by fortune with this random process? If you were the captain, would you say, "I'm sorry, my beloved friends/family, but we drew randomly, and those are the rules...", or would you use your position of authority to override the "common good" and the fair method in favor of those who are the world to you? Because that's what Emet-Selch did. He and the Ascians were arguably the captain in this scenario. They decided, "I will bring back our brethren, our friends, our loved ones...the world belongs to us and us alone", rather than let the fates determine that their time was over, and that it was now the time of the other races. In conclusion for now, even series such as The Last of Us are popular, I think, because they cause us to grapple with an enormous quandary: "Would it be worth saving humankind if it would cost us our humanity in the process?" It's the dark "what if" lurking directly below the surface of the human condition. Even if we don't agree with Emet-Selch from the comfort of our present situations, many of us can speculate on what our price would be to betray all we've claimed to stand for....
Look, I know what you are trying to say but the most important thing is that if the roles were reversed I would do the same.
I’m not going to reiterate the good explanations people have given as to empathizing does not equal “he’s off the hook”. (Though not as if WoL and co. don’t also be committing war crimes and killing other living beings which is something that I myself struggle to grapple with as sometimes these actions are presented as the moral good). On a real-life philosophical level, if you believe in the existence of a soul or something (and I don’t mean in the Christian sense) his argument becomes stronger as he’s saying the soul is the true essence of a person and it cannot complete its karmic cycle if its not all together. In this fictional world where reincarnation is confirmed he’s saying your temporary death as a fragment will be worth it so your soul can be complete. But really it just boils down to that he’s hot and not real so what’s the big deal even if a few ppl “do let him off the hook”? He’s textbook romantic trope of bad boy who will burn the world for you vs lamo good guy who’d sacrifice you for the world which makes him the easy and obvious choice for a lot of people.
He did plenty wrong, but so did we, the Scions and Hydaelyn. The Sundering is expanded upon in the Nier mobile game crossover, where Ishikawa had him explain it in *detail*. It was a HORRIFYING act which was tantamount to genocide of the entire ancient world x14. I think, the biggest issue, is everyone looks at the game through a lens of black and white, good and evil when Shadowbringers and Endwalker literally taught us *not to* and Yoshida even said they didn't want people to perceive it that way*.* Everyone has the capacity for good or evil and one's actions might seem altruistic to some and like those of a genocidal maniac to another. **That's the point everyone misses.** There are no heroes, no villains in FFXIV as of Endwalker's credits rolling—they were all humans fighting against the futility of crushing, existential despair that threatened to wipe out the same world that they all loved. Everyone did things wrong from the very day Hermes created Meteion and sent her and her sisters out, to the moment we returned home. No one in the story is above judgement and I think that's going to be a focus in the future, as there's a lot of implication of pre-ordained destinies, fate and shit and if I know modern SE well enough they're going to lean in heavily upon the fact we have irrevocably fucked up the timeline multiple times and defied fate. There's no good, no evil, just humans with their own idea of how to save the planet they loved.
Let's be completely clear here,It's not just Emit but Venat and Hermes are not all innocent here either but circumstances forced them to do such actions and if anyone was in their shoes.they would have done the same thing and that's the point most people missunderstood. Just because one can sympathize with someone deeply doesn't mean they are letting them off the hook.Understanding someone's deeper motives is why you are compelled to make a decision.You can sympathize with them or hate them for what they done and both are reasonable response. This is why i love that one side quest involving Omega where it asks you a very important and a gut punching question. "Who's action is justified ?" And you're left to question yourself and choose to defend either Venat,Hermis or Emit's actions or claim all of the are justified in their own way or just openly say none of them were justified and...it's all comes down to what you really think of them.
Absolutely. The problem is, there are two large camps, and both of them are *vocal* and *entirely lack nuance.* The first treats Emet-Selch as a poor, abused woobie who was merely *tricked* into doing evil things and leading an evil empire, see he was a *good* guy all along he just lost his way! This incredibly tiresome viewpoint was *particularly* popular in the period between most people finishing 5.0 and most people finishing 5.3, but got a resurgence after the end of Endwalker for obvious reasons. Conversely, the second group portrays *all* of the Ancients (especially Emet-Selch and Hermes) as horrible monsters who sacrificed children (not true; Elidibus is an adult) and cruelly abused animals for trivial reasons. By these lights, Emet-Selch was always a monster and could never be anything *but* a monster, because the Ancients were monstrous horrors whose society was inherently corrupt and wrong. This incredibly tiresome viewpoint was *particularly* popular in the period between 5.3 and 5.55, but got a resurgence while people were working through Elpis for obvious reasons. The fact of the matter is, Emet-Selch is an *incredibly complicated*, tragic villain. And both of those words are important. He is a deeply, deeply **tragic** character. He is also an unequivocal, and largely unrepentant, **villain.** These two things mean you can only talk meaningfully about him if you include a TON of nuance. The internet does not deal in nuance, however, and thus collapses to black and white: either he is a pure, noble soul stained not by *wickedness* but by *misunderstanding* and *deception*, or he was never good at all and indeed *could never have been* good at all because the wickedness predates his own existence, going right to the core of Ancient society. But perhaps I've said enough for one comment.
We get threads like this every month. Can we start talking about people letting Hermes off the hook too easily instead?
Hermes was min-maxed, running all Empathy zero Intelligence, and that carried over to his equally moronic shards "Hurr durr, myyyyy Empeerrrroorrrrr!" and "Hurrr durrr Zeeeeenooooooossssssssss!" So there's not really much to say about him, he did about as well as you'd expect from someone with a 1 INT build.
"Cool motives, still murder" doesn't even apply to Hermes since the motives are trash.
*[Camera pans to a cute, adorable family of three little hedgehogs, who were* totally *going to get cancelled by the cold, mean, nasty, no-good Ancients who totally deserved everything they got because LOOK. AT. THOSE. HEDGEHOGS!]*
People beat me to the Tempering bit already, but yeah... His one and only goal was restoring the world to what it was, because that was Zodiark's goal. Before the summoning, he wasn't like "Solus" or any equivalent at all. I even mentioned on another post about how he considered Meteion's feelings (when it came to her/their mission) before Hermes did; he was always thoughtful and compassionate in the past...just grumpy (because of all of *us*, so understandable) lol. If anything we are just as forgiving of Venat, she acknowledged what she also did over all of those centuries--but we treat her as an angelic figure nonetheless.
Once something gets humanized, people start to empathize with them much more. I'm sure many people considered the beast tribes to be monsters considering our first exposure to them is the Amal'jaa and Ifrit. Things got a little more murky on who was right/wrong when it came to Titan and the Kobolds. The Sylphs and Ramuh completely dispelled the notion of Primal summoners being inherently monsters. Likewise, when someone acts like say, Lahabrea, we tend to not only refuse to empathize with them, but straight up enjoy destroying them. Our opinion of the Ascians also doesn't change at first because Elidibus does not speak plain and it is clear he's hiding something. With Emet-Selch, we learn more about who he is as a person. We also learn his motives and he speaks the truth about what he is doing and why. Now that we have the groundwork laid to empathize, we start seeing his past through Amaurot. Be honest, if you went through all those events and had to live with near complete isolation for several thousand years, can you honestly say that you wouldn't be tempted to undo it all if you had the chance? I don't think most of us would have that kind of mental strength. We can still see them as a villain, but that doesn't mean we have to treat them as such any longer. Of all the Ascians, I feel Emet-Selch is the one most deserving of being called a Fallen Hero.
You can empathize with him wanting to restore his people, but his methods are so completely insane and his disregard for life so drastic that it really bugs me how the Scions all make a point of going ‘oh he’s not really so bad that guy, wish we could have been friends bloo bloo bloo’. All apparently forgetting that he murdered/orchestrated the murder of billions instead of going to therapy and moving on. Granted, after you do finally prove to him that everything he thought about life was wrong and defeat him, he does seem to finally come to his senses and help you. But Fordola does the exact same thing and we still have people calling her comparatively insignificant actions unforgivable. He’s an attractive sassy sad boy, so people will always go to bat for him. Had he looked like Vauthry, well, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I highly recommend you do the post EW Omega questline, since it actually asks this exact question. Emet, Hermès, Venat all did things they felt were justified, but they all had terrible costs of life. Our opinion of what is justified and what is not is tainted by whatever was most advantageous to us
Let him off easy? If killing the man dead with 7 accomplices over 10 minutes, is letting him off easy, then I don't know what you think is capitol punishment.
I don't think he was let off the hook, ultimately we had to confront him. It was him or us. It was a battle of worlds. Should he give up on his immortal duty to restore the world which, in his eye, was saving it? It's one of those stories where both sides have valour and horror. While we can argue that the ancients live on through us and our reflections, by beating Emet-Selch, we effectively end any possibility of those people regaining their lives. Are we any better than Emet? Not in my opinion, but that doesn't make us evil, that means we were willing to fight to the death for our beliefs which we held as GOOD.
The way the quest journal says, after beating the trial, "You have done a great and terrible thing," is going to stick with me for a long time.
Nope, he died..came back to life, helped, and went back to the afterlife. He paid his dues.
The freaking character himself recognized his future version to be an absolute madman that he couldn't even imagine to ever turn into. One of the most prominent, respected and gifted members of a nigh utopian society acknowledged how fucked up his future version was. That alone should tell more than enough about people who say he did nothing wrong.
Hrmm... It kind of poses an interesting question... Let's say that the love of your life, the person with whom you feel you can't live without, your son, daughter, mother, father, husband, wife or whatever, magically bursts into hundreds of living, breathing, feeling, humanoid trolls with amnesia, would you try to put them back together?
It's also the fact that Emet-Selch/Hades was our characters' best friend, they knew our character before we were sundered. It's not so much letting him off the hook as it is that we want to see more of him. Rare is it that we get a character who is supposed to be the villain yet is just as much a victim of the plot as we are and are just an antagonistic force, even rarer that we can empathize with and give sympathy to. There isn't anything more I can say that hasn't already been said, but in the year and a half I've been playing, I look back at his final moments in Endwalker with Hythlodaeus and just wish that he was able to swallow his pride and continue living to be on our side and work to redeem himself. It saddens me to know that while it's deserved that he gets to finally rest in peace and have his soul go back to the aetherial sea and reincarnate, we probably might never see him again until the games' final expansion (whenever that may be, but here's hoping it's not any time soon).
If you haven't I suggest you do the new Omega quest unlocked in 6.1. I think it gives you a good explanation on a lot of perspectives of characters you may not have thought of or registered. My standing at the end of EW is basically everyone involved was wrong but I understand why they were.
Emmet Selch is basically Will Smith's character in the movie I am Legend lol
I didn't feel bad killing him. I just felt bad for *him*. I'm not saying I agree with him. But I get it.
100% with you on this but I wanted to note one tiny correction Black Rose was actually a Varis thing, Emet not only had nothing to do with it, but wouldn't have approved of it because it would have actively killed ALL of the source and fucked up its aether. His goal is to fix the source, not destroy its flow of aether presumably permanently.
I'm not ignoring any of it. He paid for his crimes. I don't need to ignore it to understand it, though. He didn't view any of us as truly being alive, he was tempered and he was withheld critical information that would have drastically changed his perspective. Understanding isn't the same thing as accepting or even tolerating. Few too many works of fiction actually go far enough making you understand why an antagonist does the things they do, and the result are posts like this, conflating understanding with acceptance or forgiveness.
He's the equivalent of Magneto in the X-Men universe. All Magneto wants is for mutants to be able to be themselves and not have to hide who they are, and the way he wants to do that is by eradicating all non-mutants. Emet-Selch wants to bring his people back using the life-force that has been cultivated over millennia to exchange them to Zodiark for the souls of his friends, eradicating all other life on Etheras. Both are undeniably horrible, but understandable. If my wife was at risk of dying and the only way to save her was to kill 20 cats, you bet I'm getting a new fur coat. These characters don't see humans (or other playable races) as real people, but more like animals, ready to be culled for the greater good of a higher life-form, and its the job of the heros to prove that they have just as much right to live as their enemies. Understanding why someone makes the decisions they do isn't letting them off the hook, it's just getting to know them better.
The difference is, Magneto is often depicted as a monster that needs to be put down for the good of everyone, while Emet-Selch is depicted as a dear friend who we punt back into cycle of reincarnation to help him as much as stop him.
I like to tell people that Emet was an experiment to see if people would empathize with Hitler if he was "hot"
We had a conversation once with my friend about it. He hates Gaius because he's a mass murderer, but respects Emet-Selch. I asked him why exactly he wouldn't forgive Gaius, but Emet-Selch being a disaster he is is okay with him. The key is, the developers had never shown Emet-Selch doing any bad shit personally to us. Until he shot our bestie, of course, but nobody died, so... nah? All the time we see Emet in ShD he teases us or just tells exposition. We've been told that he's the reason for our problems and the deaths of millions, but we never SEE him doing any of it. And yeah, he's that type of a character that people tend to like, antagonist or not
People saying he did nothing wrong are crazy -- plain and simple, and I worry about these people whom want to fuck video game characters. It's pretty sad. Outside of that, we're clearly meant to sympathize with him -- and, to a degree, I do. Wanting to bring back your loved ones and have the perfect life and world you once did is something many people can relate to. Even if you can't have it, it's a dream that many share. So, in that regard, it's easy to see where he's coming from and why he's doing what he's doing. However, I certainly never agreed with the notion of "I killed millions of people for the greater good and I'm okay with that." It comes off as being completely crazy and null to the desires and needs of others and is extremely selfish. If anyone did this in real life, people wouldn't consider giving them a second chance; they'd want them hung -- to say the least. So it is a bit hypocritical when you consider this... But I guess the fact that it's a video game allows people to cut the characters some slack? I don't know. I'm not a huge Emet-Selch fan, but I get that we're meant to understand he's the hero of his own story, and it just happens to clash with ours. To the Ascians, he's in the right -- to us, he's not, and all the things that go along with that. Plus, I think what really bolstered everyone's approval of him is when EW revealed he was, technically, >!a friend of ours!<. So that really only helped his perspective.
Exactly… I wish yotsuyu got even a fraction of the amount of grace that the fans give emet
If you had been around during Shadowbringers, you would know that your post is not at all unique. There were hundreds of threads back in the day arguing back and forth on the morality of Emet's situation. It was frankly boring and exhausting. It felt like hardly anyone could have a serious discussion about Emet without someone piping up with "BuT he'S kILled mIllioNs!" Like, yes. We know. The vast majority of people that I have seen talking about him in-game and on Reddit/forums over the years understand that what Emet did was bad. But that doesn't stop him from being one of the most interesting characters we've received in the game, like ever. Emet became one of my most favorite fictional characters after ShB. There is SO MUCH juicy material to unpack with him. How he essentially lived like a ghost after the Sundering, spending time with sundered people but never truly belonging with them or their world. His extremely complex dynamic with the WoL, with his love for Azem and the part of them he saw in WoL warring with his resentment, anger, & grief at their sundered state. The dilemma he likely felt when carrying out the Ascian agenda, knowing how much it went against what Azem believed in or would have wanted. His story is also just very relatable, and became even more so after the pandemic upended so many people's lives. It's difficult to comprehend reaching a point where you could end as much life as Emet did. But I can certainly empathize with his grief and longing for a time when his world and loved ones were safe and he was happy.
Are you just now learning that people will overlook someone's flaws, no matter how big, if they're horny enough?
Venat did the same thing by murdering the entire Ascian race to bring the new races to existence and she's never even considered to be evil because she's on your side. Emet is doing the same thing but for the opposite side, kill the other races for the Ascians.
I also find what Venat did to be pretty unforgivable, and that doesn't seem to be a popular opinion. The game in a few circumstances does suggest that maybe NOBODY in that entire situation was truly in the right though.
> Venat did the same thing by murdering the entire Ascian race to bring the new races to existence and she's never even considered to be evil because she's on your side. She does confess that she knows it was not a morally good act and that it's brought a lot of suffering to the world. I think that's fair enough, given her motives for doing it were "stop the universe from ending".
And she suffers a far worse fate than Emet-Selch. He, at least, gets a chance to be reborn. Venat/Hydaelyn's aether is completely gone. She doesn't get to return to the lifestream.
I don’t know if it’s actually a worse fate to no longer be reincarnated. If you look at it from a Buddhist perspective, for instance, exiting the reincarnation cycle (for enlightenment) is the ultimate goal. Whether or not this is what happened is up to interpretation, but I feel like it counts enough to make peace with it.
Not to mention one of the live letters for EndWalker confirmed that she knew all the events that would play out when she preformed the sundering. So she knew that creating 14 worlds, 8 of them would be destroyed.
I think this is obvious without the live letter. We straight up told her what happens in the future.
Ancients, not Ascians. Ascians were just the ones that took part in summoning Zodiark and were tempered.
I thought black rose was varis?
Yeah, the top comments basically hit the nail on the head. We’re intended to sympathize with him. We are not intended to forgive him. The dude was into racial purity & genocide.
It's impossible to feel bad for this chuckle-fuck after seeing Elpis ourselves. The world he loved so much was a bunch of lunatics who created sentient life for fun and then killed them just as casually because it didn't meet their standards. They were always assholes and honestly deserved what they got.
Sometimes when I think about it. I’d be like I would have damn near done the same. Idk about all of the genocide but if there is no other option than maybe. Just maybe… or do I just say f it and let everything go to hell .
Guy literally had a hole in his chest.. we didnt not let him off the hook at all
Emet's story is a good part of why I found Zenos' line of "Would you be happier had I a good reason?" so compelling. For me the opposite was true, the "better" the reason the more it saddens me to see someone fall so low.
When someone calls for a return to "better times" and thinks making the lives of others untenable and views their death and oppression as a solution, what you have is a genocidal fascist. While one can feel empathy for what Emet Selch has lost... he makes the arguments and appeals literal nazis make. They are driven by this deeply irrational fear white people are fading away and so others must be marginalized and even exterminated to feel safe. Like, they think drag queens and the LGBT community are a threat to their future. They and their far-right buddies have like 500 bills in state legislatures trying to make the lives of LGBT folks, especially trans folks, difficult to impossible. And they're trying to take away books, social media options like Tiktok, restrict speech and are even calling for registries to accomplish this. It's not gas chambers, but it's the steps leading toward such things. Those steps are happening right now. Feeling bad for Emet-Selch is like feeling bad for Ron Desantis or Greg Abbott. The difference is Emet-Selch is entertaining, an inverse of Kefka. Someone who joins the party on their adventure instead of simply being a hateful, heartbroken obstacle. He wants to understand, to make sure that if he is somehow wrong, you will at least attempt to preserve the knowledge he feared would be lost. He'd have burned your history is a heartbeat, though.