What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Brinne]

snip

Mm, yeah, I think it might be worth refreshing on HW Ardbert and Crew’s antics, up to and including his sinister smirks and jeers as he plots murder and destruction, and his friends laughing and gloating over nearly murdering Alisaie in her brother’s face.

It also seems weird to me to be a little dismissive of the deliberate suffering they were causing, and that he was more of a “cornered animal” in his situation compared to the surviving Ancients upon seeing the destruction and mutilation (as they understood it) of the remains of their world. “Antagonizing beastmen” is a strange turn of phrase to lighten his actions compared to the rhetoric used for the Ascians – frankly, Ardbert and Crew’s actions actually mirror Emet and the Ascians’ disturbingly well – simply on a smaller scale and on a smaller timeframe, for now, due to happenstance. To put it bluntly, Ardbert was deliberately targeting, killing, and manipulating oppressed, vulnerable populations with the aim of driving them into such despair and desperation that they would fall into extremism and self-destruction that it would lead to a Calamity (“genocide,” in non-sanitized terms) and widespread, untold death across the Source. They did this “systemically,” too, going from tribe to tribe. If Ardbert and crew were “under the manipulation of a third party,” then so too were the Ascians, as we now know they were unwittingly operating under Venat’s roadmap of the timeline leading to the WoL the entire time.

A point is also made that Ardbert and crew actually do know the full stakes of what they’re doing. They’re not being “misled” by the Ascians in terms of what they’re fighting for – Alisaie and Urianger have a whole exchange about how they’re fully aware that causing the Rejoining will still result in the death of their world, just that some form of its existence will continue in the Rejoined Source, rather than the complete oblivion by the Flood of Light, so it’s easy to argue in a lot of ways his goal was less justifiable than Emet’s. Emet, though the hope was faint, was fighting with the hope to concretely save people and allow them to live the lives that were stolen from them. Ardbert was way beyond that point, fighting for something even more vague and ill-defined on behalf of his beloved people. And once again, you never actually convince him to stop, or that he was wrong. The culmination of his arc is him coming to the conclusion that he wasn’t wrong, at least in his driving feeling of fighting to save the people of the First. In the scope of Heavensward, he only relents when figures from our side concede and go "you're right, your world needs to be saved, and we're going to help you do it so that you don't need to destroy ours."

I'm going to disagree here and say we threw a spanner in his works through the luck of our being Azem - an Ancient, someone he loved, someone who mattered amidst the rabble. I think we invoked some small semblance of the person he once was, and we saw a more vulnerable and human side of Emet than has likely been revealed for a while, but when we did not measure up, we became expendable just like all the rest. He was capable of kindness, but the habit of attributing this to him as a defining personality trait after the flashbacks we see of him prior to ShB - and what we see once we disappoint him - seems too optimistic. Emet, deep down, knew the futility of what he was trying to do, he had lost the will go on, the years of isolation and disappointment wearing on him, and he wanted out, and it was more this that I think drove his inner turmoil - the desire to relinquish his duty but being so tired, in every sense of the word - more than reasons to do with empathy towards mortals or his better nature.

This, at least, isn’t really accurate – the narrative suggests, and Yoshida explicates in interviews, that Emet has tried again and again, with “pure/earnest intent,” to believe in Sundered humanity and see them as worthy – but he was betrayed by them as a result so many times that he eventually simply gave up. We are not his first attempt to extend a chance to the Sundered. Us being Azem is, rather, cited as the what moved him to try one last time after he’d already been thoroughly burnt out, against his better instincts.

One thing I’d like to clarify is that when I refer to “kindness” in Emet’s case in particular, I don’t intend it as an evaluation of his character as such – more like an internal impulse that spurs reaction on his part due to feeling. The fact that he feels these instincts of kindness are what spurs his manic behavior that probably in many ways results in more cruelty than there would have otherwise, because it creates that element of overcompensation, of trying to prove something to himself, to resolve his internal dissonance. I’m not trying to argue that he’s a good person because he’s kind, rather, pointing that that specific aspect of his personality was always a key factor in what led him to do what he did in the way that he did it, for better and for worse, for himself and for others.

In that way, Endwalker highlighting “kindness” as his key trait as a person, divorced from his circumstances and duties and trauma, felt perfectly consistent to me and was already something I as a reader had picked up on from Shadowbringers alone. I was happy to see it reinforced, as the core factor behind much of his strange behavior, as opposed to something more straightforwardly connected to malice such as “arrogance.” Even back in Shadowbringers, this reading was far more compelling and interesting to me. “Kindness” in and of itself does not necessarily lead to a more benevolent outcome; when “kindness” is an irrepressible impulse in someone put in a position where they see no alternative to killing and tormenting others, it actually can and often does lead to incredibly ugly places. This is why a support network is so important, and Emet going so badly off the rails is attributed to being his isolation from his loved ones more than anything else.

I think there’s sort of a fundamental difference here in the disbelief of “there’s simply no way you could describe anyone who took the actions Emet did as ‘kind’” – whereas my reading has always been more “yes, I can see how an excess of kindness can actually be a destructive trait when certain types of extreme pressure are applied, and it’s really interesting character work.” I also think it’s totally fair to not really buy into Shadowbringers’s thesis – it’s just that I would point out that then, however, you can’t really indicate that as a gap between Shadowbringers as a good narrative and Endwalker as a failure of that narrative, at least in this particular case. (I think Endwalker was a failure of Shadowbringers’s narrative in a million other ways, of course.)

It’s just that Shadowbringers’s thesis has never been “regardless of how sympathetic his position, Emet-Selch is Wrong” and has always explicitly been “if you wind up in Emet-Selch’s position, you WILL end up like him, so don’t end up in his position (of being alone.)” I’m not sure there’s a lot to debate with a basic disagreement of “no, I don’t buy that premise,” although I think the added context of how long Emet-Selch has been doing this, how often it’s been implied/stated he’s earnestly tried to reach out to the Sundered and been betrayed, and therefore how hard his soul has been ground down for so long helps as a factor in understanding it. Ardbert may not have reached the sheer levels of depravity or numbers of victims Emet-Selch did, but Ardbert also had less time grinding away at his personal mission of saving the First – after millennia at it in isolation, well, who knows what Ardbert might have become, had we (or rather, Urianger) not gone out of our way to give him another way out?