Emet-Selch *Major Spoilers*

[Morningstar1337]

All i see is a sob story...

I think I can see where your coming from. But I must put mu 2 gil in the matter.

The way I see it there are two types of villians

• The card-carrying type. Usually flat, usually revels in villainy and usually makes their mustache twirling evil apparent. A staple of stories with more clear cut morality. Executed poorly (bar that effect being intentional) they are less characters and more forces of evil
• And then there's the sympathetic type: Which can range to reluctant villain to anti villain to even antihero. They usually aren't evil for the sake of it like the above, and thus they tend to have Freudian excuse backstory (which despite the term may not actually excuse their actions). Sometimes they are the well-intentioned extremists who seeks to achieve good ends via bad means, other times they are desperate souls who think they have no choice but to do what they do to archive some end, and sometimes they are just villains who have some sort of standards that make them more noble incomaprison to the other villains.

For the former, we have only Zenos and some of the Ascians, for the latter we have Yotsuyu, The Ascians (including the member of whom this thread is named) and Gaius. But the thing is...

• None of them are redeemed per se IMO, Yotsusu died a tragic but deserving death but she became a monster of her own making so she had to go.
• Emet-selch has sympathetic motives but his ends were at odds with everyone else and I'd argue that he was bordering on "master race" ideology.
• Gaius is on our side but he still harbors the same kind of ideology that the Ascians had, and only dislikes being used by them. He is arguably still the same kind of fascist that would be anathema to anyone that id both good and isn't drowning in their flavor-aid (which is likely why are characters still disdain him). He's only in it to settle personal scores with the Ascians and try to save his orphans he unknowingly doomed. The Weapon storyline might change that but for now I put him in the same running as the Diamonds of Steven Universe among others, not quite redeemed yet (and this is at best).

Anyway my point is that this is a grey game and therefore it has a lot more gray villains, but I do kinda agree that we need a bit more evil-for-its-own-sake villains

As an addendum I must point out that Valthrey it also in the grey category and similar to Yotsusu in some aspects. His upbringing left him with a superiority complex and a severe lack of empathy, meaning he is as pitiable as Yotsusu and as irredeemable, both are borderline.