Tired of Zenos (spoilers)

[MarsAstro]

She also wrote the drk quests did she not? Which also ended up being crazy sob story. I felt the ascians had depth because ever since arr [... snip for character limit ...] They gave him only 2 patches to try and flesh out his character and failed miserably, whereas we have zenos now who’s had more screen time than him and he’s only been around since 4.0 whereas Elidibus has been around since 2.0.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to reduce the DRK questline to just a "crazy sob story", but otherwise I see where you're coming from. I'm still not sold on Elidibus being a repeat of Emet simply because they did similar things though, fundamentally they were quite different characters. Even if the conclusion to Elidibus was a little weak, it was still different to Emet's character arc. You can make anything sound like they're the same thing if you simplify it enough, but if you look at the details they are clearly two different characters arcs. I wish they'd spent more time fleshing out Elidibus too, but it wasn't terrible. I'm assuming they rushed it a little bit to get it out of the way before Endwalker, since the whole "sympathetic Ascians" were probably supposed to be a Shadowbringers thing. I'll be disappointed if they pull something similar for Zenos and/or Fandaniel, I'd hate if they try to flesh them out as a tragic sympathetic villains too. I don't expect them to do that though, I'm pretty sure that was simply a theme for Ascians in Shadowbringers.

Ishikawa is a good writer, but adopting the same approach to sympathy building across more antagonists will get old quickly for me. I am a person who is more interested in setting lore than feelz, and I want Fandaniel at the least to deliver on the former, if nothing else. Applying such an approach to Zenos would disappoint me even more, particularly after Yoshi has said they don't do half-measures when it comes to sympathetic vs unsympathetic characters, and he specifically names Zenos as an example of the latter. So I am not taking a blind faith approach in her writing ability to "improve" him.

Yeah, personally I don't think Zenos needs to be, or even should be, "improved" as a character. His personality and motivations are pretty fixed at this point, and trying to rewrite him into something else would feel dishonest and forced to me. I think the way to improve his continued inclusion in the story will solely have to be through setting a stage in which his personality fits the narrative and offers an interesting dynamic between him and the other characters, all while keeping him true to his character so far. Giving his part in the story a conclusion that's unexpected but fitting would also be nice.