Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
To be honest I'm not sure where we disagree.

Arguably, Emet-Selch wrote a fan-fic and gave it a chance to play out but the Warrior of Light didn't validate his headcanon, lol.
We don't agree because I'm suggesting that Emet-Selch actually got his most preferred outcome and the one he put the most work into making possible.

After WoL defeats Innocence, Emet has effectively already completely won. He didn't need to do a single thing except wait, and WoL would turn into a Sin Eater and shift the aether of the First back into a state of rejoining. From the perspective you're saying he had, the game was up right then. Instead, he tells everyone where he could be found, thus allowing the Scions to track him down.

I'll stress again, he had absolutely no reason to do this. His "invitation for an abomination" simply makes no sense. Indeed his entire creation of the phantom Amaurot makes no sense from the standpoint you say he was acting from, because it served no purpose towards his plans for the rejoining. Rather, he created the city, the elaborate scenario of the Final Days, and the Azem stone all for the purpose of informing WoL and pushing them to see if they could overcome and be true to the person Azem was. Even Hythlodaeus' creation, which he suggests was just an accident, was clearly calculated to give more information about the sundering to WoL and reveal their connection to Ardbert, something which Emet had likely already seen in advance. And we can take this to be the case because the reveal of the stone shows that Hythlodaeus was something Emet orchestrated rather than an offminded mistake. WoL passing the test and not being broken by everything, therefore allowing Emet to finally give up his burdens and entrust the future to someone he could recognize as his old friend, was the ending he most wanted but the one he believed in the least.

If the plan for the rejoinings was Emet's 12,000 year-old painstakingly scripted dramatic play, what he ultimately ended up seeing acted out on the stage was in fact his impossible guilty-pleasure fanfic where everything miraculously came together at the 11th hour.