[ENDWALKER SPOILER!] On Zenos

[StealthPaladin]

All I can say is:

1. I absolutely love Zenos being involved with the ending as he was
2. While both Zenos and WoL avoid being honest about it, you probably really do need Zenos's dragon form to fight the Endbringer
3. When it is all said and done, WoL must surely know if he doesn't face Zenos, he will cause carnage in the future trying to get your attention
4. Zenos is a force of sheer willpower. Originally without aether his strength must logically come from innate dynamis usage, so that's a thing
5. Zenos is obviously not dead, and if he were, it wouldn't matter. Death obviously doesn't stick to Zenos very much -- no like it or not, whereas I certainly do like it, Zenos is very probably somewhat like Kain of FF4 and will soon join your party

[StealthPaladin]

Zenos is a fairly one note, on dimensional character. Whether you like him or not is largely going to come down to whether the one thing he has appeals to you or not. For some people they like him, for some of us we're not into it and that leaves him with nothing else to offer us as a character.

mmmm I think he is flat on purpose, because it is only the very base of his character to come.

[Loggos]

I've said for a long time that our character is Goku. We are a positive flat character. Our entire purpose in the story is to grow stronger and be the inspiration of hope. If we're Goku, then Zenos is definitely Vegeta.

This analogy does not really work because the reasons why Goku and our WoL are positive "flat" characters are entirely different. Our character is "flat" because the story can't attach too many defined characteristics to a completely open-ended blank-slate character that first and foremost embodies each player's own interpretation of their avatar's personality and role. The generic nature of our character's writing is only a placeholder because we fill in the necessary background the game can't provide.
Goku is not an open-ended character. He has a defined personality and doesn't fulfill the purpose of a place-holder or a blank-slate projection surface for any imaginable personality.
Zenos is the Vegeta to all the WoLs who personally see themselves as Goku.
But the "I mainly go fishing, housing is the true end-game for me and I do the MSQ for the emotions" WoL probably doesn't even need a Vegeta.
The game's nature is rightly that of a theme park and whereas the story has to superimpose some corner stones of storytelling on us, the characterisation of Goku is very specific and not at all a generic role so broad, that it allegedly fits on every WoL regardless of their personality and motives. It is actively at odds with the nature that some players choose and actually act out ingame for their WoL.
In the end your WoL is Goku. That is abolutely fair. But somebody else's may not be Goku.

(Whether or not we can realistically skip the fight and whether the different dialogue options are sufficient to RP your own interpretation of said fight is a different discussion. I'm solely focusing on the "The WoL is Goku" assertion here.)

[Bright-Flower]

mmmm I think he is flat on purpose, because it is only the very base of his character to come.

If they had any plans of building upon his character and making him a layered, deeper character, they would have done it in SHB/EW. That they brought him back and decided DIDN'T have him change much and then gave him just about the best ending you COULD give his character, doesn't feel to me like they're planning on keeping him around to develop. If that was the plan, they wouldn't have killed him again. It would have made more sense not to drag him into the climax and quickly wrap up his story at the end if they were planning on more, they could have left him contemplating things in ala mhigo to develop more over 6.X patches or something.

[nighttimebunny]

I think it was partially symbolic, like we killed the old Zenos now.

[CKNovel]

I like Zenos but I hate his motivations.
If he was more than "Yeah I just want to fight", he could be an amazing character.

But the "Yeah I just want to fight" motivation was just bland.
I'm not asking for a redemption arc, but if he had a change of mind to actually help the Scion for some reason, any reason would work, then sacrifice himself with a cool sentence, it would have worked much better.
Last part with him was good, but all the fundations are bad.

Like Stormblood and ShB we end up with a nice looking house that crumbles because of the terrible fundations.

[Eclair_Xysha]

While I agree on your points, I think, they, the dev team, meant for us to feel like hes an obsessive PITA thorn.
Part of story telling if you will...

Plus, yeah we just defeated evil divinity, why is he that strong, but at the same time, we should be HELLA tired after the battle. For Zenos to be like "Fight me." actually made me think, "Beeeaach, I'm TIRED. Tired of this. Tired of YOU." Would make sense as to why he would appear to be stronger than the deity.

I also think he's really dead this time. He stopped breathing. We all left him there, dead.

[KageTokage]

The way I took his immortality was that he couldn't be killed physically; as in having his body rendered non-functional by a grievous injury while the aether of his soul still burns bright would not end him.

In this case, he specifically wanted to fight until he had nothing left to give from neither body nor soul, which makes me feel like barring some weird shenanigans with his avatar (Which is not without precedent given the RPR quest's lore that a loyal avatar can allow its master to cheat death, while the disloyal can simply hijack them in a moment of weakness), he's dead for good.

Overall, his role in Endwalker played out almost exactly how I was expecting it to; with the only thing that really shook me up being the lengths he went to try to tick us off by attempting to harm our friends using our own body.

[Nanchi]

I absolutely love Zenos. I love the whole point of his nihilistic personality being in tune with the theme of this expansion, but clearly we see a start of change in his behavior. There are too many plotholes open with him so I honestly doubt he's dead. People are so overly narrow minded as soon as it comes to his character and it doesn't help that stormblood did a poor job in giving him the necessary screentime. I do think the screentime he got in endwalker was meaningful and necessary for his and our character. He's after all an ascien in all but name, if he comes back it might not even be in the same body but I'm almost certain that he's not dead.

[Erendis]

What really annoys me that they would not properly talk about Azem because "they want to leave it to people imaginations and not ruin it for them" and yet they pushed Zenos' "friend" agenda so hard... Zenos was despicable and repulsive, there's no way my character was his "friend", "mirror" or whatever. When he said I can walk away I hopefully thought: Can I really!? Choosing one of the three "choices" was really disappointing.