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

[Kallera]

It would be pretty ironic if the Garlean people flock to Zenos because the WoL's reputation over there has grown into making them a harbinger of chaos and death, threatening a repeat of history between people wanting a check on a seemingly unstoppable power...

[Gaethan_Tessula]

Can the Antagonist progress the story if they kill the Protagonist? If not, then the Antagonist is poorly written.

I'll add my queue to the people who object to this statement. It seems by your signature that you later qualified it to "destroy," which is better because it allows for the antagonist to ruin the protagonist non-lethally and still qualify, but I'm still not sure this is true.

I'll admit I have personal reason for this. I am not a good writer, and my "writing" is running tabletop instead of any medium over which I have full creative control, but one of the antagonists I found most interesting to run required the cooperation of a PC and would have found it quite counterproductive to kill them. Long story short, the antagonist in question is an entity which once caused immense ruin to any land in which it roamed, offering powerful bargains that inevitably monkey-paw'd on those who took them up.

To mitigate its power, a Mage tricked it into entering a pact wherein its power would be greatly suppressed for the duration of the deal, then engineered her own death to leave the deal unfulfilled. This left the entity more on the level of "Needful Things" instead of "God-Hand," a situation it detests. Its one hope is that the wording of the pact that left it without dissolution in the case of death ALSO meant that the oath could be fulfilled by another Mage if they meet a stringent set of criteria. It spends the next few hundred years futilely trying to create such a successor to the bargain, leaving shattered small communities and lives in its wake.

Skip forward to the present day, and the PC's are a cabal whose lives (mostly unbeknownst to them) have been partially shaped by the knock-on effects of this thing's machinations. One of them meets the criteria it's looking for (ironically NOT because of its efforts). The creature knows this, and openly tries to befriend the cabal so that it can trick or persuade the PC in question to fulfill the old deal and free it. Meanwhile, it works against their interests from the shadows in order to make its frontal offers of assistance more enticing (and also because it needs to create its monkey-paw deals in order to feed on the resulting symbolism).

Until/unless the thing is freed from its oath, killing or otherwise removing the protagonists won't progress the story. At best, it allows the creature to draw a new jumbo cactpot ticket, pray the numbers all match, and hope that the next candidate is more pliable. And while immortal, its patience for its reduced stature has its limits, so it doesn't want to reroll the dice unless it really, really has to (like, if the party figures out a way to put an end to it more completely).

Perhaps this is, in fact, a fatally flawed concept for an antagonist, but I'd prefer to think any deficiencies result from my execution and not the foundation of the idea.

And if he does create more victims in order for us to care about him, well, that kind of runs into the whole issue that we don't care about him, we only care about making him go away.

Obviously, Zenos is not the only instance of this happening, even in just the Final Fantasy series. Of the ones I've played, Zeromus kind of springs to mind.

I agree, and I DO agree with Edax that Zenos just can't carry THE story of FF14, even if I disagree with the Edax Test. Zenos already played his part, as plot device and as a way to compare/contrast his motivations for racking up such a large body count with the WoL's (whether Zenos is mostly right or utterly wrong depends on the player in question, but even being able to reject him is an important character moment... for the WoL and not Zenos). I am deeply, deeply afraid that modern SE is going to hand the reigns to Zenos and let him destroy the world because "hey, that worked with Kefka!" while ignoring WHY that worked with Kefka in the context of FF6.

As to other FF's, sometime they're even worse. Zero/Zeromus only seems to exist so that Golbez can have a heel-face turn, something that I feel actually took AWAY from the reveal of "Cecil, I am your brother!"

FF in general seems to like trading out a great/good plot for a worse one somewhere along the line. I love FF9, but it's a great example of that.

[Edax]

I'll add my queue to the people who object to this statement. It seems by your signature that you later qualified it to "destroy," which is better because it allows for the antagonist to ruin the protagonist non-lethally and still qualify, but I'm still not sure this is true.

I'll admit I have personal reason for this. I am not a good writer, and my "writing" is running tabletop instead of any medium over which I have full creative control, but one of the antagonists I found most interesting to run required the cooperation of a PC and would have found it quite counterproductive to kill them. Long story short, the antagonist in question is an entity which once caused immense ruin to any land in which it roamed, offering powerful bargains that inevitably monkey-paw'd on those who took them up.

To mitigate its power, a Mage tricked it into entering a pact wherein its power would be greatly suppressed for the duration of the deal, then engineered her own death to leave the deal unfulfilled. This left the entity more on the level of "Needful Things" instead of "God-Hand," a situation it detests. Its one hope is that the wording of the pact that left it without dissolution in the case of death ALSO meant that the oath could be fulfilled by another Mage if they meet a stringent set of criteria. It spends the next few hundred years futilely trying to create such a successor to the bargain, leaving shattered small communities and lives in its wake.

Skip forward to the present day, and the PC's are a cabal whose lives (mostly unbeknownst to them) have been partially shaped by the knock-on effects of this thing's machinations. One of them meets the criteria it's looking for (ironically NOT because of its efforts). The creature knows this, and openly tries to befriend the cabal so that it can trick or persuade the PC in question to fulfill the old deal and free it. Meanwhile, it works against their interests from the shadows in order to make its frontal offers of assistance more enticing (and also because it needs to create its monkey-paw deals in order to feed on the resulting symbolism).

Until/unless the thing is freed from its oath, killing or otherwise removing the protagonists won't progress the story. At best, it allows the creature to draw a new jumbo cactpot ticket, pray the numbers all match, and hope that the next candidate is more pliable. And while immortal, its patience for its reduced stature has its limits, so it doesn't want to reroll the dice unless it really, really has to (like, if the party figures out a way to put an end to it more completely).

Perhaps this is, in fact, a fatally flawed concept for an antagonist, but I'd prefer to think any deficiencies result from my execution and not the foundation of the idea.

If your antagonist realized its plans and recovered its powers, then he would be able to destroy the protagonists and continue on with its story. Is that correct?
I don't have the full story but it does seem the antagonist is lacking a compelling reason to cause ruin. If the antagonist wins, the story might be less interesting if all it amounts to is a montage of meaningless destruction.

[Gaethan_Tessula]

If your antagonist realized its plans and recovered its powers, then he would be able to destroy the protagonists and continue on with its story. Is that correct?

Yes, though at that point it would prefer to have them serve it, and could potentially even outright ignore them if it wanted to (mechanically, while even weak Mages can do some very impressive things and anything with a stat block can be hypothetically defeated, this entity at full power has little to fear from the cabal). At any rate, the game is likely over at that juncture even if the story could hypothetically continue.

I don't have the full story but it does seem the antagonist is lacking a compelling reason to cause ruin. If the antagonist wins, the story might be less interesting if all it amounts to is a montage of meaningless destruction.

I suppose I can elaborate a little more on why it does what it does.

1. It wants to go home. In this system's setting, there are two worlds: one of pure platonic symbols (the Supernal) and a "phenomenal" world created by the confluence of Supernal symbols. Magic is worked by aligning the Phenomenal and the Supernal.

In any case, after a time some Mages found a way to get to the Supernal bodily and proposed to control the Supernal (and thus the Phenomenal) directly, purportedly for the good of mankind. Others disagreed that any one group of people should have that sort of power, and a war was fought that reached into the Supernal itself. The climax of this battle rent reality asunder, estranging the Supernal and the Phenomenal, resulting in the latter being filled with untrue Lies (ie. "magic doesn't exist"), and most importantly to my story threw many Supernal symbols into the Fallen Phenomenal as incarnate entities.

Existing in the Fallen is painful physically, mentally, and spiritually, doubly so for those fallen symbols who originated from the Supernal. The only way to escape the Fallen, either for mortal mages or the displaced "earthbound" symbols, is to ascend to the Supernal, a process that involves aligning oneself into a symbol for some aspect of the world itself (put more plainly, if you mold the world into a state that reflects who you are and what you think reality should be, you ascend to the Supernal and become a Truth of the universe). Our displaced symbol of fairness here thus set out to make deals and bring the world into alignment with itself, allowing it to return home. However...

2. Being exposed to the Lies of the Fallen world twisted the symbolism at the heart of this entity. Whereas before it was similar to a Nu Mou on a godlike scale when manifested outside the Supernal, requiring deals of precise mutual compensation, now it could also grant one-sided wishes for mortals so long as it also inflicted them with a proportionate curse to go with their requested boon. Though aware of this corruption, the entity found that men in their diminished state after the fall could offer it little in return for its services. With such small acts of mutual aid, the earthbound despaired of ever seeing the Supernal again. However, while men's means were limited, their desires were infinite, and taking advantage of the Lie that infected it allowed the earthbound to have a much bigger impact upon the world much more easily. Especially if it could get people to try and fix the consequences of their deals with still more deals.

3. The more the entity utilizes the Lie festering within, the more that Lie becomes the whole of its being. This is one of the reasons why it never thought to return to its original, benevolent methods after being tricked into losing much of its power. The other being that, between small virtues and petty evils, people tend towards the latter in this setting. Doling out small cursed wishes was thus still the easier and faster route to attaining its goals, or so it believes.

If it got its power back and bent or destroyed the cabal, it'd set out to bend the world towards resembling itself again. Unfortunately for it, down its current path getting to the Supernal is impossible. The Lie will eventually consume it completely, and it will become one more foundation of Untruth keeping people asleep and trapped in the Fallen.

[Edax]

Yes, though at that point it would prefer to have them serve it, and could potentially even outright ignore them if it wanted to (mechanically, while even weak Mages can do some very impressive things and anything with a stat block can be hypothetically defeated, this entity at full power has little to fear from the cabal). At any rate, the game is likely over at that juncture even if the story could hypothetically continue.

The point being is that your antagonist would past The Edax Test, because it has motivations beyond the protagonist and could destroy the protagonist to resume it's personal goals if it had won the story's conflict. It's a question of "What happens if the antagonist wins?" and not a question of "Can the antagonist destroy the protagonist at any time?". Badly written antagonists are often used as cardboard props to serve as obstacles for the protagonist to overcome because the story needs a conflict. If the antagonist wins and you realize the result would be nothing, then it highlights that the story's conflict was near pointless.

[Cilia]

My issue with the "Edax Test" is that it's not really a test - it's an assertion, and that can be challenged.

"Zenos killing the Warrior of Light doesn't advance the plot, therefore he is poorly written."
-Not necessarily...

What constitutes "good writing" and "bad writing" are somewhat subjective, so trying to apply an objective criteria to determine those is bound to fail.

[Edax]

My issue with the "Edax Test" is that it's not really a test - it's an assertion, and that can be challenged.

"Zenos killing the Warrior of Light doesn't advance the plot, therefore he is poorly written."
-Not necessarily...

What constitutes "good writing" and "bad writing" are somewhat subjective, so trying to apply an objective criteria to determine those is bound to fail.

Would saying that Zenos would be underwritten be more objective?

[YianKutku]

Would saying that Zenos would be underwritten be more objective?

I suppose it depends on what a given person would feel is "sufficiently written".

Subjectively for me, Zenos falls under the category of either being under-written, or sufficiently written, but there's simply not much there. Which almost directly leads into the criticism that if he feels this under-written after an entire expansion about him (not counting whatever is in store in future patches), then there might be a problem with narrative pacing.

[RopeDrink]

There's plenty of people who don't like Zenos, which is fine. There's also plenty who do, me being one of them. Not that it matters but I'll be skipping posts that speak as if 'we all hate X' is some given truth that applies to the masses. It should be a two-way discussion, not a celebration of one's own opinion, like it applies to everyone (which it doesn't).

It's also depressing when people lean so heavily on the 'can the story go forward if the antagonist wins' mantra when the game is an MMORPG that will never allow this to happen outside of duties where you might control someone else temporarily, so it's just a self-made setup that doesn't really mean much. If this was a book, or a movie, or any media which doesn't rely on the player being the ever-present Numero Uno and the biggest star of the show, then you'd be on to something. But it's not. The story will always go on with us, either as the front-runner or following beside it as a spectator. This will continue until the game dies, or they make an effort to have its characters become more equal to the WoL.

The story actually can go ahead with Zenos, provided you stop putting a magnifying glass on his self-centric goal and more on what his goals do to the surrounding world (and its characters). We've had so many villains built up over the years and the majority have (and will) end with some grandiose agenda-pushing speech before their inevitable defeat by the WoL (along with some words about how they couldn't fathom the idea of being bested by someone who has been CRUSHING EVERYTHING LEFT AND RIGHT FOR YEARS). Even Emet fell into this writing trap. Zenos wasn't one of them.

We've had plenty of Garlean antagonists, most of which have something to like and/or hate about them, but for the most part, almost all of them have had some form of agenda in the background that works through them. Zenos isn't one of them. It's funny, I've actually like the vast majority of Garlean antagonists, especially Nero, Regula, Gaius and Zenos, as well as the others, but as much as you hate him, you have to respect the simple fact that Zenos is a mile apart from all of them in almost every way.

In short, I like him because he's that huge variable. You don't have to like him to see that such a character is far more capable of unpredictability compared to the rest. He has absolutely no interest in the empire as a whole and barely ever had, which in itself is going to cause a lot of problems (assuming Varis is 100% dead). Even if Varis wasn't, this is going to cause turmoil and I suspect one of the larger themes will be the end-result of the Empire (be it totally destroyed, taken over by a new leader, or whathaveyou). Zenos being given insight about Zodi/Hyde/First thanks to Elidibus is bad-news-bears for EVERYONE on the source, more-so without the WoL. They're just lucky that his thrill-seeking doesn't involve any particular value in something disastrous like Black Rose (but I highly doubt that BRose was written in just to be cut short by Zenos. He may have little value in it himself, but he's also the type of character that will resort to anything if it helps him get what he wants). It's clear Zenos is a space-trip distance away from redemption, yet someone so unashamedly self-centred is also not destined to only do evil things. Even unintentionally, someone so self-absorbed could achieve things regardless of whether the result aligns with X bad group or Y good group, however small. If Black Rose does die out, then it'll have been mostly thanks to Zenos cutting the head off the empire out of greed.

Having said all that, I do not believe Zenos will be the primary antagonist. Just like we hunted Vauthry, only for it to result in a curve-ball and immediately point to something bigger, Zenos will likely be the face on the carton but not the contents. He'll most certainly cause a hell of a lot of trouble, but such a situation is what someone like Elidibus needs to work with and plot a bigger scheme. I doubt even Elidibus will be the one, but you can rest assured it won't be Zeno-Zeno-Zeno-Zeno-Zenobreaker for the entirety.

[Edax]

It's also depressing when people lean so heavily on the 'can the story go forward if the antagonist wins' mantra when the game is an MMORPG that will never allow this to happen outside of duties where you might control someone else temporarily, so it's just a self-made setup that doesn't really mean much. If this was a book, or a movie, or any media which doesn't rely on the player being the ever-present Numero Uno and the biggest star of the show, then you'd be on to something. But it's not. The story will always go on with us, either as the front-runner or following beside it as a spectator. This will continue until the game dies, or they make an effort to have its characters become more equal to the WoL.

I would say it's inspiring that people would want better written villians in their video games. Just because the antagonist's game function is little more then bullet sponges doesn't mean they should have to have the motivations of a sponge. When you look at a game like Mass Effect, you have an antagonist with goals outside of the protagonist. This gives the story conflict stakes and elevates the main antagonist above the henchmen. Just because the game cannot let the antagonist win doesn't mean the antagonist shouldn't be fleshed out.

We've had plenty of Garlean antagonists, most of which have something to like and/or hate about them, but for the most part, almost all of them have had some form of agenda in the background that works through them. Zenos isn't one of them. It's funny, I've actually like the vast majority of Garlean antagonists, especially Nero, Regula, Gaius and Zenos, as well as the others, but as much as you hate him, you have to respect the simple fact that Zenos is a mile apart from all of them in almost every way.

In short, I like him because he's that huge variable. You don't have to like him to see that such a character is far more capable of unpredictability compared to the rest. He has absolutely no interest in the empire as a whole and barely ever had, which in itself is going to cause a lot of problems (assuming Varis is 100% dead). Even if Varis wasn't, this is going to cause turmoil and I suspect one of the larger themes will be the end-result of the Empire (be it totally destroyed, taken over by a new leader, or whathaveyou). Zenos being given insight about Zodi/Hyde/First thanks to Elidibus is bad-news-bears for EVERYONE on the source, more-so without the WoL. They're just lucky that his thrill-seeking doesn't involve any particular value in something disastrous like Black Rose (but I highly doubt that BRose was written in just to be cut short by Zenos. He may have little value in it himself, but he's also the type of character that will resort to anything if it helps him get what he wants). It's clear Zenos is a space-trip distance away from redemption, yet someone so unashamedly self-centred is also not destined to only do evil things. Even unintentionally, someone so self-absorbed could achieve things regardless of whether the result aligns with X bad group or Y good group, however small. If Black Rose does die out, then it'll have been mostly thanks to Zenos cutting the head off the empire out of greed.

Zenos isn't even remotely like Grynwaht in any way, shape or form.

I have already made numerous comparisons between Grynwhat and Zenos. Grynwaht is that Garlean antagonist that is alike to Zenos, one that cares not for the Empire but only cares about fighting with with the WoL. It's been done already, in the same expansion even. The only hope we have here is that Zenos doesn't become the main antagonist and just becomes a secondary antagonist. And even then, there's not much to be gained from having Zenos on screen. None of his words have value to the WoL or by extension the player.