Emet-Selch

[Baalfrog]

'Should become'?

Excactly! Immortality is a pretty big deal, when everything you have and everyone you know (in this case) would disappear from around him. Now if this was the world of old, then it wouldn't matter since it would be natural for them, but he is the unnatural being in this case, which would very likely shift his perspectives and he would probably end up like the elves from Lord of the Rings for example, jaded and apathetic as the world passes them by essentially.

Now here is the interesting question we should be asking, him being tempered is the key here. Anything he does with any kind of enthusiasm and fanatism really, is essentially Zodiark's plan. kill the WoL, so the threat the WoL is, is gone, which is good for return of the ancients and blablabla all that. The reason he wants to do that really is just cause Zodiark is like, bring these guys back so I have more worshippers, also so I can eat all the things. Nothing he really wants to accomplish, rejoining, genocide, bringing back his old mates, is all just so Zodiark can live. This effectively makes him a slave to a genocidal god and whoever he was is long gone. Maybe his personality and such is intact, but all his actions and fanatical belief in what he does is right, very very likely stems from the fact that there is a god poking at him and being like "Hey, do this so I can reward you! Oh, and also eat all the things!"

This all wraps up backwards pretty nicely, because in a sense, he is "human" to a sense, just absurdly strong and long lived compared to post-sundering humans, but he is a human from the world prior. So why doesn't he doubt his beliefs, why isn't he questioning anything, all we see is him (and his kin) and their endless machinations, 100% devotion to the cause, which to me tells that they are essentially slaves to Zodiark's will at this point, draving the endless strenght, patience and faith in the endgame they have, working tirelessly without doubt or ever tiring, something that even almost incomprehensibly powerful beings would eventually face in due time.

I do think that Emet-Selch is a decent villian, it does clear the whole Ascian plot quite a bit, explains a lot on how the universe works, which is all good. Buuut, overall he and the other Ascians suffer from few things, 1. they are obviously super evil, 2. they wear black coats, 3. they are nigh unkillable and probably can't die due to age and 4. are on paper so much stronger than any beings on the universe. These things mean that they are doomed to fail anyway, so there is no real tension. If Ascians are involved, you know whatever they planned on doing will eventually fail. Its just how it goes, if they did succeed, the wold would end, and now its not just a wild guess, their evil god would come and consume all life and maybe bring back a few guys, if he can even do that. So end of the world evil dudes in black coats, in a JRPG? They automatically fail, 100% of the time.

Many of his reasons were just even if his actions were not.

Are they just, when the reasons are not his own reasons, but the reasons of the god commanding him, only to quarantee the continued excistence of said god?