[Spoilers] Why Zenos is the most important character moving forward

[Jaywalker]

While the Bechdel test is not a hardline test of quality, it does highlight a specific problems. Star Wars may be well made, but that does not change the fact that the original movie only had 2 women in it within a cast of hundreds. The reason why Star Wars fails The Bechdel Test highlight a problem that most people perhaps have perhaps not considered before.


I do not cook. That does not mean I'll tolerate bad food because of it. Nor does it mean I cannot have an opinion on the food despite lacking profession credentials. I can live by having a standard.

Now if you can refute my Edax Test, then I'll perhaps come out wiser then I was before. You need not be a professional to expose any flaws in my logic.

Having two women talk to each other about something other than a man is a flawed principle for evaluation, inherently unequal in its criteria, and eliminates the possibility of treating women as default with as much respect, attention to quality, attention to detail, and focus on individual identity compared to men. It misses the forest for the trees and diminishes potentially brilliant works and characters for something ultimately insignificant. Men are not subjected to any version of this test and would not have their quality called into question if they failed to meet such criteria.

Having a quota for representation and potentially lowering the bar for representation because meeting that quota takes priority over telling the story effectively hurts representation. This is because a flood of forced, lower quality stories teaches audiences to associate representation with low quality. It's good to include a wide variety of characters across demographics because they offer a broader range in life experiences and perspectives, but they should fit the work and they should have some purpose within the work beyond existing as representation. Anything less is dehumanizing and ultimately hurts representation because the audiences WILL notice what you're doing. The path to success comes from sincere enthusiasm and being treated as normal or nothing. Because there are people capable of delivering that enthusiasm and the depth that comes with normalcy. The more they get drowned out by token characters, the more stigma goes to the represented group.

There is room for stories about just men. There is room for stories about just women. There is room for stories about men and women together. So on and so forth. The arena for sharing stories is open to anyone who chooses to tell them and can tell them well enough. It must remain that way rather than fall to identitarian censorship. That censorship just breeds resentment and further division while limiting options instead of expanding them.

You do not cook. You can understand basic things like there shouldn't be a cockroach on top of your food. You know you like the taste of some things but not others. If you go into a high end restaurant, order something prepared in a way you're not used to and don't like, then tell the chef they did it wrong and don't know what they're doing--you are in the wrong there. You don't have to like the food prepared. It isn't the fault of the chef and doesn't mean something was wrong with the food. If you want to evaluate the technical quality of an unusual food in a high end restaurant, you better know damn well what you're talking about.

Writing is not all about your feelings and how much you do or don't like something. There are different forms of writing between genres and according to whether a work draws from empathy with its characters or wish-fulfillment using stand-ins for the reader. It is ignorant to use the same criteria you would use on I don't know, Paradise Lost, for a bodice ripper.

I can refute your Edax test not only for Zenos but for a number of other characters. Zenos is obvious and easy but doesn't address your entire principle being flawed.

Zenos killing the Warrior of Light doesn't mean anything more than he needs a new rival and the Warrior of Light no longer meets his needs. It's just that simple. He does not care one bit about the Warrior of Light as an individual person, as I've said repeatedly in this and other threads. He cares about someone being strong enough to beat him. It could be literally anyone and he would be just as excited. Right now, the person he found is the Warrior of Light. If the Warrior of Light is dead, he needs to resume his search. He won't mourn us as a person. He'll mourn that the role is empty again. He is driven by very few, very simple desires but he will pursue them ruthlessly and remorselessly. There are people like that. Part of how empathy-based fiction operates involves reflecting the human experience in some way, shape, or form. This is a type of human experience. It operates with clear and understandable cause and effect motives. It is shaped by the environment it interacted with from birth and a series of experiences, all effected in-turn by born personality. It is nature and nurture both, consistently and cohesively.

We could easily have a story about the Scions struggling to deal with Zenos as he searches for new quarry while trying to fill the void left behind the Warrior of Light.

Now lets try a hypothetical villain who fails your Edax test. Lets say that the arc of this villain involves them deteriorating over time. Like Macbeth. Lets say that the villain begins as a person of decent or middling morality, but extremely low self-worth coupled with isolation. The villain is treated to a small kindness by our hero. They latch onto that and spiral deeper and deeper into obsession. Eventually they can no longer imagine life without the hero. They stalk the hero, kill competition for the hero's attention, kidnap the hero and keep them in a basement.

The hero tries to escape and, in the scuffle that follows, the villain kills them by mistake.

The absolute lack of self-worth remains, but now added to this the villain also realizes that this one person who did them a kindness, who let them feel for a while like maybe they were worth kindness, is dead. And it's their fault.

Villain commits suicide.

Boom. Technically fine character and variations off of this concept have been around for centuries. Character is tragic, has a clear arc, has motivations throughout.

Characters do not become ineffective because they are personally weak. This is part of the human experience too, and knowing that it is a possibility furthers suspense across the board because it lets audiences know that it is possible for heroes to fail. This lends weight to every victory. It's why it's important that we as the Warrior of Light lose to characters like Zenos and Ran'jit. It's why it matters that the Fuath nearly drowned us and Emet-Selch nearly turned us into an unstoppable sin eater. When you never fall and never experience vulnerability or weakness, you not only lose perspective and dramatic tension--you lose the sense of humanity that allows audiences to relate and invest. Because human beings are sometimes weak and sometimes fail. It's part of why heroes who manage to succeed despite this threat are so inspiring. They're willing to face those stakes.

I've been seriously trying to be nice to you with this. As I said before, I don't care if you don't like Zenos. This is a measurable craft and it does have objective elements not related to mechanics like spelling or grammar. Your feelings and individual preferences will not make you more right about technique.

[ObsidianFire]

The point of "The Bechdel Test" is to point out a specific problem: the number of times two women are talking about men in a way that doesn't have to do with romance happens far, far less in fictional works (especially film) then all the times they do talk about men in the context of romance. If you have women talking about men in ways that has nothing to do with romance... then great! That is a non-stereotypical way for women to talk about men! But nine times out of ten, romance is the context we see women discussing men in or worse, women never talk to each other without men around in the first place. The point is less about what the answer is and more how] the question is answered.

Edax's "Antagonist" Text does much the same thing. It honestly isn't just about if the Antagonist can progress their plans if they destroy the Protagonist (although if they can't, that is a really huge issue right off the bat). It has a lot to do with why the Antagonist can or cannot progress their plans. Zenos just happens to have bad or unsatisfactory answers and reasoning for the entire question while other villains in FFXIV don't.

BTW, can I borrow that question in other forums Edax? It's a great one to ask about a lot of unsatisfactory villains to see how it is answered and why they are so unsatisfactory...

[Liam_Harper]

I know a lot of people hate on Zenos, but he's always been one of my favorite villains for reasons that may surprise people though I hope some share this feeling as well! We've fought against Ascians and otherworldly entities bent on manipulation, destruction, and grandiose plots to warp and reshape reality itself. But Zenos? Zenos doesn't want any of that. He just wants to fight and kill strong opponents and that's always been his hook from day one. As far as villains go, I find Zenos to be refreshingly... I want to say "honest" for lack of a better term. He's completely transparent about who he is, what he wants, and what he's about. In a story full of liars and manipulators, I actually love the fact that we have a villain with such a simple goal.

I personally liked Zenos a lot as a villain and interesting personality, until it came to the whole taking the power of Primals thing. First Shinryu and now most likely he's looking towards absorbing the powers of Hydalean or Zodiark just to fight us. He went from an honest villain with an honest goal of fighting the strongest opponent purely for the hunt and the thrill, to another standard ff villain with a convoluted goal that makes little sense.

He'd be far more interesting if he wanted to fight us with his own strength. To reach the heights purely on his own.

[Cilia]

The issue with the "Edax Test" is that it operates under the assumption that the villain has a plan.

Villains like Zenos do not have plans. Zenos is like the Joker - a dog chasing cars, who wouldn't know what to do if he caught one. He doesn't have a plan or plot beyond getting a satisfying fight. He can't "progress the story if he wins" because he has no stake in the overarching mythos driving everyone else.

As a character, Zenos is very boring; as a plot element, decidedly less so. (Pointing out which was the reason this thread was made.)

[Edax]

Having two women talk to each other about something other than a man is a flawed principle for evaluation, inherently unequal in its criteria, and eliminates the possibility of treating women as default with as much respect, attention to quality, attention to detail, and focus on individual identity compared to men. It misses the forest for the trees and diminishes potentially brilliant works and characters for something ultimately insignificant. Men are not subjected to any version of this test and would not have their quality called into question if they failed to meet such criteria.

Like I said, the Bechdel test is not a hardline test of quality, it does highlight a specific problems. Understanding why A New Hope fails the Bechdel test highlights that A New Hope has a gender ratio difference of over a 99%. You talk about reverse the Bechdel test, well in the opening scene of A New Hope, a male Stormtrooper tells Vader that the plans are not in the main computer. So you have 2 men talking about something other then a woman, so it passes the reverse Bechdel Test in the first minutes of the movie.

Having a quota for representation and potentially lowering the bar for representation because meeting that quota takes priority over telling the story effectively hurts representation.

Which is why you shouldn't use quotas. The fact that A New Hope only has 2 women can be traced back to the script and the writing of George Lucas. A sacrilegious as it sounds, Star Wars could have had a better script.

Having a quota for representation and potentially lowering the bar for representation because meeting that quota takes priority over telling the story effectively hurts representation. This is because a flood of forced, lower quality stories teaches audiences to associate representation with low quality. It's good to include a wide variety of characters across demographics because they offer a broader range in life experiences and perspectives, but they should fit the work and they should have some purpose within the work beyond existing as representation. Anything less is dehumanizing and ultimately hurts representation because the audiences WILL notice what you're doing. The path to success comes from sincere enthusiasm and being treated as normal or nothing. Because there are people capable of delivering that enthusiasm and the depth that comes with normalcy. The more they get drowned out by token characters, the more stigma goes to the represented group.

There is room for stories about just men. There is room for stories about just women. There is room for stories about men and women together. So on and so forth. The arena for sharing stories is open to anyone who chooses to tell them and can tell them well enough. It must remain that way rather than fall to identitarian censorship. That censorship just breeds resentment and further division while limiting options instead of expanding them.

Here you are objectively wrong. Passing the Bechdel Test does not require quotas, censorship or forced diversity. A well written story should be capable of passing that test on it's own merits without "forcing" anything. As you say, there is room for stories about men and women so why even mention "identitarian censsorship"? It's a huge leap to even link the idea that 2 women talking to each other in a movie about something other than a man is tantamount to censorship. The two concepts don't correlate at all.

You do not cook. You can understand basic things like there shouldn't be a cockroach on top of your food. You know you like the taste of some things but not others. If you go into a high end restaurant, order something prepared in a way you're not used to and don't like, then tell the chef they did it wrong and don't know what they're doing--you are in the wrong there. You don't have to like the food prepared. It isn't the fault of the chef and doesn't mean something was wrong with the food. If you want to evaluate the technical quality of an unusual food in a high end restaurant, you better know damn well what you're talking about.

The problem with your scenario here is that I am not talking to the chef. We are both consumers of product in this forum. I am not talking directly with the creator. As you say, I can point out if there's a cockroach on my plate. You can defend the chef but when you demand my résumé, you've overstepped your bounds. I do not need professional credential to critique a product. A critic only needs to be capable of criticizing something. We don't need to encourage the Brie Larson school of gatekeeping where critics need to be a specific race, gender or profession to "count".

Writing is not all about your feelings and how much you do or don't like something. There are different forms of writing between genres and according to whether a work draws from empathy with its characters or wish-fulfillment using stand-ins for the reader. It is ignorant to use the same criteria you would use on I don't know, Paradise Lost, for a bodice ripper.

Then your not being objective. If a bodice ripper cannot match the standard of Paradise Lost, then it is not as well written. To abandon the objective standard to say otherwise would be an appeal to emotion.

Zenos killing the Warrior of Light doesn't mean anything more than he needs a new rival and the Warrior of Light no longer meets his needs. It's just that simple. He does not care one bit about the Warrior of Light as an individual person, as I've said repeatedly in this and other threads. He cares about someone being strong enough to beat him. It could be literally anyone and he would be just as excited. Right now, the person he found is the Warrior of Light. If the Warrior of Light is dead, he needs to resume his search. He won't mourn us as a person. He'll mourn that the role is empty again. He is driven by very few, very simple desires but he will pursue them ruthlessly and remorselessly. There are people like that. Part of how empathy-based fiction operates involves reflecting the human experience in some way, shape, or form. This is a type of human experience. It operates with clear and understandable cause and effect motives. It is shaped by the environment it interacted with from birth and a series of experiences, all effected in-turn by born personality. It is nature and nurture both, consistently and cohesively.

What you just described isn't a story. As you say, if Zenos wins, he stops caring. If he stops caring, there's no story. How is Zenos any different then Grynewaht, both in personality or function in the story? You can technically tell a story about a human that does nothing, but most would objectively agree that would be a bad story. If Zenos wins, the plot ends because he has no plot.

We could easily have a story about the Scions struggling to deal with Zenos as he searches for new quarry while trying to fill the void left behind the Warrior of Light.

But they wouldn't. Zenos does not care about the Scions. Zenos would have no reason to ever get out of his chair.

Now lets try a hypothetical villain who fails your Edax test. Lets say that the arc of this villain involves them deteriorating over time. Like Macbeth. Lets say that the villain begins as a person of decent or middling morality, but extremely low self-worth coupled with isolation. The villain is treated to a small kindness by our hero. They latch onto that and spiral deeper and deeper into obsession. Eventually they can no longer imagine life without the hero. They stalk the hero, kill competition for the hero's attention, kidnap the hero and keep them in a basement.

The hero tries to escape and, in the scuffle that follows, the villain kills them by mistake.

The absolute lack of self-worth remains, but now added to this the villain also realizes that this one person who did them a kindness, who let them feel for a while like maybe they were worth kindness, is dead. And it's their fault.

Villain commits suicide. Or villain goes on to try and find a substitute because they can no longer exist alone and becomes a serial kidnapper.

If the antagonist commits suicide, then the story is over. Destroying the protagonist meant the antagonist could not progress the story. Becoming a Serial Kidnapper would likely not have anything to do with the story leading up to that point. Unless it was a villain protagonist from the very start, then the story has been broken.

Either you are describing a scenario in which the story has ended and a completely new one has taken its place...or the Antagonist has successfully progressed the story after they destroyed the protagonist because they are well written. Edax Law upheld.

Also your scenario is quite reminiscent of the Amazing Spiderman. Electro's motivations completely revolved around Spiderman. If Electro succeeded and killed Spiderman, the story could no longer progress because Electro would no longer have any purpose. This is a film famed for its poor writing. Electro is not the objective standard for a well written villain.

Boom. Technically fine character and variations off of this concept have been around for centuries. Character is tragic, has a clear arc, has motivations throughout. You can switch to focus on a sibling of the villain, or a new victim, or a police officer looking into the crime. Good stories can shift focus to even a background character and make them feel like the protagonist.

Game of Thrones story survived the death of it's protagonist by the antagonist because it was well written. The Lannisters did not exist purely to oppose Ned Stark, they had their own motivations that continued after the protagonist was executed.

Characters do not become ineffective because they are personally weak. This is part of the human experience too, and knowing that it is a possibility furthers suspense across the board because it lets audiences know that it is possible for heroes to fail. This lends weight to every victory. It's why it's important that we as the Warrior of Light lose to characters like Zenos and Ran'jit as the Warrior of Light. It's why it matters that the Fuath nearly drowned us and Emet-Selch nearly turned us into an unstoppable sin eater. When you never fall and never experience vulnerability or weakness, you not only lose perspective and dramatic tension--you lose the sense of humanity that allows audiences to relate and invest. Because human beings are sometimes weak and sometimes fail. It's part of why heroes who manage to succeed despite this threat are so inspiring. They're willing to face those stakes.

I don't know what this is a reply to. I made no criticisms of physical weakness. Red herring?

This is a measurable craft and it does have objective elements not related to mechanics like spelling or grammar. Your feelings and individual preferences will not make you more right about technique.

I agree we should hold this story to an objective standard. It is a shame that you have taken my objective statements and examples about the story and implied they were subjective.

The issue with the "Edax Test" is that it operates under the assumption that the villain has a plan.

Villains like Zenos do not have plans. Zenos is like the Joker - a dog chasing cars, who wouldn't know what to do if he caught one. He doesn't have a plan or plot beyond getting a satisfying fight. He can't "progress the story if he wins" because he has no stake in the overarching mythos driving everyone else.

As a character, Zenos is very boring; as a plot element, decidedly less so. (Pointing out which was the reason this thread was made.)

But in the Dark Knight, the Joker did have a plan and he was most certainly the main antagonist. The bank heist was planned, hostage situation, letting himself get captured was planned and the boat bombs were all planned. And all the plans were tied together so that the Joker could push his ideology onto Gotham. It was all in a bid to show Gotham that they were all as ugly as himself. When the Joker said he was a dog chasing cars, he was lying to Harvey Dent. If the Joker killed Batman, then the Joker would continue to erode society of Gotham. Enough of the Joker's motivations have been established that the story could continue to run until Gotham had tore itself apart like as Bane intended. We could potentially see that the Joker was right and Batman was wrong because he had an affect on all the characters around him. If a less well written character like say the Scarecrow had killed Batman, then yes the story no longer progress because Scarecrow doesn't have any motivation beyond making people scared. What would Scarecrow do if he killed Batman? Spray someone with fear gas and then go home? -shrug-

BTW, can I borrow that question in other forums Edax? It's a great one to ask about a lot of unsatisfactory villains to see how it is answered and why they are so unsatisfactory...

Go ahead.

[Jaywalker]

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The confrontation in Bleach wasn't better. You liked it more. These are completely different things. Frankly, I find it weird, less believable, and less human that someone who supposedly lives for the challenge of a fight specifically because the rest of reality is unfulfilling would be invested in ideology or converting others to it. Reality being unfulfilling extends to other people.

Zenos commands loyalty because he leads people in combat and rewards people based on merit. He does not care if his soldiers are Ala Mhigan, or Doman, or Garlean, or anything else. They could be purple people eaters for all he cares. If they can fight well, take direction, and strive for better the way he does then they have a place by his side. This is not something that can be taken for granted in Garlemald and the gesture goes a long way, particularly with people like Fordola and Asahi. Having the heir to the empire itself treat you like an equal to any other soldier based on your abilities is a huge deal when others of status would have denied opportunity out of hand.

Warriors code does not by itself make a good character, a good leader, or a good villain. Being morally or philosophically correct doesn't either. Those both fall under things you like rather than things that are technically good. Given that Zenos is a serial killer and has no empathy, of course regular nihilists like characters from the Big Lebowski wouldn't like him. And frankly, not all nihilism is the same either.

The story about Zenos undergoing training as a kid comes from The Chronicles of Light, in book form. It is canon. You keep referencing him not working for power. The story literally shows him doing just that.

Neither Deus ex Machina nor Diabolus ex Machina were even employed in Stormblood unless you count Hildabrand, which was for absurd humor. I was referring to the very practice of using shortcut terminology to articulate a critique, which gets very sloppy very quickly and hinders communication through vagaries.

Deus ex Machina and Diabolus ex Machina both require a random event that is not in keeping with normal functions of the narrative universe to dramatically change the outcome of a situation. The sole explanation for their occurrence comes from the storyteller going "because I said so". This is not the case even remotely for either the Warrior of Light or Zenos. Both use established in-universe mechanics that apply to characters outside of themselves and reach positions of influence as a result of choices made, with said choices coming from clear motives that stem from life experiences. Dramatic and unusual events do not qualify by themselves. The example you provided would involve breaking dramatically with the terms of the narrative universe established while involving zero motive for Gabriel and Mephistopheles. If there was a battle occurring in a world where angels and demons were established previously, where it was understood as possible to share power in the way described, and there was some means or motivation behind the occurrence--there is zero issue between two human warriors having a Gabriel versus Mephistopheles fight. It could even have a historical bent to it for something weird and campy as long as the rest was built up adequately.

Dismissing chosen one narratives actually limits human experience and agency. They can be executed well or poorly, but when executed well they can offer unique insight to how being forced into a position of tremendous responsibility can wear a person down and what it takes to endure despite that. It also offers a look at how the chosen one manages free will and how their personality and choices ultimately make being a chosen one less something imposed from outside and more something that they choose because the alternative isn't acceptable in their own eyes. They are chosen because their identity, personality, and values have shaped them into the person who feels driven to carry out the role despite obstacles and sometimes terrible costs. The Warrior of Light qualifies for this.

A well done character would be able to display agency even locked alone in a cell for the entire story with no means of escape. A good writer could execute that.

Zenos will probably need to be dealt with like an Ascian and/or he will encounter character development that pushes him to removing his artificial Echo himself. Alternatively, the Resonant can be defeated using means that haven't been explored in the plot yet. We don't know everything about how he even got an artificial Echo, let alone the mechanics of aether in Eorzea. We only just learned about the souls of dead children lingering as pixies.

You're not correct about Joker or about staying power in static villains. Joker tries to push an ideology in Christopher Nolan's series. This is not his primary or entire existence. Sometimes Joker is light and campy. Sometimes Joker remembers his past differently moment to moment, has the same lingering emptiness and lack of direction Zenos has, and tries to both find meaning by becoming a symbol. The way he treats Batman in these incarnations is essentially the same way Zenos treats the Warrior of Light: Bruce Wayne is irrelevant and doesn't matter. He doesn't want to know about Bruce Wayne, he wants a fellow symbol in Batman. Likewise for the personal identity of the Warrior of Light. Some versions of the Joker just don't care about other people and think it's fun to commit horrible acts in funny ways and see how people freak out about something he sees as not a big deal.

The Joker stays because he is very good at foiling against Batman both personally and symbolically when there is an overarching theme within Batman about the relationship between being a person and being a symbol. For FFXIV the WoL is developing a gallery too, and the villains we've encountered frequently look at different pieces of the WoL's character or WoL's mission. How things could go wrong with different priorities or circumstances.

You still miss the point of Zenos and what he's trying to do.

It's not about fun. It never has been. He doesn't need to try to change the world or society. Sometimes stories are about people trying to connect to others. Sometimes those people fail.

Zenos, again, is someone who has zero value for personal connection. He doesn't care if he gets sung a lullaby every night by a mother trying to love him. The lullaby accomplishes nothing and he doesn't even see a person looking at his mother. He doesn't see someone with as much consciousness as him, and even if she does have that it doesn't really matter to his life except that she thinks to feed and take care of him while he's an infant who can't take care of himself.

Zenos does not get fulfilled by receiving praise and it doesn't upset him to be reprimanded. That requires investing in another person's identity. He is a purely self-oriented and physical creature. Nothing else is necessarily real to him. There is nothing to do and no direction in that. He does like challenging himself, but if the challenges are all predictable then it's easy to finish and the challenge goes away. At least with a challenge he's working toward something, he has a goal. The reason it's combat for him is because combat offers stakes, unpredictability, a possibility of death. Suddenly, instead of nothing and certainty there's suspense. He has to actually try, and if he fails there are consequences that could change things irrevocably. That tension plus adrenaline and the need to push himself toward a goal offer direction. More than fun, it's an escape from an existence he considers empty.

And again. There are people like that in the real world.

If you need a look at the world according to Zenos, life is empty and meaningless in itself. People fade and die and there are no threads tying one person's experience to another. The only meaning that can be found comes from the challenges you find for yourself. Some of these challenges take the form of beasts. Some take the form of people, who are essentially the same thing. And if a beast can give him the gift of meaning and direction, that's something to be treasured.

How caveman.

He literally pushes both Asahi and Fordola through insane development arcs, and he is indirectly responsible for the arcs of countless others from the witness to his slaughter of an entire Doman resistance squadron to Ilberd and Yotsuyuu.

Bladerunner is well-written and has a tremendous amount of thought poured into it on both literal and non-literal levels. This spans not only the world but the characters themselves. It isn't remembered only for being first or for an aesthetic only. I'm completely astounded you don't see the relevance or shift in meanings between Decker being a replicant or not a replicant given he spends the whole movie killing replicants who seem more human than him. Do you not realize that there are statements to made in stories told through ambiguity and that "can't decide" is a deliberate open-ended question to the audience?

Based on your response to Khalithar, you seem to actively want to put down anyone who sees something in a character you personally don't like. It doesn't help your case, especially since you don't seem to understand that non-intellectual and sometimes humorous characters like Grynewaht can also be tragic and horrifying.

[KageTokage]

I'm honestly hoping that if anything, he ends up just being another tool for the Ascians and that Elidibus ends up being the bigger problem in 6.0.

The latter has been present since the early days of ARR and I really want to see him get a resolution as good as, if not better then Emet-Selch did.

[ShinShimon]

Zenos is you, the player. You spend all your time roaming this world, spending every day killing and nearly being killed yourself. You do this for fun, to momentarily escape from the meaninglessness of your existence. For all the lofty motives you have have as the Warrior of Light, you cannot escape the fact that you and Zenos are kindred spirits. He's simply more honest about it.

The finale of 6.0 will be the single greatest 1v1 in video game history. Get hype for the Crystalbowl.

[Nononu]

Ech, nevermind. I've no desire to "debate" with someone who flings their "experience" around on a completely subjective matter like this. Even less interested when a one-note villain like Joker is brought into the discussion, but I mean, it is a thread about Zenos, so birds of a feather and all that.

[Jaywalker]

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The standard of even employing a test like the Bechdel test as a requirement, for anyone, is nonsense. Having two women in a movie isn't inherently a problem. Having two men in a movie isn't inherently a problem. If there are two movies about women or made by women when more women than that are capable and interested in making movies, that's a problem. Derailing conversations and plots from what they otherwise might have been focusing on just so you can tell everyone you passed the Bechdel test is ridiculous and does a disservice to the work. The idea that female characters who are otherwise fully fleshed out and well-developed are somehow diminished because they didn't talk to each other about something other than a man is absolutely sexist. Men who are under those same circumstances in reverse, Star Wars or otherwise, would not be considered diminished in that manner. As a basic observation of how much something does or doesn't happen without judgment it's fine, but the number of people who use it that way is minuscule.

I think it's funny you assume I find Star Wars to be high quality and I think it's hysterical that you think you are in the slightest position to talk about objective correctness when you didn't read the words I wrote or even your own post.

Quotas would be brought up in instances where people are voicing complaints about how many of X or Y demographic appear in a piece of media. Which you did, even in your reply, citing two women in A New Hope. A well-written story does not need to force women into a story where it doesn't make sense for them to be or in a capacity that derails from the story. Same for men. Same for anyone. I personally don't think Star Wars is particularly well done. It's a very archetypal story and resonates with a lot of people successfully because of that. It doesn't do anything particularly complicated or groundbreaking, it has issues with how it references Asian cultures throughout, and it's somewhat limited in approach. It's fine for what it is, but certainly not technical mastery.

Lol you're not talking to the chef and you're not getting cockroaches. You're literally doing the equivalent of complaining that you don't like your perfectly executed soufflé to a professional food critic as a random customer who likes desserts but has never had a soufflé and certainly doesn't know how to make them. Anyone can give a critique but if your critique is uninformed and demonstrates an absolute lack of awareness, you deserve to be called on that. It has nothing to do with credentials or identity politics. I mentioned my experience because I was talking objectively, and I wanted to let you know that it was because I have a weird background most people are very unlikely to have. It is a dramatically different situation than it would have been if I didn't have that. I literally invited more challenges and questions because I wanted to show that regardless it's important to go on merit of arguments and explore a lot of options.

What I had been trying to tell you gently before was that you are coming across as inexperienced and are talking to someone who has moved well past what you're doing and has managed to use that to get a position of some rank through the merit of my work. This is my job, which I earned over a long period of time after extensive study that covered and went beyond the points you're referencing.

I do understand the approach you're using. Part of why I've bothered trying to explain this is because I also understand why it's wrong. At first I seriously wanted to help you as someone who's been there, and as someone who's seen professionals just get mean in situations like this. At this point, because you've been rude repeatedly and don't seem to have the humility to recognize your likes and dislikes are not objective, I'm just addressing the points in case it helps someone else. After that I plan to turn in.

For what it's worth, there's more for me to learn too. I learn important things on the job every day, from all kinds of people. I don't expect this to stop anytime soon. I also know what knowledge I've established as solid, how, and why. And I know from having gone through this that what you're proposing does not work and offers a scope that is neither broad nor deep enough to be truly effective.

You have zero grasp of how standards of quality shift according to the tradition and purpose of a work, and with your comment on Paradise Lost versus bodice rippers have just demonstrated that you are in fact a one trick pony. And more than that, you're unfortunately the kind of one trick pony who is too inflexible to perform a really unique or impressive trick.

You can have an objective set of criteria that is employed for wish-fulfillment. You can have an objective set of criteria used for literary fiction, and a different set for upmarket, and another set for commercial. All of these subcategories can also be applied to things like Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Women's Fiction, Historical Drama, Thrillers, Horror, the works. There needs to be an in-depth understanding of each category and how they operate in order to effectively gauge how successful a work is within that category. To judge a piece that draws from wish-fulfillment on how well it builds empathy and literary technique is stupid. It misses the entire point of works in that vein while acting to homogenize the way stories are evaluated in a manner that is uninformative and ultimately ineffective.

Again, laughing because of course there's a story for Zenos. The way he finds his next worthy opponent is by creating more strife to inspire others to rise against him the way the Warrior of Light did. He's hardly going to stop moving just because the role is empty again. If anything, succeeding once is likely to encourage him to keep going with his methods because clearly something went right. And the Scions getting involved would be because they would never sit back and let Zenos continue wreaking havoc that way, even if none of them are worthy in his eyes.

Grynewaht was motivated by anger, frustration, and a desire to prove himself in the eyes of others as someone who was treated with disrespect constantly. He took it to a point of extreme self-mutilation that ultimately ended in death. The self-mutilation parallels with Zenos' suicide, but not only is Zenos' status and indifference to the opinions of others a huge difference (note that it doesn't matter what answer is given to his invitation to while away the hours together, which is specifically because you're not a person to him so much as a role)--it's also extremely significant that he kills himself because he has never worked so hard or exerted so much power in his life only to have his opponent endure everything and win. He has meaning and direction, and can't imagine being happier or pushing harder than he had in that moment. He gave everything he had and wanted to end with that feeling forever.

One death was despair, the other was triumph.

There is an extremely famous and critically acclaimed story by I believe Proust, about a man rolling over in bed. There's another story by Kafka that was highly experimental and again, critically acclaimed, about a small burrowing creature. No other living things exist in that story. It is absolutely possible to tell a story about a character doing nothing well. You just probably wouldn't like it.

Antagonist committing suicide would fail your test but tell a powerful story about human despair. Ending the story with the suicide does not mean the story no longer works or that the villain is an ineffective character. Likewise, if the other route is taken and the villain tries to kidnap more people there is still room for a story to be told. Clearly you've never seen Psycho if you don't think there's a story to be told where the protagonist is murdered by a serial killer lol.

There is too much to be said about Amazing Spider-Man 2. What I'll leave that point at is that Electro was never the reason that movie struggled.

There wasn't even a single protagonist in Game of Thrones and it's silly to argue as such. It is a massive fixture that the plot operates through multiple protagonists.

Reread. Personal weakness is not physical and this is no red herring, you just weren't paying attention.

You are too narrow-minded and surface-level to have a realistic grasp on what would be an effective objective evaluation of storytelling technique. You think it's a shame I pointed out spots your subjectivity is showing, I think it's a shame you've cut yourself off at the knees like this.