What would the path be had you been able to contain the light?

[Cleretic]

I think this plays into why the playerbase likes Emet so much. He's a deep and complex character, and is conflicted. He got the most human treatment out of all of the Ascians, and made him feel like somebody you can sympathize with easily. The lives of him and those he cared about were basically burned into the ground, and he has been in a constant flux of grieving stages. It feels like over the course of ShB we see him fluctuate between several of the stages, before finally hitting Acceptance after the final battle with him.

Also because he's unconventionally hot (but not too unconventionally hot), and a type of evil where he simultaneously feels like he has a point but he could also maybe possibly be convinced to not do the horrible thing.

Emet appeals to people who want a quirky sexy man, the people who want a guy they can fix, and the people who want to agree with the evil guy, while somehow managing to remain generally consistent, charismatic, sympathetic and detailed as a character at the end of it all. He's checking more 'character appeal' boxes than I genuinely thought were even possible to check with the one character in the one piece of media; MCU Loki took like, five movies and a miniseries to get this far. Snape's a good comparison, too.

I don't like him, and I remember being very surprised when I learned I was basically alone about that after finishing Shadowbringers; it was very alienating to bring my fresh opinion of 'well most of that was great, shame the ending dropped the ball' to people after finishing and getting 'confusion bordering on anger' as a response. But stepping back and taking a wider look at it... yeah, I can see exactly why I didn't find much agreement there.