Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
Emet-Selch in Shadowbringers is probably the single most emotionally disconnected person in the game, with no care for anyone else's feelings of any type or any level. That's clearly learned behavior over twelve thousand years, as he's clearly not like that in Elpis (although he is still noticeably callous to the mental states of others), but he very clearly just... doesn't have any emotional connections to anyone. In fact, that's clearly not just an 'us' thing, he's just as rude to Varis. And his way of reaching out is basically just forcing people to listen to his own emotional turmoil, rather than actually trying to connect with anyone else's. He's worse than Zenos; at least Zenos actually tried to empathize with someone, even if he was patently terrible at it.

This isn't a knock against the character, that is clearly the intention; you don't write the line 'I don't consider you people, therefore it's not murder if I kill you' without knowing exactly how little that character cares about others.
Emet's broader sense of feeling disconnected from the people he lives with is definitely there as a function of being an imposter in another person's body (in 'Through His Eyes' he describes Varis as 'this body's grandson'). But there's also an emotional disconnect between Emet's reasoning and the humans that he's interacting with.

Yoshi-p made an interesting comment about how very different the Ancients were in their thinking from us. They're very logical, despite being emotional creatures like us, but they're not particularly empathetic. And I think a lot of that comes from the fact that they are, on some level, 'gods', and are used to having their way. They're very much in tune with their own emotions. Just not so much with those of the 'malformed twisted creatures' around them.